World War II Day by Day

London, England · June 18, 1940

Four days after the fall of Paris to Ger­man invaders, Charles de Gaulle, a tall (6 ft, 4 in), young (49), rela­tively un­known French gene­ral who had escaped to Eng­land on June 17, 1940, ad­dressed the French people in a radio broad­cast from Lon­don on this date in 1940. In a cele­brated call to arms, de Gaulle said: “The flame of French resistance must not and shall not die!”

The BBC gave de Gaulle’s “Free French” move­ment a five-minute slot each evening, and over the next ten days the French­man’s voice gained author­ity. His mes­sage was the same: It was a crime for French men and women in occupied France to sub­mit to their occu­piers, and it was an honor to defy them. “Since they whose duty it was to wield the sword of France have let it fall,” he said accusingly nearly a month later of the top mili­tary and poli­ti­cal people who coa­lesced around the 84‑year-old Vichy presi­dent Marshal Philippe Pétain, “I have taken up the broken blade.”

Also on this date, June 18, 1940, Soviet Foreign Minis­ter Vya­ches­lav Molo­tov con­grat­u­lated Adolf Hitler for the “splen­did suc­cesses of the Ger­man Wehr­macht” (armed forces) in France and the Low Coun­tries. Molotov would live to regret his flattering words just over a year later, when Hitler vio­lated the Molotov-Ribben­trop Non­aggression Pact of August 1939 by launching his surprise invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa).

As British citi­zens anx­iously awaited for the next shoe to drop—namely, Ger­many’s inevi­table inva­sion attempt of their island nation—Prime Minis­ter Winston Chur­chill stood before the House of Com­mons in Lon­don and in front of BBC micro­phones to say: “The Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. . . . The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned upon us.” Chur­chill did not flinch from acknow­ledging the great appa­rent dan­ger these events posed to Britain’s national survi­val and national inter­ests in this, the third of three speeches he gave during (roughly) the Battle of France (May 10 to June 22, 1940). But he turned the grave situ­ation into a roar of deter­mi­nation and defi­ance when he con­cluded his address, saying: “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 still say, ‘This was their finest hour’.”

Call to Arms: Gen. Charles de Gaulle and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, June 18, 1940

Left: Gen. Charles de Gaulle in the studios of the BBC in Lon­don, Octo­ber 10, 1941. This photo­graph has some­times been used in con­nection with de Gaulle’s “Appel du 18 juin” speech of 1940, of which no photo­graph exists. De Gaulle’s June 18th “call to arms” appeal had little imme­di­ate mili­tary or polit­i­cal impact, for hardly a single French­man heard his ini­tial broad­cast from his London sanc­tu­ary much less ever heard of his name. De Gaulle’s June 18th speech was not recorded, so four days later he asked if he could read it again over the air, this time, he wagered, to a larger, more atten­tive audi­ence. (An audi­ence made all the more atten­tive because the date of the second broad­cast, June 22, was the date repre­sen­ta­tives of the new Pétain admin­is­tra­tion formally signed a humil­i­ating cease­fire, the Franco-German Armi­stice of Com­piègne, which divided the vanquished nation into a larger German-occupied zone with Paris as its head­quarters and a smaller southern, unoccu­pied, nominally inde­pen­dent zone with its admin­is­tra­tive capital at Vichy where Pétain held sway.) The defiant 49‑year-old brig­a­dier general, who briefly served as under­secretary for war in French Premier Paul Reynaud’s govern­ment before it collapsed on June 16, was one of the few mili­tary or polit­ical leaders in France in the summer of 1940 to flee abroad and from there organize oppo­si­tion to the German occu­pa­tion. By early 1941 many patriotic French­men had adopted the upstart general and his two-barred Cross of Lorraine as symbols of French resistance against the Germans and their Pétainist lackeys.

Right: Winston Churchill giving his famous V-sign (used to repre­sent the letter “V” in “Vic­tory”) on May 20, 1940, just ten days after he became prime minis­ter, and on the day Ger­man troops reached the Eng­lish Chan­nel in pre­pa­ra­tion for their exter­mi­nating the British Expedi­tionary Force trapped at Dunkirk on the French coast.

Below: A draft of Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech shows the way he exten­sively edited it before deli­vering it to the House of Com­mons on June 18, 1940. In 36 minutes of soaring ora­tory, Chur­chill sought to rally his country­men with what has gone down in his­tory as his “finest hour” speech. The speech—ending with the words, “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 still say, ‘This was their finest hour’”—has reso­nated ever since. On both sides of the Atlan­tic and beyond, it has been hailed as the moment when Brit­ain found the resolve to fight on after the fall of France and, ulti­mately, in alli­ance with Allied mili­tary forces (what would be called the United Nations) to van­quish Hitler’s armies that had overrun most of Europe.

Excerpt from Winston Churchill’s “Finest Hour” Speech to the House of Commons, June 18, 1940