British Pathe

Full titles read: "THE FIRST TEN WEEKS OF THE WAR - BY MR WINSTON CHURCHILL"

M/S and C/U's of the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill sitting at a desk giving a speech on the first ten weeks of the war. He says: "Nowadays we are assailed by a chorus of horrid threats. The Nazi Government...

Full titles read: "THE FIRST TEN WEEKS OF THE WAR - BY MR WINSTON CHURCHILL"

M/S and C/U's of the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill sitting at a desk giving a speech on the first ten weeks of the war. He says: "Nowadays we are assailed by a chorus of horrid threats. The Nazi Government exhumes to every neutral state inside information about the frightful vengeance they are going to reek upon us and they also bawl it round the world by their propaganda machinery. If words could kill, we should be dead already. We are in a very different position from that we were in ten weeks ago. We are far stronger than we were ten weeks ago, we are far better prepared to endure the worst malice of Hitler and his Huns than we were at the beginning of September. But General Goering, and he is one of the few Germans who has been having a pretty good time for the last few years, General Goering says that we have been spared so far because Nazi Germany is so humane, it cannot bear to do anything to hurt anybody. All they ask for is the right to live and to be let alone to conquer and kill the weak. Their humanity forbids them to apply severity to the strong. I shall not attempt to prophet something whether the frenzy of a cornered maniac will drive Herr Hitler into the worst of all his crimes, but this I will say without a doubt that the fate of Holland and Belgium like that of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria, will be decided by the victory of the British Empire and the French Republic. If we are conquered all will be enslaved and the United States will be left single handed to guard the rights of men. As the Nazis look out tonight from their blatant, clattering panoplied Germany, they cannot find one single friendly eye in the whole circumference of the globe - not one. The whole world is against Hitler and Hitlerism. Men of every race and climb feel that this monstrous apparition stands between them and the forward move which is their due and to which the age and time are ripe. It may well be that the final extinction of a baleful domination will pave the way to a broader solidarity of all the men in all the lands than we could ever have planned if we had not marched together through the fire".

Cataloguer's note: Good footage of early Second World War Churchill speech.