The Sinews Of Peace (The Iron Curtain" Speech'") [Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri] (May 5th, 1946}

The Iron Curtain - Winston Churchill

Last time I saw it all coming

And cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen

And to the world

But no one paid any attention

Up till the year 1933 or even 1935

Germany might have been saved from the awful fate

Which has overtaken her

And we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind

There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action

Than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe

It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot

And Germany might be powerful

Prosperous and honoured to-day

But no one would listen

And one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool

We surely ladies and gentlemen I put it to you

Surely we must not let that happen again

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic

An iron curtain has descended across the Continent

Behind that line lie all the capitals

Of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe

Warsaw Berlin Prague Vienna Budapest Belgrade Bucharest and Sofia

All these famous cities and the populations around them

Lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere

What is needed is a settlement

And the longer this is delayed

The more difficult it will be

And the greater our dangers will become

From what I have seen of

Our Russian friends and Allies during the war

I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength

And there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness

Especially military weakness