Yet this was also the speech in which Churchill, while lauding the achievements of the RAF, offered what history would later appraise as one of the most powerful moments in oratory—the very line Churchill had tried out in the car with Pug Ismay during the fierce air battles of the previous week: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Like many other diarists of the era, Colville made no reference to the line in his diary; he wrote, later, that “it did not strike me very forcibly at the time.”
