Eighty-five years ago this month, Winston Churchill began to save his country and his civilization from descending into what he called a “New Dark Age.” Asked by the king to form a national government on May 10, 1940, Churchill rose to the task with an indomitable will and undaunted courage. Of all the many biographers of Churchill, perhaps John Lukacs captured best the importance of courage to Churchill’s success. Lukacs persuasively argued that without Churchill’s courage, the New Dark Age would have triumphed.

Prior to May 1940, Churchill had demonstrated physical courage on battlefields in Sudan and the Northwest Frontier, in his daring escape from a Boer prison during Britain’s war in South Africa, and political courage in readying the fleet for war as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1914, in championing the Dardanelles campaign and later fighting on the Western front in the First World War, in opposing Indian independence in the 1930s, and in raising alarms about Germany’s growing threat to the balance of power in the lead-up to the Second World War. But in May–June 1940, Churchill’s courage was geopolitical.

In May 1940, Churchill’s words, decisions, and actions affected global geopolitics; indeed, they affected the destiny of the world. And Churchill knew it because he knew history. He had read Gibbon and Macaulay, and Shakespeare. He wrote a multi-volume biography of his ancestor, the great Duke of Marlborough, who opposed the armies of Louis XIV. He wrote about Pitt, Nelson, and Wellington, who opposed Napoleon. He lived through the Great War and afterward wrote six volumes about it. Churchill had what Robert Kaplan calls a “tragic mind.” And as William Manchester wrote, he had the ability to “gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends.

The historian John Lukacs wrote short books about Churchill, but their brevity does not detract from their profundity. The title of one of those books was taken from one of Churchill’s most important speeches, Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat. Churchill delivered the speech just three days after being named Prime Minister and speedily forming a War Cabinet. Germany had invaded France and the Low Countries after eight months of “phony war.” The French Army was completely taken by surprise as German panzers bypassed the Maginot Line and headed for Paris and ultimately the Atlantic coast. Churchill, when he was out of power, had criticized Anglo-French appeasement of Hitler, but now the critic was in charge. What would he do?

Churchill revealed his mindset in a passage in The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his magisterial history of the Second World War. He wrote about the belated and futile guarantee to Poland by Britain and France after Hitler’s takeover of all of Czechoslovakia. “Here was decision at last,” he wrote, “taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.” But, Churchill argued, it was the right decision because “if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.” Worse, he wrote, “[y]ou may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.”

In May–June 1940, Britain faced a choice of fighting alone against an unbeaten German army and air force, which had conquered much of Europe and parts of North Africa and was allied to Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Churchill’s courage and bravery would be tested as never before. And as Lukacs wrote, “beneath Churchill’s bravery lay his understanding of a looming catastrophe, still unimaginable to most: that it was late, probably too late, that Adolf Hitler was winning, that he was about to win; that he was close to winning the Second World War.” So, what would he tell his people and the world? He told them this:

I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

Lukacs wrote that Churchill in this speech was preparing the British people for the worst aspects of war: “the prospect of plight and suffering in the face of disasters, indeed of disasters around the corner, so to speak: ahead lay no promises but threat.” Churchill had the courage to tell the people the truth. Victory, if it came, would be after they traveled a “long and hard road.” Victory, if it came, would be costly—“in spite of all terror.” But victory was necessary because without it “there is no survival.” “Courage,” Lukacs wrote, “is the capacity to overcome one’s fear.”

Lukacs believed that Churchill did not fear for himself but “feared for his country, for his people, for Western civilization.” Churchill’s courage informed his decision to refuse France’s request for help from the Royal Air Force—those planes would be needed for the anticipated Battle of Britain. Later that summer, he would make another crucial but difficult decision in ordering the sinking of the French fleet at Mers el Kebir. But perhaps his most courageous decision was taken against the advice of his foreign secretary and some other members of the War Cabinet—the decision to refuse to parley with Hitler.

Churchill’s refusal to negotiate a peace with Nazi Germany forms the core of Lukacs’s book Five Days in London, which examines the meetings of the War Cabinet between May 24 and May 28, 1940. This was the moment, Lukacs wrote, when Churchill’s domestic opponents and many others in Western Europe “were inclined to accept the collapse of parliamentary democracy and seek some kind of accommodation with the triumphant Third Reich.” Led by Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, this group also grasped the great difficulty Britain faced in opposing Germany alone, and to them it made sense to get the best deal possible from Hitler before he unleashed the Luftwaffe on their island and against their people.

Churchill, almost alone, understood, Lukacs continued, that “the end of Western civilization was near.” In this, Lukacs contends, Churchill was “inspired . . . by a kind of historical consciousness.” It was that historical consciousness that led Churchill, at a dramatic meeting of the War Cabinet and other select members of Parliament, to explain that “it was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms from Germany than if we went on and fought it out.” Britain would become, he said, a “slave state” under a Hitler “puppet.” In those five days, Lukacs concluded, Churchill saved Britain, Europe, and Western civilization.

In his short biography Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian, Lukacs wrote about Churchill and this time period in May 1940, that “There was no one else who could have done what he did . . .” Churchill, he wrote, had a “visionary assessment of Hitler and his Third Reich.” And “the bravery and resolution that Churchill demonstrated at that time were inseparable from . . . his vision.” And that vision was that of a British imperial patriot whose guideposts were the interests of Britain and its empire.

At the end of this short biography, Lukacs notes that Churchill was a man of the Right, meaning a conservative who, with France’s De Gaulle (another man of the Right) were the “truest opponents of Hitlerism.” Churchill, he wrote, represented “a certain superb kind of patriotism, not internationalism.” Churchill engaged the world with an approach of Britain and its empire first. It is little wonder that one of the first things President Trump did at the beginning of his second term was to once again prominently display Churchill’s bust (that had been removed by Presidents Obama and Biden) in the Oval Office. Trump’s “America First” foreign policy is also a “certain superb kind of patriotism, not internationalism.” It has Churchillian echoes.