![]() Ours were plain cardboard, but smart women might have a fancy carrier for their gas mask. KEN SEFTON: Everybody had to carry a gas mask. Ken Sefton(ph) was a 12-year-old boy in Belfast, Ireland. There was even speculation that German paratroopers would land disguised as nuns. Posters and cartoons warned about espionage and spies. They were not yet used much, but the practices were going on.īURKE: Food was rationed. And then there these great barrage balloons hanging over the city, and the searchlights playing across the clouds at night. RAMSDEN: The big buildings in central London, the museums and galleries, the palace even, you know, we were all surrounded by sandbags. ![]() JOHN RAMSDEN (Historian Churchill Biographer, Queens College): The sights, the sounds, the smells, they were all telling you all the time that death was expected to come raining down from the skies.īURKE: Historian and Churchill biographer John Ramsden of Queens College in London. England had been prepping for German bombing raids since at least 1938, and British people lived daily under the weight of that threat. Why are we not attacking?' And it was called the phony war, and there's a little feeling that `If we're going to have a war, let's have it.'īURKE: Meanwhile, the home front was enduring very real wartime stresses. They say, `What the hell's going on? We're supposed to be at war. It was almost as though there was a kind of pact: Let's not bomb each other.īURKE: Veteran BBC correspondent Charles Wheeler, who was 16 in 1940, says British foreign policy sowed seeds of cynicism and apathy. CHARLES WHEELER (Veteran Correspondent, BBC): We were dropping leaflets. The army life is fine.īURKE: But while army troops served on the front lines of Europe and the British navy escorted supply ships across the Atlantic, political leaders in London refrained from using all-out force against Germany, and some in Parliament were even pressing to negotiate peace with Hitler. Unidentified Man #2: (Singing) Now imagine me in the Maginot Line, sitting on a mine on the Maginot Line. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our empire.īURKE: Churchill's fine writing and unflagging defiance became vital to the British people throughout the war, but his speeches immediately fell on welcome ears, because the citizens of England had endured a frustrating period of ambivalence known as the phony war.īURKE: Technically, Britain had been at war with Germany since September of 1939. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Prime Minister WINSTON CHURCHILL (Great Britain): What General Weygand has called the battle of France is over. When Churchill came over the airwaves that evening, the world was listening. And just days before, France had surrendered to Hitler. Allied forces in mainland Europe had fallen beneath the crush of the Nazi blitzkrieg in a matter of weeks. Producer Adam Burke brings us this account of British life at a time when England stood alone in the world against the might of Nazi Germany's Adolf Hitler.ĪDAM BURKE: June 18th, 1940, was a tumultuous time in British history. And in a long and spectacularly colorful life, this may have been his finest hour as well. He summoned them to what he called their finest hour. Unidentified Man #1: (Singing) There'll always be an England, where there's a country lane.ĬHADWICK: Sixty-five years ago tomorrow, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered one of the most memorable speeches in history, first to the British Parliament, and then that evening over the radio to the British people.
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