In May 1940, Britain was losing the war. France was collapsing. The British Expeditionary Force was pinned at Dunkirk, 300,000 men trapped on a beach with the Wehrmacht closing in. The United States was neutral. The Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with Germany. Italy was about to join the Axis. Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, led a group in the War Cabinet that was seriously looking at a negotiated peace with Hitler through Mussolini. Those terms would almost certainly have left Hitler as the master of Europe. Winston Churchill had been Prime Minister for exactly ten days. Many saw him as a man of terrible judgment. He had pushed the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in World War I. He had been wrong about the gold standard, wrong about Gandhi, wrong about Edward VIII. His career had looked finished for a decade. He was sixty-five years old. In the crisis of May 1940, what he had was words.
Churchill had been preparing to speak this way his whole life. He gave his first big speech in Parliament in 1901, at age 26. He had written and delivered hundreds of thousands of words before he became Prime Minister. He wrote his speeches out in full and memorized them, so what sounded off-the-cuff was carefully prepared. He grasped something scientists have since confirmed: feeling comes before persuasion. You do not win people over with arguments. You win them by making them feel something first, and the argument follows. In May and June 1940, Churchill needed Britain to feel something it had no real reason to feel: that it could win.
Churchill gave his first speech as Prime Minister to the House of Commons on May 13, 1940, three days after taking office. It was the same day the Germans attacked through the Ardennes. It is one of the boldest opening speeches any wartime leader has given, because it starts by promising the British people nothing but suffering.
This speech works for a few reasons. First, Churchill is brutally honest. He does not promise an easy or quick win. He promises 'blood, toil, tears, and sweat,' and that honesty builds trust. A leader who tells you it will be hard is easier to believe than one who says it will be easy. Second, he asks and answers his own questions ('You ask, what is our policy? I will say...'). This turns a speech into a conversation and makes members feel included, not lectured. Third, he repeats the word 'victory' three times: 'victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road.' Repeating a word at the start of each clause is called anaphora. Churchill used it constantly. It builds a drumbeat and drives the word home through rhythm, not argument.
By June 4, 1940, Dunkirk was over. 338,226 British and Allied soldiers had been rescued from the beaches. It was a near-miracle, but the losses in equipment were huge: 84,000 vehicles, 657 tanks, and 2,500 guns left behind. France was about to fall. Churchill had to speak to the House of Commons and stop the Halifax group from seeking peace. The speech he gave is now seen as one of the finest in the English language.
This may be the most famous use of anaphora in English political speech. 'We shall fight' comes eight times in a row, building to 'we shall never surrender.' Each repetition adds another place, another front, until the listener feels the fight is everywhere. That was the feeling Churchill wanted. Retreat was made to feel impossible, not by the facts on the ground but by his words. Notice that 'we shall never surrender' is in the future tense. Churchill is not describing how things are. He is making a promise about the future, and pulling the House, and through it the nation, into making that promise with him.
Two weeks after Dunkirk, France signed an armistice with Germany. Britain was now completely alone. Churchill gave this speech the day after France formally asked for armistice terms. It is his most important speech strategically, because it had to do the impossible: make being alone feel like strength.
The ending is beautifully built. Churchill lays out two futures: the 'broad, sunlit uplands' of a free Europe if Britain holds, or the 'abyss of a new Dark Age' if it fails. This is the classic two-choice frame. You offer one bright option and one terrible one, so the choice you want feels like the only decent path. The last line, 'This was their finest hour,' is a clever trick with time. Churchill speaks in the present but quotes an imagined future historian looking back. He is not asking Britain to be brave. He is telling them that history will already remember them as brave, so they only have to live up to it. He uses faith in the future to shape the present.
Churchill gave this speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, alongside President Truman. The war was over. The Soviet Union had just taken over Eastern Europe. Churchill was no longer Prime Minister. He had been voted out of office in July 1945, weeks after Germany surrendered. The Iron Curtain speech is not a wartime speech. It is something rarer: a speech that names a new world before that world is fully visible.
Churchill did not invent the phrase 'iron curtain.' Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels and German diplomat Count Schwerin von Krosigk had used versions of it weeks earlier. But when Churchill said it before a worldwide audience, he fixed an image that would define the Cold War for forty-five years. That is the power of a concrete image over a dry description. He could have said 'Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe is cut off from the democratic West.' Instead he said 'an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.' The image is solid, cold, and dividing, and it did more than any diplomatic cable could. At first the speech was met with anger in the United States and Britain, who were still allied with the Soviet Union. Within two years, every major Cold War institution was in place: NATO, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine. Churchill's picture of the world had become the accepted truth.