Winston Churchill’s annotated End of the Beginning speech from 1942. Photograph: James Gourley/Rex/Shutterstock
From a hasty sketch detailing the plan for one regiment’s escape from Dunkirk, to the handwritten annotations on Winston Churchill’s End of the Beginning speech, a clutch of rarely seen documents from the second world war are being published – many for the first time - by the Imperial War Museum.
The museum’s head of documents Anthony Richards sorted through thousands of papers in the IWM archives to come up with 20 he felt defined the second world war. These include a “diagrammatic layout of embarkation” in which Capt Ken Theobald of the Fifth Battalion Royal West Kent Regiment detailed the plan the British Expeditionary Force would use to help his regiment escape the Dunkirk beaches in 1940.
“People remember Dunkirk because of the scale of it – it was such an enormous operation,” said Richards. “The plan in the book only covers a very small part of the beach there – it was intended for just one special unit. It makes it more personal.”
A sketch by Capt Theobald showing the evacuation plan for units of the British Expeditionary Force to escape from Dunkirk in May 1940. Photograph: Estate of Captain F K Theobald/I/PA
Richards’s The War on Paper, which is published by IWM on 27 September, also includes Adolf Hitler’s signed directive ordering the invasion of Poland in 1939; Churchill’s annotated 1942 End of the Beginning speech, which shows how he “honed his punchy ‘Churchillian’ style”; handwritten notes made by Lieutenant Colonel R McLay while serving as a junior member of the court in the Belsen war crimes trial; Kindertransport identity papers; and the Lüneburg Heath surrender document, in which the Nazis surrendered to Field Marshal Montgomery.
“If you look at the Churchill document, it’s interesting because of the content of the speech, but also because if you look carefully at the way the speech is typed and laid out, you can see it’s written in a way to enable him to seem more effective, and you can see the amendments he made,” said Richards.
“Even a document which is almost cold, like the surrender document for the second world war, the more you look into it, the more interesting it is. Monty was in his tent waiting for the Germans to turn up – they did, and someone came in saying the Germans are here to sign the surrender. He made them wait for half an hour, and when they sat down to sign, Monty got the date wrong and had to cross it out. Those little details bring it all to life.”
The book, which also contains images, extracts from letters and diaries, maps and posters is being published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Anglo-German Declaration, which was signed in Munich in September 1938 with the aim of promoting peace between the two countries. Included in replica in the book, the declaration is “symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again” – according to signatories Neville Chamberlain and Hitler.
Richards said: “It has been my privilege to have worked with the IWM documents collection for over two decades, and in that time it has never ceased to impress and at times surprise me with its depth of coverage and insight into how the war was fought and experienced. The story behind certain documents can be fascinating, and I hope that readers will find the examples included in The War on Paper to be both interesting and thought-provoking, as they portray the events of the war in a most immediate, direct way.”