Reffering to the Battle of Britian in 1940?

Question

World History! :)

Winston Churchill said "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." What did he mean?

Answer 1

The statement is part of a speech that Winston Churchill gave in the House of Commons on August 20, 1940. Below is the relevant excerpt. He was expressing his appreciation of the British airmen who were defending the British air space as well as those taking the fight to the enemy.

That he is talking about all the British airmen, not just the fighter pilots, can be verified by reading the very next paragraph in his speech.

"The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

"All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day; but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power. On no part of the Royal Air Force does the weight of the war fall more heavily than on the daylight bombers who will play an invaluable part in the case of invasion and whose unflinching zeal it has been necessary in the meanwhile on numerous occasions to restrain."



The website below has a transcript of the entire speech.

Answer 2

efw has it right.

Had the RAF (and the exile pilots of the Free Poles, Free Czechs, etc.) not been able to hold off the Luftwaffe, Hitler's plan to invade England (Operation Sealion) would have gone off.

If Sealion would have worked or not is a serious question.. The German General Staff really didn't have a handle on the sort of problems a cross-channel invasion would entail... they viewed it as a really big river crossing operation. Still it might not have had to work. The history books tend not to mention it, but there was serious political support for the idea of surrender in the summer and fall of 1940. I mean, the Allies were LOOSING the war, big time... and the USA was NOT coming in. Surrender was certianly an option. As long as Sealion didn't end in an absolute disaster, just having Nazis come ashore in England... or the threat thereof, might have been enough to tip the political ballance and force the British to quit the war.

Where would that have left the millions of people in Europe? Under either the Nazis or the Stalinists for the next several generations. Where would that have left England's colonies in Africa and Asia? Well surrender would have put them either under either the Japanese (who's conduct during the Rape of Nanking tells you all you need to know about how they would have treated the natives) or the Nazis... and you can imagine how a regieme founded on racial purity and genocide would have treated the dark skinned citizens of Bombay, Lagos, Calcutta, and Cairo. The Holocaust against the Jews, Gypsies, Poles and Slavs would have just been the warm up.

So tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of people are alive today, in places like Poland, Israel, India, Nigeria, South Africa, France, Slovakia, Greece, and other countries only because the men of the RAF Hurricane and Spitfire Squadrons were able to stop the Luftwaffe from achieving air superiority over the English Channel in August of 1940. Hundreds of millions of others live in freedom and prosperity only because of what happened that summer.

So, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much (freedom, the survival of civilization, life itself, ) owed by so many (everyone on the planet who was not a Aryan German, and their children, and their children's children) to so few (a few hundred men and women in the RAF).

Answer 3

The number of fighter pilots involved were relatively few, around 6-800, and yet the fate of thousands and millions rested on the outcome of the fight.