CHURCHILL OUT OF HIBERNATION, WEEK 27

We have reached the end of a terribly trying year. And we’re still here. Thankfully, so are you.
Let’s celebrate our future together with ONWARDS TO VICTORY, our New Year’s destination,
as we determinedly  journey on through the book-length works of Winston Churchill.

The fourth volume of Churchill’s war speeches, published in June 1944, Onwards to Victory assembled addresses from 1943, a year that witnessed
the Casablanca, Quebec and Teheran Conferences, but ended with Churchill suffering two mild heart attacks. On December 27, 1943, he was flown to Marrakech for three weeks of rest at Villa Taylor (“Flower Villa,” as Churchill and FDR had referred to it, while staying there in January 1943). During the dangerous days immediately following his heart attacks, Churchill was read to by his daughter Sarah — Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, at his request. Throughout the evening of New Year’s Day 1944, Churchill listened delightedly to two gramophone records of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas — The Pirates of Penzance and Patience— part of a complete set given to him that Christmas by his daughter Mary. “On the whole one of the happiest hours I have had in these hard days!” he wrote to her the next day. “How sweet of you to have the impulse! How clever to have turned it into action and fact!”

Churchill’s 1943 Onwards to Victory speeches glisten with glimmers of not just hope but victory. One in particular, delivered at Harvard University on September 6, 1943, spoke to the future and, “To the youth of America, as to the youth of all the Britains…
I say ‘You cannot stop.’ There is no halting-place at this point. We have now reached a stage in the journey where there can be no pause. We must go on. It must be world anarchy or world order…All these are great possibilities, and I say: ‘Let us go into this together…If we are together nothing is impossible.”

We wish you the happiest, safest possible New Year. We go into it together.