The greatest defeat in British military memory turned, at the despatch box, into the moment a nation resolved never to surrender.

By 4 June 1940 the world Churchill described from the despatch box had come apart with terrifying speed. He had been Prime Minister for less than a month; the phoney war had detonated into blitzkrieg on 10 May, the Meuse front had collapsed at Sedan, and the finest army Britain possessed had been driven, cut off and half-encircled, to a single French port. What was supposed to be a report of the greatest military disaster in British history had become, over nine days and 800-odd vessels, the deliverance of a third of a million men from the beaches of Dunkirk. Churchill's genius here lies in refusing the easy comfort of triumphalism. He tells the House plainly that wars are not won by evacuations, that a colossal disaster has occurred, that the guns and transport of a superbly equipped army lie abandoned in the fields of Flanders. He pays the debt of honesty before he draws down the credit of hope. The listeners knew the stakes as few Commons audiences ever have. France was days from collapse; Italy would declare war within the week; America was neutral and Roosevelt non-committal. Behind Churchill sat men, notably Halifax, who only a fortnight before had pressed for exploring terms with Hitler through Mussolini. This speech was, among other things, the sealing of that argument: there would be no negotiated peace. The peroration, worked and reworked, ascending from the beaches to the hills to that final, deliberate invocation of the New World stepping forth to rescue the Old, was aimed as much at Washington as at Westminster. History has been generous, and rightly. The words entered the bloodstream of the language; "we shall fight on the beaches" became shorthand for defiance itself. Churchill was correct in almost every particular that mattered: the RAF would indeed prove the shield of civilisation that summer, the island would ride out the storm, and the new world would, in God's good time, step forth. His scorn for King Leopold has been softened by later historians, but the essential prophecy held. It is worth reading now because it is the rarest of things: a great speech that is also completely honest about defeat, and a promise kept.

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