pdf Speak for England: Be Prepared (The Cost)

They had it in writing. And they didn't go.

2 September 1939. The House of Commons has been waiting since a quarter to three. Poland has been under attack for thirty-six hours and every man in that chamber has come down on a Saturday expecting to hear his country declare war.

Instead the Prime Minister stands up and talks about consulting the French. And from the benches behind him — from his own side — a Conservative shouts across the floor at the leader of the Opposition:

"Speak for England, Arthur!"

That night the Cabinet meets in a thunderstorm and tells Neville Chamberlain that he will send the ultimatum or he will not have a Cabinet by lunchtime.

In our world, he sent it. Here, the vote fails by a dozen hands.

Warsaw falls. France falls faster and harder and entirely alone. And Great Britain spends twenty-seven months getting rich — ploughing four million acres, laying down escorts, raising steel towers along the chalk — until she is the strongest undamaged power in Europe and the most despised government on the continent.

Across the Atlantic, America looks at a map with no friends on it and starts building a year early. In Philadelphia a convention hands its nomination to a man wearing a German decoration. In a Richmond shipyard a woman from Beaumont, Texas learns to weld in three weeks. In thirty-eight inches of West Virginia coal a man is paid by the ton and not paid for the timbering that would keep the roof off him.

And a government that will not spend one soldier discovers there is something else it can spend.

Everything Britain gains here, somebody else pays for. No free lunches, no easy victories, and a reckoning that arrives in a single week in December 1941 — not by Britain's choice, but by somebody else's.

Speak for England is Book One of THE COST: the story of the two years the world was given, who paid for them, and what they were worth.