BBC MONITORING SERVICE — TRANSCRIPT OF FOREIGN BROADCAST
Origin: Radio Nacional de España, Madrid
Relay: Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS); National Broadcasting Company (NBC); WCAU Philadelphia
Date: 24 August 1940 — 11:07 hours British Summer Time (10:07 Greenwich Mean Time)
Duration: 7 minutes, 41 seconds. Recording quality: good. No interference recorded.
Note: Domestic BBC relay prohibited by Ministry of Information Direction MOI/BBC/40/Dir/23 of this date. Transcript prepared for government distribution only. Not for publication or broadcast.
[Recording begins mid-announcement, in Spanish. English transmission commences at 0 min. 34 sec.]
Good morning. I am speaking to you as a private person — I hold no office, no commission, no authority to speak for any government or institution. I am aware of that. I speak only as a man who has known this country and its people since birth, and who finds that he cannot remain silent at a moment when silence has a cost he is not willing to pay.
Britain is at war. I do not need to tell you that. What I want to put before you is something simpler, and I know that some will find it unwelcome to hear: this war, as it is now being fought, cannot be won on the terms its present prosecution requires. That is not defeatism. It is arithmetic.
France has fallen. The continent is closed to us as a theatre of ground operations. The young men of this country — the young men I know, whose fathers I knew — are being killed in the air above their own fields. I am told the question before the country is whether to fight on. But that is not quite the question. The question is what we are fighting for, and whether the manner in which we are fighting for it can possibly produce the outcome we desire.
I believe — and I have believed this for some time — that there exists the possibility of an honourable arrangement, acceptable to both parties, which would preserve the institutions and sovereignty of this country, allow those men to come down from the sky, and give Europe the chance, in time, to recover from what has been done to it. I am not speaking of surrender. I am speaking of a settlement between civilised peoples who have established, at sufficient cost, what the limits of the possible are.
I do not speak for Germany. I do not speak for any government. I speak as a man who cares about this country with a devotion that nothing that has happened to him personally has diminished, and who asks only that those now in government consider, honestly and without the constraint of a rhetoric that has made consideration impossible, whether a negotiated peace on terms that preserve British sovereignty is not preferable to the continuation of a war whose end, on honest military assessment, cannot be guaranteed.
I ask only that the question be put. The men who are dying above Kent deserve to know that every possible avenue of preserving their lives has been explored, and not foreclosed in advance.
I have said this from my own conscience, without instruction from any quarter and without encouragement from any government. I ask only that those who hear it hold it in that spirit.
Thank you.
[Recording ends. Spanish-language programming resumes at 11:15 BST.]
CBS relay monitored at: New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles. NBC relay monitored at: New York, Cleveland, San Francisco. Shortwave reception reported in Dublin, Belfast, Reykjavik, and Toronto.
Estimated total listening audience, United States: 6–9 million. Estimated Canadian audience: 400,000–600,000.
Domestic British reception via personal shortwave receivers: unquantified. Press Association wire distributed transcript to all UK newspaper desks at 11:34 BST. Publication suppressed by D-Notice at 12:08 BST.