On the evening of July 19, 1940, Adolf Hitler stood on the podium of the Kroll Opera House in Berlin and declared that Britain had only two choices: a negotiated settlement or annihilation. He spoke as a conqueror. He was waiting for a response. The reply came within the hour, broadcast over the radio by a man who had no authority to give it on behalf of his government.
When word of that broadcast reached the Reich Chancellery, the Nazi leadership in Germany was genuinely stunned. In the summer of 1940, no one in Berlin could understand why Britain would choose destruction over dialogue. To understand that bewilderment, it is necessary to go back eight weeks, to a room in London where Britain nearly made the opposite choice. On the evening of May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill entered 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
He was 65 years old. He had been out of government for a decade, was not trusted by most of his own party, and had only been recalled because the alternative was seen as worse. On the morning of that same day, German forces had crossed the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. By the time Churchill kissed the King’s hand that night, the war he had spent five years warning about had already begun in the West.
But he had 17 days. Seventeen days between the moment he took office and the moment his war government nearly took the country in an entirely different direction. Few in Britain knew that a struggle was taking place behind closed doors. Almost no one outside a handful of ministers learned of it until 25 years later.
In the last week of May 1940, behind closed doors in Whitehall, the British government came closer to opening peace talks with Adolf Hitler than at any other point in the war. By the third week of May, the German advance through France had achieved something no serious military planner in London had believed possible. Armored divisions under Guderian and Rommel had pushed through the Ardennes, crossed the Meuse, and driven straight toward the English Channel. On May 20, German tanks reached Abbeville at the mouth of the Somme.
Within ten days they had split the Allied armies in two. The best-trained British forces, the British Expeditionary Force, were trapped. More than 300,000 men were encircled in a shrinking pocket in northern France and Belgium, pressed toward a single Channel port. That port was Dunkirk.
On May 26, the French garrison at Calais surrendered after four days of ferocious house-to-house fighting. On the night of May 27, the Belgian army surrendered, opening the northern flank of the pocket. The evacuation from Dunkirk had started the day before under the codename Operation Dynamo, but by May 27, only about 7,600 soldiers had left the beaches. The Royal Navy expected to move around 45,000 troops in total before the pocket collapsed.
That meant leaving more than a quarter of a million British soldiers dead or prisoners in German hands, and Britain almost without a trained army to defend its shores. That was the map on the wall when the War Cabinet met. There were five men in it: Churchill as Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain his predecessor still leading the Conservative Party, Labour ministers Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood, and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. Halifax mattered more than anyone else in what was coming.
He was tall, thin, deeply religious, and one of the most experienced men in British public life. He had served as Viceroy of India. He had sat opposite Hitler at Berchtesgaden in November 1937. Only three weeks earlier, when Chamberlain’s government fell, Halifax had been the King’s preferred choice to replace him.
He had declined, believing a member of the House of Lords could not lead the country in wartime. Churchill took the post instead, while Halifax remained Foreign Secretary, the most powerful Conservative in government after Chamberlain himself. Halifax looked at that map and reached a conclusion that many cautious, experienced men in his position might have reached. He believed Britain should at least find out what terms were on the table.
He had a channel to test those terms. Italy had not yet entered the war. Mussolini was still balancing between sides, waiting to see which way the scales tilted. On May 25, Halifax met the Italian ambassador in London, Giuseppe Bastianini, and suggested, in careful diplomatic language, that matters troubling Italy could be discussed as part of a broader European settlement.
It was not an offer of surrender. It was a probing of intentions. If Mussolini was willing to act as a mediator between London and Berlin, Halifax was signaling that Britain would listen. The next day, the War Cabinet began nine meetings over three days.
They met in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. They met at the Admiralty. They met in Churchill’s room in the House of Commons. Between May 26 and May 28, they returned to the same question again and again.
Should Britain, through Mussolini, explore what Hitler would ask? Halifax argued yes. His case was not about surrender. It was about information.
France was clearly finished. The army in Belgium was about to be lost. Britain still had the fleet, the Royal Air Force, and influence. Halifax said it was better to use that influence now, while it existed, to find out whether an acceptable settlement was possible, rather than fight, lose the influence, and later be forced to accept worse terms.
Churchill’s response was that this influence was the trap itself. He said the moment Britain sat down at the table, Germany would set the agenda. Hitler would demand the surrender of the fleet. He would demand naval and air bases in the British Isles.
He would demand the reduction of British armed forces to a level that made resistance impossible. Any government that accepted those terms would become a puppet dependent on Germany’s goodwill. Once in that trap, there would be no escape. Churchill said it was better to keep fighting while the two things that could stop a German invasion remained intact: the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy.
The most dangerous moment came on the afternoon of Monday, May 27. Halifax felt that day that Churchill was, in his own diary words, talking terrible rubbish. That evening, he confided that he was seriously considering resignation. If he left, taking Chamberlain’s Conservative followers with him, Churchill’s coalition government, barely two weeks old, would collapse before the Dunkirk evacuation was even over.
A new government might then be ready to negotiate. Two things stopped that from happening. The first was Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain was the man of Munich.
He had signed the 1938 agreement that gave Hitler the Sudetenland in exchange for a promise of peace. He had seen that promise broken within six months. In May 1940, he was also dying of stomach cancer, though he did not know it yet. He still led the Conservative Party, and his decision would determine whether the parliamentary party stayed behind Churchill or turned against him.
At the start of the crisis, Chamberlain stood in the middle. He understood the strength of Halifax’s argument. But he also remembered what Hitler’s promises were worth. By the afternoon meeting on May 28, he had sided with Churchill.
Continue the fight. That single shift, carrying with it votes and loyalties, was the first turning point in the whole story. The second was a room full of men. Churchill himself went out to gather them on the evening of May 28, after the War Cabinet meeting ended that day without final decision.
He called in the expanded government, the ministers of Cabinet rank who were not among the five members of the inner Cabinet, around 25 men. He met them in his room in the House of Commons. He briefed them on the military situation, on the state of France, and on the options before the government. He told them plainly that he had thought carefully about whether it was part of his duty to consider negotiations with that man.
He said he was sure that each of them would rise and cast him from office if he thought for one moment about negotiating or surrendering. According to the diary of Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare, who was in the room, Churchill ended with a sentence they never forgot. If this story of ours on this island is to end at last, then let it end only when each of us falls choking in his own blood upon the ground. The ministers cheered him.
Many rose from their seats and rushed around the table to pat him on the back. When Churchill returned to the War Cabinet later that evening and conveyed their reaction, the argument was over. Halifax was in the minority. The idea of exploring terms through Mussolini did not survive that night.
None of this was announced to the public. What the public heard were the defiance speeches that came later. On June 4, as the last soldiers left the beaches of Dunkirk, a total of 338,000, a number far beyond what the navy had thought possible, Churchill stood in the House of Commons and said Britain would fight on the beaches, in the fields, in the streets, and in the hills, and would never surrender. On June 18, with France collapsing, he said the Battle of France was over and the Battle of Britain was about to begin.
On June 22, in the Compiègne forest, in the same railway carriage where Germany had signed its surrender in November 1918, France signed an armistice with the Reich. Britain was now alone. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler read the same news, looked at the same map, and drew the opposite conclusion. The summer of 1940 did not look to Berlin like a war still in progress.
It looked like a war already won. France, which theoretically possessed the strongest army in Europe, had collapsed in six weeks. The British Expeditionary Force had escaped from the beaches but left behind nearly all its equipment, tanks, trucks, artillery, and radio sets piled on the sand for German army photographers. Belgium had surrendered.
The Netherlands had surrendered. Norway and Denmark were already occupied. From the north to the Pyrenees, the coast of Europe was now directly or indirectly under the Reich. From the standpoint of the German general staff, there was no serious military problem left in the West.
Only a diplomatic problem remained. On July 6, 1940, Hitler returned to Berlin from his forward headquarters in the West. He arrived at Anhalter Station to a reception the regime had spent days preparing. Flowers were scattered along the route from the station to the Reich Chancellery.
Loudspeakers were installed down Wilhelmstrasse. The crowds, according to American radio correspondent William Shirer, who watched from the platform, were larger and more genuinely enthusiastic than anything he had seen in seven years of covering Nazi Germany. This was the moment, in the regime’s own staging, of the conqueror of France returning home. Hitler expected the ovation to coincide with a message from London.
It did not. Hitler waited for the next ten days. There is no dramatic scene describing those ten days, because the point is that nothing at all happened. No British envoy appeared in any neutral capital.
No probing initiatives arrived through Sweden, Switzerland, or the Vatican. The BBC kept broadcasting defiance. Churchill kept making speeches in the House of Commons. The Royal Navy kept control of the Channel.
Inside the Reich Chancellery, the leadership of a country that had just conquered Western Europe found itself in the odd position of waiting for a phone call that never came. The debate within the German government was not what an outside observer might expect. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was not pressing for a settlement. He had spent his diplomatic career underestimating the British and telling Hitler what he wanted to hear.
He had assured the Führer in 1939 that Britain would not go to war over Poland. He had been wrong then. Now he was demanding a hard-line policy of pressure and threats, and invasion if necessary. The more cautious voice was State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker, a professional diplomat who understood the British better than his minister and quietly advised patience.
But Weizsäcker was not the one whispering in Hitler’s ear. Hitler himself was hesitant. His public statements throughout June assumed the war in the West was effectively over. His private orders reflected the same assumption.
When his generals, especially army chief of staff Franz Halder, began asking what would happen if Britain did not accept its position, they received no clear answer. There was no invasion plan ready on the shelf. No one in the Wehrmacht had seriously developed one because no one thought one would be necessary. By mid-July, that had to change.
On July 16, 1940, Hitler signed Führer Directive No. 16. Its title was “On the Preparation of a Landing Operation against England,” and it gave the operation the codename Sea Lion. The opening lines of the directive are the most revealing document in this whole story, because they show that even at the moment Hitler was ordering an invasion, he did not really believe he would have to carry it out.
The directive began: “Since England, despite the hopelessness of her military situation, has so far shown no willingness to come to a settlement, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England, and if necessary, to carry it out. ”
Hopelessness of her military situation. That was the phrase. For three weeks in Berlin in mid-July 1940, the fixed view at the top of the German government was that Britain had already been defeated and was simply refusing to admit it.
The invasion was not ordered as a primary line of attack. It was ordered as a threat, a show piece to convince London the game was over. The problem was that once the order was signed, the German armed forces had to try to turn it into reality. The plan that emerged over the following weeks was enormous on paper.
It called for a landing on a broad front along England’s south coast, from Ramsgate in Kent to Lyme Regis in Dorset. Nine divisions in the first wave. Airborne troops securing the ground behind the beaches, with follow-on convoys arriving over the following weeks. But the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, looked at the maps and said something the army did not want to hear.
The Channel was not a river. It was one of the busiest and most dangerous bodies of water in the world, controlled by the Royal Navy, still the largest surface fleet on earth. The German navy had lost nearly half its destroyers during the Norwegian campaign in April. It did not have the escort ships to protect an invasion fleet.
It did not have the specialized landing craft the operation required. They would have to improvise, seizing river barges from the canals and ports of occupied Europe and towing them across the Channel behind tugs, hoping the weather stayed calm, that the Royal Navy did not intervene in force, and that the Royal Air Force would first be driven from the sky. That last condition became the pivot on which the whole operation turned. Before the barges could sail, the German Air Force had to defeat Fighter Command.
Everything now depended on Hermann Göring’s air force. Hitler was still not committed to invasion. He remained convinced that if pressure were increased enough, London would break. On July 16, the same day he signed Directive 16, he began drafting one last attempt to make the British realize what he considered self-evident.
He would speak before the Reichstag. He would speak as the conqueror of France, and he would make an offer of peace publicly, before so many witnesses, that it would be very hard for London to reject without paying a political price. The Reichstag was summoned for the evening of Friday, July 19, at the Kroll Opera House on the western side of Königsplatz. The German parliament had been meeting there since the Reichstag fire destroyed its original building in February 1933.
That night, the Kroll was full. Deputies in their brown Nazi uniforms. Senior military officers in dress uniforms. Foreign diplomats in the balcony.
William Shirer sat in the press box. Not far from him sat Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, in the black and gray uniform of the Fascist militia, holding a German text of the speech he was surely unable to follow. Before the speech itself, Hitler used the session for a ceremony. Twelve senior Wehrmacht officers were promoted to field marshal rank in a single act.
Walther von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the army. Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Armed Forces High Command. Gerd von Rundstedt, Fedor von Bock, and Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, who had led the three army groups in the French campaign. Günther von Kluge, Wilhelm List, Walther von Reichenau, and Erwin von Witzleben, the army commanders.
From the air force, Erhard Milch, Albert Kesselring, and Hugo Sperrle. Twelve field marshal’s batons handed out at once, in a deliberate display meant to underscore the scale of what had been achieved in France. Then Hitler went one step further. Hermann Göring, already a field marshal, was promoted to a new rank invented for him alone, Reich Marshal of the Greater German Reich.
The promotion made Göring, in theory, superior to every other officer in the German armed forces and confirmed to the public that he was Hitler’s designated successor. Göring received his new marshal’s baton on the same platform. Then Hitler turned to deliver his speech. He spoke for two hours.
Much of it was a review of the wars waged so far and a long personal attack on the British leadership, especially Churchill, whom he called a conscience-less politician who had ruined whole nations and who would, when the day of German victory came, escape safely to Canada, where Hitler claimed the money and children of British war-mongers had been sent. But near the end came the passage everyone in the hall was waiting for. “In this hour, I feel it my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Great Britain as much as elsewhere,” Hitler said. “I consider myself in a position to make this appeal, since I am not the vanquished begging for favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason.
I see no reason why this war should go on. ”
Then came the sentence around which the entire evening had been built. “Perhaps Mr. Churchill will believe me this time when I predict that a great empire will be destroyed, an empire which it was never my intention to destroy or even to harm.
I realize that this struggle, if it continues, can only end in the complete destruction of one of the two sides. Mr. Churchill may believe this will be Germany. I know it will be Britain.
”
That was the core. Settlement or annihilation. The offer was carefully worded. No specific demands were read from the platform.
Nothing was said about the fleet, military bases, or colonies. It was a public appeal from a conqueror to a defeated opponent to be rational. Some foreign diplomats in the hall left that evening genuinely worried, as Shirer later noted, that the British might seize on the vagueness of the language as an opportunity, a pretext to send envoys and open negotiations. The German press was fully prepared.
The next morning’s papers were already ready with headlines presenting the speech as a noble gesture from the most powerful man in Europe. Radio stations across the continent broadcast the offer that same night in twelve languages. Goebbels’ propaganda ministry had paved the way for British acceptance, or at least for a face-saving delay while London worked out how to respond. No one had counted on what happened next.
In London, at Broadcasting House, a man named Sefton Delmer was listening to the speech live. Delmer was 36 years old. Born in Berlin in 1904, he was the son of an Australian professor of English literature teaching at the University of Berlin. German was his first language.
Before the war, as head of the Daily Express office in Berlin, he had been personally acquainted with most of the Nazi leaders. He had flown with Hitler during the 1932 campaign. He knew the rhythms of Hitler’s German better than any other living Englishman. Now he was working in the German service of the BBC, broadcasting programmes to listeners inside the Reich.
Delmer had no authority from Downing Street or the Foreign Office to respond on behalf of the British government. Any official Cabinet response would take days. But Delmer was due on air in German within the hour. He understood exactly what the German propaganda machine intended to do if British silence continued.
He decided, on his own initiative, not to give them that silence. About an hour after Hitler left the platform at the Kroll Opera House, Sefton Delmer appeared on the BBC’s German service. He addressed Hitler personally in German and rejected the offer immediately. He began: “Mr.
Führer and Reich Chancellor, we throw your words back in your face, and return them to your reeking teeth. ” He then proceeded to reject the terms point by point, in language carefully designed to close every door Hitler had opened. It was a private broadcast by a single journalist. It carried no diplomatic weight.
But it went out over the airwaves in German, and it was heard in Berlin. The effect at the Reich Chancellery and the Propaganda Ministry was complete confusion. The speed and directness of the response convinced Goebbels and his team that they had just heard the voice of the British government itself. They could not accept that an announcer would speak in that tone without authorization.
In Berlin, as Shirer reported from among German officials hearing the first BBC bulletins, there was a clear, undisguisable mood of disappointment. It was beginning to look as though the war in the West was not going to end after all. Ribbentrop was said to be in a fury. The Gestapo added Sefton Delmer’s name to the so-called “special arrest list for Great Britain,” the blacklist of people to be arrested immediately if Germany occupied Britain.
Three days of silence from official London followed. Then came the official reply, carrying an irony Berlin had not expected. On July 22, 1940, the British reply was broadcast from London to the world by radio. It was not read by Winston Churchill.
It was read by Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, the same man who had wanted to explore peace terms through Mussolini in May, who had considered resigning over Churchill’s refusal to negotiate. Now he stood before the microphone to close the door himself. Halifax said Hitler’s speech had offered no basis for justice. It contained no recognition of the right of nations to govern themselves.
Its only appeal was to the basic instinct of fear, and its only argument was the threat. Britain, he said, would not stop fighting until freedom was secured for itself and for others. The leader of the peace faction inside the British War Cabinet had become the voice of Britain’s refusal. In Berlin, the political option was now closed.
The struggle Hitler had described from the podium of the Kroll Opera House as the annihilation of one opponent or the other would now have to be settled the only way left. The Germans printed the text of the Reichstag speech as a leaflet in English, titled “A Last Appeal to Reason. ” In the first days of August, Luftwaffe aircraft began scattering it over the fields of southern England, over Somerset, Hampshire, and the countryside near Stratford-upon-Avon. British civilians picked the leaflets out of hedgerows.
Local authorities in some counties collected them and auctioned them off for the Red Cross and the Spitfire Fund. By that time, the aircraft dropping leaflets were no longer alone in the English sky. The first phase of the German air offensive against Britain had begun before Halifax spoke on July 22. The Luftwaffe called it the Channel Battle.
From the second week of July, formations of German bombers, escorted by Messerschmitt Bf 109 and Bf 110 fighters, attacked British coastal convoys in the English Channel and ports along the south coast. Partly the purpose was to disrupt British shipping. The deeper goal was to lure RAF Fighter Command into battle over water, where the Luftwaffe hoped to wear it down before the main offensive began. Fighter Command, under Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, refused to be drawn into the terms the Germans wanted.
Dowding kept the bulk of his squadrons away from the coast. He committed only what was needed for protection, preserving his strength for the larger battle he knew was coming. During late July and early August, the Channel skirmishes cost both sides aircraft and pilots, without producing a decisive result for either. The main German offensive was set for August 13.
Göring named it Adler Tag, Eagle Day. The plan was to destroy Fighter Command in southern England within days, attacking its airfields, radar stations, and aircraft factories, and forcing its fighters into battles where the more numerous German fighters could shoot them down. The Luftwaffe estimated it could break Fighter Command in four days. Once broken, the invasion could proceed.
Eagle Day itself was a day of confusion. Poor morning weather led to a partial callout of the German bomber force, which in some cases arrived without its fighter escort. The Luftwaffe flew nearly 1,500 sorties over the day but achieved far less than planned. Several radar stations along the south coast were bombed but were back in service within hours.
Fighter Command lost 13 aircraft in the air. The Luftwaffe lost 47. The pattern continued over the following weeks. The Germans kept attacking.
Fighter Command kept flying. Dowding’s two most important assets were radar, which gave early warning of incoming raids, and the sector control system, which allowed him to direct squadrons to interceptions where they were needed, rather than keeping continuous standing patrols. The Luftwaffe never fully understood how the British system worked and never systematically destroyed the coastal radar stations, which they rated as less important than they turned out to be. By the last week of August and the first week of September, Fighter Command was under real pressure.
Its airfields in Group 11, covering southeast England, were hit repeatedly. Pilot losses were high. Aircraft losses were being replaced faster than new pilots could be trained. Dowding was moving squadrons in from other groups, but the margin was narrowing.
Then, in early September, the Germans changed targets. On the night of September 7, 1940, 300 German bombers attacked the London docks. The city burned along the Thames from the Isle of Dogs to Woolwich. The daylight raids that followed in the same week were aimed at London itself rather than at Fighter Command’s airfields.
The Blitz, as the British called it, had begun. For British civilians, this was the destruction Hitler had promised. Between September 1940 and May 1941, nearly 43,000 civilians in Britain were killed by German bombing, more than half of them in London. Entire streets in the East End were reduced to rubble.
The city of Coventry was destroyed in a single night in November. Portsmouth, Southampton, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast, Bristol, Plymouth, Hull, every major port and industrial center was struck. This was what Hitler meant by annihilation when he used the word at the Kroll Opera House. The shift toward London saved Fighter Command.
Group 11’s airfields got the days they needed for repair. Aircraft production under Lord Beaverbrook at the Ministry of Aircraft Production was replacing losses. Squadrons were rotated and directed from quieter sectors to the front. On September 15, the Luftwaffe launched what it intended to be a final, decisive daylight attack on London.
Nearly every fighter squadron in Group 11 was scrambled, with reinforcements from Group 12 under Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory joining the battle. The German bomber formations were broken up. Their escorts were engaged all the way to the target and back. The Luftwaffe lost about 60 aircraft against 26 British.
September 15 has since been remembered in Britain as Battle of Britain Day. Two days later, on September 17, 1940, Adolf Hitler postponed Operation Sea Lion indefinitely. It was not announced publicly. The barges remained moored in the Channel ports for a few more weeks before being quietly dispersed.
The invasion divisions were released for other duties in December. That December, Hitler signed Führer Directive No. 21, setting out plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, scheduled for the following spring. The war in the West had not been settled.
The Reich would turn east with Britain undefeated behind it, in control of the Atlantic coast. That was the answer to the question Berlin had asked in July. Hitler had stood on the podium at the Kroll Opera House and told the world this conflict could end only in the complete annihilation of one opponent or the other. He was certain that opponent would be Britain.
Two months later, the invasion he ordered to carry out that prophecy was cancelled, because the Luftwaffe could not clear the sky over southern England, and without a clear sky, the barges could not sail. The annihilation of Britain as a material military possibility ended on the afternoon of September 17, 1940. The list of what the men in this story did that summer is short. Neville Chamberlain, whose voice in May kept Churchill’s government together and closed the door on negotiations, was already dying when he gave it.
He had undergone surgery for stomach cancer during the summer. He resigned from the government in early October 1940 and died at his home in Hampshire on November 9. He was 71. Whatever else history may record about him, the decision he made in the War Cabinet in the last week of May 1940 was probably the most important act of his political life.
Lord Halifax, who wanted to explore terms in May and rejected them on the radio in July, remained Foreign Secretary until December 1940. He was then sent to Washington as Britain’s ambassador to the United States, a post he held for the rest of the war. He proved an effective ambassador. He never returned to a decisive role in British domestic politics.
Sefton Delmer, the BBC announcer who answered Hitler on his own initiative within an hour of the Reichstag speech, spent the rest of the war running a network of British radio stations directed against Germany. The most famous was “Gustav Siegfried Eins,” which pretended to be a staunch German patriot broadcasting from inside the Reich, denouncing corruption in the Nazi party and encouraging resistance to Allied bombing. German listeners tuned in believing it was authentic. The Gestapo kept trying to locate the source of the broadcasts.
Delmer’s name stayed on the arrest list until Germany’s surrender. The larger significance of those three weeks in the summer of 1940 is difficult to exaggerate. Had the British government accepted Hitler’s offer in July, or begun the exploratory talks Halifax had wanted in May, the strategic geography of the Second World War would have been completely different. There would have been no independent base in the British Isles from which to launch a strategic bombing campaign against Germany.
There would have been no Atlantic convoy system arriving at a friendly port at its eastern end. When the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, there would have been no place in Western Europe from which American forces could push toward the continent. There would have been no buildup. There would have been no invasion of Normandy in the spring of 1944, because there would have been no England to build up in.
The decision that shaped all of that was not made on a battlefield. It was made in a room in Downing Street in the last week of May 1940, when five men argued over sending a message through Mussolini, and one man’s view won. That decision was reinforced in a room in the House of Commons on the evening of May 28, when Churchill spoke to the expanded ministry and the ministers rose to congratulate and support him. It was declared in a broadcast from London on July 22, when Lord Halifax closed the door he had once tried to open.
It was tested and held over the airfields of southern England through August and September, until the German Air Force could push it no further. Hitler had posed a simple question at the Kroll Opera House on the evening of July 19, 1940. He had expected a simple answer.
What came back to him, first from an unauthorized announcer in a BBC studio within the hour, then from the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom three days later, and finally from the pilots of Fighter Command through the long weeks of summer, was the shape of the next five years of the war.