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” in France and the Low Coun­tries. Molotov would live to regret his flattering words just over a year later, when Hitler launched 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 “call to arms” speech of June 18, 1940, of which no photograph exists.

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