"Wolves, Sheep and Shepherds"

 

The photo is from Aesop’s Fables, “The Wolf and the Shepherd.”

 

The essay is my own invention and reflects something about which I have spent many hours thinking. Many of you will disagree with my conclusions, But I have always felt we are best off when we express our opinions...and remembering that they are only opinions.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Wolves, Sheep and Shepherds”

March 6, 2027

 

“The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.”

                                                                                                “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” 1815

                                                                                                Lord Byron (1788-1824)

 

The war in the Middle East pits forces of good – Israel and the U.S. – against forces of evil – Iran and its proxies. With their support of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and various Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, Iran has been the leading sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East and around the world. For forty-seven years, they and their proxies have waged a relentless war against Israel and have murdered hundreds of Americans, citizens of the “Great Satan,” along with hundreds of Europeans. In providing funding for weapons, training and intelligence, they have destabilized the region. They are part of an Axis of evil that includes China, Russia and North Korea. As a nation, their leaders are wolves. President Biden said “Don’t.” The Mullahs ignored him.

 

Hitler and Tojo were exemplars of evil, and so was the late unlamented Ali Khamenei. They were wolves. Yet the potential for evil resides within all of us, something Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about in The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” It is our moral duty, for the sake of ourselves and those who follow us, to keep evil at bay. How do we in the United States do that? By never losing sight of our Judeo-Christian heritage: honesty, integrity, perseverance, compassion and respect. Retaining our traditional traits: personal responsibility and accountability. In maintaining a strong military. And by refocusing on individualism, self-reliance, thrift and excellence – factors that allowed the United States to become the most powerful, freest and most prosperous nation in history – while avoiding excessive national debt, state-handouts and multiculturalism.

 

In his poem quoted in the epigraph that heads this essay, Byron wrote of the Assyrian king Sennacherib who in 701 BCE besieged Jerusalem to punish King Hezekiah of Judah. Hezekiah, a reformist and religious revivalist, is praised in the Bible as one of its righteous and faithful leaders of the Jewish people. He rebelled against Assyrian rule. With him as a shepherd, the wolf Assyrian Sennacherib failed in his goal to take Jerusalem and its Temple. There is a lesson for us in the fundamental morality of his story.

 

The United States stands today on a precipice. It is mired in debt, with a population – near to declining – that is increasingly dependent on government subsidies, and therefore ripe for pillaging by wolves in Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. We have lost contact with many of those attributes enumerated above that contributed to our economic success and made us a beacon for aspirant and freedom-loving people. 

 

The United States does not seek war. It knows its horrors, from the Civil War, when 360,000 Union soldiers died freeing four million slaves from bondage. In 1917-18, 117,000 Americans died in Europe, helping their allies in France and Britain defeat imperial Germany. Less than a generation later 410,000 American soldiers were killed in Europe and the Pacific, putting an end to the tyranny emanating from Japan and Germany whose armies threatened Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Another 100,000 Americans died in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. America has always been selfless in their sacrifices for freedom. No, the U.S. does not want war, but it knows the same cannot be said for its enemies, which is why it has understood the importance of a strong defense, and it is why the U.S. and Israel acted against Iran when they did. Obviously, I cannot speak for the 93 million Iranian people, but the numbers of protesters against the regime (and despite the murder of 32,000 of them) suggest many see President Trump as a modern-day Hezekiah. Whether the attack was “preventive” or “pre-emptive,” as discussed in last Wednesday editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, I leave for politicians to decide. From my perspective, it was necessary.

 

We must restore our basic beliefs in those self-evident truths given us by Thomas Jefferson – the ones that offer each of us the opportunity to be a shepherd, not a sheep – “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator (not the state) with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” We cannot let our defenses down, not unless we choose to be sheep, a target for wolves, with no shepherds to protect us. 

"A Different Time"

 

Today’s TOTD follows in the mold of my most recent ones, where I have tried to stay away from personalities to write about issues that to me are important. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack, President George Bush proclaimed that you are either with us or against us. At the time, his words reflected an appropriate rallying cry, but I see no reason to extend such metaphorical proclamations onto our domestic political lives. Personalities matter, but there are other factors, such as policy preferences: the border and immigration; demands on our utility grids; affiliations with allies and alliances; interest costs, soaring debt, and the role of capitalism in the economy; views on education and the environment; whether abortion should be a political or personal issue; and perspectives about the purpose of government and how big a role it should play in our lives. These are issues we should be able to discuss, without becoming bogged down as to which candidate is most corrupt or which is least mentally fit. The latter breed arrogance, division and hatred, while the former lead to intelligent and respectful debate, with the goal of working together.

 

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

April 5, 2024

“A Different Time”

 

“We must strive to keep fresh in the minds of our people that men

sacrificed their lives to give the world one more chance to live.”

                                                                                                                                Colonel David M. Fowler

                                                                                                                                Commander, 87^th Regiment

                                                                                                                                20 October. 1945

                                                                                                                                Camp Carson, Colorado

 

As Americans we have choices, except when we don’t. When liberty is at risk, we have a duty to ensure that freedom reigns. In his Farewell Address (published in September 1796), George Washington wrote: “The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts – of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.” There are times when liberty needs defending.

 

While Washington, in the same Address, warned against foreign entanglements, he could not have foreseen how the world would shrink. By the dawn of the 20^th Century, steamships and later air travel shortened distances across the Atlantic and Pacific, encouraging commerce, trade and tourism. Obligations, embedded in treaties and alliances, extended beyond our borders. By the late 1930s Europe was mired in a second world war, brought about by Hitler’s hatred for Jews and his desire for lebensraum – living space. Over the course of almost six years he and his NAZIs murdered seven million Jews. At its peak, in November 1942, Germany dominated Europe. Apart from the United Kingdom, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal, Germany’s occupation extended 2,500 miles, from Brittany east to Stalingrad (now Volgograd), and 2,100 miles from Helsinki south to Athens. As well, they controlled a good part of North Africa. 

 

On December 7, 1941 Japan attacked our naval base at Pearl Harbor. The next day, the U.S. declared war on Japan. In his address to Congress on December 8, President Roosevelt committed the United States: “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.”  Three days later, Germany declared war on the United States. Two years later, by early 1944, the momentum of the War, which in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East was in its fifth year, favored the Allies. Even so, some of its costliest battles – the invasion of Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima – were still in the future. Millions of soldiers and civilians were yet to die. 

 

Eighty years ago this spring my father, a 33-year-old married father of three was drafted into the U.S. military, one of ten million American men drafted into the armed forces over the three years and nine months the United States was in the War. My father was an artist who abhorred violence. While he was not a pacifist, he was not a warrior; he never owned a weapon. When in combat in Italy’s Apennines, he became a runner so he wouldn’t have to carry a rifle. But still, when called to serve, he went; because of his age, he was more aware of the risks than his much younger fellow soldiers. Today, I wonder about our youth – offered safe spaces and protected against harmful words – are they ready to respond to such a call?

 

Very few Americans alive now were of draft age during World War II. Yet, from a nation of 160 million people, about 19 million men and women served in the armed forces during the War. What would be the response today to such threats to democracy, to the freedom we and others have? When we see so many abandoning Israel in their time of need, expressing ambivalence about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or evading the consequences of a China intent on destroying democracy in Hong Kong and threatening Taiwan, one wonders – have we lost our moral fiber?

 

Do we realize how fortunate we are to live in this place at this time? Are we aware of what the founders of this nation created in 1776? Do we honor all those who have left hearth and home to defend our rights and the rights of freedom-loving people in other nations? Do we realize that freedom is not free, that it must be defended? My father went to Italy with the 10^th Mountain Division in early 1945, where he served in the 87^th Regiment. The Division was tasked with breaking through the Gothic Line, which Germany had established north of Florence in late summer 1944. In just over two months of intense fighting in early 194 301 soldiers from the 87^th Regiment were killed, 25 from my father’s company out of perhaps 200 men. He wrote to my mother from Camp Carlson on October 19, 1945: “I become more and more surprised that I ever lived through it at all. There would have been very few of us left if it had lasted any longer.”

 

We cannot recover the past, but we can learn from it. And, in this age of ethical equivocation and moral relativism, we should never forget that there are universal principles, embedded in the inseparability of religion and morality, that are eternal. In his Farewell Address quoted above, Washington wrote: “Of all the habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.”

 

Our homes, families, friends, and communities descend from a system we inherited. Our duty is to ensure they are there to pass on to succeeding generations. In a letter to my mother written on March 15, 1944, a week after he had been inducted, my father wrote from Alabama’s Fort McClellan: “They seem to want you to forget about home as quickly as possible, which seems foolish because if it wasn’t for that there wouldn’t be any point to all of this anyway.” It is for our homes, families and neighbors, but also for our unique country and the freedom for which it stands, that men and women have given their lives over the past two and a half centuries. The U.S. may not be perfect, but why do you think so many clamor to get here? In this world, the United States stands alone.

 

We do live in a different time. Consumer products have improved living standards. Technology has bettered our lives in a way unrecognizable to those of eighty years ago. We live more open, more equitable and less structured lives. But some things do not (or should not) change – that diligence and hard work are integral for success, that obeisance to the Golden Rule will make us better citizens, that moral lessons from Aesop’s Fables help mold our characters, and that adherence to George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior make us better people. Each generation greets new opportunities and confronts new obstacles, which, individually and collectively, they must take advantage of or overcome. Accepting challenges, taking responsibility, helping others, admitting mistakes, and reaping rewards are all part of the American experience in any time.

 

The “Greatest Generation” rose to challenges they faced. We must ensure we do so as well.

"'Night' by Elie Wiesel & The Ongoing Presence of Evil"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Night, Elie Wiesel & The Ongoing Presence of Evil”

August 31, 2023

 

“Nobody had any strength left. And the night seemed endless.”

                                                                                                                                              Elie Wiesel (1928-2016)

                                                                                                                                              Night, 1958

 

Unlike other soldiers who returned home from World War II, my father did speak of his experiences – at least some of them, and to me, his oldest son. I remember his admonishment – we should never forget what the Nazis did to the Jewish people over the dozen years they held power. And I never have.

 

Re-reading Elie Wiesel’s book every few years is a worthy habit. In the 2006 edition, translated by his wife Marion, he wrote in the introduction: “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.” He is right. Those who grew up like me in the 1940s and ‘50s, in comfortable post-War America amid loving families, and with only the distant, vague threat of the bomb, can never understand the fear of those threatened with abandonment, imprisonment, torture, and death by the Third Reich.

 

Yet, as I read this book for the third or fourth time, I found myself thinking in broader terms – beyond just Europe, the Jewish people, and Nazis. While true goodness is rare, evil is ubiquitous across all classes, races, religions, and nationalities. It comes in all sizes, shapes, and colors. It infects individuals. But it is political/universal evil that concerns this essay. The human capacity to inflict harm is global. It knows no borders. Consider: Approximately forty percent of the ten to fifteen million Africans sold into slavery in the Americas between 1500 and 1900 died, either in Africa or aboard ships. Many of the survivors died in captivity. It is estimated that up to twelve million indigenous people were killed between 1492 and 1900, in South, Central, and North America. 

 

Things were worse in the 20^th Century. The Nazis killed an estimated sixteen million soldiers and civilians. An estimated one and a half million Armenians were killed by Turks between 1915 and 1923. Approximately ten million Russians were killed between 1917 and 1923, during their revolution. Between six and twenty million Russians and others were killed by Stalin, including about four and a half million Ukrainians during the Holodomor (1932-1933). Forty percent of U.S. prisoners held in Japanese POW camps are estimated to have died. Estimates are that up two million Muslims and Hindus were killed in post-independence India.  It is estimated that between forty and eighty million Chinese were killed by Mao Zedong, including the famine (1959-1961) and the cultural revolution (1966-1976). Between 1975 and 1979, the Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, led by communist dictator Pol Pot, killed between one and a half million and three million of their seven million population. Today, Iran supports Muslim terrorists around the world, and sub-Saharan African Islamists kill about twenty-five thousand Christians every year. Man’s capacity for evil is untold. 

 

Why? There is no answer. How did Austro-Germany, countries that produced Johannes Gutenberg, Johann Sebastian Bach, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Albrecht Dürer produce an Adolph Hitler and Heinrich Himmler? Why do people have so little regard for the sanctity of life that they will torture, mutilate and kill? Hitler’s Schutzstaffel (the SS) established twenty-five main concentration camps, with over a thousand satellite camps. While still confined to the ghetto, Wiesel wrote: “There no longer was any distinction between rich and poor, notables and the others; we were all people condemned to the same fate...” 

 

Once at Auschwitz, death was omnipresent: “Death was settling in all around me, silently, gently. It would seize upon a sleeping person, steal into him and devour him bit by bit.” As the Soviets advanced westward in late 1944, surviving prisoners from Auschwitz were force-walked most of the four hundred and twenty-five miles west to Buchenwald. More than half died on the way. Shortly after their arrival, Wiesel’s father died in January 1945. Three months later, on April 10, Americans arrived. Survivors were saved, but at what cost: “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”

 

This is a short but powerful book. It is still read in some high schools, as it should be, for its message is one we should never forget. But it should also be a reminder that evil lurks everywhere. It is why we need religion and their moral codes of conduct. Evil infested Tailei Qi, the shooter this week on the UNC campus. It is with us today in many parts of China (the treatment of Uyghurs in China’s northwest); in Russia (Prigozhin’s death was no accident). It is visible in Islamic terrorist attacks in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We ask again, ‘Why?’. Remembering his own time in the World War I trenches, J.R.R. Tolkien, in The Fellowship of the Ring, has Frodo say to Gandalf: “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” “So do I,” replied Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the life that is given us.” Life is not fair. It never has been and never will be. We must play with the cards we are dealt.

 

We cannot deny evil’s existence. In recent years, we in the West have been fortunate. Democracy and free market capitalism give power to the people, not the state. Evil nations reflect excessive powers granted to, or usurped by, governmental workers. Our Founders, rejecting Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s naïve belief that man was inherently good, recognized man’s capacity for evil, so they gave us a federal government with limited powers, with separate but equal branches – legislative, executive, and judicial – separate entities that make, execute, and interpret laws. Nevertheless, the desire by individuals to garner power persists; it is gradual and subtle and has become common in Washington. Evil takes root with a promise to do good, which justifies whatever insidious means are necessary to achieve a desired end. And the silence of good people abets its advance. 

 

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published his dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here. It was directed at the rise of Fascism and was a warning that no nation or civilization is immune from authoritarianism. Today, while we must remain vigilant of right-wing extremists, we should not ignore the fact that most of the Twentieth Century’s murderous regimes emanated from the left – from communist governments that control the media, along with the educational, cultural, economic, and personal lives of their people. 

 

A re-reading of Elie Wiesel’s classic tale Night is a reminder that evil is real, it is pervasive, and it is contagious. It must be confronted, from whichever direction it comes and in whatever guise it appears.

"Defying Hitler," Sebastian Haffner

While not an historian, I have read several books on Germany and World War II. This book, recommended by a friend in New York, is the best I have read in explaining how a civilized people, in a short period of time, became barbarians. It offers a lesson to us, as we abandon personal responsibility and delegate more decisions to the state. It explains why today’s trend toward “wokeness” leads to night, not morning. A powerful state – abetted by a subservient media, aided by big tech that denies free speech and supported by schools and universities that indoctrinate students – can lead to authoritarianism. The book was written in 1939 by Raimund Pretzel, under the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner. It was first published in German in 2000 and in English, with the six concluding chapters, in 2002.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing inro Books

“Defying Hitler,” Sebastian Haffner

June 9, 2021

 

“It is this lack of self-reliance that opens the possibility of immense

catastrophe of civilization, such as the rule of the Nazis in Germany.”

                                                                                                                                                Sebastian Haffner (1907-1999)

                                                                                                                                                Defying Hitler, 2002

 

China in 2021 is not Germany in 1933, nor is the United States. History never repeats itself exactly. The past, despite Antonio’s remark to Sebastian in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is not necessarily prologue. But knowledge of the past provides warning signs. The book is a cautionary tale to those who believe in the goodness of big government. They forget what evil people, in the name of the common good, can do.

 

In this personal, Orwellian-like memoir, Sebastian Haffner attempts to answer the question of why “no individuals ever spontaneously opposed some particular injustice or iniquity they experienced…”, an accusation, he wrote, that applied to himself. “What,” he asked, “became of the Germans?” Haffner was born in 1907, so his earliest memories are of the Great War, a war that was not fought on German soil. “It took place somewhere in distant France.” To a generation of German school boys, war was seen as a “great, thrilling, enthralling game between nations,” which became “the underlying vision of Nazism.” By the spring of 1919 the Nazi revolution was already fully formed and potent: “It lacked only Hitler.” He quotes Bismarck who once said that moral courage is a rare German virtue but “it deserts a German completely the moment he puts on a uniform.”

 

We read of the hyperinflation of 1923, the year Haffner turned sixteen: “The old and unworldly had the worst of it. Many were driven to begging, many to suicide. The young and quick-witted did well.” The decade of 1914-1923 was a time when a sense of balance, tradition and continuity were abandoned, and many youths turned nihilistic. How, for example, were elders to explain to the young why Germany lost the Great War. As the 1920s wore on, those like Haffner wanted to see the world they loved preserved, but they were becoming a minority: “We knew we could not talk with many of our contemporaries because we spoke a different language.” Hitler was master of promising “everything to everybody.” He evoked the glorious memories of pre-war 1914, as well as the triumphal, anarchic looting of 1923. In doing so, Haffner experienced the loss of “fun, understanding, goodwill, generosity and a sense of humor.”

 

By the summer of 1932, the Nazi Party had increased their representation in the Reichstag and Hitler was offered the vice-chancellorship. Haffner compares the summer of 1932 in Germany to 1939 in England: “…the League of Nations lies moribund [in 1939]; there is no security…Spain has fallen, as have Austria and Czechoslovakia,” yet “a pathological, unreasonable optimism seized us.” 

 

Once in power, in 1933, the Nazis ruled via terror – not wild, unkempt mobs, but a cold, calculating and repressive terror, using state-sanctioned orders, a “nightmarish reversal of normal circumstances…” All designed to induce fear. Jews were not initially chosen for annihilation. Distinctions were made between “decent’ Jews and others. But fiendish questions were asked: Why do Jews represent a higher proportion of doctors and lawyers than their percent of the population would imply? Are they over-represented in the Communist Party? Did they experience fewer deaths in the Great War? An insidious incrementalism of venality brought a “systemic infection of a whole nation.”  Diabolically, they destroyed in a few years the restraints that “had been the work of a thousand years of civilization.”

 

The Nazis were masters of propaganda, allowing a façade of normalcy to define everyday life. Yet fear kept people meekly accepting a gradual shift toward conformity and hatred. Once in full political mastership, the Nazis knew they must control people’s private thoughts. Haffner wrote: “Having cleared the sphere of politics of all opposition, the conquering, ravenous state has moved into formerly private spaces in order to clear these, too, of any resistance or recalcitrance and to subjugate the individual…whom he loves, what he reads, what pictures he hangs on his wall.”

 

Haffner justified his memoir: “I am convinced that by telling my private, unimportant story I am adding an important, unrecognized facet to contemporary German and European history – more significant and more important for the future than if I were to disclose who set fire to the Reichstag, or what Hitler really said to [Ernst] Röhm.” He is right, for if we are to learn anything from the horrors that Germany wrought it is to not allow such events to happen again. While most people are good, bad people exist, and so does evil. Reliance on the state leads to “groupthink,” and a loss of individual accountability and personal independence, the bedrock of freedom. Government is the most powerful instrument in any state, therefore must be restrained. How different history would be if men were still independent, standing on their own two feet, as in ancient Athens.

 

The author trained as a lawyer, to follow his father into Germany’s civil service. He had a few months of military training before taking his final exams. In 1934 he went to Paris, but soon returned home. During the next couple of years, Haffner supported himself writing harmless pieces. In early 1938, with war looming, the young Jewish woman with whom he had fallen in love was able to get to England. He followed a few months later. By mid 1939, he had become a permanent resident. After the War, the manuscript of this book lay forgotten, as Haffner’s literary career took off. He returned to Germany after the War, but this book never saw publication. He died in 1999, at age 92. Publication was left to his son Oliver Pretzel, who also served as translator. When asked: how was the rise of Nazism possible and why didn’t you stop them, Oliver Pretzel wrote: “My father’s vivid account makes the rise of the Nazis psychologically comprehensible, and it shows how difficult resistance was.”

 

Most frightening was the ease with which the German people surrendered politically, morally and spiritually – something that rings familiar to this reader. But I also suspect (and pray I am right) that Americans of the 2020s are more independent, resilient and smarter than Germans were in the 1930s.

"The Splendid and the Vile," by Erik Larson

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Burrowing into Books

“The Splendid and the Vile,” Erik Larson

May 10, 2020

“Only he had the power to make the nation believe it could win.”

                                                                                                Edward Bridges (1892-1969)

                                                                                                War Cabinet Secretary

                                                                                                As quoted by Erik Larson

                                                                                                The Splendid and the Vile

Eighty years ago, on Friday evening, May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill was summoned to Buckingham Palace where George VI asked him to form a government. The King, who had had a close relationship with Neville Chamberlain, was dubious about Churchill being the man for the job, given his reputation as an unconventional war monger. “I cannot yet think of Winston as P.M.,” King George wrote in his diary that May. Within a few weeks, he had changed his mind.

Erik Larson provides a fascinating and up-close look at Churchill, his family, close advisors and his relationship with the Roosevelt Administration. The story begins with end of the “Phony War” and evacuation from Dunkirk and ends a month before the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

Why another book on Churchill? More than a hundred biographies have been published. His histories of World War I and II comprise a dozen volumes. His speeches make up at least that many. Mr. Larson provides one explanation: “…it is in frivolity that Churchill often revealed himself.” John Colville, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, writes of an early Sunday morning in June that Churchill looked “… just like a rather nice pig, clad in a silk vest.” Churchill once quipped of his wife Clementine, when she was perturbed by a guest: “Clemmie dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree.”

Larson makes wide use of letters and diaries, particularly those of Colville, his youngest child Mary, who was seventeen when the story begins, his daughter-in-law Pamela and, in Germany, the diaries and papers of Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring. We learn of Mary’s loves, of Randolph’s gambling and drinking, and of Pamela’s growing disillusionment with Randolph and of her affair with Averill Harriman. And we learn that the speech on August 20, 1940, in which he used the words, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few,” were first spoken to 1^St Baron (Pug) Ismay, his chief military assistant, in a car driving back from a visit to the RAF operations room at Uxbridge five days earlier.

Churchill’s person and character made him beloved of the British people. He was short, round and bore a beatific smile. In speeches, he roused their patriotism, and in mingling with them, following a night of bombing, they heard words of revenge and saw tears of sympathy. In Bristol, in April 1941, after a particularly brutal attack, Churchill spoke: “…I see the damage done by the enemy attacks; but I also see …the spirit of an unconquerable people.” They saw strength in his bravery, as he watched bombing raids from the roof of 10 Downing Street, and they knew he would be by their side ‘til victory.

From the time Churchill became Prime Minister until the attack on Pearl Harbor nineteen months later, Britain fought alone. Hitler had conquered more of Europe than anyone since Napoleon. Until Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, an invasion of England seemed imminent. Churchill pinned his hopes on Roosevelt. Larson quotes from Harold Nicholson’s diary in April 1941, referring to Churchill: “His peroration implies that we are done without American help.” About the same time Averill Harriman, FDR’s “defense expeditor,” wrote his boss after listening to Churchill speak in Parliament: He (Harriman) marveled at “…the extent to which the faith and hope for the future of the people here are bound up in America and in you personally.” One weekend at Ditchley, with American emissary Harry Hopkins present, Churchill launched into one of his grandiose monologues about war aims of Britain. When he finished, he turned to Hopkins: “What will the president say to all that?” Moments passed. Then Hopkins replied: “Well, Mr. Prime Minister, I don’t think the President will give a dam’ for all that.” A deafening silence ensued: “You see, we’re only interested in seeing that Goddam sonofabitch Hitler gets licked.” Churchill smiled.

The bombing of England intensified. Hitler was convinced that once America entered the War, Churchill and Roosevelt would seek an alliance with Stalin. That would create, Hitler said, “a very difficult situation for Germany.” He was right. Nevertheless, by April Joseph Goebbels was feeling content with how the War was going. “His dairy,” Larson writes, “crackled with enthusiasm for the war and for life: ‘What a glorious spring day outside! How beautiful the world can be!’” A month later, Goebbels was more subdued: “England’s will to resist is still intact.”

There were personal moments, weekends at Chequers and Ditchley House in Oxfordshire. Marriage was often on Churchill’s mind. He was unhappy with daughter Sarah’s marriage to actor Vic Oliver. Randolph and Pamela’s marriage unraveled. Mary, at eighteen, had been proposed to by Eric Duncannon, an engagement that upset Clementine. “Churchill,” Erik Larson writes, “believed marriage to be a simple thing and sought to dispel its mysteries through a series of aphorisms, like: ‘All you need to be married are champagne, a box of cigars and a double bed.’”

Churchill enjoyed life, but he was singularly focused on victory. By the end of his first year, Erik Larson writes: “Against all odds, Britain stood firm, its citizens more emboldened than cowed. Somehow through it all, Churchill had managed to teach them the art of being fearless.” As to the claim he had given the people courage, Churchill demurred, “I never gave them courage. I was able to focus them.” As he himself was focused.

Erik Larson has given us a readable, literate and knowledgeable look at an important piece of history that began eighty years ago today. His title captures perfectly the difference between those who would defend western civilization and those who would destroy it.