Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning | John Lukacs

This is basically all that Lukacs has to add to what he has already told us, though he usefully reminds us of one or two other points. One was the mistrust with which Churchill was initially greeted by the political Establishment, and the importance of Neville Chamberlain’s loyalty to the new regime in dispelling it. Churchill was to repay that loyalty in a eulogy for his old adversary that was one of the most moving speeches ever made in English, or come to that any other language. Another was the formidable strength of the enemy that the British people faced in 1940. Hitler and his cohorts may seem slightly absurd to a generation that never knew them, but they were nothing of the kind. They were, quite literally, terrible, and the only reason the British people were not terrified was that they had no idea what they were up against. But Churchill understood very well, and always had. When he warned of the danger that ‘if we fail, the whole world . . . will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the light of a perverted science’ he did not exaggerate. If Hitler had won, that is exactly what would have happened. And he very nearly did.

Lukacs gets one thing wrong. When a Foreign Office mandarin expressed the fear that Churchill would ‘build up a “Garden City” at Number 10, full of the most awful people’ Lukacs offers the explanatory footnote, ‘a cheap modern suburb’. In fact the reference was to the huts built in the garden of Number 10 to accommodate the political advisers and their staff imported by Lloyd George during the first world war. It is just as well that none of them lived to see what Tony Blair did to the place 60 years later.