May 1940: How Churchill Came to Save Christian Civilization

On May 10, 1940, Britain’s King George VI summoned Winston Churchill to Buckingham Palace to form a government. The immediate impetus for this move was Britain’s failures in the Norway campaign, especially the failure to hold Narvik. Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, was the minister most responsible for that failure. But, as historian Andrew Roberts has noted, the debate “was as much about appeasement as about Norway, about the past as about the future,” and Churchill had long been right about the failures of appeasement. There was a strong sense in Parliament that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had to go, but members were divided over who should replace him. Whoever was chosen would not only become the defender of the realm, but also the defender of Western, that is, Christian civilization.

Prime Minister Chamberlain wanted to stay in office, but the debate in Parliament made it clear that, despite governing with a huge majority, he had lost too much support, even among Conservatives. Conservative MP Leo Amery quoted Oliver Cromwell’s words to the Rump Parliament: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

The choice for the new prime minister came down to two men: Churchill and Lord Halifax, then Britain’s foreign secretary. As John Colville later explained, Halifax was the “safe” choice—a member of the House of Lords who was known to be steady, trustworthy, and uncontroversial—while Churchill was considered irresponsible, untrustworthy, and reckless. The king wanted Halifax, but Halifax doubted that the empire’s new war leader should come from the House of Lords. So, it was Churchill the king sent for and who in the next three weeks made decisions that saved not only England but what Churchill himself referred to as “Christian civilization.”

On the same day King George VI summoned Churchill, Nazi Germany invaded France and the Low Countries in fast-moving ground and air attacks—the blitzkrieg. May 1940 would be a month of German successes, followed by even more successes in June. What kind of a leader was required to save England and Christian civilization? Biographer William Manchester in the first volume of The Last Lion explained:

England’s new leader, were he to prevail, would have to stand for everything England’s decent, civilized Establishment had rejected. … [He would have to be] a passionate Manichaean who saw the world as a medieval struggle to the death between the powers of good and the powers of evil, who held that individuals are responsible for their actions and that the German dictator was therefore wicked. A believer in martial glory was required, one who saw splendor in the ancient parades of victorious legions through Persepolis and could rally the nation to brave the coming German fury. An embodiment of fading Victorian standards was wanted: a tribune for honor, loyalty, duty, and the supreme virtue of action; one who would never compromise with iniquity, who could create a sublime mood and thus give men heroic visions of what they were and might become. . . [A] leader of intuitive genius, a born demagogue in the original sense of the word, a believer in the supremacy of his race and his national destiny, an artist who knew how to gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends, an embodiment of inflexible resolution who could impose his will and his imagination on his people—a great tragedian who understood the appeal of martyrdom and could tell his followers the worst, hurling it to them like great hunks of bleeding meat, persuading them that the year of Dunkirk would be one in which it was ‘equally good to live or to die’—who could if necessary be just as cruel, just as cunning, and just as ruthless as Hitler but who could win victories without enslaving populations, or preaching supernaturalism, or foisting off myths of his infallibility, or destroying, or even warping, the libertarian institutions he had sworn to preserve. Such a man, if he existed, would be England’s last chance.

Churchill proved to be that leader. Churchill hoped it was not too late, but he recalled feeling a sense of relief after becoming prime minister. “I felt,” he wrote in The Gathering Storm, “as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.”

Churchill was, as Andrew Roberts points out, “superbly prepared—in experience, psychology and foresight—for the coming hour and trial.” He had experienced combat himself in Cuba, the Sudan, on the Northwest Frontier of India, in South Africa, and on the Western Front during the First World War. He had led the Admiralty at the beginning of World War I, and served as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, led the Air Ministry, and was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the mid-1920s. And, as Edward R. Murrow once remarked, Churchill had the ability to mobilize the English language and send it into battle.

On May 13th, Churchill spoke briefly in the House of Commons: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Our policy, he said, “is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength God can give us.” Our goal, he said, “is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road maybe, for without victory, there is no survival.”

Churchill’s words galvanized the British people, but many in the War Cabinet, including Halifax, and in Parliament believed that England should reach a deal with Hitler. France’s impending fall and Hitler’s non-aggression pact with Stalin’s Soviet Union meant that England would soon have to face the Nazi juggernaut alone. Better, perhaps, many thought, to get the best deal possible now before the bombs start falling on London and Nazi hordes land on England’s shores. On May 28th, Churchill called a meeting of the wider Cabinet and announced that he would not “enter into negotiations with That Man [Hitler].” He dismissed the notion that Hitler would agree to better terms if England made peace instead of fighting it out. “We should become a slave state,” he warned them, under a puppet regime controlled by Hitler. “If this long island story of ours is to end at last,” he concluded, “let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

After the fall of France and the “miracle” of Dunkirk in June 1940, Churchill spoke to the nation about what was at stake in the war against Nazi Germany:

Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. . . . Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say: This was their finest hour.

Western, Christian civilization survives today because of what Winston Churchill said and did 86 years ago. Which is why, like Churchill’s military aide Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, we should “thank God . . . that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth.”