Winston Churchill: “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” Speech

On September 3, 1939, Britain declared war on Germany, and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain invited Winston Churchill (1874–1965), one of his biggest critics, into his government as first lord of the admiralty. Churchill would prove to be Chamberlain’s downfall, in ironic fashion. Churchill’s poor organization of an invasion of Scandinavia tipped off the Germans, who occupied Norway themselves before the Royal Navy could marshal its forces. The result was the end of Chamberlain’s government—and the rise of Churchill to the premiership, as the only long-term committed opponent of Nazi ambitions in the Conservative Party.

As it turned out, few people could have been better matched to their time than Winston Churchill. The best thing about him as a leader was his ability to marshal the rhetoric necessary to shape “the good war” in moral terms for everyone fighting on the side of the Allies. Yet his determination to achieve “victory at all costs” would also lead him to preside over the decline and fall of the British Empire he wanted so badly to defend. No speech he made during the war is better at showing both sides of that conundrum than “We Shall Fight on the Beaches,” made to Parliament on June 4, 1940, after stranded British and French troops had survived an evacuation from Dunkirk. On one hand, Churchill’s fiery rhetoric at the end of the speech, demanding that the British people “never surrender,” moved his audience to tears. On the other hand, his admission that Britain would hold out until the “New World … steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old” admitted that Britain could not win the war without the United States and that therefore its empire should look to the United States as well for its own salvation.