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Foreign.
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Hey there, it's Scott Bertram, host of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour on this week's program. Well, so much talk about Anthony Fauci over the past seven days or so. We're going to go in a different direction. You'll hear excerpts from a lecture by Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, and his lecture restoring Gold Standard Science. He wants to launch a second scientific revolution here in the US And Mark Edward Lender joins us, historian. We continue our celebration of America 250 as he'll discuss the keys to victory in the American Revolution. All that this week on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Find it at podcast hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio. Every week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss great books, great men and great ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast hillsdale. Edu or wherever you find your audio.
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Morning Gloria and Evening Grace America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. That music means it's time for the Hillsdale dialogue. Dr. Larry Arn is with me and we are covering this book, of course. We're back in Winston Churchill's the finest hour, volume two of his six volume World War II memoir. And this is the critical year. This is 1940 to 1941, the finest hour of Great Britain. And Dr. Arne, early on he writes a letter to Ismay and you might want to put a word in about Ismay at this point, June 4, 1940, things are bleak and Churchill writes an effort must be made to shake off the mental and moral prostration to the will and initiative from which we suffer. What's he talking about and how do you do that?
[02:14]
A
That's a great theme with Churchill. If you go to the Federalist Papers, the chapters on the papers on the executive branch are written by Alexander Hamilton. And the point is the word execution is cognate with the word executive, Right? In other words, get it done. And that's a great theme with Churchill. When Churchill became prime minister in May, his first speech, which we read is blood, toil, tears and sweat, was very inspiriting. And then the guys who were working for he had written a letter during the twilight war, between September 1939 and May 1940, he'd written a letter to the foreign minister, Lord Halifax. And it and the days are full of agreeable work.
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D
And at the end of each one,
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A
not very much has been done. He said we have to live under conditions of stress, of soul that rivals that of the soldiers in the field. So Churchill thought like that. This is war. After Churchill was Prime Minister for about three weeks, all his private secretaries who became devoted to him were Chamberlain men. He didn't fire any of them. And they, after about three weeks, their diaries started showing things like, oh, I see, this is how you go about fighting a war. And so Churchill's trying to stir him up.
[03:34]
D
Get going, let's do it.
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A
You know, you may like or not like Donald Trump, but there isn't any doubt that he has an executive temper
[03:44]
D
and he's pushing all the time and
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A
he's not very restrained in how he goes about it. I praised Lindsey Graham earlier for being unpredictable sometimes. Well, that's another feature of the executive. So this letter is very characteristic of Churchill.
[04:02]
C
You just remind me, I wrote a column last week for the DC examiner that primarily 9, 10 of it was about Lord Palmerston and part of it was drawn, I don't know if you read that six volume history of England, but volume five is about Victoria's reign from Waterloo to her death in 1901. And in it, Lord Melbourne, Victoria's first Prime Minister, says, there's no stopping Palmerston. He does what he wants and he's just an energetic guy and he needs a blockade of Greece, he orders the blockade of Greece and he gives a five hour speech on the Don Pacifico affair in the House of Commons and he wins them over. That's the executive temperament, I think, even though he's a legislator, member of the House of Commons, nevertheless, their ministers are either doers or they're watchers. And he was a doer and he was the Prime Minister throughout our civil war, which I did not realize until I dove deep into him for the purpose of this column. Are you an admirer of his?
[05:04]
A
Oh, yeah. Castlereagh and Canning and Palmerston are the makers of British foreign policy in its heyday, right, when Britain was the greatest power on earth. And you know, that began to develop with Queen Elizabeth in 1588. They beat the Spanish and French armada. But then, you know, by the 18th century, they're the man, right? They got this big navy and they articulated the main elements of British foreign policy. Churchill repeats them beautifully in many places and tried to follow them all his life. And that is, we are independent of the continent and we keep our independence. We take sides in continental disputes when they're important enough and threaten us and we're always against the one that might dominate the continent. That means we only pick on the big boys. And that means if It's France or if it's Spain or if it's Germany, whoever it is, who threatens to dominate the continent. We're for the other guys. And those guys are the guys who articulated that. And it was in the bones of Winston Churchill.
[06:25]
C
And after those three, Castlereagh, Canning and Palmerston, there comes Disraeli and Salisbury. And they're in that, they're in that line. And then Churchill kind of completes it. There are periods of weakness and periods where they don't repair their navy. And I'm reminded now with some of our strategic depth issues in the munitions stockpile, of what happens when you have four or worse eight years of a president who doesn't much care. And that's got a long tail that Donald Trump is working to overcome, but it's very much a long tail. The other thing that comes through is that Churchill is absolutely fixated on tanks. I mean, they're falling back across the Channel, they gotta have airplanes. But he's pulling out memos that he runs on tanks and landing craft for tanks from 1917. What was his filing system like? How did he even find this stuff?
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Well, he. I have carried his files around for hours with me. I can tell you in detail, I
[07:28]
D
can tell you in detail how he did that.
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A
But, you know, first of all, he had a really great memory. And second of all, his themes are persistent through his life. He's the inventor of the tank. But if you want to know how to organize your files, there's, by the way, a tremendous correspondence in 1925 with a man named Sir Warren Fisher, who's the head of the British Civil Service, big time distinguished bureaucrat Sir Warren Fisher. Churchill did not become a Sir until decades later, Churchill was Chancellor the Exchequer. And Fisher sends Churchill a snippy note about how ministers of the Crown probably shouldn't have time about how to organize files. Churchill had sent him a note how to organize the files. And Churchill gave him a tremendous response in which he includes for the first time the phrase no longer civil, no longer servants. Isn't that good? But here's how he did it. If you open a Churchill file in the Churchill filing cabinets, which is what Martin Gilbert had in the bottom of the Bodleian library that I used to work in. First of all, the cabinets are arranged thematically and then the drawers are arranged thematically. So his bank accounts are in one and his this book is in another. And then the folders, each one of them is in reverse chronological order and in the exterior folder and in each document in it there's a hole punch, a little round hole in the upper left corner. And then he takes one of those little ribbons with kind of a string with a metal thing on each end, and he feeds it through. So that you can remove a document if you want to, but they're fixed in place, and when you open it, the most recent thing is on top. And that means that because Martin Gilbert wanted to write everything in chronological order, whereas. And that's the opposite, by the way, from work. Because when you're doing work, you know everything you know right now, and a lot about the past for each issue. And so you start with the current stuff, right. Whereas if you're writing history, you have to pretend that you don't know everything you know right now. So you start at the back and then you can be closer to the actual situation we're in, which is, we don't know tomorrow.
[10:07]
C
How did Sir Martin Gilbert get command of the bottle and basement? Because that is one of the world's preeminent libraries. You can't miss it. If you visit Oxford, I've been there a few times. You can't miss it. But I imagine that that real estate is precious.
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A
Yeah. So the Bodleian Library has three main buildings and they're connected by. And all three buildings. The new library is where this was. It's across the street and then the main Bodleian Library. And then next to it is a big round building called Radcliffe Camera. And all three of those buildings go three floors up in their reading rooms. And they all three go three floor down, three floors down. And they're the stacks, so they're in the basement.
[10:53]
D
Right.
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A
You go down underground. And those three floors, those three buildings are all connected underground. They're not connected. You have to go outside to traverse between them and the reading room levels. So anyway, you go to the new library and you have a pass, you have a key, and you get in the elevator. It's an old timey elevator with one of those things that you swing across, you know, to kind of a cage to close yourself in. And you go down to the very bottom floor. And you're three floors below ground now. And you get off the elevator and you walk about 30ft and there's an opening in the stacks. And Winston Churchill's filing cabinets are arranged in a U. And of course, he wrote an essay on the filing cabinet. You know, what kind of filing cabinet should you have? Fireproof, so heavy that it takes two strong men to move them. And because then they can't be Stolen. Very solid, right. The ones by Mrs. Chubb are the best he writes. And his are all Chubb filing cabinets. So you go down there and in this U, in between these wings of filing cabinets, there's a crappy wooden table and a hard wooden chair. That's all the furniture down there. And I have sat in there for hours and hours and hours.
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C
Well, that's how a young scholar becomes a preeminent scholar. Let me talk about this chapter 12, though it is full of memos about minutiae about landing craft. Now we went through this in 1942, 43. I remember from researching an Eisenhower book decades ago that this was a real knotty problem for America and it required that fellow down in New Orleans, that Stephen Ambrose Foundation. That's why The World War II Museum is there, because he invented our landing craft. But Churchill was thinking about it from the beginning and this whole chapter is full of minutiae about minutia. I don't know how he had this capacity to write these things and I am astonished.
[13:08]
A
Well, so you have to relate the two things that are going on and they're sort of a mixture of the human capacity of prudence. Half of these memos are about how do we keep these guys from coming ashore, right? Because they may invade us and take London this month. Right. They're worried about that. Right. And we for a while they had an unarmed army. Most of the ones who got back, 350,000 who got back from Dunkirk, most of them didn't get back even with their rifles and the artillery was all gone. They got a big shipment of rifles first from us and they started arming their main army. And then pretty soon they had a million man home guard. So he's worried about that. Right. And there's memos going out about that. And at the same time in alternation, how are we going to invade Germany and kill Adolf Hitler? And you see both problems are present. And if you that that thing you read to Ismay, who is a very close associate of Churchill's, a senior general close to him, all war were beside him, all war and was eventually the first head of NATO in 1945, 46. We have to work urgently and solving the problem today, how we go about that will be affected by what the next problem is going to be. And the first problem is to save us. And the second problem is to kill Hitler. And pretty soon he's thinking about the third problem, which is what's the world going to be like after we've done that. And Churchill had Those dimensions going on all the time.
[14:54]
C
Now, I had suggested in my notes that I sent you that you read the two paragraphs on page 226 and 227 that begin, the buoyant and imperturbable temper of Britain, which I had the honor to express, may well have turned the scale. I don't know if you looked those up or if your book was as accessible as the paperback edition.
[15:14]
D
I got them here.
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C
Yeah, okay, run with that.
[15:18]
D
I will read it. Let me make a point. First of all, if my. I knew a lot of people when I was in England from 77 to 80 and on beyond. They're all dead now. But people who lived through these years, my wife's family, her father and her mother. And it's amazing how often they regard this time in their lives, of this maximum danger, as the greatest time in their lives. Churchill writes, the buoyant and imperturbable temper of Britain, which I had the honor to express, may well have turned the scale. Now I'll make a point. I had a little to do with Darkest Hour, the movie where Gary Oldman got an Academy Award. And it's about this time in 1940, and they contrive a. Sorry I'm wandering now, but I have to tell this. They contrive him to go down in the subway, and various people talk to him and suggest things that later recur in his speeches. And I Talked to the VPs at Focus Features. I saw a preview of it in New York. They want to talk to me. And they said, what do you think?
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A
They were trying to decide whether to
[16:30]
D
promote the movie for an early dinner. Sorry? For an Academy Award. I had an early dinner. And I said, it's great. And they said, did Churchill go down in the subway? And I said, on that day? And they said, yes. And I said, no, he did not. And they said, how do you know? And I said, we know everything he did that day. You can account for everything. And he said, but you still say it's great. And the reason is he wrote in a different passage in the first volume, in this volume, actually, a related passage to this one, in which he said that he was. He'd drive around the town and he'd see people with weary faces in the bus queues, and they'd notice him, and their eyes would brighten up and they would give him the V sign. And he said, the British had become the lion. And I was called upon to give the roar. So I told that to the people at Focus Features and said, you see, all you've done is shown them. Him giving them, giving him the words that he made so famous. Yeah, that's what he says here. I had the honor to express, may have turned the scale. Here was this people who in the years before the war had gone to the extreme bounds of pacifism and improvidence, who had indulged in the sport of party politics and who, though so weakly armed, had advanced light heartedly into the center of European affairs. You see what he's saying? Remember, there's a kinship with George Washington there. You don't go making commitments that are beyond your power to perform because that will get you in trouble. And he thought they were doing that in the 1930s and they were making more commitments than they were building weapons. Advanced light heartedly into the center of European affairs. Now, confronted with the reckoning alike of their virtuous impulses and neglectful arrangements, they were not even dismayed. They defied the conquerors of Europe. They seemed willing to have their island reduced to a shambles rather than give in. This would make a fine page in history. But there were other tales of this kind. Athens had been conquered by Sparta. The Carthaginians made a forlorn resistance to Rome. Not seldom in the annals of the past, and how much more often in tragedies never recorded or long forgotten, had brave, proud, easygoing states and even entire races been wiped out so that only their name, or even no mention of them, remains. See, Churchill is proud of the spirit, but he's aware of the danger. And that's what he'd been warning about for a decade when others were improvident, he calls them. And that's why he's sitting in that chair. In that day, he was proved right. Few British and very few foreign foreigners understood the peculiar technical advantages of our insular position. See, we have that today, by the way. It is true that the oceans are not as wide as they used to be, but they're still there. And we should not ever give up the advantage of them. We have fighter aircraft in numbers on the American continent, and we went 40 years without that. And our strategic defenses are better and getting better. And we should remember that. Nor was it generally known. Even in the irresolute years before the war, the essentials of sea and latterly air defense had been maintained. You see. In other words, we didn't abandon everything. Thank God for it. He had something to do with that. It was nearly 1,000 years since Britain had seen the fires of a foreign camp on English Soil, by the way, isn't that a good way to talk? You might have just said, since Britain had been invaded, seeing the fires of a foreign camp on English soil at the summit of British resistance, everyone remained calm, content to set their lives upon the castle, risk everything. That this was our mood was gradually recognized by friends and foes throughout the whole world. Where he presents in this chapter, by the way, some German memoranda discovered after the war where the German military is commenting to Hitler, these guys are ready to fight. You know, that helped prevent the invasion. What was behind the mood? That could be settled only by brute force. So we're going to find out.
[21:26]
C
That's an amazing brace of paragraphs. And I don't know how long it took him to write it. I doubt anyone does. But he's channeling his 1940 Persona there. He's bringing it back in 1946, 47. And those are not quotes from documents. He's recollecting much in the way your in laws recollect. This is how he felt. He must have felt increasingly confident. He also notes they firmly believe, however, with the help of God, that they will not lack the means to discharge this task. Interesting pointer to the Creator. Not unlike the way Washington would talk. Never got down into the specifics of theology, but very much about Providence.
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A
Oh, yeah.
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D
Well, Washington was a Christian and.
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A
But he was also executive of a
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D
land committed to religious freedom.
[22:20]
C
Yeah.
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A
And so as was Churchill.
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D
He talked at the level of generality
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proper to that, to include everyone and,
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D
you know, the laws of nature and of nature's God. If you don't believe in those, you're an idiot. And it's hard for you to understand the basis of America.
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C
Now I want to go to the practice.
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D
So.
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C
Yeah, in this chapter on July 19th. So we've gone a month and a half into preparing for what we'll talk about next week, the sea lion threat. He replaces General Ironside, who's got the best name in the book with General Alan Brooke. This is an. Who had been stranded in Europe and he was ordered to retreat. Why does that matter so much?
[23:02]
D
Well, Brooke was, you know, he was tremendously effective man, Churchill's team.
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A
You know, there were some changes in it. And Churchill, you know, he very seldom,
[23:16]
D
almost never denounces anybody, even enemies, but certainly not people he worked with. But he got his team together and
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A
they were good, right.
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D
And they were tight with each other. Brooke and Ismay and Jacob and Dill.
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A
Those were slim.
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D
Those were tremendous guys. There's down Whitehall. So Big Ben Picture that in your mind.
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A
And there's a street that runs from Big Ben to Trafalgar Square, one of the most consequential streets in history called Whitehall.
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D
And along the way, in Whitehall, if you're walking away from Big Ben, over toward the right, there's a stand of three generals. And they are slim. Let me get Remember who they are, slim. Montgomery and Brooke.
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A
And they're tremendous people, right?
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D
And they had a tremendous war record.
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A
And they fought sort of like our
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C
MacArthur, our Marshall and our Eisenhower.
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D
That's right.
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C
Same thing. Nimitz has got to be in there, too. I don't want to get the Navy mad at me.
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D
Yeah, yeah. Well, pet, you know, Patton gotta include Pen. And, you know, those guys were good. And they. And one of the points, I I Victor Hansen's very fine book, the Second
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World wars, which might be the best
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D
book I've ever read on the subject. Although Martin Gilbert wrote one too. It's very good. He makes the point of how effective the British were. And that was possible because of the
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spirit in the people.
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D
And it was possible because of the
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A
tightness and skill of the leadership.
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D
They weren't quarreling with each other all the time. You know, they did quarrel, but the truth is mostly what they did was work together. And Churchill was, you know, frustrating to Brooke.
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A
Alan Brooke, who became Lord Alan Brook, one word.
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D
Because he kept him up at night
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A
always giving them difficult orders, and sometimes he'd wear out and.
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D
And, you know, say, gosh, leave us alone. We got a job to do here. Right?
[25:23]
A
And that's in his diaries.
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D
And those are published.
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A
And it makes it look like that
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D
this was the scene of regular conflict.
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A
Martin Gilbert always believed that those diaries.
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D
And one can read the originals of the diaries, by the way, are distorted by Arthur Bryant, who edited them. Because the truth is, they're also meaning.
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A
Some of them are in the book, some of them are not.
[25:44]
D
Shining instances in the diary where he talks about how he just marvels at Churchill and how well he can think about how determined he is about how far he can see, including the passage. We cannot help. We could never win this war without him, he says. So it was a very tight. And these snowflakes that we talked about before that Rumsfeld is always sending, they were important because, you know, if you. If you're not. If you send out 30 or 40 notes a day to people which, you know, and they're degrade in Churchill, they're grades of them, right? A lot of them are.
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A
Are just be thinking about this this
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D
came up to me.
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A
This came up to my mind be
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D
thinking about this and that he had confidence in those people.
[26:36]
C
One example of that is in this chapter he's thinking about artillery duels. It's sort of a premonition of drone warfare that we see today. He's thinking about long range artillery duels between the Germans and the Brits over the Straits of Dover. And so he thinks we've got to get the old decommissioned guns, 13 half inch guns from the Iron Duke, which an old ship that doesn't sail anymore but had big guns and we got to put them on railway moorings and run him up and down the coast. That's not what normally one thinks about in a prime minister's job.
[27:10]
A
Yeah, well, he also begins the invention because he. The tank and the landing ship for tanks and later infantry and the portable harbor, right? He's already thinking about that this month, right. When he's getting ready for invasion. And so he, you know, eventually they built a harbor that they could float across the channel and make a way to get a lot of stuff ashore without a deep port. Well, he here in this chapter, he sends a memo out be thinking about this, get somebody thinking about it, right? And one of the things was he thought you could make them out of concrete and put floats on them and then they could be places for people to live too. And then you'd go and float them across the channel and then take the floats off and they sink down to the surface and you've got a fort. He said, you know, he's thinking like that, right?
[28:11]
C
Did you? We're running low on time here for this week and we'll come back to the invasion threat next week. But did you see the movie Pressure this summer with Brandon Fraser as Ike and Kay Summersby in the British Meteorology Corps? And all that conversation about whether to go or not go June 4th.
[28:28]
A
I haven't watched it yet. I haven't watched it yet. I did have a talk with Tom Selleck. Let me drop a name here. Now he listens to the show and
[28:38]
D
he's such a nice man.
[28:39]
A
He narrates our recent movie and he said, tell Hugh Hewitt to pay attention to the movie in which I play General Eisenhower.
[28:51]
D
I will do that because yeah, you should watch that movie.
[28:55]
C
Brandon Frazier is not quite physically fit enough to be a persuasive Ike because those men, he does smoke enough to be a persuasive Ike. But I like the fact that the meteor, the things you gotta think about. And this is a theme that will extend to next week. If you've prepared to be invaded, you are then prepared to invade. You agree with that?
[29:17]
D
That's right. Isn't that something? Yeah. Yeah.
[29:19]
A
If they look, we're afraid they're going to do this to us. If they can do this to us, it proves we can do this to them. And you know, he's I mean, one of my. I think it's probably my favorite letter that Winston Churchill's wife wrote about Winston Churchill was when Churchill lost his job in 1916 in the middle of the First World War. Clementine wrote to the prime minister Asquist and urged him to keep Churchill in the government. And you'd want your wife to think of you this way. Only Winston has the deadliness to fight the Germans. And I think she was right about
[30:03]
C
that and it proved it to be case the closing line for this week, page 245 as the month of July and August passed without any disaster, we settled ourselves down with increasing assurance that we could make a long and hard fight. Next week, Dr. Arn and I are doing chapters 14 and 15 on the invasion problem and Operation Sea lion. And boy, they are fascinating. So do not miss that. All things Hillsdale are collected at hillsdale. Edu and all of our prior dialogues, especially on the first book and a half the World War II mentalrs, are at Hughes for hillsdale. Com. Thank you, Dr. Arne.
[30:42]
B
Thanks for listening to the Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you find your audio. For more information about Hillsdale College, head to Hillsdale. Eduardo.
[31:12]
E
Hello, this is Jeremiah Regan, Executive Director of Online Learning here at Hillsdale College, and I have some great news. We've brought Hillsdale's incredibly popular free online courses to the Hillsdale College Podcast Network, and our next series is the American Left From Liberalism to Despotism, a course taught by Associate professor of Politics Kevin Slack and Hillsdale President Larry P. Arn. After listening to all 11 episodes, you'll have a deeper understanding of what has happened to America in the past 60 years and what we can do about it today. The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, hosted by Online Learning Marketing Director Juan Davalos and me, expands Hillsdale's mission to provide all who wish to learn the education necessary to increase happiness and to preserve the civil and religious liberties of America. We want you to be a part of it at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu. Subscribe now to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast to hear new episodes every week with additional commentary and insights from our team. Go to Podcast Hillsdale Edu to learn more. That's Podcast Hillsdale Edu.

Summary7 min read

Podcast Summary: Hillsdale Dialogues

Episode: Churchill’s The Second World War, Part Thirty

Host: Hugh Hewitt
Guest: Dr. Larry P. Arnn (President, Hillsdale College)
Date: August 10, 2026

Overview

In this episode, Hugh Hewitt and Dr. Larry P. Arnn continue their extensive series on Winston Churchill’s multi-volume memoir, The Second World War. Focusing on "The Finest Hour", volume two, they explore Churchill's executive temperament during the critical period of 1940-1941 as Britain faces the threat of Nazi invasion, grapples with national morale, and sets the strategic groundwork for eventual victory. The conversation blends historical analysis, personal anecdotes, and contemporary parallels, revealing how Churchill’s leadership style and strategic thinking influenced both immediate outcomes and long-term global history.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Churchill’s Executive Temperament and "Getting Things Done"

[01:25–04:02]

Churchill on action and morale: Churchill’s leadership was rooted in decisive action, as highlighted by his early letter to Ismay during the darkest days of 1940:

"An effort must be made to shake off the mental and moral prostration to the will and initiative from which we suffer."
(Churchill, as quoted by Hewitt, 01:46)
Connection between executive virtue and effective wartime leadership:
Dr. Arnn draws a parallel between Churchill’s drive and Alexander Hamilton’s arguments in the Federalist Papers:

“The point is the word execution is cognate with the word executive...get it done. That’s a great theme with Churchill.”
(Dr. Arnn, 02:14)
Leadership comparison: Arnn and Hewitt compare Churchill’s executive approach to both historic figures (Lord Palmerston, Lord Melbourne) and modern ones (Donald Trump).

“You may like or not like Donald Trump, but there isn’t any doubt that he has an executive temper and he’s pushing all the time...That’s another feature of the executive.”
(Dr. Arnn, 03:36)

2. Britain’s Grand Strategy and the Continuity of Foreign Policy

[04:02–06:25]

Traditions of British foreign policy:
The discussion highlights how figures like Castlereagh, Canning, and Palmerston established enduring tenets that Churchill followed:

“We are independent of the continent and we keep our independence. We take sides in continental disputes when they’re important enough and threaten us and we’re always against the one that might dominate the continent...And it was in the bones of Winston Churchill.”
(Dr. Arnn, 05:13)
Historical context:
The hosts tie Britain’s strategic struggles during WWII to longer arcs in British and Western military history, emphasizing preparedness as an enduring lesson.

3. Churchill’s Meticulous Methods and Legendary Memory

[06:25–10:07]

Churchill’s obsession with tanks and logistics:
Amid crisis, Churchill digs up memos from WWI about tanks and landing craft.
His organizational talents:
Dr. Arnn provides a detailed inside look into Churchill’s filing systems and working methods:

“First of all, he had a really great memory. And second of all, his themes are persistent through his life. He’s the inventor of the tank...If you open a Churchill file...The cabinets are arranged thematically and then the drawers are arranged thematically...most recent thing is on top.”
(Dr. Arnn, 07:29–09:39)
- Notable anecdote: Churchill’s combative correspondence with Sir Warren Fisher about file organization, introducing the phrase “no longer civil, no longer servants”.

4. Churchill’s Physical and Strategic Working Environment

[10:07–12:23]

Rare glimpse into Churchill’s archives at the Bodleian:
Dr. Arnn shares personal experiences working in the basement at Oxford surrounded by Churchill’s famed Chubb filing cabinets, underscoring both the physical legacy and the immense scope of Churchill’s work.

“Down there, Winston Churchill’s filing cabinets are arranged in a U...there’s a crappy wooden table and a hard wooden chair. That’s all the furniture down there. And I have sat in there for hours and hours and hours.”
(Dr. Arnn, 11:35)

5. Strategic Duality: Defense and Offense in 1940

[12:23–14:54]

Planning for both survival and victory:
Churchill balanced immediate defense concerns (potential German invasion) with forward-looking plans for invasion and ultimate victory:

“We have to work urgently in solving the problem today…The first problem is to save us. And the second problem is to kill Hitler. And pretty soon he’s thinking about the third problem, which is what’s the world going to be like after we’ve done that. And Churchill had those dimensions going on all the time.”
(Dr. Arnn, 13:37)

6. The Moral Spirit of the British People

[14:54–22:11]

Quoting Churchill on British character:
Dr. Arnn reads pivotal passages from Churchill’s memoir about the psychological and spiritual fortitude of the British people in 1940:

“The buoyant and imperturbable temper of Britain, which I had the honor to express, may well have turned the scale...”
(Churchill, read by Dr. Arnn, 15:19)
The myth vs. reality of leadership moments:
Dr. Arnn recounts consulting on the film "Darkest Hour," distinguishing between the dramatic subway scene and Churchill’s real interactions with the British public:

“He’d drive around the town and he’d see people with weary faces in the bus queues, and they’d notice him, and their eyes would brighten up and they would give him the V sign. And he said, the British had become the lion. And I was called upon to give the roar.”
(Dr. Arnn, 16:50)
Churchill’s religious language and its political function:
The hosts reflect on Churchill’s invocation of Providence, likening it to Washington’s rhetoric:

“They firmly believe, however, with the help of God, that they will not lack the means to discharge this task…Not unlike the way Washington would talk. Never got down into the specifics of theology, but very much about Providence.”
(Hewitt & Dr. Arnn, 22:04)

7. Leadership and Strategic Teamwork

[22:39–26:35]

Churchill’s military team:
The appointment of General Alan Brooke (later Lord Alanbrooke) and his dynamic but sometimes tense rapport with Churchill are discussed:

“Brooke was, you know, tremendously effective man...Churchill’s team, you know, there were some changes in it...they were good, right. And they were tight with each other. Brooke and Ismay and Jacob and Dill...Those were tremendous guys.”
(Dr. Arnn, 23:02–23:35)
Importance of teamwork and discipline:
The British military and political leadership maintained cohesion despite internal quarrels—an essential factor in victory.

8. Strategic Innovation and Early War Technologies

[26:35–28:10]

Churchill’s proactive thinking:
Examples given include reusing old battleship guns for coast defense and envisioning portable harbors, foreshadowing eventual D-Day engineering feats.
Willingness to experiment and empower subordinates:
Churchill’s practice of sending “be thinking about this” memos encouraged innovative thinking.

“He sends a memo out be thinking about this, get somebody thinking about it...”
(Dr. Arnn, 27:10)

9. Historical Parallels: Preparation and Offense

[28:10–29:19]

Preparing for invasion as preparation for counter-invasion:

“If you’ve prepared to be invaded, you are then prepared to invade. You agree with that?”
(Hewitt, 29:15)
“That’s right. Isn’t that something? Yeah. Yeah.”
(Dr. Arnn, 29:17)

10. Personal Strength and Legacy

[29:19–30:42]

Clementine Churchill’s view of her husband:

“Only Winston has the deadliness to fight the Germans. And I think she was right about that...”
(Dr. Arnn, 29:45)
Closing reflection:
The chapter ends with Churchill’s growing confidence after surviving the initial threats:

“As the month of July and August passed without any disaster, we settled ourselves down with increasing assurance that we could make a long and hard fight.”
(Churchill, read by Hewitt, 30:03)

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

"The British had become the lion. And I was called upon to give the roar."
—Dr. Arnn, quoting Churchill (16:55)
"If you’ve prepared to be invaded, you are then prepared to invade."
—Hugh Hewitt (29:15)
“Only Winston has the deadliness to fight the Germans.”
—Clementine Churchill, as recounted by Dr. Arnn (29:45)
“You don’t go making commitments that are beyond your power to perform because that will get you in trouble.”
—Dr. Arnn, referencing Churchill’s warnings in the 1930s (17:45)
“We take sides in continental disputes when they're important enough and threaten us and we’re always against the one that might dominate the continent.”
—Dr. Arnn (05:13)

Timestamps for Key Segments

01:25: Introduction to WWII’s “Finest Hour” and Churchill’s executive challenges
04:02: Analysis of executive temperament—historical and contemporary comparisons
06:25: Churchill’s strategic memory and organization
10:07: Working in Churchill’s archives at the Bodleian Library, Oxford
12:23: Planning for invasion—both against and by the British
14:54: Churchill’s reflections on national morale; readings from his memoir
22:11: Churchill’s invocation of Providence and parallels to Washington
22:39: Churchill builds his strategic team—Alan Brooke’s appointment and working dynamics
26:35: Churchill’s proactive technological and tactical innovations
28:10: Lessons from preparing for war on both defense and offense
29:19: Clementine Churchill’s insight on Winston’s unique character
30:03: Churchill’s closing assessment of Britain’s resilience

Final Notes

This episode provides a vivid tour through Churchill’s wartime psyche, leadership methods, and the collective fortitude of Britain in 1940. Dr. Arnn’s historical expertise and personal anecdotes illuminate the practicalities and philosophies that underpinned Churchill's greatness. The dialogue offers both fresh insights and timeless lessons relevant to anyone interested in leadership, strategy, and the moral dimensions of history.

Next week: The series continues with chapters on the invasion problem and Operation Sea Lion. For more, visit Hillsdale Dialogues Archive.

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Transcript92 lines

[00:00]
A
Foreign.
[00:05]
B
Hey there, it's Scott Bertram, host of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour on this week's program. Well, so much talk about Anthony Fauci over the past seven days or so. We're going to go in a different direction. You'll hear excerpts from a lecture by Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, and his lecture restoring Gold Standard Science. He wants to launch a second scientific revolution here in the US And Mark Edward Lender joins us, historian. We continue our celebration of America 250 as he'll discuss the keys to victory in the American Revolution. All that this week on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Find it at podcast hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio. Every week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins Hugh Hewitt to discuss great books, great men and great ideas. This is Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast hillsdale. Edu or wherever you find your audio.
[01:26]
C
Morning Gloria and Evening Grace America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. That music means it's time for the Hillsdale dialogue. Dr. Larry Arn is with me and we are covering this book, of course. We're back in Winston Churchill's the finest hour, volume two of his six volume World War II memoir. And this is the critical year. This is 1940 to 1941, the finest hour of Great Britain. And Dr. Arne, early on he writes a letter to Ismay and you might want to put a word in about Ismay at this point, June 4, 1940, things are bleak and Churchill writes an effort must be made to shake off the mental and moral prostration to the will and initiative from which we suffer. What's he talking about and how do you do that?
[02:14]
A
That's a great theme with Churchill. If you go to the Federalist Papers, the chapters on the papers on the executive branch are written by Alexander Hamilton. And the point is the word execution is cognate with the word executive, Right? In other words, get it done. And that's a great theme with Churchill. When Churchill became prime minister in May, his first speech, which we read is blood, toil, tears and sweat, was very inspiriting. And then the guys who were working for he had written a letter during the twilight war, between September 1939 and May 1940, he'd written a letter to the foreign minister, Lord Halifax. And it and the days are full of agreeable work.
[02:59]
D
And at the end of each one,
[03:02]
A
not very much has been done. He said we have to live under conditions of stress, of soul that rivals that of the soldiers in the field. So Churchill thought like that. This is war. After Churchill was Prime Minister for about three weeks, all his private secretaries who became devoted to him were Chamberlain men. He didn't fire any of them. And they, after about three weeks, their diaries started showing things like, oh, I see, this is how you go about fighting a war. And so Churchill's trying to stir him up.
[03:34]
D
Get going, let's do it.
[03:36]
A
You know, you may like or not like Donald Trump, but there isn't any doubt that he has an executive temper
[03:44]
D
and he's pushing all the time and
[03:47]
A
he's not very restrained in how he goes about it. I praised Lindsey Graham earlier for being unpredictable sometimes. Well, that's another feature of the executive. So this letter is very characteristic of Churchill.
[04:02]
C
You just remind me, I wrote a column last week for the DC examiner that primarily 9, 10 of it was about Lord Palmerston and part of it was drawn, I don't know if you read that six volume history of England, but volume five is about Victoria's reign from Waterloo to her death in 1901. And in it, Lord Melbourne, Victoria's first Prime Minister, says, there's no stopping Palmerston. He does what he wants and he's just an energetic guy and he needs a blockade of Greece, he orders the blockade of Greece and he gives a five hour speech on the Don Pacifico affair in the House of Commons and he wins them over. That's the executive temperament, I think, even though he's a legislator, member of the House of Commons, nevertheless, their ministers are either doers or they're watchers. And he was a doer and he was the Prime Minister throughout our civil war, which I did not realize until I dove deep into him for the purpose of this column. Are you an admirer of his?
[05:04]
A
Oh, yeah. Castlereagh and Canning and Palmerston are the makers of British foreign policy in its heyday, right, when Britain was the greatest power on earth. And you know, that began to develop with Queen Elizabeth in 1588. They beat the Spanish and French armada. But then, you know, by the 18th century, they're the man, right? They got this big navy and they articulated the main elements of British foreign policy. Churchill repeats them beautifully in many places and tried to follow them all his life. And that is, we are independent of the continent and we keep our independence. We take sides in continental disputes when they're important enough and threaten us and we're always against the one that might dominate the continent. That means we only pick on the big boys. And that means if It's France or if it's Spain or if it's Germany, whoever it is, who threatens to dominate the continent. We're for the other guys. And those guys are the guys who articulated that. And it was in the bones of Winston Churchill.
[06:25]
C
And after those three, Castlereagh, Canning and Palmerston, there comes Disraeli and Salisbury. And they're in that, they're in that line. And then Churchill kind of completes it. There are periods of weakness and periods where they don't repair their navy. And I'm reminded now with some of our strategic depth issues in the munitions stockpile, of what happens when you have four or worse eight years of a president who doesn't much care. And that's got a long tail that Donald Trump is working to overcome, but it's very much a long tail. The other thing that comes through is that Churchill is absolutely fixated on tanks. I mean, they're falling back across the Channel, they gotta have airplanes. But he's pulling out memos that he runs on tanks and landing craft for tanks from 1917. What was his filing system like? How did he even find this stuff?
[07:18]
A
Well, he. I have carried his files around for hours with me. I can tell you in detail, I
[07:28]
D
can tell you in detail how he did that.
[07:29]
A
But, you know, first of all, he had a really great memory. And second of all, his themes are persistent through his life. He's the inventor of the tank. But if you want to know how to organize your files, there's, by the way, a tremendous correspondence in 1925 with a man named Sir Warren Fisher, who's the head of the British Civil Service, big time distinguished bureaucrat Sir Warren Fisher. Churchill did not become a Sir until decades later, Churchill was Chancellor the Exchequer. And Fisher sends Churchill a snippy note about how ministers of the Crown probably shouldn't have time about how to organize files. Churchill had sent him a note how to organize the files. And Churchill gave him a tremendous response in which he includes for the first time the phrase no longer civil, no longer servants. Isn't that good? But here's how he did it. If you open a Churchill file in the Churchill filing cabinets, which is what Martin Gilbert had in the bottom of the Bodleian library that I used to work in. First of all, the cabinets are arranged thematically and then the drawers are arranged thematically. So his bank accounts are in one and his this book is in another. And then the folders, each one of them is in reverse chronological order and in the exterior folder and in each document in it there's a hole punch, a little round hole in the upper left corner. And then he takes one of those little ribbons with kind of a string with a metal thing on each end, and he feeds it through. So that you can remove a document if you want to, but they're fixed in place, and when you open it, the most recent thing is on top. And that means that because Martin Gilbert wanted to write everything in chronological order, whereas. And that's the opposite, by the way, from work. Because when you're doing work, you know everything you know right now, and a lot about the past for each issue. And so you start with the current stuff, right. Whereas if you're writing history, you have to pretend that you don't know everything you know right now. So you start at the back and then you can be closer to the actual situation we're in, which is, we don't know tomorrow.
[10:07]
C
How did Sir Martin Gilbert get command of the bottle and basement? Because that is one of the world's preeminent libraries. You can't miss it. If you visit Oxford, I've been there a few times. You can't miss it. But I imagine that that real estate is precious.
[10:22]
A
Yeah. So the Bodleian Library has three main buildings and they're connected by. And all three buildings. The new library is where this was. It's across the street and then the main Bodleian Library. And then next to it is a big round building called Radcliffe Camera. And all three of those buildings go three floors up in their reading rooms. And they all three go three floor down, three floors down. And they're the stacks, so they're in the basement.
[10:53]
D
Right.
[10:53]
A
You go down underground. And those three floors, those three buildings are all connected underground. They're not connected. You have to go outside to traverse between them and the reading room levels. So anyway, you go to the new library and you have a pass, you have a key, and you get in the elevator. It's an old timey elevator with one of those things that you swing across, you know, to kind of a cage to close yourself in. And you go down to the very bottom floor. And you're three floors below ground now. And you get off the elevator and you walk about 30ft and there's an opening in the stacks. And Winston Churchill's filing cabinets are arranged in a U. And of course, he wrote an essay on the filing cabinet. You know, what kind of filing cabinet should you have? Fireproof, so heavy that it takes two strong men to move them. And because then they can't be Stolen. Very solid, right. The ones by Mrs. Chubb are the best he writes. And his are all Chubb filing cabinets. So you go down there and in this U, in between these wings of filing cabinets, there's a crappy wooden table and a hard wooden chair. That's all the furniture down there. And I have sat in there for hours and hours and hours.
[12:23]
C
Well, that's how a young scholar becomes a preeminent scholar. Let me talk about this chapter 12, though it is full of memos about minutiae about landing craft. Now we went through this in 1942, 43. I remember from researching an Eisenhower book decades ago that this was a real knotty problem for America and it required that fellow down in New Orleans, that Stephen Ambrose Foundation. That's why The World War II Museum is there, because he invented our landing craft. But Churchill was thinking about it from the beginning and this whole chapter is full of minutiae about minutia. I don't know how he had this capacity to write these things and I am astonished.
[13:08]
A
Well, so you have to relate the two things that are going on and they're sort of a mixture of the human capacity of prudence. Half of these memos are about how do we keep these guys from coming ashore, right? Because they may invade us and take London this month. Right. They're worried about that. Right. And we for a while they had an unarmed army. Most of the ones who got back, 350,000 who got back from Dunkirk, most of them didn't get back even with their rifles and the artillery was all gone. They got a big shipment of rifles first from us and they started arming their main army. And then pretty soon they had a million man home guard. So he's worried about that. Right. And there's memos going out about that. And at the same time in alternation, how are we going to invade Germany and kill Adolf Hitler? And you see both problems are present. And if you that that thing you read to Ismay, who is a very close associate of Churchill's, a senior general close to him, all war were beside him, all war and was eventually the first head of NATO in 1945, 46. We have to work urgently and solving the problem today, how we go about that will be affected by what the next problem is going to be. And the first problem is to save us. And the second problem is to kill Hitler. And pretty soon he's thinking about the third problem, which is what's the world going to be like after we've done that. And Churchill had Those dimensions going on all the time.
[14:54]
C
Now, I had suggested in my notes that I sent you that you read the two paragraphs on page 226 and 227 that begin, the buoyant and imperturbable temper of Britain, which I had the honor to express, may well have turned the scale. I don't know if you looked those up or if your book was as accessible as the paperback edition.
[15:14]
D
I got them here.
[15:15]
C
Yeah, okay, run with that.
[15:18]
D
I will read it. Let me make a point. First of all, if my. I knew a lot of people when I was in England from 77 to 80 and on beyond. They're all dead now. But people who lived through these years, my wife's family, her father and her mother. And it's amazing how often they regard this time in their lives, of this maximum danger, as the greatest time in their lives. Churchill writes, the buoyant and imperturbable temper of Britain, which I had the honor to express, may well have turned the scale. Now I'll make a point. I had a little to do with Darkest Hour, the movie where Gary Oldman got an Academy Award. And it's about this time in 1940, and they contrive a. Sorry I'm wandering now, but I have to tell this. They contrive him to go down in the subway, and various people talk to him and suggest things that later recur in his speeches. And I Talked to the VPs at Focus Features. I saw a preview of it in New York. They want to talk to me. And they said, what do you think?
[16:29]
A
They were trying to decide whether to
[16:30]
D
promote the movie for an early dinner. Sorry? For an Academy Award. I had an early dinner. And I said, it's great. And they said, did Churchill go down in the subway? And I said, on that day? And they said, yes. And I said, no, he did not. And they said, how do you know? And I said, we know everything he did that day. You can account for everything. And he said, but you still say it's great. And the reason is he wrote in a different passage in the first volume, in this volume, actually, a related passage to this one, in which he said that he was. He'd drive around the town and he'd see people with weary faces in the bus queues, and they'd notice him, and their eyes would brighten up and they would give him the V sign. And he said, the British had become the lion. And I was called upon to give the roar. So I told that to the people at Focus Features and said, you see, all you've done is shown them. Him giving them, giving him the words that he made so famous. Yeah, that's what he says here. I had the honor to express, may have turned the scale. Here was this people who in the years before the war had gone to the extreme bounds of pacifism and improvidence, who had indulged in the sport of party politics and who, though so weakly armed, had advanced light heartedly into the center of European affairs. You see what he's saying? Remember, there's a kinship with George Washington there. You don't go making commitments that are beyond your power to perform because that will get you in trouble. And he thought they were doing that in the 1930s and they were making more commitments than they were building weapons. Advanced light heartedly into the center of European affairs. Now, confronted with the reckoning alike of their virtuous impulses and neglectful arrangements, they were not even dismayed. They defied the conquerors of Europe. They seemed willing to have their island reduced to a shambles rather than give in. This would make a fine page in history. But there were other tales of this kind. Athens had been conquered by Sparta. The Carthaginians made a forlorn resistance to Rome. Not seldom in the annals of the past, and how much more often in tragedies never recorded or long forgotten, had brave, proud, easygoing states and even entire races been wiped out so that only their name, or even no mention of them, remains. See, Churchill is proud of the spirit, but he's aware of the danger. And that's what he'd been warning about for a decade when others were improvident, he calls them. And that's why he's sitting in that chair. In that day, he was proved right. Few British and very few foreign foreigners understood the peculiar technical advantages of our insular position. See, we have that today, by the way. It is true that the oceans are not as wide as they used to be, but they're still there. And we should not ever give up the advantage of them. We have fighter aircraft in numbers on the American continent, and we went 40 years without that. And our strategic defenses are better and getting better. And we should remember that. Nor was it generally known. Even in the irresolute years before the war, the essentials of sea and latterly air defense had been maintained. You see. In other words, we didn't abandon everything. Thank God for it. He had something to do with that. It was nearly 1,000 years since Britain had seen the fires of a foreign camp on English Soil, by the way, isn't that a good way to talk? You might have just said, since Britain had been invaded, seeing the fires of a foreign camp on English soil at the summit of British resistance, everyone remained calm, content to set their lives upon the castle, risk everything. That this was our mood was gradually recognized by friends and foes throughout the whole world. Where he presents in this chapter, by the way, some German memoranda discovered after the war where the German military is commenting to Hitler, these guys are ready to fight. You know, that helped prevent the invasion. What was behind the mood? That could be settled only by brute force. So we're going to find out.
[21:26]
C
That's an amazing brace of paragraphs. And I don't know how long it took him to write it. I doubt anyone does. But he's channeling his 1940 Persona there. He's bringing it back in 1946, 47. And those are not quotes from documents. He's recollecting much in the way your in laws recollect. This is how he felt. He must have felt increasingly confident. He also notes they firmly believe, however, with the help of God, that they will not lack the means to discharge this task. Interesting pointer to the Creator. Not unlike the way Washington would talk. Never got down into the specifics of theology, but very much about Providence.
[22:11]
A
Oh, yeah.
[22:12]
D
Well, Washington was a Christian and.
[22:15]
A
But he was also executive of a
[22:18]
D
land committed to religious freedom.
[22:20]
C
Yeah.
[22:20]
A
And so as was Churchill.
[22:23]
D
He talked at the level of generality
[22:25]
A
proper to that, to include everyone and,
[22:29]
D
you know, the laws of nature and of nature's God. If you don't believe in those, you're an idiot. And it's hard for you to understand the basis of America.
[22:38]
C
Now I want to go to the practice.
[22:39]
D
So.
[22:39]
C
Yeah, in this chapter on July 19th. So we've gone a month and a half into preparing for what we'll talk about next week, the sea lion threat. He replaces General Ironside, who's got the best name in the book with General Alan Brooke. This is an. Who had been stranded in Europe and he was ordered to retreat. Why does that matter so much?
[23:02]
D
Well, Brooke was, you know, he was tremendously effective man, Churchill's team.
[23:09]
A
You know, there were some changes in it. And Churchill, you know, he very seldom,
[23:16]
D
almost never denounces anybody, even enemies, but certainly not people he worked with. But he got his team together and
[23:25]
A
they were good, right.
[23:27]
D
And they were tight with each other. Brooke and Ismay and Jacob and Dill.
[23:34]
A
Those were slim.
[23:35]
D
Those were tremendous guys. There's down Whitehall. So Big Ben Picture that in your mind.
[23:41]
A
And there's a street that runs from Big Ben to Trafalgar Square, one of the most consequential streets in history called Whitehall.
[23:49]
D
And along the way, in Whitehall, if you're walking away from Big Ben, over toward the right, there's a stand of three generals. And they are slim. Let me get Remember who they are, slim. Montgomery and Brooke.
[24:06]
A
And they're tremendous people, right?
[24:10]
D
And they had a tremendous war record.
[24:12]
A
And they fought sort of like our
[24:13]
C
MacArthur, our Marshall and our Eisenhower.
[24:17]
D
That's right.
[24:17]
C
Same thing. Nimitz has got to be in there, too. I don't want to get the Navy mad at me.
[24:22]
D
Yeah, yeah. Well, pet, you know, Patton gotta include Pen. And, you know, those guys were good. And they. And one of the points, I I Victor Hansen's very fine book, the Second
[24:34]
A
World wars, which might be the best
[24:36]
D
book I've ever read on the subject. Although Martin Gilbert wrote one too. It's very good. He makes the point of how effective the British were. And that was possible because of the
[24:47]
A
spirit in the people.
[24:48]
D
And it was possible because of the
[24:50]
A
tightness and skill of the leadership.
[24:53]
D
They weren't quarreling with each other all the time. You know, they did quarrel, but the truth is mostly what they did was work together. And Churchill was, you know, frustrating to Brooke.
[25:06]
A
Alan Brooke, who became Lord Alan Brook, one word.
[25:10]
D
Because he kept him up at night
[25:14]
A
always giving them difficult orders, and sometimes he'd wear out and.
[25:18]
D
And, you know, say, gosh, leave us alone. We got a job to do here. Right?
[25:23]
A
And that's in his diaries.
[25:25]
D
And those are published.
[25:26]
A
And it makes it look like that
[25:28]
D
this was the scene of regular conflict.
[25:30]
A
Martin Gilbert always believed that those diaries.
[25:32]
D
And one can read the originals of the diaries, by the way, are distorted by Arthur Bryant, who edited them. Because the truth is, they're also meaning.
[25:42]
A
Some of them are in the book, some of them are not.
[25:44]
D
Shining instances in the diary where he talks about how he just marvels at Churchill and how well he can think about how determined he is about how far he can see, including the passage. We cannot help. We could never win this war without him, he says. So it was a very tight. And these snowflakes that we talked about before that Rumsfeld is always sending, they were important because, you know, if you. If you're not. If you send out 30 or 40 notes a day to people which, you know, and they're degrade in Churchill, they're grades of them, right? A lot of them are.
[26:25]
A
Are just be thinking about this this
[26:29]
D
came up to me.
[26:30]
A
This came up to my mind be
[26:32]
D
thinking about this and that he had confidence in those people.
[26:36]
C
One example of that is in this chapter he's thinking about artillery duels. It's sort of a premonition of drone warfare that we see today. He's thinking about long range artillery duels between the Germans and the Brits over the Straits of Dover. And so he thinks we've got to get the old decommissioned guns, 13 half inch guns from the Iron Duke, which an old ship that doesn't sail anymore but had big guns and we got to put them on railway moorings and run him up and down the coast. That's not what normally one thinks about in a prime minister's job.
[27:10]
A
Yeah, well, he also begins the invention because he. The tank and the landing ship for tanks and later infantry and the portable harbor, right? He's already thinking about that this month, right. When he's getting ready for invasion. And so he, you know, eventually they built a harbor that they could float across the channel and make a way to get a lot of stuff ashore without a deep port. Well, he here in this chapter, he sends a memo out be thinking about this, get somebody thinking about it, right? And one of the things was he thought you could make them out of concrete and put floats on them and then they could be places for people to live too. And then you'd go and float them across the channel and then take the floats off and they sink down to the surface and you've got a fort. He said, you know, he's thinking like that, right?
[28:11]
C
Did you? We're running low on time here for this week and we'll come back to the invasion threat next week. But did you see the movie Pressure this summer with Brandon Fraser as Ike and Kay Summersby in the British Meteorology Corps? And all that conversation about whether to go or not go June 4th.
[28:28]
A
I haven't watched it yet. I haven't watched it yet. I did have a talk with Tom Selleck. Let me drop a name here. Now he listens to the show and
[28:38]
D
he's such a nice man.
[28:39]
A
He narrates our recent movie and he said, tell Hugh Hewitt to pay attention to the movie in which I play General Eisenhower.
[28:51]
D
I will do that because yeah, you should watch that movie.
[28:55]
C
Brandon Frazier is not quite physically fit enough to be a persuasive Ike because those men, he does smoke enough to be a persuasive Ike. But I like the fact that the meteor, the things you gotta think about. And this is a theme that will extend to next week. If you've prepared to be invaded, you are then prepared to invade. You agree with that?
[29:17]
D
That's right. Isn't that something? Yeah. Yeah.
[29:19]
A
If they look, we're afraid they're going to do this to us. If they can do this to us, it proves we can do this to them. And you know, he's I mean, one of my. I think it's probably my favorite letter that Winston Churchill's wife wrote about Winston Churchill was when Churchill lost his job in 1916 in the middle of the First World War. Clementine wrote to the prime minister Asquist and urged him to keep Churchill in the government. And you'd want your wife to think of you this way. Only Winston has the deadliness to fight the Germans. And I think she was right about
[30:03]
C
that and it proved it to be case the closing line for this week, page 245 as the month of July and August passed without any disaster, we settled ourselves down with increasing assurance that we could make a long and hard fight. Next week, Dr. Arn and I are doing chapters 14 and 15 on the invasion problem and Operation Sea lion. And boy, they are fascinating. So do not miss that. All things Hillsdale are collected at hillsdale. Edu and all of our prior dialogues, especially on the first book and a half the World War II mentalrs, are at Hughes for hillsdale. Com. Thank you, Dr. Arne.
[30:42]
B
Thanks for listening to the Hillsdale Dialogues, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you find your audio. For more information about Hillsdale College, head to Hillsdale. Eduardo.
[31:12]
E
Hello, this is Jeremiah Regan, Executive Director of Online Learning here at Hillsdale College, and I have some great news. We've brought Hillsdale's incredibly popular free online courses to the Hillsdale College Podcast Network, and our next series is the American Left From Liberalism to Despotism, a course taught by Associate professor of Politics Kevin Slack and Hillsdale President Larry P. Arn. After listening to all 11 episodes, you'll have a deeper understanding of what has happened to America in the past 60 years and what we can do about it today. The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast, hosted by Online Learning Marketing Director Juan Davalos and me, expands Hillsdale's mission to provide all who wish to learn the education necessary to increase happiness and to preserve the civil and religious liberties of America. We want you to be a part of it at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu. Subscribe now to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast to hear new episodes every week with additional commentary and insights from our team. Go to Podcast Hillsdale Edu to learn more. That's Podcast Hillsdale Edu.