
Happy New Year: “May we all come through safe and with honour”
New Year’s Eve, 31 December 1941…
Somewhere east of Ottawa, a special train bore the Prime Minister of Great Britain toward Washington. He had been in Canada to address Parliament. His most memorable lines came as he spoke of the French in 1940:
When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone, whatever they did, their generals told their prime minister and his divided cabinet, “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” Some chicken! … Some neck.
A week earlier Churchill had won cheers from hardened American politicians in Congress, hurling defiance at the enemy.…