World War II
Hear Queen Elizabeth II Give Her Very First Speech to the British People, During World War II (1940)
“Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl, but she doesn’t have a lot to say,” sings Paul McCartney on the Beatles’ “Her Majesty.” That comic song closes Abbey Road, the last album the band ever recorded, and thus puts a cap on their brief but wondrous cultural reign. In 2002 McCartney played the song again, in front of Queen Elizabeth II herself as part of her Golden Jubilee celebrations. Earlier this year her Platinum Jubilee marked a full 70 years on the throne, but now — 53 years after that cheeky tribute on Abbey Road — Her Majesty’s own reign has drawn to a close with her death at the age of 96. She’d been Queen since 1953, but she’d been a British icon since at least the Second World War.
In October 1940, at the height of the Blitz, Prime Minister Winston Churchill asked King George VI to allow his daughter, the fourteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth, to make a morale-boosting speech on the radio. Recorded in Windsor Castle after intense preparation and then broadcast on the BBC’s Children’s Hour, it was ostensibly addressed to the young people of Britain and its empire.
“Evacuation of children in Britain from the cities to the countryside started in September 1939,” says BBC.com, with ultimate destinations as far away as Canada. “It is not difficult for us to picture the sort of life you are all leading, and to think of all the new sights you must be seeing and the adventures you must be having,” Princess Elizabeth tells them. “But I am sure that you, too, are often thinking of the old country.”
In the event, millions of young and old around the world heard the broadcast, which arguably served Churchill’s own goal of encouraging American participation in the war. But it also gave Britons a preview of the dignity and forthrightness of the woman who would become their Queen, and remain so for an unprecedented seven decades. As Paul McCartney implied, Queen Elizabeth II turned out not to be given to prolonged flights of rhetoric. But though she may not have had a lot to say, she invariably spoke in public at the proper moment, in the proper words, and with the proper manner. Today one wonders whether this admirable personal quality, already in short supply among modern rulers, hasn’t vanished entirely.
(source: opencultures.com)
WW2 Documentary: How Stalin Saved Britain
Presented by Professor David Reynolds. Historian Professor David Reynolds reassesses Stalin’s role in the life and death struggle between Germany and Russia in World War Two, which he argues was ultimately more critical for British survival than ‘Our Finest Hour’ in the Battle of Britain itself.
Causes of World War II: History of Germany & German Militarism
This film (originally titled as ‘Here is Germany’) is a 1945 American propaganda documentary film directed by Frank Capra and produced by the U.S. Office of War Information. It was made to prepare soldiers who had not seen combat to go to Germany for the U.S. occupation after the May 8, 1945 unconditional German surrender. It explains why the Germans started World War 2 and what had to be done to keep them from « doing it again ».
The film gives us a brief history of Germany and German militarism till 1939. It traces the rise of Prussia from Frederick the Great through Bismarck, telling the audience that the Prussian state was organized as an instrument of conquest, dominated first by aristocratic landowners, militarists and state officials, later joined by those big industrialists with ties to the militarists and their Imperial Government. The development of a military-industrial dominated state in the founding of the Prussian-dominated German Empire in 1870 climaxes in the catastrophe of World War 1. The film depicts the Third Reich from this perspective, seeing Nazism as simply a continuation of the aggressive German tradition, promoted by the businesses dependent on government contracts for arms. Lire la suite »
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