Collection · 1938 — 1945
Words That Won The War
1938-1945: From Appeasement to Victory
The speeches that rallied nations, declared war, and shaped the outcome of humanity's greatest conflict. This collection traces the arc from Chamberlain waving a piece of paper at Heston Aerodrome in September 1938 through the surrender signed aboard the USS Missouri seven years later.
Churchill's wartime oratory dominates, but the story runs wider: Roosevelt moving American opinion from isolation to the Four Freedoms; de Gaulle, broadcasting to an occupied France from a BBC microphone in London; Stalin addressing a nation reeling from Barbarossa; Eisenhower's order of the day to the men climbing into landing craft off Portsmouth; and — finally — Hirohito's own voice, heard by Japanese civilians for the first time, announcing the unendurable.
Interactive Timeline · 1938 — 1945
Further Reading & Viewing
Books on rhetoric & great speeches
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The Second World War
Antony Beevor
The definitive single-volume history of the war.
View on Amazon →The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
William Manchester & Paul Reid
The final volume of Manchester's monumental Churchill biography.
View on Amazon →Churchill: Walking with Destiny
Andrew Roberts
One of the most acclaimed recent single-volume lives of Churchill.
View on Amazon →No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt — The Home Front in World War II
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer-winning portrait of the Roosevelts during the war.
View on Amazon →The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
William L. Shirer
The classic first-hand history of Nazi Germany by a journalist who was there.
View on Amazon →The World at War (BBC documentary series)
Thames Television / Jeremy Isaacs
The canonical 26-part documentary, with archival interviews of surviving participants.
View on Amazon →Browse the full speech library
Beyond WWII, our library catalogues hundreds of historic addresses with rhetorical breakdowns and verified transcripts.
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