Every week. Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss great books, great men, and great ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes@podcast.hillsdale.edu or wherever you find your audio.
Morning glory. Good evening, Grace America, I'm Hugh Hewitt. That music means the Hillsdale dialogue is underway. Doctor Larry Arnn is my guest this week as we plunge into this book, which is the Finest Hour volume two of Winston Churchill's memoir of the Second World War. And I have the modern paperback edition. There are many, many different editions. So the pages that I reference may not be the pages
that you reference. But doctor, aren't we read every page of the Gathering Storm because it was so apropos of the time we live in. I don't know if we'll do every page in the finest hour. I'm not sure. We'll do volume three, four, five and six. But why is the finest hour different and unique and important among the other five volumes of memoirs?
Well, it's the peak. It's one of the turning points. Solzhenitsyn has written a series of, of, uh, history books, one of which still in the translation process. Uh, and he wrote about what he called nots. Uh, that is to say, places where history comes together and everything changes. And those, those nots tend to form around events that are very narrowly run, right? That it could have gone the other way. And so one of those happened in May through September of 1940. Uh, and the finest hour
is that period of time. It actually extends until the middle of 1941. Because beginning on May the 10th, the Second World War broke out on September 3rd, 1939, when Hitler and the Soviet Union attacked Poland and they worked on Poland from September until May of the next year, 1940. And they destroyed it also Finland. And, uh, right toward the end we talked about this. Hitler attacked Norway. So the war was spreading. But May the 10th was the
big day. Uh, that's when the Wehrmacht turned its blitzkrieg machine west, and they attacked Belgium and France, and they did it in an innovative way, somewhat alike, but mostly different from the way they did the same thing in 1914 to start the First World War.
But without the French. This time, the theme of the book. And I want to tell people that because it's on the first page, Churchill wrote it. Theme of the volume how the British people held the fort alone till those who hitherto had been half blind were half ready. He's still not going to let anyone forget that they were not ready when he was called upon to to save the world.
Yeah, they were not. Britain was not ready and France was really not ready. And we were not ready. And we of course, didn't get into it for quite some time. But the way they came to be alone was that against every expectation. There's no modern equivalent of this. Hitler conquered France in six weeks and destroyed a 3 or 4 million man army in that amount of time and drove the British off the continent. They got most of
their soldiers away. Many French soldiers to almost none of their equipment, and that was the only army Britain had. And so when Churchill says alone, that's what he means. At that moment, Hitler was master of Western Europe, into Central Europe, bordering Eastern Europe and over into Poland. And he was allies with the Soviet Union, the other great
remaining independent power in Europe. And between them they had complete control of the continent, where most of the power and people in the world lived at that time.
Now, the first three chapters are on the government, but the chapter two and three, which I think will probably spend the most time on, is about the collapse of the French. As Churchill puts it, 4 or 5 millions of men met each other in the first shock of the most merciless of all the wars of which record has been kept. I think we do have. Bill Bennett used to say we have trouble with numbers in this age. That's a lot of soldiers fighting, a lot of soldiers.
That's a lot of tanks and airplanes in the air. That's an immense undertaking that we see in movies by little bits, and we read books about it. But the idea of 4 or 5 million men and all the tanks in the army clashing across Europe is really something. I hope we never see it again. Kind of extraordinary to have had to have lived through.
Yeah. It it it was the Second World War was, uh, much bigger. I mean, the First World War was unprecedented. And the cost of it and the fighting conditions were unprecedentedly bad. The Second World War was much bigger, much bigger, and went on longer. And, uh, casualties were much higher, although not, uh, British casualties. They, their casualties were about half what they were in the First World War. And that was partly because technology was which war was fought
had changed very much. Maneuver and tanks instead of trenches, and partly because Churchill was in charge and he was always looking for a way to spare life. Uh, but it was a terrible thing. And of course, it was a complete astonishment because Britain, you know, first of all, it was a controversial decision. It was controversial to Churchill to ally with France and send an expeditionary force onto
the continent. They'd done that before in the world, in the wars of Marlborough and others, but they were always reluctant to do it because they're a great naval power and they have the channel to protect them. But now it's the airplane time, right? And that means, you know, Britain can get bombed soon. It would be. And the Navy might not even be able to operate safely in the channel with air power, as proved to be true until they got air superiority.
So there's a curious part, Larry, at the beginning of the book, I got to ask you this question very beginning of volume two. Churchill almost breaks the fourth plane and is talking to the millions of Americans. This book comes out in 48 or 49. It's a huge bestseller. Everybody wants to read about the war in which they have been involved, or their family's been touched. And he spends the first few pages making sure that at least the American reader and certainly the British reader understand who
did what. And he writes he doesn't want to insult the United States, but he writes, it is in the combined interest of the English speaking world, and that would include Australia and New Zealand and Canada, that the magnitude of the British war making effort should be known and realized.
And he goes on to point out that until July of 1944, which is five years after this thing gets started, Britain and her empire had a substantially larger number of divisions in contact with the enemy than the United States. And then he goes through the casualties. The British lost 303,000 men, the dominions the Empire lost 109,000 men. They lost 60,500 civilians in the air raids in the Battle
of Britain. They lost 30,000 merchant and fisherman. And he says, compare that to the United States, which lost all over the world, 322,000. Why does he do that?
Well, by the time he's writing this book, uh, and indeed, before the Second World War, we had become the greatest reserve of power in the world. And he. And we rescued them. It took the British standing alone for us to get a chance to do that, but we rescued them. He wants to make the point that they are serious partners, and also he wants to honour his country, which he got. Victor Hanson in his very good book, The Second World Wars, he calls it, because there were such huge theatres all
over the world and they operated independently, somewhat. He makes the point that pound for pound, the British got the most out of themselves of any nation. They sacrificed so much, you know. And Churchill was just really good at organizing a war and fighting one, fighting it to win, fighting it as cheaply as possible. But here he simply outnumbered. And and so he's got to fight by every hook
and crook to try to keep the nation alive. And, you know, we have to talk about the politics of this some, because there are deep things evident in the parts of this early book about what Churchill figured out over the course of his life about politics, because one of the things.
There, because he's in our last segment, in the last chapter of Gathering Storm, Chamberlain steps down. Churchill steps up after playing his cards very nicely. He's now in charge of the whole thing. He has to keep the Conservative Party. He's got to keep Chamberlain in the government. He's got to keep Halifax a couple of other Appeasers, Simon and Hoare. And he's got to bring in the other party. It's a balancing act. It's a juggling act that, uh, we
don't really know much about. That's not how we do our governments. But what a.
Yeah. Well, he could, so he could he didn't have a term. Right. He could lose his job on any day in a vote of the House of Commons. And the conservatives had a majority of 120. And they were loyal to Chamberlain and Halifax, who had led them for a long time, and. And they were cool to Churchill.
And remember that he could lose his job on any day, lose his job on any day. So I had to walk a very fine line. More on their finest hour with Doctor Larry Arnn. All things hillsdale@hillsdale.edu. All the dialogues@hughforhillsdale.com. Welcome back America. I'm Hugh Hugh with Doctor Larry Arnn. We're talking about the finest hour by Winston Churchill and his command by speech of the House of Commons, even though it wasn't with him. Doctor arm.
Uh, in the very great speech, which is in this volume when it's in the in the last volume, he says, uh, I will say to my this house, as I've said to my colleagues in the cabinet, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. Well, the first paragraph of that, it's a very short speech, but the first pair is only two paragraphs long. The first paragraph
is not so famous. And in the first paragraph he says, uh, I've reorganized the cabinet over the weekend, and I'm sorry that I didn't get to talk to some of the people who have been fired. And then he goes into that, as I've said to them, I say to you, nothing but blood. He completely reorganized the cabinet in three days, And he had learned how to do that. First of all, there's a part of the American Constitution that he always
admired unreservedly. He admired the whole thing. He usually subordinated to the British, but sometimes not the provision that there's a commander in chief, and that commander in chief is appointed by the people of the United States. And that means in America, war policy can be uniform. It can be united, can be unidirectional. And Britain did not achieve that in the Second World War, the First World War. In the Second World War. Churchill organised that over the
weekend and he thought about it for decades. And he mentions in this book where he learned the importance of that. He learned that in the First World War when he was advocating the Dardanelles, but he didn't have the authority to see it through. And he believed that if it had just been prosecuted consistently, it would have succeeded. Instead, the people who did have the authority abandoned it when it got tough and he suffered the consequences. And so
he sets up his cabinet. So there's a small war cabinet. Uh, he appoints himself Minister of Defence, and that makes him in charge of the war ministries, all of them. And it makes him the chairman of the, uh, Chiefs of Staff Committee. That's all. The service heads, the serving officers, the supreme generals and admirals. And that meant that there were these three bodies. There's the the War Cabinet and there's the defence civilian establishment, and there's the United War Services.
And Churchill is the only member of all three.
It's kind of astonishing that he would sit there and ask not only ask, but demand more and more power. He is going to run this war, and it's an overwhelming amount of power that he's gathering into his hands. But he's doing it, as you pointed out, quite conscientiously. And they're down to five in the War Cabinet about the War Cabinet. He writes, they were the only ones who would have the right to have their heads cut off on Tower Hill if we did not win. So
there are five people. But then about those five people, he writes a little bit later it was understood and accepted that I, Churchill, should assume the general direction of the war, subject to the support of the War Cabinet in the House of Commons. The key change which occurred on my taking over was, of course, the supervision and direction of the Chiefs of Staff Committee by a Minister of Defence with undefined powers. So it's all new in
British history. He's doing something new for a new exigency.
Yeah. And he but also, by the way, something he had thought through for 25 years. Uh, you know, he suffered the absence of that to his cost in the First World War. And so he, he had reached a place in his life that he was the one who could do this. And of course, there's something controversial, controversial today about all of this and controversial. And that is he comes into power on the 10th of May 1940,
the same day Hitler attacks to the West. And it's very important to to people to understand the drama of these days. He's writing about these days in this book. And the drama is that on the eighth and 9th of May, 1940, there is a debate over a motion of no confidence against Neville, Chamberlain and Churchill, and it was likely to succeed. And Churchill could surmise that if Chamberlain fell, he would be one of the two people
who would be picked. Halifax the other one, Churchill spent those two days defending Neville Chamberlain the most fiercely and taking personal responsibility for the failures of the Chamber of Administration on his own shoulders. And that was, first of all, noble, right. And effective. And I think it bore fruit because from that time until Neville Chamberlain died in November of that year, he had cancer. He didn't live very much longer than he had cancer on the eighth or 9th or 10th
of May. Um, a friendship was born. And that friendship was important because on the 27th of May. See. So you're talking about May the 10th. The German attack starts and Churchill takes power. And 17 days later, Lexi. 13 days later, it starts on the 23rd of May. It becomes apparent that France is going to fall and Britain is going to be alone and might not get its army back. And my wife's father was in that army
and left Dunkirk Beach the last day anybody did. And I remember my wife was born after that I might not have ever met. Um, so these dramas are going on. And Mussolini not yet in the war, but Hitler henchman, a former British ally in the First World War and before, is appealing to open a peace conference. And, uh, if I remember correctly, Mussolini's son in law or nephew, I can't remember is the Italian ambassador, and he's talking to Halifax,
the foreign minister. And remember, in the cabinet they are there because they have a constituency of their own and they have some force. And so on the 23rd of May, 13 days later, Halifax begins bringing these appeals for a peace conference to the cabinet war cabinet to the War Cabinet, the whole cabinet. 25 others don't know that this is going on. And so the first day Churchill Temporizes find out what they say. Second day, third day, fourth day, fifth day. It gets to be the 28th. And Halifax
is becoming insistent. Now, if Halifax or Chamberlain or both of them had resigned from the War Cabinet and the cabinet, then probably Churchill's government would have fallen. So he couldn't make them right. And, you know, remember, there are people writing today that it would have been better to have made a piece at that time, because Britain did lose its pre-eminence in the war through the course of this war. Probably going to lose it anyway because we're a much
bigger country. But never mind.
Never mind. Don't go anywhere, America. Much more coming up. All things Hillsdale are@hillsdale.edu, including Erika Kirk's commencement address at the state, including all their video courses, hillsdale.edu, and of course, all the prior dialogues@hughforhillsdale.com. Stay tuned. Welcome back America. I'm Hugh Hewitt talking with doctor about all the internal debate debates that go on, really about whether or not Churchill ought to have made a separate peace.
So remember, there's second guessing about this going on to this day. Well, Churchill doesn't say much for days. And then he gets to the 28th and Halifax is pressing and threatening slightly. We have the record of these conversations, by the way, and they're not candidly recited in this book that we're reading. Churchill does a remarkable thing. He calls on the at the moment, on the 28th of May,
a meeting of the entire cabinet. And they don't know what's going on, and they don't really know the war situation. And Churchill gives them a speech of an hour. It's a rare speech that he did not write out in advance, but two guys were in the room and took detailed notes. Um, the best one, a labour minister, a left wing crazy named Hugh Dalton, who I always loved, Winston Churchill. And
he wrote down copious notes. Right. And we know that Churchill for an hour described the war situation and said that it's very serious, said that we might have to try to get our army off France. And we don't know if we can do it. We still have a navy. The airplane problem will be the next battle. And then he says these words, which are more or less exact.
He said, I've been thinking in these last few days whether it is part of my duty to open negotiations with that man, meaning Hitler, and I believe that if I were for a moment to consider parley or surrender, every one of you would rise up and tear me down from my place. If this island story is to end at last, let it end. When each of us in this room lies choking in his own blood upon the ground. He finished with that. And then they leaped up and cheered him, and there was a huge burst
of feeling. Churchill calls it uncommon in the story of the of the cabinet. And then they get the War Cabinet back together, and Halifax says, yes, I think if we open negotiations at this stage, we'll be on a slippery slope. Well on that day. That remarkable maneuver in those tremendous words are what kept Great Britain in the war, which is the reason.
By the slimmest of threads. Meanwhile, I want to make sure in our ten minutes we tell people, I'm not going to cover much of chapters two and three because the collapse of the French army, it's very technical. It's full of good maps. Churchill knows his maps. He knows his war. What I take away is a civilian who's not very good with maps. They literally fell apart. They couldn't communicate. The French had millions of men strung out
over all of Europe, and they had no reserve. In fact, Churchill writes at one point, rather startlingly, that he's almost physically knocked over by the fact that the French don't have a strategic reserve. I find that I understand what a strategic reserve is. I'm astonished that they didn't have one. Are you?
Well, the chairman, first of all, the French French army wasn't in good nick at this time. But what the Germans did, the French and the British expected the attack to come up through Belgium, and that it could not come through a place, uh, south and west of the Maginot. Let me get my numbers right. Yeah. South and west of the Maginot Line. Because they built these big entrenchments, you know, to keep the Germans from coming again. And, uh. And they couldn't get in. What? South and west of
that line is the Ardennes forest. And they held the view that the Germans couldn't come through that. Well, the Germans did. Uh, they were actually reinforced in that view because, uh, some, some imaginative people thought they might get tanks over those mountain roads, but they could never get enough fuel. And they forgot that they had gas stations all over France. And so the Germans did. Rommel and Guderian got a major tank army behind the French army and between the
French army and Paris and its lines of supply. And they cut those lines of supply, and everything was confusion.
And very bad to have forgotten the gas stations. We got to come back to that. Welcome back America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. I'm often amazed by Churchill's memoirs, really sometimes just surprised the amazing part. Larry the Winston Churchill. I cannot imagine anything like this today flew back and forth, I think at least three times into the teeth of the battle so that he could talk to the French who were there, stunned and forlorn and paralyzed to a
large extent. They don't have a plant, but their bullets flying around. He's got ten hurricanes, but but he flies back and forth. What do you make of that? That would be considered foolish in this day and age? It would be Yamamoto, right? You're you're bait for the Intel services to shoot you down.
Yeah. Well, yeah, the, uh, Andrew Robertson is very good. Recent biography of Churchill Walking with Destiny goes through how much Churchill traveled during the war. A multiple of all the other world leaders put together because he was keeping a grand alliance. He called it together, and he went three times to beg the French to fight to the last. And the French had had, uh, a treaty with Britain
that they would do that. And they did break that treaty. Uh, in one of the meetings, de Gaulle young he was one of the young European military commanders who understood the tank. Patton was another. Rommel. And Guderian did, uh, and he was a junior, though Churchill noticed him there and noticed that he had a lot of fire in his eyes and he sat bolt upright. Well, he's in these meetings, right. But we can also see that, um, the French are collapsing.
They call out PTEN and vegan heroes of the First World War. PTEN was the commander at Verdun, the bloodiest battle in the West in the First World War. And they're trotted out and they're making policy now. PTEN would eventually be the president of the Vichy Republic under the German thumb. Uh, and at one point, uh, Churchill says, uh, you can consume two German Army corps in the streets of Paris. And Patton says, we've already given the order
for the evacuation of Paris. And Churchill replies, Nations that die fighting rise up again. Those that surrender tamely are gone forever. And then. And now we have a record of this from a man named Edward Louis Spears, who was a very close friend of Churchill, and he was raised in France, and who was his French was excellent, and he was the liaison officer between the British and the French armies in both First and Second World Wars. And he wrote excellent books about them. The first one
is called liaison 1914. The second one is called Assignment to Catastrophe, and he is the one there as a translator to record these conversations with the French. And he was in very close sympathy with Winston Churchill. He's a brilliant man. In fact, the first time he was elected to Parliament was the first time Churchill lost his parliamentary seat, and he immediately wrote to Churchill and offered Churchill his seat.
So after Churchill said that about nations that die fighting Renault, who was a little better, although they were having one of these meetings in a in an apartment where Renault was hanging around with his mistress, and her nightgown was draped over one of the chairs. Uh, something that General Spears noticed. And Reynolds says he's the prime minister. He says. Well, if you will give us your Air force, we can
carry on. And, uh, Spears records. He said that was a moment of danger, he says, because I knew Winston and I knew how generous he was, and I thought he might do that. And Churchill looked down for a minute and looked up and said, this is not the last battle. He says, they must kill us in our island or they cannot win. And Reynolds says, how will you stand up against the whole German war machine by yourself?
And Churchill says, I haven't thought about it very hard yet, but I expect the plan will be to drown most of them on the way over and choke the rest of them to death on the beach.
I want to close with one quick, one quick anecdote. Quote. I am a strong believer in transacting official business by the written word. In Churchill's own phrase, he underscores and italicizes written word. He knows he's got all this power. He does not want people speaking in his name unless they've been authorized by him to do so. Is that a practice you follow?
Oh, yeah. Well, um. Sure. Um, but, you know, Churchill wrote a million emails, memos, and they're very good. They're tremendous. Um, uh, once in a while they're long. Uh, they are always well ordered and clear. Uh, he had a stamp he would put on things. Uh. Action this day. Uh, but. And if you wrote him and he did, most of his memos are very short. Uh, uh, and very precise and concise. Right at the point you can. They don't
leave much room for ambiguity. If you gave him a long memo, he would do what, uh, Margaret Thatcher used to do. I knew her pretty well. And I was told that by several people who worked for her. If you handed her a multi-page memo while you were standing there, she would start reading the first page. And he would she would put the later pages in the wastebasket. Huh?
Oh, brutal. Oh, that's a good message. And you'd pretty soon get one page memos. Uh, the statue of the Iron Lady is on Hillsdale's campus, by the way, and they have. We'll have to talk about that someday, doctor. Don't go anywhere, America. All things hillsdale@hillsdale.edu. All the hughforhillsdale.com. Welcome back America doctor. I'm finished by telling them what you were telling me off air.
I was telling a student the other day because we were talking about how, you know, about the past, because there are all these crazy things being said about the past. And I said, well, the past, we know it because it's written down. Did you ever, I said, discover something that you wrote in high school, a paper or a letter? And they said, yeah, somebody, by the way, the other day presented me with my original correspondence with Martin Gilbert. Oh, I was in Claremont, and that starts in 1977, a
long time ago. And the young man said, yeah, I did do that. And I said, and wasn't it a resting when you did that? Didn't you correct whatever memory you had of your time back then? Because you write it down. Right. And, and that means that, you know, and you know, the records of the college, the future archives of the college are today my working files.
And, you.
Know.
Larry, We'll leave it here. But in evidence, when you teach evidence. I don't teach evidence, but I remember it. Uh, someone called written documents put into evidence. Are the past knocking at the door of the present, uh, demanding to be heard. And that's it. Demanding to be heard. Well.
The day you write the thing you don't know about today yet, write the future, right?
No. You don't.
That's that's why that's how you write. You know, if you if you if you, uh, study with Martin Gilbert, you learn like it's such a blessing that Churchill wrote so much because you can, in fact, know what he was thinking. He wrote so much of it down and you can have it from the time Churchill followed a rule that he would not excoriate people for things they did unless he had taken a position on it himself
at the time. And, uh, and that and, you know, he did take so many positions and they are written down and they are spoken in the House of Commons, and all that is written down verbatim. And that means you can know what he thought, but what he's writing about here is exactly connected to that. Right. In other words, uh, the the biographer of Hugh Hewitt will ask Betsy, where's the letters? And, you know, that's the first thing you ask for. Where's the papers? Your emails. Right. There's a
million of them. Those are hard. They present challenges.
Oh my goodness. Do they ever.
By the way, the digital age, like most of our correspondents, Hugh, which is extensive, is an email.
It's an email. Right? Yeah.
Will that be around in 15 years? I hope so. The lawyer our attorney hopes not, but I hope so. And, uh, you know, it's, uh. But you see, in other words, uh, there's a danger that the effect of the digital age will be to cut us off from the past. In part, there will.
Be no or fewer knocks at the door. Fewer. Doctor. Thank you. We will come back next week and we will talk about the amazing chapters four and five in this book, The rush to the sea, where Larry's father in law and 330 000 other brave and lucky souls get off of Europe as Rommel and Guderian surround them. Don't go anywhere. Adam. Thank you. Harley. Thank you general. Thank you. We'll talk to you next time on the next Hillsdale Dialogue.
Thanks for listening to the Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes@podcast.hillsdale.edu or wherever you find your audio. For more information about Hillsdale College, head to hillsdale.edu.