Sublime

The latter months of 1940 were decisive in determining the course of the war. The Nazis, stunned by the scale of their triumphs, allowed themselves to suffer a loss of momentum. By launching an air assault on Britain, Hitler adopted the worst possible strategic compromise: as master of the Continent, he believed a modest further display of force wo

Churchill visualized the Cold War, and may even have been contributing to its onset. Eisenhower hoped that the defeat of Nazi Germany would lay the groundwork for a peaceful world in which the victorious Allies would cooperate.

Churchill instructed Dalton to establish – as he called it – a Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

Winston Churchill constantly expressed concern that the Auxiliary Units didn’t have enough weapons. ‘These men must have revolvers!’35 he scribbled in the margin of one memo. They got them soon afterwards, along with American .32 Colt automatics acquired from the New York Police Department. Each underground cell was also equipped with at least one

The enormous battlefield losses of World War I, Churchill’s own unfortunate experience with the amphibious landing at Gallipoli in 1915, plus an awareness of how ill-prepared the Allies, particularly the United States, were to take on a battle-tested German Army, caused the British government to rethink its earlier commitment.

After being briefed by Stirling on an impending attack on Benghazi, and the way that the SAS represented ‘a new form of warfare’ which had ‘awesome potential’, Churchill quoted to Smuts the lines from Byron’s Don Juan: ‘He was the mildest-mannered man / That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.’ The next day, he summoned Stirling to the Embassy to d

Fox Conner also viewed Woodrow Wilson’s concept that the nation had actually fought a “war to end all wars” as a “mere slogan of propaganda.” In contrast to the isolationist sentiment then prevalent in the United States, Conner repeatedly told Eisenhower that American participation in another large-scale European war was “almost a certainty.” Again

Churchill took these concerns seriously. In his Harvard speech, he declared his support for Basic, a drastically reduced version of English containing 850 words, only 18 of them verbs (come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, be, do, have, see, say, send, may, and will). Basic was English for foreigners.

her father’s favourite Winston Churchill quote: Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.