The well-named big three-decker HMS Victory, Nelsons flagship, led the fleet that frustrated Napoleons drive for domination and subsequently contained European militarism for the hundredyears ofthe Pax Britannica, 1815-1914. Drydocked in Portsmouth, she served as flagship of the Channel Fleet in World War II and suffered battle damage from German bombs. After that war ended in Allied victory, the Allies observed Nelsons prayer of140years earlier, that "humanity after victory be the predominant feature ofthe British fleet. "
the former corporal came to power, led an England that once again, as in Napoleon's day, stood alone against a conquered Europe. The decision to fight on was not taken easily. The Western democracies had been riven by the horrors of World War I, and confidence in democratic society was shaken by the worldwide depression of the 1930s. The totalitarian creeds of Communism and Fascism and their most virulent offspring, Nazism, had taken their toll-even in the US. The situation in England, where the decision to fight on against Nazi Germany had to be taken to have any chance of averting what Churchill rightly called a new Dark Ages, was bleak. As John Lukacs points out in a fine new study, Five Days in London (reviewed in this Sea History, page 45), the decision was not easily achieved. In the end it was taken on faith, and on determination that the fight must continue. But England won the battle for the skies over the island, frustrating German invasion plans, and somehow held on for a year, alone against the German Colossus. A large part of that "somehow" was President Franklin Roosevelt's determination that Germany must first be quarantined in captive Europe, and then, somehow, defeated. Churchill had said at the outset of the war,"We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny," and slowly the world came to accept that view, heartened by England's stand. Roosevelt interpreted American neutrality in distinctly unneutral ways to get vital supplies to England, including the establishment of a Neutrality Zone that extended most of the way across the Atlantic. He took an unprecedented step in meeting with Churchill offNewfoundland, in the summer of 1941, to sign a document of war aims called, significantly, the Atlantic Charter. By then, Soviet Russia had been dragged into the war. Hitler explained to his generals that the invasion of Russia, his erstwhile ally, was necessary because of England's refusal to surrender. So he made Napoleon's mistake, leaving an unsubdued England behind him. Japan then rashly attacked the United States, bringing the most powerful nation in the world directly into the conflict. So in the great crisis of our age, and in the ensuing Cold War with Russia, the democracies prevailed. The English-speaking countries had come of age, and in declaring their own identities free of the empire, had saved the values the independent members of the comity had come to cherish and contribute to. The system was imperfect and ofren abused-but it survived, like a ship always raising her head after a boarding sea sweeps the decks, to resume the forward struggle. It is yet to be seen how this gathering of peoples and purposes, surely a major achievement of mankind on the Cape Horn road, fares in the changed world before us now. ,t
SEA HISTORY 92, SPRING 2000
In August 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill stands at the rail ofthe Royal Navy battleship Prince of Wales, watching the departure of"my great andgoodfriend" President Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard the US Navy cruiser Augusta. They met to sign the Atlantic Charter in Argentia Bay, Newfoundland. The British battleship would be sunk by Japanese warplanes four months later. just under three years later, the American cruiser would serve as command ship in the AngloAmerican invasion of France which culminated in the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny, enforced by the once-invincible German Army. In victory, all the promises ofthe Atlantic Charter would be kept.
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