Churchill’s “end of the beginning”

On 10 November 1942, Winston Churchill addressed the Lord Mayor’s gathering at the Mansion House in London. Recent news from the fronts, he observed, had been better. He called the British victory in Egypt a new experience: “a remarkable and definite victory.” The sentence offered relief, but not a forecast of an early peace.

Churchill credited General Harold Alexander and General Bernard Law Montgomery with a “glorious and decisive victory” in what he called the Battle of Egypt. He said their aim had not been to take ground for its own sake, but to destroy the enemy’s armed force. Rommel’s army, he said, had been defeated, routed, and largely destroyed as a fighting force.

His account also named the forces that had fought alongside the British. Indian troops, Fighting French, Greeks, and representatives of Czechoslovakia had taken part; Americans had given “powerful and invaluable service in the air.” Yet Churchill said the fighting had been conducted almost entirely by men of British blood and from the Dominions against Germans.

He described the battle in terms of weapons as well as ground. The Germans, he said, had been outmatched and outfought with every kind of weapon, including aircraft, tanks, and artillery. Then he placed a limit on the celebration: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” The line made the victory substantial without pretending the war’s outcome was settled.

Churchill linked the fighting in Egypt to the American-led enterprise at the western end of the Mediterranean, where British Army, Air Force, and Navy forces were also taking part. He presented the two operations as connected efforts, and described himself as President Roosevelt’s “active and ardent lieutenant”. The speech moved from battlefield news to the larger partnership, but kept its claims carefully bounded: Egypt’s defence might become decisive and final, he said, not the war as a whole.

He also declared that he had not become the King’s First Minister “in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” In one address, he celebrated a victory, acknowledged allied contributions, and drew a firm line around what he believed it meant.