• A Quora - Churchill to FDR greatly relieved after Pearl Harbor

    From a425couple@21:1/5 to All on Wed Jul 26 10:51:40 2023
    XPost: aalt.war.world-war-two, sci.military.naval, soc.history.war.misc

    Profile photo for Centrist Boy
    Centrist Boy
    Updated 3y

    Was there ever a sense of "we are going to win, it's only a matter of
    time" from the Allies during WWII?

    After Churchill heard that America had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, he
    rushed to a secure telephone to call Franklin Roosevelt. His Memoirs of
    the Second World War relate the following:

    In two or three minutes Mr. Roosevelt came through. "Mr. President,
    what's this about Japan?" "It's quite true," he replied. "They have
    attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now."

    No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that 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 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 Force
    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-breath; 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.

    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.

    That night, Winston Churchill recorded, he slept the sleep of ‘the saved
    and thankful'.

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