Victor Davis Hanson offers his
take on the Darkest Hour film and what the world owes the late Winston
Churchill in the Washington Times.
The new film “Darkest Hour”
offers the diplomatic side to the recent action movie “Dunkirk.”
The story unfolds with the
drama of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill assuming power during the
Nazi invasion of France in May 1940. Churchill’s predecessor, the sickly
Neville Chamberlain, had lost confidence of the English people and the British
government. His appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the disastrous first nine
months of World War II seemed to have all but lost Britain the war.
Churchill was asked to become
prime minister on the very day that Hitler invaded France, Belgium and the
Netherlands. The armies of all three democracies — together larger than
Germany’s invading forces — collapsed within days or a few weeks.
About a third of a million
British soldiers stranded in a doomed France were miraculously saved by
Churchill’s bold decision to risk evacuating them by sea from Dunkirk, France,
where most of what was left of the British Expeditionary Force had retreated.
Churchill’s greatest problem
was not just saving the British army, but confronting the reality that with the
German conquest of Europe, the British Empire now had no allies.
The Soviet Union had all but
joined Hitler’s Germany under their infamous non-aggression pact of August
1939.
The United States was
determined at all costs to remain neutral. Just how neutral is emphasized in
“Darkest Hour” by Churchill’s sad phone call with U.S. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt. FDR cleverly assures Churchill that in theory he wants to help while
in fact he can do nothing.
Within days of Churchill
taking office, all of what is now the European Union either would be in
Hitler’s hands or could be considered pro-Nazi “neutral.”
“Darkest Hour” gets its title
from the understandable depression that had spread throughout the British
government. Members of Churchill’s new War Cabinet wanted to sue for peace.
Chamberlain and senior conservative politician Edward Wood both considered
Churchill unhinged for believing Britain could survive.
Both appeasers dreamed that
thuggish Italian dictator Benito Mussolini might be persuaded to beg Hitler to
call off his planned invasion of Great Britain. They dreamed Mussolini could
save a shred of English dignity through an arranged British surrender.
Not Churchill.
In one of the few historical
lapses in an otherwise superb film, Churchill is wrongly portrayed as seriously
conflicted and about to consider the deal with Mussolini — until he takes a
subway ride and rediscovers the defiance of the average Londoner. The subway
scene is pure fantasy.
… Churchill led the only
major nation to have fought Hitler alone. Only Britain fought from the first
day to the last of World War II. It alone entered the war without attacking a
country or being attacked, but simply on the principle of helping an
independent Poland.
The world as we know it today
owes its second chance to Winston Churchill and the United Kingdom. Without
them, civilization would have been lost in the darkest hours of May 1940.
You can read the rest of
the piece via the below link:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/27/darkest-hour-winston-churchill-roosevelt-world-war/
To learn more about Winston
Churchill I suggest you read William Manchester's outstanding trilogy, The Last Lion.
No comments:
Post a Comment