" Hitler had a giant strategic imperative in attacking Britain : he had to knock out Britain before he went east , and took on Russia . Even in July , 1940 , the whole shape and dynamics of the war were clear to Winston Churchill -- just as he had foreseen the shape of the First World War as well .
' Hitler must invade or fail . If he fails , he is bound to go east , and fail he will , ' he said at Chequers on 14 July . He saw , with his unerring and pellucid understanding of the big picture , that if Britain could survive , if Britain could hang on -- then Hitler would lose , because not even the Nazi war machine could fight on two fronts at once .
It was thanks to Churchill -- and at crucial moments , thanks to him alone -- that Britain did hang on . It is clear that there was something utterly magical about his leadership that summer . With his poetic and sometimes Shakespearean diction he made people feel noble , exalted -- that what they were doing was better and more important than anything they had done before .
He mentally elided ideas of Englishness and freedom , and it helped that the weather was fine , because there is nowhere lovelier than England in June ; and perhaps that gentle beauty sharpened the general sentiment he encouraged : that the threat must be repelled , and that this was an island to fight and die for . He gave the people an image of themselves : as a tiny band of heroes -- analogous to the tiny band of RAF pilots -- holding out against tyranny and against the odds , the story from Thermopylae to the Defence of Rorke's Drift in the Zulu war -- the eternal and uplifting story of the few against the many .
In this mood of adrenalin - fuelled exhilaration the British indeed accomplished extraordinary things . There is only one period that I can discover in the last 120 years when British manufacturing output overtook Germany's -- and that was the summer of 1940 . Britain produced more planes than Germany ; and by the autumn they had seen off the Luftwaffe . Goering made the fatal mistake of turning the attention of his fighters and bombers to the towns of Britain , and giving up on Dowding's airfields . "
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The New and Improved Joey? thread (Read 2,106,745 times)
