"The Darkest Hour" generally refers to the time when Britain was under threat of invasion in 1940 and 1941. Who coined the phrase?
The Darkest Hour The Darkest Hour is a phrase coined by British prime minister Winston Churchill to describe the period of World War II between the fall of France in 1940 and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when the British Empire stood alone against Nazi Germany and the Axis Powers in Europe. The length of time between the fall of France in June 1940 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 measured 363 days, or 11 months and 28 days. It is particularly used for the time when the United Kingdom was under direct threat of invasion; following the evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk and prior to victory in the Battle of Britain. The darkest moment is usually considered to have been 10 May 1941, when over 1,500 civilians died in Luftwaffe bombing raids on London alone.
MAUD Committee The MAUD Committee was founded by Winston Churchill, in response to Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch's memorandum, in June 1940. Their memorandum was a discussion of the potential relative ease of obtaining a nuclear bomb, compared to earlier projections. All the work in the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum was purely theoretical, so the purpose of the MAUD committee was to do the research required for what Frisch and Peierls called a super bomb. The MAUD Committee investigated if applying nuclear technology to make a bomb was, in reality, feasible. The chair of the committee was Thomson. Each university where research was being done had a commander as well. All the research finally culminated, after fifteen months, in two reports - 'Use of Uranium for a Bomb' and 'Use of Uranium as a source of power' - known collectively as the MAUD report. These reports discussed the necessity of a super-bomb for the war effort. In order to research this further, the British created their own nuclear program officially named Tube Alloys.