Prime Minister Winston Churchill throws the V for Victory sign outside 10 Downing Street in 1943.
[World History Archive]
Mislead, indeed. Perhaps conflict’s most telling and well-known quotation is “the first casualty of war is the truth,” variously attributed to the Greek dramatist Aeschylus circa 550 BC, English writer Samuel Johnson in 1758, and U.S. Senator Hiram Warren Johnson in 1918. Regardless, truer words were never spoken.
Tough talk is a fundamental tenet of war speak, but as he stood in Spain one day in 1809 and cast his eyes over the ragged levies that were to carry him through his peninsular campaign against the French, Lieutenant-General Arthur Wellesley—the Duke of Wellington—spoke plainly and honestly of what stood before him.
“I don’t know what effect these men will have on the enemy,” he said, “but, by God, they frighten me.”
More than a century later, Britain’s Winston Churchill became prime minister after Neville Chamberlain resigned having declared that he had “returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.”
Echoing what to many Britons would have been a familiar passage from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer and a line in the hymn “God the Omnipotent,” it proved one of the great miscalculations in all of history.
In his first major speech to the House of Commons as PM, Churchill assured his colleagues and rivals alike of his conviction, famously telling them on May 13, 1940, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
By June 4, 1940, the forces of Nazi Germany had overrun all of western Europe to the Channel shores of France, but not before some 338,000 Allied troops had been miraculously evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk, including 26,000 French.
Now Hitler’s forces stood poised to invade Britain. There were calls for appeasement from within Churchill’s own caucus. The British bulldog was having none of it.
“We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be,” he declared. “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.”
Brigadier-General Anthony McAuliffe and his staff gather inside Bastogne’s Heintz Barracks for Christmas dinner 1944. This military barracks served as the Division Main Command Post during the siege of Bastogne, Belgium, during the Battle of the Buldge. The facility is now a museum known as the “Nuts Cave.”
[U.S. Armysthorne]
Nevertheless, one of history’s great orators had all but silenced the appeasers and, more importantly, rallied Britons, even though the speech was not broadcast or recorded. Jock Colville, a Churchill secretary, noted in his diary: “A magnificent oration, which obviously moved the House.”
Chips Channon, one of Churchill’s Conservative MPs, wrote: “he was eloquent and oratorical and used magnificent English; several Labour members cried.” One of them, Josiah Wedgwood, a friend of Churchill’s since WW I, wrote him: “My dear Winston. That was worth 1,000 guns and the speeches of 1,000 years.”
“Even repeated by the announcer, it sent shivers (not of fear) down my spine,” said author, poet and journalist Vita Sackville-West. “I think that one of the reasons why one is stirred by his Elizabethan phrases is that one feels the whole massive backing of power and resolve behind them, like a great fortress: they are never words for words’ sake.”
Ten days later, Winnie, as he was known, uttered the words “this was their finest hour,” the third of the triumvirate of powerful speeches he made at the outset of his leadership, when Britain was facing one of the greatest crises in its long history.
In it, he spoke poetically and forcefully for 36 minutes about what was at stake in the coming months—26 pages of riveting, flawlessly inspiring oratory.
“Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization,” he said in his distinctive grumble. “Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire.
“The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. 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 freed, 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 still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”
“There is only one possibility to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation: that is the honorable surrender of the encircled town.”
Shortly after, the Luftwaffe intensified its attacks on Channel shipping and the airfields of England in a lead-up to a planned amphibious invasion of the British Isles. The Battle of Britain would last 113 days through the summer and early fall of 1940, when Hitler abandoned the campaign and instead set his sights on Russia.
It was an improbable, skin-of-the-teeth victory for the pilots of the Royal Air Force, along with the Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and a handful of others who fought off waves of German attackers day-in, day-out for nearly four months.
They saved Britain and changed the course of the war. Hitler’s invasion of Russia the following June proved a fatal mistake—the beginning of the end of the Third Reich.
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” Churchill declared Aug. 20, 1940, after the decisive showdown, when Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring threw everything he had at the British and lost the gamble.
Churchill’s wartime speeches were the stuff of history, epic self-written oratory that he invariably tweaked and revised right up to and during his earnest delivery.
He was a man for his time. He would later write that “I felt…that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.”
Few could put together words like Churchill, but one of the great communiques of the war contained no grandeur or poetic turns of phrase.
A single word from Brigadier-General Anthony McAuliffe, acting commander of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne, Belgium, in December 1944 may have shifted the fortunes of another key battle.
The Battle of the Bulge, a German offensive that constituted Hitler’s last gasp in the west, was raging in the forests of the Ardennes. Bad weather had been preventing resupply to the cold, hungry and ill-equipped American troops.
Suddenly, out of the dark forest emerged four German soldiers bearing a white flag of truce and a message for McAuliffe.
“There is only one possibility to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation: that is the honorable surrender of the encircled town,” said the typed note, signed ‘The German Commander.’
“If this proposal should be rejected one German Artillery Corps and six heavy A. A. Battalions are ready to annihilate the U.S.A. troops in and near Bastogne.”
He gave the American two hours to decide.
“Go back to your commanding officer and tell him to just plain ‘go to hell.’”
McAuliffe didn’t wait.
He crumpled the message into a ball, threw it in a wastepaper basket, and muttered, “Aw, nuts.”
The officers in McAuliffe’s command post were trying to find suitable language for an official reply when Lieutenant-Colonel Harry Kinnard suggested that McAuliffe’s first response summed up the situation well, and the others agreed.
The response was typed and centred on a full sheet of paper:
December 22, 1944
To the German Commander,
NU T S!
The American Commander
McAuliffe handed the message to a laughing Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Harper, commanding the 327th Glider Infantry, who delivered it to the German delegation waiting at the ‘F’ Company command post. Asked what it meant, he told them: “Go back to your commanding officer and tell him to just plain ‘go to hell.’”
General Heinrich Freiherr von Lüttwitz was incensed and somewhat nonplussed at “nuts.”
But McAuliffe’s note was a message to his American troops as much as to his German counterpart. And since the general could not deliver it to all of them himself, he relied on word of mouth to convey it among the U.S. rank-and-file scattered through the forests and hills of the wintery Ardennes.
The reply filtered along the lines all right, lifting spirits and fortifying resolve in the face of the anticipated withering artillery barrage. As it turned out, the barrage never happened: the German heavy guns had already been moved elsewhere and von Lüttwitz’s higher-ups had ordered the intended infantry to another objective.
The lack of follow-up by the Germans in the face of McAuliffe’s simple and simply stubborn response only reinforced “nuts” as a watchword and a rallying cry to the beleaguered Americans.
Captain Vincent Vicari, his personal aide at the time, recalled that “General Mac was the only general I ever knew who did not use profane language. ‘Nuts’ was part of his normal vocabulary.”
By Christmas, the skies had cleared, supplies were dropped and reinforcements followed. The day had been saved and the Allied advance on Berlin could resume.
Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there.
Then there was Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins who, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, was speaking to his troops of the 1st Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment, at their staging point in Kuwait.
Born in Belfast and a graduate of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Collins delivered one of history’s most poignant and elegant battle speeches, all of it off the top of his head.
It has been compared to the Agincourt address in which Shakespeare’s Henry V urges his legions “once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”
That Collins’ words survived at all is thanks to the shorthand of a single journalist, Sarah Oliver of The London Daily Mail on Sunday. There is no recording or film of his address but for a Kenneth Branagh re-enactment for the BBC Two television series “Ten Days to War.”
“We go to liberate, not to conquer,” Collins told his 1,000 soldiers, his Irish accent, as Oliver would later describe, “rhythmic, lyrical, like someone who had the right to make you behave, maybe your dad.”
“We will not fly our flags in their country,” the commander said. “We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them.”
Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins addresses the Royal Irish Regiment. His speech in March 2003 has been described as one of history’s greatest military speeches. [ROYAL IRISH REGIMENT]
“I expect you to rock their world,” Collins told them. “Wipe them out if that is what they choose. But if you are ferocious in battle, remember to be magnanimous in victory. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there.”
His audience was “loyal and respectful,” Oliver recalled in a column written five years later, “but also quite familiar. Tim’s leadership was so unquestioned that he did not need the buttons and badges of his rank to command it.”
The colonel, she said, was naturally always at full volume. Especially, one would assume, when speaking to 1,000 soldiers without the aid of a microphone.
“My dear Winston. That was worth 1,000 guns and the speeches of 1,000 years.”
“You will see things that no man could pay to see,” declared Collins. “And you will have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis. You will be embarrassed by their hospitality even though they have nothing.
“Don’t treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country.
“Their children will be poor, in years to come they will know that the light of liberation in their lives was brought by you.”
While Collins was sentimental about his family, explained Oliver, “he was clinical when it came to fighting and perhaps dying.”
Journalist Sarah Oliver and Collins in Iraq.
In his speech, Collins addressed the issue of death head-on.
“If there are casualties of war, then remember that when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day,” he said. “Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves.
“It is my foremost intention to bring every single one of you out alive. But there may be people among us who will not see the end of this campaign. We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back. There will be no time for sorrow.”
As for the enemy, he said many regional commanders with “stains on their souls” were stoking the fires of hell for their leader, Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi president would eventually be captured, tried and hanged by his fellow Iraqis.
“He and his forces will be destroyed by this coalition for what they have done,” promised Collins. “As they die, they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity.
“The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please.”
But he reminded his troops to show mercy to those who surrender and not exceed the limits of good conduct in war.
“If you harm the regiment or its history by over-enthusiasm in killing or in cowardice, know it is your family who will suffer. You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest—for your deeds will follow you down through history.
“We will bring shame on neither our uniform or our nation.
“Let’s bring everyone home and leave Iraq a better place for us having been there.
“Our business now is north.”
Those tentatively supporting the war suddenly had their poster boy.
Collins would bring them all home, returning to Canterbury, England, in mid-May. The battalion received a unit citation for its work. Collins was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for distinguished service. He retired a full colonel.
Coalition troops and subsequent investigations by international teams of experts could find no evidence of the weapons of mass destruction that then-U.S. president George W. Bush claimed as the war’s primary justification.
Saddam’s brutality, however, was well documented. He had his reasons. Without him, Iraq broke down into continuing sectarian violence and became a breeding ground for ISIS and other militants—defying Bush’s infamous “mission accomplished” declaration, made about the time the Royal Irish were heading home.
“Almost five years later, the words of Colonel Tim’s speech are still resonant,” Oliver wrote in 2008. “I think I know why. His historic and humanitarian idealism stood in bold contrast to months of political chicanery in Downing Street and Washington.
“Those tentatively supporting the war suddenly had their poster boy, while those against it were reminded that the men and women charged with fighting Saddam’s forces were not responsible for the geopolitics that had put them there.”
Collins himself would later admit in a London Telegraph column that “the raison d’être of this war was at best vague.”
The USS Abraham Lincoln returns to port carrying George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner.
[Wikimedia]
“I guess it was the things that I had encountered that inspired lines of my talk,” he said. “The bravado and fierce oaths of those who were in reality terrified—in my experience, the most likely to shoot when there was no need—led to: ‘It is a big step to take another human’s life….’
“The dismissive glee of some racist whom I overheard declaring that he couldn’t wait to get among the backward Iraqis must have inspired this: ‘Iraq is steeped in history….’
“A senior officer, who had never before been to war and declared it would be just like a big live-firing exercise, may have sparked: ‘…there may be those of us who will not see the end of this campaign.’”
After he spoke that day, Collins was standing outside his tent smoking a Montecristo when Colour Sergeant Chris McDonald happened by. “Great talk, boss,” he said in his distinctive Newry accent, “I’m proud to be here.’”
Collins thanked him. A year later, McDonald and Canadian Andrew Bradsell, 34, were killed in an ambush in Mosul. The two were working for a private security firm at the time.
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