Churchills speech to the Commons on the eve of the French collapse, June 18, 1940, broadcast to USA.

However matters may go in France or with the French Government or other French Governments, we in
this island and in the British Empire will never lose our sense of comradeship with the French people...
If final victory rewards our toils they shall share the gains--aye, and freedom shall be restored to all. WE
abate nothing of our just demands; not one jot or tittle do we recede...Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, have joined their causes to our own. All these shall be restored.
What General Waygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to
begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British
life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy
must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the
war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into
broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all
that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and
perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our
duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its commonwealth last for a thousand
years, men will say, " This was their finest hour."

My Father and Family listened to these words around the radio, and at the end of the program there was
silence in the room, perhaps silent thought as to the reality of those words and what the future held for
them all. His conversations with Olivier about his plans to offer his services as a Pilot in the RAF when
He finished his course of instructon at Dobbs Ferry led my Father to say that he to might look into this
possibility for himself in the future.