World War: BATTLE OF BRITAIN: This Turning Point

“This Turning Point”

An intensely symbolic scene was laid in a great hall of Bristol University one day last week. It was the day after a dreadful raid. Not many yards from the hall, high walls were still tottering and crumbling.

The faces of the assembled doctors, bachelors and fellows were pale: many had been up all night fighting fires. But on their backs the tired men wore medieval robes of blue and green, and hoods and scarfs of red and ermine—badges of centuries of tradition.

The gaudiest robe of the lot—a dark gown almost armored with gold braid—draped awkwardly on the huge round shoulders of the Chancellor of Bristol University. Winston Churchill. Near him, in the scarlet and salmon pink gowns of doctors of law, stood Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies of Australia and U.S. Ambassador John Gilbert Winant.

Winston Churchill had just conferred honorary degrees on these two men: personifications of Dominion support and of U.S. aid.

Winston Churchill was certainly conscious of the scene’s aptness. This was a week in which all Britain was holding its breath. It was a week in which, to assuage the public thirst for revenge, the Government and R.A.F. had sanctioned a furious incendiary raid on Berlin, along whose Unter den Linden proud establishments like the State Opera and Prussian State Library were fired. It was a week in which the Germans began to talk again, loudly and confidently, of invading the British Isles. It was also a week in which Coventry had been blasted “worse than Coventry,” and now Bristol too.

Ambassador Winant and Prime Minister Menzies had just spoken in simple, moving terms. John Winant: “I will always think first of the patience, character and courage of the people of Bristol.” Robert Menzies: “This is humanity’s war.” Winston Churchill grimly declared: “The traditions which have come down to us throughout the centuries . . . will enable us most surely at this moment, this turning point in the history of the world, to bear our part. . . .” Where the next hard blow would fall—perhaps on Eire, where preparations were considered for the evacuation of Dublin, perhaps on Greenland, which the U.S. had just taken over—Winnie Churchill might guess but only his hated foe could know.