The Phoney Victory Quotes

“Prince of Wales still lies, her huge 44,000-ton bulk turned upside down by the violence of the enemy, nearly 40 fathoms deep off the Malaysian coast. Here, in all its concentrated, solemn vastness, an official war grave, is a solid, enduring relic of Britain’s final days as a great industrial, economic and naval power. At 745 feet long and 105 feet wide, she contains centuries of shipbuilding and fighting experience, now dead, scattered, disbanded, forgotten or lost, thousands of tons of steel from blast furnaces, mills and forges long demolished, made with coal from mines long ago closed and sealed, and dug and smelted and hammered by an industrial working class now vanished. Every intricate part of her was made according to the traditional measurements of England, feet, inches, pounds and hundredweight. These are now abandoned in favour of the metric system which was used by our enemies in that war and which would have been imposed upon us had we been defeated. But in this matter, as in so many others, we have made a conquest of ourselves. Somewhere in her barnacled ruins is the cabin where Churchill slept, the cinema where he watched That Hamilton Woman with tears in his eyes, the bridge from which he waved so cheerfully, and perhaps the rotted fragments of the hymn book from which he so lustily sang ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ and ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers!’, beside his ally and supposed friend, the president of the United States.”
― Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion