Eighty-six years ago this afternoon, Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons to report on the first year of the war and said of the RAF’s fighter pilots, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” The Battle of Britain was at its height; the line is said to have been drafted in the car on the way back from Fighter Command. The same speech did something less quotable and, for Washington, more consequential: it announced that Britain would lease bases in its Western Hemisphere colonies to the United States — the destroyers-for-bases arrangement that drew a neutral America one step closer.

That is the banner across that afternoon’s Evening Star, below: not the famous sentence, but the deal. Newspapers have their own sense of what matters. It is usually the part with a map.