This Was Their Finest Hour
Under the title This Was Their Finest Hour (German: "This was their best hour") was known a speech that Winston Churchill gave on June 18, 1940 in his capacity as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom before the House of Commons . Subject was after the fall of Paris looming military defeat of France in the final of the German western campaign , which Churchill as the "darkest hour in the history of France called" ( "darkest hour in French history").
In addition to Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat , Never was so much owed by so many to so few and We Shall Fight on the Beaches , This Was Their Finest Hour is one of the four great speeches with which Churchill - along with other speeches - encourages the will to assert himself tried to strengthen the British population during the German summer offensive of 1940. The question one of the most well known and popular, particularly in Anglo-Saxon culture speeches of Churchill and also one of the most famous in is World War II speeches at all (as other particularly well-known speeches are Goebbels' Sports Palace speech ( Do you want total war? , 1943), Hitler's speech at the invasion of Poland from September 1, 1939 ( "Since 5:45 will now shoot back!") and the radio address of Charles de Gaulle , which this on June 18, 1940 held from London to the French people).
This Was Their Finest Hour is named after its most famous passage, which says:
"Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'"
Two German translations are:
"So let us do our duty and let us do it so that even after a thousand years, if there is still a British Empire and its Commonwealth, people will say: This was their best hour."
"We therefore want to reflect on our duties and fight ourselves [in this difficult hour] so bravely that - if our Empire and its Commonwealth are to continue for a thousand years - one will say in retrospect: This was their proudest hour."
The typescript shows how the speech starts in an almost hymnic prayer tone towards the end - expressed by a strict, 5-line verse form in indented script to end with the finest hour phrase. Experts believe it is possible that this is a deliberate parallel to the Book of Psalms .
Churchill took up the wording that gave his speech the name after the war, when he wrote down his World War II memories ( The Second World War ), by naming the second volume of his war memories Their Finest Hour .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ www.charles-de-gaulle.org ( Memento of the original from June 18, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Typescript with manuscript annotations, Churchill and the Great Republic (A Library of Congress Interactive Exhibition, Text Version). Retrieved August 25, 2019 .
- ^ John F. Burns: Seventy Years Later, Churchill's 'Finest Hour' Yields Insights . In: The New York Times . June 17, 2010, ISSN 0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed August 25, 2019]).
- ^ The Second World War Volume Two - Their Finest Hour. Cassell & Company, 1st ed. 1949.
