November 28, 2021

80th Anniversary of Attack that Brought the United States into the Second World War

By WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

Winston Churchill learned of the Japanese attack against the US Navy at Pearl Harbor while spending the weekend at Chequers with US Ambassador Gilbert Winant and Presidential Envoy Averell Harriman. The Prime Minister quickly confirmed the news by Trans-Atlantic telephone with President Franklin Roosevelt. Afterwards, Churchill reflected in his memoirs about the magnitude of the development.

No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death.

So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk; after the Fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war—the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand’s breadth; after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress. We had won the war.

England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals.

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Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force. The British Empire, the Soviet Union, and now the United States, bound together with every scrap of their life and strength, were, according to my lights, twice or even thrice the force of their antagonists.

No doubt it would take a long time. I expected terrible forfeits in the East; but all this would be merely a passing phase. United we could subdue everybody else in the world. Many disasters, immeasurable cost and tribulation lay ahead, but there was no more doubt about the end….Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.