Tailed by Luftwaffe, Western civilization in the balance, Churchill flies cooly home

Well-known story of the Second World War with never-before-released pictures:

One very cool customer: Churchill, puffing on cigar and wearing dashing aviator
glasses while being tailed by the Luftwaffe during ‘most daring flight of the whole war'

It was the perilous 18-hour flight which saw Britain's wartime Prime Minister fly back from America while being hunted by the German Luftwaffe.

Winston Churchill had flown back across the Atlantic in 1942 after lobbying President Roosevelt over the Allied Forces' strategy against Hitler.

And given the flight risks and importance of the discussions, the long-haul voyage back to Britain was one of the most significant of the Second World War.

Now a rare family archive has captured the intimate moments of Churchill's flight, including pictures of the wartime leader at the controls of the Boeing Clipper flying boat RAM 'Berwick'.
---

Click to expand...

the story and the pictures at Daily Mail link above

Thanks for this! Churchill is one of my heros!

A remarkable man. He has some of the best quotes in history too!

Reader said:

Thanks for this! Churchill is one of my heros!

Click to expand...

Mine too.

"We shall fight on the beaches....we shall never surrender" speech delivered in Commons, 04 June 1940. Crucial last paragraph begins at somewhere around eleven minutes. And Wiki, on that peroration.

It's always amazes me that Churchill made regular trips to the U.S. during the war and Roosevelt made at least one trip to Africa (Morocco, I believe) and another to Yalta in Southern Ukraine. Obviously, face-to-face meetings were essential in a day when radio communications were not secure. (For those who are interested, there were major disputes among the Allies (US, UK and USSR, later Free French) as to when and where to invade the European mainland, and then later what to do with Germany after it was defeated.)

Today it's hard to imagine the President of the United States being simply "out of the country" and unavailable for a month during wartime.

That the Luftwaffe was unable to find Churchill between Bermuda and England makes it all the more remarkable that Americans found and shot down the plane of Isoruko Yamamoto, the architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The airmen involved admitted the assassination took quite a bit of luck.