We shall fight on the beaches

We Shall Fight on the Beaches is a common title given to a speech delivered by Winston Churchill to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom on 4 June 1940. This was the second of three major speeches given around the period of the Battle of France, with the others designated as the Blood, toil, tears, and sweat speech of 13 May, and the This was their finest hour speech of 18 June. Events developed dramatically over the five-week period, and although broadly similar in themes, each speech addressed a different military and diplomatic context.

In this speech, Churchill had to describe a great military disaster, and warn of a possible invasion attempt by Nazi Germany, without casting doubt on eventual victory. He also had to prepare his domestic audience for France's falling out of the war without in any way releasing the French Republic to do so, and wished to reiterate a policy and an aim unchanged – despite the intervening events – from his speech of 13 May, in which he had declared the goal of "victory, however long and hard the road may be".

Background
Churchill had taken over as the British Prime Minister on 10 May, eight months after the outbreak of World War II in Europe. He had done so as the head of a multiparty coalition government, which had replaced the previous government (led by Neville Chamberlain) as a result of dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war, demonstrated by the Norway debate on the Allied evacuation of Southern Norway.

Coincidentally, the German Wehrmacht offensive in the Low Countries and France had begun on 10 May with the invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Churchill had spoken to the House of Commons as Prime Minister for the first time on 13 May, to announce the formation of the new administration:

"I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.'"

In that speech he had said nothing about the military situation in France and the Low Countries.

Expecting that the German offensive would develop along much the same lines as it did in 1914, the lines of communication of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) did not run through the "short crossing" Channel ports – Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk, etc. – but rather through Dieppe and Le Havre. On 13 May, the Wehrmacht's attack through the Ardennes had reached the Meuse River at Sedan and then crossed it, breaking through the defences of the French Army. By 20 May, Wehrmacht armoured divisions had reached the coast of the English Channel, splitting the BEF from the French First Army and from the main French forces.

The Wehrmacht next moved against the cut-off Allied forces, moving along the seacoast with only small Allied forces to resist them. After the capitulation of Belgium on 28 May, a gap had also appeared on the eastern flank of the Allied forces, which had been forced to retreat into a small pocket around the seaport of Dunkirk. From this pocket the bulk of the BEF and a considerable number of French troops had been evacuated — Operation Dynamo — but had left behind virtually all of its heavy armaments. Also, the French regiments that had been removed from Dunkirk were relocated to Brittany, where they were soon forced to surrender to Nazi Germany, anyway. Thus, the evacuation of the French accomplished nothing in the long run.

Churchill had made a brief statement to the Commons on 28 May reporting the Belgian capitulation, and concluding "Meanwhile, the House should prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings. I have only to add that nothing which may happen in this battle can in any way relieve us of our duty to defend the world cause to which we have vowed ourselves; nor should it destroy our confidence in our power to make our way, as on former occasions in our history, through disaster and through grief to the ultimate defeat of our enemies." He had promised a further statement of the military situation on 4 June, and indeed the major part of the speech is an account of military events – so far as they affected the BEF – since the German breakthrough at Sedan.

The German breakthrough had not been exploited southwards, and the French had improvised a relatively thinly held defensive line along the Aisne and the Somme. The British military evaluation was that this was unlikely to withstand any major attack by the Wehrmacht. In the air, the French were short of fighter planes and the shortage was worsening due to their many losses in combat. The French military commanders had hence asked for additional British fighter squadrons to be sent into the fight in France. Politically, there were considerable doubts over the French willingness to continue the war, even in the absence of any further military catastrophes. Churchill had argued in favour of sending the fighter squadrons to France because he considered that that move would be vital to sustain French public morale, and also to give no excuse for the collapse of the French Army. That would possibly lead to a French Government that would not only drop out of the War, but also become hostile to the United Kingdom. The British War Cabinet discussed this issue at meetings on 3 June and on the morning of 4 June, but it decided to take the advice of the Royal Air Force and the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, that the British priority must be to prepare its own defences. The three squadrons present in France would be kept up to fighting strength, but no further squadrons could be spared for the Battle of France.

Despite relief that the bulk of the BEF had made it back to Britain, Mass Observation reported civilian morale in many areas as zero, one observer claiming that everyone looked suicidal. Only half the population expected Britain to fight on and the feelings of thousands were summed up as: 'This is not our war – this is a war of the high-up people who use long words and have different feelings'. Therefore, when talking about the future course and conduct of the war in this speech, Churchill had to describe a great military disaster, and warn of a possible German invasion attempt, without casting doubt on eventual victory. He needed to prepare his domestic audience for France's departure from the war without in any way releasing France to do so; in his subsequent speech of 18 June immediately after the French had sued for peace Churchill said: "The military events which have happened during the past fortnight have not come to me with any sense of surprise. Indeed, I indicated a fortnight ago as clearly as I could to the House that the worst possibilities were open, and I made it perfectly clear then that whatever happened in France would make no difference to the resolve of Britain and the British Empire to fight on, "if necessary for years, if necessary alone." Finally, he needed to reiterate a policy and an aim unchanged — despite the intervening events — from his speech of 13 May, in which he had said: "We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be."                               January 8 1999

Peroration
The peroration is perhaps the best known part of the speech, and is widely held to be one of Churchill's finest oratorical moments. "Turning once again, and this time more generally, to the question of invasion, I would observe that there has never been a period in all these long centuries of which we boast when an absolute guarantee against invasion, still less against serious raids, could have been given to our people. In the days of Napoleon, of which I was speaking just now, the same wind which would have carried his transports across the Channel might have driven away the blockading fleet. There was always the chance, and it is that chance which has excited and befooled the imaginations of many Continental tyrants. Many are the tales that are told. We are assured that novel methods will be adopted, and when we see the originality of malice, the ingenuity of aggression, which our enemy displays, we may certainly prepare ourselves for every kind of novel stratagem and every kind of brutal and treacherous manœuvre. I think that no idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered and viewed with a searching, but at the same time, I hope, with a steady eye. We must never forget the solid assurances of sea power and those which belong to air power if it can be locally exercised."

"I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty's Government – every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength."

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. '''We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. 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''', and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

It is said that as the House of Commons thundered in an uproar at his stirring rhetoric, Churchill muttered in a whispered aside to a colleague, "And we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because that's bloody well all we've got!" The speech was, nonetheless, immediately viewed as historic. The next year American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker wrote "[The words of the speech] deserve to be memorized by us all", observing that "With Churchill's picture these words are placarded in homes and offices throughout the British Empire."

In the sentence ending in 'surrender' only the last word – surrender- does not have Old English roots; a point sometimes commented upon. There is no similar overwhelming preponderance in the peroration as a whole; nor do the perorations of other Churchill speeches largely exclude words with foreign origins. However, Churchill himself had attended a speech given by Georges Clemenceau in Paris in June 1918, in which Clemenceau had used similar diction ("I will fight [the Germans] in front of Paris, I will fight in Paris, and I will fight behind Paris"). Both orators used the accumulation of similar-sounding statements to emphasise their uncompromising will to fight.

Rhetoric
Unlike the Blood, toil, tears, and sweat speech or the This was their finest hour speech, Churchill's June 6 speech in the House of Commons was not a live radio broadcast. Rather, the speech was subsequently dictated by a voice actor following that evening's BBC news broadcast. A maestro of metaphor, Churchill leaned quite heavily upon this rhetorical strategy in his wartime speeches, often "...telling a story in which the actions of Hitler and Germany [were] represented as forces of evil in contrast to those of Britain and its allies...as forces of good". However, Churchill was quick to recognize metaphor's double-edged capacity to both "...[appeal] to the everyday knowledge of the hearer and...lead to conviction rather than to proof". Privately addressing the house, "...which, being small, favored conversation, point and thrust, extemporary controversy rather than long set speeches", compelled Churchill to modify his customary rhetoric to suit the circumstances. The corpus is constructed from a slow buildup of plainly reported facts, which spare little of the unspeakable details from the retreat from Dunkirk:

"Our losses in material are enormous. We have perhaps lost one-third of the men we lost in the opening days of the battle of 21st March, 1918, but we have lost nearly as many guns - nearly one thousand - and all our transport, all the armored vehicles that were with the Army in the north."

Though his delivery of the losses is frank, pathos is injected through scattered commendations of valor to British, French, and Belgian troops:

"These young men, going forth each morn to guard their native land and all that we stand for, holding in their hands these instruments of colossal and shattering power, of whom it may be said that 'every morn brought forth a noble chance, and ever chance brought forth a noble knight,' deserve our gratitude, as do all the brave men who, in so many ways and on so many occasions, are ready, and continue to be ready to give life and all for their native land."

Summoning the archaic rhetoric of Tennyson, Churchill's tendency towards climactic morale building rather than explicit justification is in full view. After abstaining from grand metaphor throughout the exhortation, Churchill unleashes his signature rhetorical style at the opening of the peroration:

"We shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone."

Linking the struggle of war to a storm, while simultaneously personifying Nazi Germany as 'the menace of tyranny', Churchill draws on the emotion of the audience. Following this metaphor, the famous anaphoric lines "we shall" echo the durability of resolve he wishes to instill among his countrymen. Specifically, the repetitive use of 'we' has been praised as having "...submerged the leader in his people and engaged the collective spirit in its fight against a crazed nation governed by men rather than laws".