The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor mooted the political division between interventionists and isolationists in the United States. America was now united like never before.
In the Pacific, the Japanese offensive pressed on.
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Playlist:
Fanfare
Opening War Theme
Symphony No. 4 in F minor
Composed in 1878 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Public domain.
Public domain recording. Source.
Closing War Theme
Except when otherwise indicated, the contents of this podcast are © and ℗ 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 by Mark Painter, all rights reserved. Some music and sound effects used by arrangement with Pond 5.
Yet another excellent episode!
Since our good old friend Winston is mentioned once again (and some days ago there was the 59th anniversary from his death), I’d like to suggest a very interesting book (Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes) in which Tariq Ali debunks the legacy of this “august statesman”.
I hope I’m presenting a “warts and all” portrait of Churchill, and obviously I’m not finished with him yet. For example, the Bengal Famine of 1943, which is coming up soon. Churchill made many mistakes and expressed many antiquated views, but there are two occasions when he was decisively correct: in calling for a harder line against Germany in 1935-39 and for refusing to countenance talk of negotiating with Hitler after the Fall of France. It is hard to imagine how the war would have played out had Lord Halifax been prime minister. In the former case, his speeches sound prophetic in retrospect, but he was equally harsh toward Gandhi, which leads me to think it was just a coincidence that one of the targets of his eloquent vituperation, Adolf Hitler, happened to deserve every word of it. I’d venture to say that had the Second World War not happened, or had Churchill not been so involved in it, he’d have been remembered as someone whose influence in world history was largely malign.
On further investigation, Wikipedia tells me that Sir Robert himself preferred the pronunciation MING-iss, which is what I was trying to say in this episode, though I didn’t get it quite right. It came out more like MENG-iss. I’ll get it next time.
I did discuss Stewart Menzies, the Chief of MI6, in episode 340, and I think I got it right on that occasion.