Secret Session Speeches, Winston S. Churchill War Speeches
This collection of addresses to the House of Commons during WWII provides unique insight into the British Prime Minister’s wartime leadership.
During World War II, security was so precarious that the House of Commons was at times forced to meet in secret in order to keep its counsel from reaching the enemy. On five separate occasions between 1940 and 1942, Winston Churchill addressed the secret assembly. Those fateful speeches are reproduced in this collection.
Here, Churchill delivers his immediate reactions to the fall of France, the discovery of a vast enemy armada in the English Channel, and the fall of Singapore, which may have been the most heartbreaking and costly military failure of Churchill's career. These speeches offer intimate insight into Churchill's thinking in this highly consequential period. Originally published in 1945, Secret Sessions Speeches provides fascinating context to some of World War II's most significant events—and continue to carry great weight and meaning today.
Winston S. Churchill
Sir Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values." Over a 64-year span, Churchill published over 40 books, many multi-volume definitive accounts of historical events to which he was a witness and participant. All are beautifully written and as accessible and relevant today as when first published. During his fifty-year political career, Churchill served twice as Prime Minister in addition to other prominent positions-including President of the Board of Trade, First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Home Secretary. In the 1930s, Churchill was one of the first to recognize the danger of the rising Nazi power in Germany and to campaign for rearmament in Britain. His leadership and inspired broadcasts and speeches during World War II helped strengthen British resistance to Adolf Hitler-and played an important part in the Allies' eventual triumph. One of the most inspiring wartime leaders of modern history, Churchill was also an orator, a historian, a journalist, and an artist. All of these aspects of Churchill are fully represented in this collection of his works.
