No. 1 Winston Churchill 1940
On June 18, 1940, four days after invading German forces entered Paris, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered a somber and urgent speech in front of Parliament. With the fall of France, Britain stood alone in the face of a Nazi onslaught that had stretched from the banks of Memel to the English Channel. Only a month after taking office, Churchill inherited a massive defeat salvaged only by the miraculous evacuation at Dunkirk. Nevertheless, British prospects were dire. America remained nominally neutral. The Soviet Union was dividing up the spoils with Hitler in Eastern Europe. France and the Low Countries were overrun by the Blitzkrieg of the Wehrmacht in just six short weeks. With the Luftwaffe controlling the skies and a seaborne landing (Operation Sea Lion) being prepared, it was just a matter of time the Germans trained their sights on the British Isles. After spurning German offers of armistice, Churchill knew all that stood in the way of Nazi hegemony in Europe was British will. So in his speech, he implored a frightened nation to fight on and of the importance of their mission: "If we fail, then the whole world ... will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. 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.' " In the modern history of western civilization, there was no speech, perhaps, that carried the burden Churchill's did.
