May 13, 1940: Winston Churchill's Offer

May 13, 1940: Winston Churchill makes his 1st speech as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Three days earlier, with the preceding Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, already seeing his government falling apart, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, with France the obvious next target. Chamberlain's policy of appeasement toward the Nazis had failed, and so had the way he had conducted Britain's effort in World War II.

Chamberlain had to go to King George VI, and tell him that he could no longer form a government. The choice for a new Prime Minister was down to Churchill and Edward Wood, the 1st Earl of Halifax. Like Chamberlain, Lord Halifax had been part of the Conservative Party's appeasement wing. Churchill had been the foremost anti-Nazi in Parliament, but he had not seriously been trusted with a high government office since his failure as First Lord of the Admiralty in World War I.

But the King knew Churchill was the right man for the moment. After reorganizing the government into a true War Cabinet, Churchill gave his 1st speech as Prime Minister on May 13, before the House of Commons.

He had already heard of an event in The War from earlier in the day: The Nazis decided to not try to breach France's "unbreachable" Maginot Line. Instead, they just went around it, over ground the French thought couldn't be gone over. As the English might have said, the French were buggered.

The phrase from the speech that remains the most familiar had been, in one form or another, used before. Ancient Roman figures Cicero and Livy had both used the phrase "sweat and blood." In 1611, John Donne wrote, "That 'tis in vaine to dew, or mollifie / It with thy Teares, or Sweat, or Bloud." In 1823, Lord Byron had written of "Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions." In 1849, rallying his revolutionary forces in Rome, Giuseppe Garibaldi had said, "I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battle and death."

In 1897, in an address to the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, the new U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, said, "Every man among us is more fit to meet the duties and responsibilities of citizenship because of the perils over which, in the past, the nation has triumphed; because of the blood and sweat and tears, the labor and the anguish, through which, in the days that have gone, our forefathers moved on to triumph."

As early as 1931, Churchill himself had given a speech speaking of "new structures of national life erected upon blood, sweat, and tears." But on May 13, 1940, broadcast all over the world by the BBC, he told the Commons this:

I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.

You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory, at all costs. Victory, in spite of all terror. Victory, however long and hard the road may be. For, without victory, there is no survival.

Churchill immediately changed his perception among many people. This would be followed by his speeches of June 4, in which he said, "We shall fight on the beaches," and so on and so forth, adding, "We shall never surrender"; and of June 18, when he spoke of those defending the nation that it would be the nation's "finest hour." In the space of 36 days, he had become one of the most renowned public speakers in human history. In December, Time magazine named Churchill its Man of the Year for 1940.

None of which would have mattered had the Nazis won the war. They did not. As a result, in 1949, Time named Churchill its Man of the Half-Century -- ahead of America's own wartime leader, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Time boss Henry Luce was a Republican, and, in a reluctant congratulations to FDR after he won a 3rd term in 1940, wrote, "We, who hate your gaudy guts, salute you.")

At some point, it was generally decided that "toil" and "sweat" were roughly the same thing, and so the saying was altered in the public mind to "Blood, Sweat and Tears." A rock band named Blood Sweat & Tears was big in 1968, '69 and '70.

On April 9, 1963, the Congress of the United States passed a resolution, making Churchill, who lived until 1965, the 1st honorary citizen of the United States. Since December 16, 2014, there are have been 8 individuals so honored: Pennsylvania founders William and Hannah Penn, Swedish diplomat and Holocaust rescuer Raoul Wallenberg, Mother Teresa, and 3 Europeans who aided the American cause during the Revolution: The Marquis de Lafayette, Count Casimir Pulaski, and Bernardo Gálvez y Madrid, 1st Count of Gálvez, for whom the Texas city of Galveston is named.

Time magazine named Churchill its Man of the Year for 1940, and later, in 1949, named him its Person of the Half-Century.

In a 2016 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist played Theodore Roosevelt, while British comedian Dan Bull played Winston Churchill. Although Churchill became great friends and allies with TR's cousin FDR, he and TR met only once, at a dinner at the Governor's Mansion in Albany, New York on December 10, 1900, with TR about to leave the Governorship as Vice President-elect, and Churchill, then only 26 years old but already a hero of the Boer War and a member of Britain's House of Commons, on a lecture tour of America.

Although the two men would seem to have a lot in common, TR once wrote a letter about the then-young British politician and writer, saying, "I do not like Winston Churchill," accusing both him and his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, of "inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety, as to make them poor public servants." Winston's feelings about TR do not appear to have been recorded. TR's daughter Alice suggested it was because they were so much alike that they didn't get along. Churchill biographer Robert Pilpel wrote, "It was a case of likes repelling."

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May 13, 1940 was a Monday. There were only 3 games played in what would later be called Major League Baseball. The New York Yankees were not in any of them:

* The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 6-3 at Ebbets Field.

* The New York Giants beat the Boston Bees, 11-15 at National League Park in Boston. This was the last season of the failed rebrand of the Boston Braves and Braves Field.

* And the St. Louis Cardinals played the Cincinnati Reds at Crosley Field. The game was tied 8-8 after 14 innings. Johnny Mize hit 3 home runs for the Cards. But the game was stopped -- not because of darkness, as Crosley was the 1st MLB stadium with lights, but because of the scheduling. This game was already a rainout makeup, and both teams had to catch trains to get to their next series.