In 'Phoney Victory' Peter Hitchens asserts that Britain didn't win the Second World War. This could also be said of the First World War. What was avoided was defeat but the cost was very high. In the case of the Great War, it was a case of blood & treasure squandered for no good purpose. By the end of 1917, it was clear that the age of multi-ethnic Empires was over. The British Navy remained supreme but it was obvious it could not fight a two front war. Japanese ships were helping patrol the Mediterranean from 1917 onward. The Empire- at least the dusky portion of it- was not pulling its weight. Partly this was because it was too poor. But, the Brits had no idea how to make India rich enough to even protect itself- let alone contribute much to Imperial defence. Thus, though territory was gained after 1918 (these were 'League of Nations Mandates' which were seldom profitable) the Empire, as a whole, was in decline. Ireland, Afghanistan and Egypt gained independence in 1922. India would have got the same by 1924 if Gandhi hadn't lost his nerve and surrendered unilaterally. After that it became too politically disunited to be able to dispense with the 'British Umpire' though, by 1937, provincial autonomy had been forced on the Indians. They could have cobbled together a Federal Government but preferred to sulk in jail or scream obscenities at each other.
In a chilly, high-ceilinged room in a Sussex preparatory school in the winter of 1959, I work intently on my model of the destroyer HMS Cossack. Such models come in lurid cardboard boxes illustrated with pictures of aircraft, tanks and warships, amid scenes of fiery melodrama, guns emitting orange streaks of flame, and the smoke of battle.
British firms also provided kits to build German fighter planes.
With these and our imaginations, we seek to recreate the thrill of the war we have just missed, in which our fathers fought and our mothers endured privations.
The UK got the atom bomb by 1952 and the H-bomb by 1957. That's what ensured the UK would remain safe.
This is a war just over the horizon of time in which we wish we had taken part, and which dominates our boyish minds above all things. Courage in pursuit of goodness, in the face of a terrible enemy, was what we most believed in. Even the Crucifixion grew pale and faint in the lurid light of air raids and great columns of burning oil at Dunkirk.
The H-Bomb meant that any future war in which the UK ran the risk of invasion would end in Nuclear Armageddon. Boys might as well read about dog-fights featuring Biggles because a Third World War (unless fought in the Turd World) would end in 15 minutes.
But the Second World War, like all events that have become myths, has become a dangerous subject.
Did you know that Churchill was a Black Lesbian? Why has this fact been suppressed.
As a nation, we are enthralled by the belief that it was an unequivocally ‘Good War’,
compared to one which ends in 15 minutes and the extinction of all life on the planet- it was a very good war. Casualties were half that of the Great War.
My father, Commander Eric Hitchens, who served in the Royal Navy for 30 years, was never wholly sure who had won.
The Navy's 'ten year rule' (i.e. the assumption that there would be no war for a decade) was abandoned in 1932 by Ramsay MacDonald's Government. Churchill, as Chancellor, had, very foolishly, taken a shilling off Income tax rather than spend that money on the Navy. Thus, though having to yield to the Japanese in the Indian Ocean, the Royal Navy (& the Merchant Marine) were able to prevail in the Atlantic and enforce the type of embargo which had been so successful in the Great War.
He neither felt he was living in a victorious country nor felt it had rewarded him justly.
Fair point. By 1950 the Royal Navy had only 80 ships. In 1945, it had 900 making it the largest in the world.
I remember well how, sometimes, late in the evening, he would look thoughtfully into the middle distance and say: ‘Ah, well, we won the war… or did we?’
With hindsight, it was the Great War which we didn't win. Germany should have been occupied. But Britain & France had been bled dry. Soldiers were mutinous. On top of that, there was a Bolshevik threat. In 1921, Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson warned Lloyd George that he didn't have enough troops to deal with a 'Triple Alliance' Labour strike (i.e. coal, railway & transport workers). Geddes 'axe'- cuts in military spending- meant Britain couldn't keep India, Egypt, Ireland or, in the event of a Communist uprising, England itself.
My mother, too, who had served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service
In both wars, UK was better at mobilizing female labour & talent.
and endured the Blitz, experienced the peacetime of victory as a disappointment, into which the ghosts of a more inspiring past sometimes intruded quite a lot.
The Thirties were indeed a 'golden afternoon of declining effort & increasing rewards' for a lot of English people.
Enough time has surely passed for us to admit that the military and political conduct of the war by our leaders was not always as good as it should have been, that the ‘Good War’ was often incompetently fought, with outdated equipment, by a country in decline.
Relative decline. By 1900, US & Germany were ahead in industrial output. In 1914, Germany produced twice as much steel.
Events of the war, often minimised or avoided in popular or school histories, reveal a country seeking to be more important, rich and powerful than it was, and failing in all cases.
That was certainly the message of the brief Suez war. The Brits & French didn't foresee that the Arabs would cut the pipelines & block the canal thus reducing oil supplies to Western Europe by 85 percent. Weakness is one thing. Colossal stupidity is another.
The myth that it was all glorious, and that it saved the world, is a comforting old muffler keeping out the clammy draughts of economic failure and political weakness.
Getting rid of the Empire was a good thing. Nothing wrong with being 'weak' if you have enough nukes to be safe from invasion. As for 'economic failure'- it just means you don't work your arse off. You get drunk instead.
Even today, the self-flattering fantasy that we won it, and the nonsensical but common belief that we did so more or less alone,
We did stand alone till Pearl Harbour. Moreover, unlike the French, we were united (apart from one or two nutters).
still leads to foolish economic and diplomatic policies based on a huge overestimate of our real significance as a country.
There has been no major fuck up since Suez though Obama blamed Cameron & Sarkozy for Libya.
One day, this dangerous fable of the glorious anti-fascist war against evil may destroy us simply because we have a government too vain and inexperienced to restrain itself.
i.e. BoJo is a fucking lunatic.
That is why it is so important to dispel it.
BoJo would self-destruct soon enough.
The myths go right back to the start of the war. The uncomfortable truth is that from the very beginning, it was Britain which sought a conflict with Germany, not Germany with Britain.
Declaring War is merely a bargaining ploy. Had the UK succeeded in gaining a 'threat point', it could have got a better deal. The mistake was to overestimate French willingness to fight. The bottom line is that the Allies didn't have an 'offensive military doctrine'. It turned out nothing less than nuclear missiles will do.
Hitler’s real targets lay elsewhere, in Ukraine and Russia, and he was much less interested in us than we like to think.
It was possible to believe the Brits would vote for Moseley & a deal with Hitler. It was said that the King Emperor was sympathetic to the Reich. True he had given up the throne, but perhaps that could be reversed. The Canadian Prime Minister liked Hitler. The Boers in South Africa, too, might be sympathetic. If the British started persecuting the Jews, the Muslims of the Empire would be happy which in turn would delight the Maha-crackpot- whom Jews had greatly helped.
Nor did we go to war, as many like to believe, to save or even help the endangered Jews of Europe. The veteran Labour MP Frank Field’s claim in his recent resignation letter that ‘Britain fought the Second World War to banish these [anti-Semitic] views from our politics’ is the most recent example of this common but mistaken belief.
It was true of certain Labour politicians & some upper class Jewish Conservatives.
Britain simply did not declare war in 1939 to save Europe’s Jews – indeed, our government was indifferent to their plight and blocked one of their main escape routes, to what was then British-ruled Palestine.
Few Jews wanted to go there because they believed the Arabs would kill them. It was America's refusal to receive them which was the problem. The UK itself had tightened up its 1905 Aliens Act in 1919. One honourable exception was the Kindertransport, which permitted nearly 10,000 mostly Jewish children to enter without visas between 1938 and 1939.
We also did nothing to help Poland, for whose sake we supposedly declared war.
Because Poland was far away. Still, the Poles helped us.
Forget, too, the ‘special relationship’ with the US:
The term was coined by Churchill in 1946. His mother was American. It must be said, the Americans were impressed by Ernie Bevin's hard line against Communism.
America was a jealous and resentful rival to whom we ceded our global status and naval supremacy. And Washington’s grudging backing came at a huge price – we were made to hand over the life savings of the Empire to stave off bankruptcy and surrender.
No. We honoured our debts because that was good for our reputation. It enabled us to rebuild our wealth. We are, after all, a nation of shopkeepers.
Even the threat of a German invasion was never a reality,Hilter did have a plan- Operation Sea Lion (Unternehmen Seelöwe)- to invade in 1940. But this required air supremacy and landing craft which the Germans lacked. The Navy and the RAF kept us safe. Still our nerve could have broken and Hitler could have got a favourable deal
more a convenient idea which suited the propaganda purposes of Hitler and Churchill.
Churchill hadn't declared war against anybody. Hitler had.
What began as a phoney war led in the end to a phoney victory, in which the real winners were Washington and Moscow, not us – and an unsatisfactory, uncomfortable and unhappy peace.
Which was paradise compared to what the Russians faced. Once we got nukes, we knew we were safe. Soon enough McMillan could say, with perfect truth, that we'd 'never had it so good'. 'Winds of change' meant we could end National Service rather than squandering blood & treasure trying to hang on to colonies in Africa.
It led to a permanent decline in our status, and a much accelerated, violent and badly managed collapse of our Empire.
It was turning into a Commonwealth in the Twenties. What was remarkable about the UK is that unlike France, Holland & Portugal, it didn't try to hang on to its South Asian colonies. This meant they stayed in the Commonwealth & the Sterling zone (except Burma where some stupid Brits were involved in the assassination of Aung San).
I recently obtained, long after his death, the medal my father should have received for his service on the Russian convoys while he was still alive. It came in a cheap plastic case, like a tourist trinket, emphasising our decline in the long years since.
That was a mistake. I suppose some bead counter got a promotion out of this miserable act of miserliness.
Beyond doubt there were many acts of noble courage by our people, civilians and servicemen and women during that war. It is absolutely not my purpose to diminish these acts, or to show disrespect to those who fought and endured.
They won. Germans fought and lost.
But the sad truth is that this country deliberately sought a war
You can declare war and then agree to peace terms without a single shot being fought. The declaration merely allows you to take various steps which would otherwise be illegal.
in the vain hope of preserving a Great Power status
Britain retains its permanent seat on the Security Council. King Charles reigns over more than ten percent of the world's land mass.
our rulers knew in their hearts it had already lost.
UK remained the biggest naval power after the War ended. After it, there was no naval threat to any Commonwealth country. BTW, India retained a British admiral till 1958.
The resulting war turned us into a second-rate power.
We were never a first-rate power- save at sea. Could we have turned India & Africa into an inexhaustible source of soldiers? No. Soldiers have to be paid. In the Great War, UK lost 900,000. India lost less than 100,000 though it had a much bigger population. It was clear that UK would have to do the heavy lifting in any future conflict. Productivity was simply too low in the non-settler colonies.
MYTH 1: WE WERE FORCED INTO WAR BY THE GERMANS
The alternative was to surrender. Hitler may have been as stupid as shit but he had heard of 'perfidious Albion'. Even if Moseley was PM & he did a deal with Berlin, Hitler could not ignore the possibility that the fellow might not secretly re-arm and intrigue against him with Uncle Sam. Also, England is eaten up by Jewry. Did you know that Churchill's real name is Cohen?
Britain actively sought a war with Germany from the moment Hitler invaded Prague in March 1939.
Why not actively seek war with Poland after it issued an ultimatum to the Czechoslovak government and subsequently annexed the Teschen Silesia region? The fact is Czechoslovakia was a lost cause (which is why it no longer exists). Poland was a different matter. But declaring war doesn't necessariy mean that hostilities will commence.
Even before then, there were powerful voices in the Foreign Office urging the need to assert ourselves as a Great Power.
The King Emperor ruled over a quarter of the world's land mass. This did involve 'assertion'. That's why, when some Prince or Pirate started killing British subjects, the Navy turned up and fucked up those cunts with vim & vigour.
Poland was a pretext for that war, not a reason – as was demonstrated by the fact that we did nothing to help Poland when Hitler invaded.
Poland collapsed too quickly. Why? The Soviets attacked simultaneously. Poland had prevented an alliance with Stalin (because he wanted to send troops across Poland to fight the Germans) and many in Britain & France considered Stalin worse than Hitler.
It was an excuse for an essentially irrational, idealistic, nostalgic impulse, built largely on a need to assert Britain’s standing as a Great Power.
No. It was a good move. You can always make peace after a show of strength. Sadly, that's where both England & France fell down.
This goes against everything we’ve been taught to believe.
By whom? My memory of O level & A level history is that UK & France left it a little late to rearm. The question was whether they could have had an offensive doctrine. I think the answer is no. Nothing less than a permanent occupation of Germany would have prevented a revanchist war. But the French occupation of the Ruhr was viewed as financially loss-making (this may not be true, but it was widely believed that it is too expensive to use bayonets to dig coal) .
But the behaviour of the Foreign Office between March 1939 – when Britain pledged to guarantee Polish independence in the Anglo-Polish alliance –
We introduced conscription in April
and the declaration of war in September 1939 strongly backs this up.
No. The Hitler-Stalin pact was only announced at the end of August though some diplomats in the Moscow Embassy warned it might happen. Still, thieves are bound to fall out sooner or later. Once Stalin had a border with Hitler, he would be vulnerable. The question was whether France could shelter safely behind the Maginot line. The answer was no.
Lord Halifax’s Foreign Office, contrary to the myth that it was a nest of appeasement, had for some time been keen on a showdown with Germany, despite our grave military weakness.
He understood that declaring war gave Britain a bargaining chip. Where differed from Churchill was in that he was prepared to use it. In May 1940, during the fall of France, Halifax wanted to negotiate with Hitler through Mussolini who was still neutral. Churchill shot this down. He knew that if the Germans got to the Channel, they would want to probe Britain's defences one way or another.
During this period, British officialdom descended into childish frenzies over baseless frights about non-existent German invasions of several countries in Europe.
like Norway?
One such scare may have actually given Hitler the idea for threatening Czechoslovakia, until then not one of his major objectives.
Sudeten Germans were keen on it. Moreover, the Czechs had a lot of heavy industry. Also uranium.
He then began, for the first time, to consider such a policy seriously.
After Anschluss, it was the logical move.
As for Poland, Warsaw’s military government had, since 1934, had surprisingly good relations with Hitler.
Because they were as stupid as shit.
And many in Britain feared there was a real possibility Poland might make a deal with Germany,
They did. They surrendered. That was the only sort of deal Hitler was interested in.
leaving Britain with no immediate reason to go to war in Europe.
They could have gone to war over Anschluss or Prague.
At the end of March 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was reported to be ‘uneasy’ that our Ambassador in Warsaw could obtain no information as to the progress of negotiations during this time between Germany and Poland. Simon Newman, in his book March 1939: The British Guarantee To Poland, records Chamberlain telling the Cabinet on March 30, 1939, of his fears Polish negotiators were giving way to Germany. The British government, so often portrayed as anxious for a way out of war, was worried it would be cheated out of a confrontation it wanted to have.
No. Britain wanted conscription because it knew its position had worsened over the previous decade. But it needed to justify it as essentially a defensive measure under the terms of the Kellog-Briand pact. This mattered because of American public opinion not to mention the host of nutters who believe that rich bastids create wars so as to suck the blood of starving pheasants. Also Neville Chamberlain's real name is Noam Cohen- a notorious homosexual Negro married to Chairman Mao.
The British people, who had mostly supported the Munich climbdown in September 1938, and turned out in their thousands to cheer it, were now persuaded war was at least a tolerable policy.
Rearmament & conscription were tolerable. The hope was that the war would be fought in France & Belgium, with the French taking higher casualties. But
This was achieved by the dubious claim we must stand firm over Poland or lose all honour.
'Honour' just means people trust you will fight by their side rather than run away. It matters because cowards are abandoned to their fate.
The plain fact is, either you have allies or you fight alone. Britain did have allies- but they were crap and folded quickly. But its own army didn't do particularly well for the first two or three years. Still, it retained its reputation as a country which keeps its word. More importantly, it won the Battle of Britain. This meant that the Americans trusted it with 'Lend Lease'. The Soviets, too, became helpful- e.g. ordering Communists to cooperate with the War effort & divvying up Iran.
How strange, in retrospect, that the USA managed to remain aloof from all this and came out of the war stronger and richer rather than (as we did) weaker and poorer, and seldom, if ever, has it had its honour impugned for waiting till it was ready to fight.
Japan attacked. Hitler was stupid enough to declare war on the US though he was not obliged to do so under the terms of his agreement with Tojo.
Might we, too, have done better to wait?
We did wait. The Rhineland was German. Hitler was merely taking back what was his own. Austrians wanted Anschluss. The German majority in Sudentenland wanted to join Germany. Poland was a different kettle of fish- though maybe Danzig was pro-Nazi. Obviously, nothing could be done for them if they didn't let Stalin send troops across the border. Still, Britain lost nothing by declaring war alongside France. The country was politically united. It was mentally prepared for a long war. But nobody wanted a bloody war of attrition. War in the air or under the water was capital intensive but preferable to feeding the Nation's youth into a meat grinder.
Suppose, we had remained neutral, like Ireland, the German fleet would had the freedom of the seas. How long before they started arming rebels in the colonies or in strategically important areas? One way or another, Britain would have had to fight or else accept Nazi hegemony.
The Polish guarantee transformed Britain from a nervous spectator of central European diplomatic manoeuvres
it was a prime mover- albeit somewhat junior to France.
into an active participant, reluctantly but resolutely accepting the need for war.
You can declare war & then negotiate peace. What was important was that the Royal Navy cut off German access to raw materials. As in the Great War, this eventually took its toll.
MYTH 2: POLAND WAS A BASTION OF DEMOCRACY
From the outbreak of war to the surrender of Warsaw in 1939 and the disappearance soon afterwards of the entire Polish nation, we did nothing to help the Poles.
So what? The job of the British government is to help Brits, not Poles.
Cabinet minutes ahead of the declaration of war reveal a refusal to discuss the fact that British forces were quite incapable of coming to Poland’s aid if it were attacked. Why? Because, although we wanted war, we never intended to fight.
But we did intend to declare war and thus gain the ability to bottle up the German fleet and merchant marine. This proved wise. The UK won the war.
Poland mattered hardly at all to the government.
But allying with them gave us a casus belli. The Poles don't blame us for not liberating them from the Soviets. They understood that we hadn't the power to do so.
Britain had no major interests in Poland, which was not a particularly democratic or free country. Since a violent military putsch in May 1926, Poland had been an authoritarian state without true free elections.
Back then, we didn't pretend to care about such things.
In 1939, it was not the martyred hero nation, champion of freedom, justice and democracy, of propaganda myth. It was deeply anti-Semitic in practice. Far from being ‘Plucky Little Poland’, Warsaw’s military junta selfishly joined in with the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia after Munich.
Just as Stalin helped himself to a chunk of Poland. But once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, he became our cuddly Uncle Joe.
The truth is our over-confident and poorly informed government believed blockade and the economic and numerical superiority of France and Britain would teach Germany a lesson about the limits of power and force Hitler to negotiate.
We really did win. Hitler really did eat a bullet.
Yet our supposedly moral position involved knowingly giving a false promise to a country we did not much like or trust.
We said we'd go to war and we did go to war. We couldn't promise to win that war anymore than we could promise that Hitler's moustache would fall off.
MYTH 3: WE FOUGHT TO PROTECT THE JEWS
Nobody fights to protect the Jews. They really aren't greatly liked. That's why they have got nukes and a kick-ass military.
The industrial mass murder of European Jews did not begin until after the war had started.
because it was safer and more profitable to work in a concentration camp than go fight Rooskis.
It may even have been made easier by the night and fog of secrecy which war makes possible.
The sad truth is killing Jews was popular. It was becoming slave labour for Germany which the French and the Poles and so forth objected to.
For years before the war, the persecution of Jews in German territory was obvious to the world and nobody doubted that the Nazi state was directly responsible. Yet we did not go to war or even break off diplomatic relations.
We have diplomatic relations and close economic ties with lots of countries which don't recognise Israel and which rejoice when Jews are killed.
Even the complete unmasking of the Nazis’ murderous intentions towards Europe’s Jews during the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 9-10, 1938, does not feature anywhere in explanations of British, French or American changes of foreign policy towards Germany.
Kristallnacht was triggered by Germany's attempt to deport Polish Jews (which was resisted by the Polish government) . The son of a couple affected by this killed a German diplomat in Paris. That's what triggered Kristallnacht. France had the most liberal immigration laws prior to 1938. They tightened them up after Kristallnacht. The truth is deporting Jews made the Vichy government popular.
Britain and other free countries took in very few fleeing Jews, even in the much celebrated Kindertransport programme. It had, in fact, severely restricted Jewish migration to Palestine following Arab and Muslim pressure, just when they most needed such a refuge.
Canada was the most anti-Semitic of the Allied countries. Their slogan was 'none is too many'. They only took about 5000 Jews between 1933 and 1945. This was out of a total of 172,000 immigrants they received.
Nobody could have known this would end in the extermination camps
Nobody greatly cared.
. Yet, when confronted with undoubted evidence of the Holocaust, later in the war, Britain and the US took no direct action to prevent it. The official view remained throughout that the best response to this horror would be to win the war, which was what the various governments involved were already seeking to do anyway.
Had the Arabs slaughtered the Jews in 1948, nobody would have shed a tear.
MYTH 4: CHAMBERLAIN WAS NOTHING BUT AN APPEASER
Fair point. Still, compared to Churchill, he and Halifax were peaceniks.
The Left still like to think that it was their outrage at Hitler which finally drove the appeasers, including Chamberlain, into action.
No. The Left see War as having to do with Capitalism- of which Imperialism is the final stage. Once Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, they could join the war-effort wholeheartedly.
But it was Chamberlain’s Tories who rearmed the country and manoeuvred Britain into its first People’s War. Despite the Munich Agreement of 1938, when Chamberlain returned to London to rapturous crowds following a negotiated peace with Hitler, he had already begun an ambitious programme of rearmament, including the development of radar capabilities.
It had begun under Ramsay Macdonald.
By the summer of 1939, he was quietly certain of war because, heavily influenced by the other supposed pacific appeaser, Lord Halifax, he had decided to bring it about.
i.e. he wanted the naval embargo of Germany. This made sense. Cut off raw material supplies to a competitor. Do it in a manner that does not violate the Kellogg-Briand pact. Win Win.
To reassert Britain’s status as a Great Power,
to use the Royal Navy to ensure it remains the mistress of the Sea is perfectly sensible. Why let Germany import raw materials so as to build more U-boats?
there must be war, or at least a declaration. No doubt he hoped and expected that it would be either brief, or static, confined to the high seas. Crucially, the rearming was not intended for a continental land war but for imperial and national defence. But without it, we would have been sunk.
In other words, Britain did smart things. True, there was an element of 'discovery'- e.g. the French turned out to be cheese eating surrender monkeys- but, by and large, British strategy was rational.
Expenditure on the Navy increased from £56,626,000 in 1934-5 to £149,339,000 in 1939-40. The naval building programme from 1936 to 1939 included six capital ships, six aircraft carriers, 25 cruisers, 49 destroyers and 22 submarines.
Army spending rose from £39,604,000 in 1934-5 to £227,261,000 in 1939-40. RAF spending went up from £17,617,000 to £248,561,000 in the same period. All these figures are equivalent to many billions now. Labour opposed almost all this rearmament at the time, only later claiming the moral high ground.
No. By 1936, Bevin & Dalton were opposing appeasement. In 1937, under Atlee, this became the party's official position. However, they abstained from voting on higher military spending and, later on, made spoke against 'peacetime conscription'. You have to remember that there was the Quaker, Pacifist, tradition which retained influence in both the Liberal and the Labour party.
MYTH 5: WE STOOD ALONE AGAINST THE NAZI MENACE
After the fall of France- yes.
The whole edifice of modern British patriotism and pride is based upon the belief that Britain stood alone against the Nazi menace after the fall of France.
Yet that is what happened.
But it is a romantic myth. Not only did French and Belgian troops (often wholly selflessly) help British troops to escape through Dunkirk,
Belgium & France surrendered. Thus we were alone.
but Britain also had a large and loyal Empire behind it throughout the war.
The Dominions & Colonies were far away. But they were equally subjects of the British King Emperor. The White ones were happy to fight for us because they viewed themselves as descended from the same ancestors. The darker complexioned may have been mercenaries or anti-Fascists or simply liked fighting.
And the part we played after 1940 is far less than we would have liked.
As was the part played by the Germans. They would have liked to conquered the world.
Just nine months after it had begun, Britain had lost the war it declared.
Nope. Its allies had lost. Britain hadn't won, but it hadn't lost either.
It had been driven from continental Europe, penniless and stripped of most of its military hardware.
Fuck off! It had plenty of money and soon had much more military hardware. It took about 3 months to ensure the home island could defend itself even if the Battle of Britain had been lost in the air.
By the end of 1941, Britain was better equipped than it ever had been. Tank production was on par with Germany. The country was safe. Should it have made a separate peace? No. The Japs fucked themselves by attacking Pearl Harbour in December. Hitler fucked himself by declaring war on the US. By the end of 1942, German defeat at Stalingrad was inevitable. Churchill, around that time, spoke of the 'end of the beginning'. He was referring to the Second battle of El Alamein- a sideshow but important for the Empire because of the Suez canal. The real 'end of the beginning' was Stalingrad.
British troops would not be in contact with the main body of the principal enemy
they were in contact with Rommel within a couple of years.
again for four whole years – in a six-year war. Our role on land, between 1940 and 1944 in colonial or sideshow wars on the fringes of the conflict and even after D-Day, was as an increasingly junior partner to the USA and the USSR.
Nothing wrong with that. We were never the senior partner in any Continental war. In 1914/15 Britain had a quarter of a million soldiers- a little less than Italy. France had 3.5 million. Russia had 4.4 million. But Britain was mistress of the sea. That's what made it a Great Power.
The prospect of peace with Germany on humiliating terms
did not exist so long as the Royal Navy could protect Atlantic convoys.
would linger like a nasty smell until the Battle of Stalingrad and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made eventual German defeat certain. In the end we were rescued by others,
by the Navy & Merchant Marine & the coal miners 'digging for victory' & the women in the munitions factories & clever clogs like Alan Turing.
and remain rescued – perhaps more rescued than many of us would like.
We weren't rescued. The US & USSR were glad to have us as allies because, thanks to the Navy- in which Hitchens's father served- we were strong and capable of inflicting great harm to the German economy. True, fewer Germans starved than during the Great War but the fact is, by May 1943, Donitz was forced to take his U-boats out of the Atlantic. The next year, the Royal Navy played a crucial role in the Normandy landing. Hitchens shows unpardonable ignorance of the role of the Senior Service though both his parents were part of it at that crucial time.
MYTH 6: THE LOOMING SHADOW OF INVASION
The threat of German invasion was never a reality, but served as propaganda which suited both Hitler and Churchill at the time.
The Navy & Air Force really did destroy about 10 percent of Hitler's invasion barges forcing him to disperse them.
For Hitler it was a way of persuading a battered, unhappy British populace to press their leaders to give in.
Giving in would mean disarming and, sooner or later, having to host German troops. I suppose Hitchens thinks the Battle of Britain didn't really happen. The Jew, Churchill & his homosexual lover, Hitler, staged the whole thing using special effects.
For Churchill, more successfully, it was a way to raise morale, production and military effectiveness by creating an atmosphere of tension and danger.
Because nobody thought that the fact that France & Belgium & Holland & Norway were occupied by German troops represented any danger to Britain. The Germans had merely come to picnic on the beaches of Normandy. They meant us no harm. Also, when they dropped bombs on us during the Blitz, it was just their way of saying 'we want to give you hugs and kisses.'
Despite their might on land, the Germans in 1940 did not possess a single landing craft, as we understand the term. Their small navy had been devastated by the Norwegian campaign, losing ten destroyers in two battles at Narvik.
Thank you, Royal Navy.
There had never been sufficient concentrations of German troops in France for such a huge operation. Hitler’s famous directive of July 16, 1940, sounds menacing because of its use of the deeply shocking phrase ‘to occupy [England] completely’. But it is subtly cautious, plainly intended to persuade Britain to ‘come to terms’.
Very true. Hitler hadn't occupied France completely. He wasn't requiring slave labour from French people. He merely wanted the Brits to 'come to terms'- i.e. agree how many kisses and cuddles they should give and receive.
Hitler was cool towards an invasion,
Why? Because he thought the Brits would slaughter his soldiers.
and serious plans for a cross-Channel attack were sketchy.
Because of the Royal Navy & RAF.
Major forces were never assembled or trained for such an enormous and risky operation.
See above.
But appearances had to be maintained. In the post-Dunkirk months, Germany attacked coastal convoys, military industries and eventually centres of population.
This was just for show. Actually, Hitler kept begging Churchill to give him some smoochy kisses. Churchill, sadly, was a genocidal maniac. This was because he was a Jewish Lesbian from Nigeria who hated Aryan people.
British pilots, and allies of many nations, fought with extreme bravery in the air in 1940. But the belief it was an all-or-nothing struggle in which every sinew was strained is undermined by the fact that in September 1940, 30 Hurricanes, with their pilots, were ordered to Khartoum in the Sudan.
Because Italy had entered the War and the Suez Canal was under threat. Britain had about 1700 Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain. The turning point in that war came on 15 Sept. By the end of October, the Germans had been defeated though quite severe bombing raids continued till May of the next year after which Hitler's air-force was redirected to the East.
Tellingly, too, Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, heard the premier refer to ‘the great invasion scare’ in conversation with Generals Paget and Auchinleck in July 1940, and imply that it was serving a useful purpose.
There was a threat but the Army was confident that the Navy & Air-force could neutralize it. They weren't wrong.
Later actions we took, especially the bombing of German civilians from 1942 to 1945,
was thoroughly enjoyable.
are often justified by the plea that our very existence was in peril,
because one sounds a bit of a brute if you gloat over all those nasty Ger-men, Ger-women & Ger-kiddies whom our bombers were blowing to bits.
when by then it was not. Hitler’s real aim, especially after 1941, was the conquest of Ukraine and Russia.
That had always been his aim. The problem was that the Jew-nited Kingdom & the Jew-nited States didn't want Hitler to enjoy himself. They were very wicked and evil. Roosevelt, I need hardly say, was a Lesbian Rabbi of Zulu extraction. She fucking hated Aryan dudes.
MYTH 7: WE CAN THANK THE ‘SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP’
Why not? Lend-Lease helped us greatly. But Hitler gratuitously declaring war on the US was a gift from Heaven.
Hitler had well-founded suspicions that the USA, far from being a friend to this country, was hostile to and jealous of the British Empire.
Why declare war on them? Let them focus on conquering Japan.
Indeed, the Anglo-American alliance refused to solidify as long as
Hitler didn't declare war on the US.
Britain still appeared to Americans as a selfish, mean and bullying Great Power quite capable of looking after itself.
It was quite capable of buying loads of stuff on tick from the US and eventually paying it all back. Brits may be selfish but being a nation of shop-keepers they want to remain credit-worthy.
Attitudes began to change only when Britain, admitting it was running out of money, came to America’s doorstep as a penniless supplicant, offering America the chance to save the world.
Hitler did that after Tojo was foolish enough to attack Pearl Harbour. Britain was fortunate that its enemies were so much stupider than herself.
The extraordinary (and all but unknown) transfer of Britain’s gold to the USA throughout 1939 and 1940 was the lasting proof that a deliberate, harsh British humiliation had to precede any real alliance. The stripping of Britain’s life savings was an enormous event.
Nonsense! Gold doesn't matter. Credit-worthiness does. Britain repaid such of its war debts as hadn't been written off- though there were years in which the obligation was deferred.
It may be said that Keynes gave away too much to get American help but he knew wealth is really about productivity. If post-War Britain focussed on boosting productivity, it would get richer and richer. Savings don't matter unless you are retired or too sick or lazy to work.
One final point. By appearing a die-hard Imperialist, Churchill was sending the signal that Britain could repay any debt it incurred by squeezing darkies in shithole colonies. Africa has a lot of gold & India has a big population which could be forced to slave away in giant factories.
Secret convoys of warships were hurrying across the Atlantic loaded down with Britain’s gold reserves and packed with stacks of negotiable paper securities, first to Canada and then to Fort Knox in Kentucky, where much of it still remains.
Churchill should have sent our gold to Hitler. Also, he should have sucked him off.
It was not for safekeeping, but to pay for the war. Before Britain could become the USA’s pensioner, we had to prove we had nothing left to sell.
Pensioners are too old to work. Hitchens thinks the Brits of the 1940s were workshy losers. The US, in his view, has a policy of giving money to very poor countries. But to qualify for assistance, you need to show you have nothing you can sell. Hitler's mistake was not to get the Germans to stop working and then sell any assets they might have. After that, Roosevelt would send him lots of money & tanks & son on as part of its International Welfare Scheme.
The ‘Lend-Lease’ system, which provided limited American material aid to Britain,
& France, Soviet Union & China
was far from the act of selfless generosity Churchill proclaimed it to be.
OMG! Politicians tell lies! What an amazing discovery!
Even the Americans’ Bill had a gloating, anti-British tinge, given the number H.R. 1776 in reference to the year of the US Declaration of Independence.
because the Bill referred to itself as 'an Act to promote the defence of the United States'. It was patriotic, not anti-British because everybody knew the UK would get most of the assistance because it had the ships to transport it.
The Destroyers for Bases Agreement, too, was quite grudging.
Churchill played hardball because he knew the US wanted the bases because they thought the UK might pull out of the war once France fell.
It led to 50 decrepit American First World War destroyers being handed over in return for the USA obtaining bases in several British territories on the Western side of the Atlantic.
It meant that Roosevelt had violated the Neutrality act in all but name. If he won the election, he could go further, which he did in fact do. Still America didn't enter the war till Japan attacked it and Hitler declared war.
This shocking surrender of sovereignty indicates Britain was, piece by piece, handing naval and imperial supremacy to its former colony.
No. It was sucking America in. Nobody thought the UK could defeat America so as to prevent Yanks getting bases in Bermuda or Newfoundland.
It symbolises the true relationship between the USA and Britain in the post-Dunkirk months, as opposed to the sentimental fable still believed.
Did you know that Roosevelt was a politician? He wasn't Santa Claus. He made deals beneficial to his country. Churchill knew that Britain's most valuable card was its reputation to sticking to the terms of deals it made.
MYTH 8: BRITISH BOMBING OF GERMANY WAS JUSTIFIED
They bombed us. We bombed them. Then we invaded and occupied a portion of their country. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise for West Germany. As Santayana said
Instinctively the Englishman is no missionary, no conqueror. He prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather glad and relieved if only natives will remain natives and strangers strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being; he travels and conquers without a settled design, because he has the instinct of exploration. His adventures are all external; they change him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.”
MANY believe British bombing in the Second World War killed German civilians only by accident, in what would now be called ‘collateral damage’. But documents and recorded remarks reveal this was not so.
This was retaliation plain and simple. However, it must be said, the Brits did have an offensive air doctrine in the Thirties. But then the Germans had used Zeppelins to bomb UK in the Great War.
The policy of bombing German civilians, mostly working-class opponents of Hitler
many of whom were Lesbian Rabbis of Nigerian extraction
in dense, poor housing, was adopted after a confidential report showed the RAF simply could not bomb accurately by night. Bombing was not confined to such moments as the Hamburg and Dresden firestorms, but sustained and directed at almost every major German city.
What keeps us safe if the fact that we have enough nukes to obliterate a goodly percentage of the population of any country which attacks us. Why is Hitchens vapouring about old fashioned bombs?
None of the justifications for this policy stands up. It did surprisingly little damage to German war production. It was incredibly wasteful of the brave young aircrews, who had no choice in the matter, who died in appalling numbers night after night.
Mortality was very high in Bomber command. From a purely British perspective, the game was not worth the candle. The bigger picture was it provided relief to the Soviets at a time when there was the danger that it would settle for a separate peace as it had done during the Great War. That would mean a much longer war.
It did not save us from invasion.
It ensured that Germany ended up getting invaded by the Soviet steam-roller.
Systematic large-scale bombing did not really begin until March 1943, by which time Hitler was in retreat in the East and in no position to invade Britain.But it forced Hitler to transfer 60% of their aircraft and anti-aircraft artillery—to home defence- thus helping the allies.
While it did draw guns and planes from the Eastern Front, the same effect would have been achieved by attacks on military and industrial sites, which were
better guarded
highly effective when tried, and would have ended the war much more quickly.
Atom bombs could do that. But by then the Germans had surrendered. Still, it was only in May 1944 that the Allies had the technology and the bases to damage synthetic oil & other vital infrastructure. The problem was that the Germans could use slave-labour to repair and rebuild.
It also removed vital aircraft from the Battle of the Atlantic, in which the Royal Navy grappled with German U-boats and came dangerously close to defeat.
Aircraft weren't really effective in anti-submarine warfare till the B-24 Liberator was deployed in 1943. It was also used to bomb Germany. There may have been some trade-off here but the devil is in the detail.
This is not hindsight. Powerful voices were raised against it at the time, some on moral grounds, some pointing out that it was militarily unjustified. But they were over-ruled and mocked.
Because the priority was to reassure Stalin. Sacrificing 50,000 RAF personnel may have convinced the Soviets that the Allies weren't fighting Hitler to the last drop of Russian blood.
MYTH 9: HEROIC BRITAIN WON THE WAR
Britain was heroic and it was one of the victors. That isn't a myth. The Brits never said that they did it all by themselves.
Britain played a surprisingly small part in the overthrow of Hitler. It was not British troops who stormed Hitler’s bunker or planted their flag on the ruins of the Reichstag.
Nor was it American troops.
Chamberlain and Daladier, the French Prime Minister, started a war which Stalin
who had a pact with Hitler and who gobbled up a big chunk of Poland
and Roosevelt
Hitler declared war on the US. The Japs attacked Hawaii.
would later take over and finish. It destroyed the Third Reich and created a new order in Europe in which Britain and France would be second-rate powers.
No. Once they got nukes, their status as permanent members of the Security Council was secure.
It may be the only case in history of a second-hand war being taken over by other belligerents and used for their own purposes.
Hitler went to war with both the US & the USSR. He was as stupid as shit.
Certainly Britain and France did not achieve their aim in declaring war. Both sought to stay in the club of Great Powers and found themselves being asked to leave.
How come Britain & France have permanent seats on the Security Council? Why do they have a veto?
The devastating cultural revolution of the past 50 years would not have happened in a country where the victorious governing classes were confident and assured.
The US had a bigger cultural revolution. Jim Crow is gone. Obama was a two term POTUS. Its 'governing class' is as confident as fuck.
And our absorption into the EU – which is the continuation of Germany by other means
it is France which dominates
– is not the fate of a dominant victor nation.
It is Britain's own fault if it failed to raise productivity & do more with its Commonwealth.
MYTH 10: WE WERE GLORIOUS IN VICTORY
The general impression is that the end of hostilities brought a new sunlit era of optimism in a ravaged continent. Yet victory led swiftly to an appeasement of Stalin at least as bad as our appeasement of Hitler in 1938, with nations handed over bound and gagged to the Kremlin’s secret police regime.
We didn't hand over shit. The Soviets occupied territory. Sometimes- e.g. their share of Austria- they decided the game was not worth the candle.
And the following months and years brought death on a colossal scale, of which we nowadays know almost nothing.
It was none of our business.
Under the Potsdam Agreement, between 12 and 14 million ethnic Germans were driven from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. We shall never know how many died – estimates vary from 500,000 to 1.5 million. Most were women and children, defenceless civilians. In one incident, 265 Germans, including 120 women and 74 children, were killed by Czech troops. They were removed from a train, shot in the back of the neck and buried in a mass grave they had been forced to dig.
Gee, I wonder why?
These disgusting slaughters were not the result of enraged citizens taking their revenge on former oppressors, but state-sponsored and centrally controlled.
They were effective.
There are many more examples, but most of them, recorded in Professor R. M. Douglas’s harrowing and distressing book Orderly And Humane (the phrase comes from the Potsdam Agreement itself) are known, in this country at least, only to professional historians.
My guess is people who read that sort of book are drooling and stroking themselves off.
A whole page of horror in European history, from which we have much to learn,
Fuck off! Horror is Count Dracula. It isn't the boring business of killing kids.
has been erased. And, as so often in these matters, those who raise these matters can expect to be falsely accused of minimising the crimes of the Nazis, as some in Germany have sought to do. But this is a stupid lie.
Hitchens minimizes the crimes of the Nazis against me. Did you know I lost my mother at Auschwitz. Actually, it was my sister who lost her. She texted me immediately. Thankfully she found her some ten minutes later at the Gift shop. I was deeply traumatized by this.
As Prof Douglas says: ‘Whatever occurred after the war cannot possibly be equated to the atrocities perpetrated by the Germans during it, and suggestions to the contrary are deeply offensive and historically illiterate.’ But the fact that a respectable academic has to make this point illustrates how very difficult it still is, nearly 80 years later, to look objectively at the Second World War.
Why look at it objectively? Why not cheer for our side because we won? Its our own fault if we failed to boost productivity & thus fell behind Germany in material standards of living (at least for some sections of the population).
Later still, as our diminished power and influence became clear in so many ways, the ghost of our 1940 defeat
retreat, not defeat.
– and the necessary but reluctant compromises we had to make in order to survive it – still haunts our lives.
They don't haunt my life nor, I suspect, is Hitchens shitting himself incessantly because of some 80 year old ghost.
The most popular film in British cinemas of summer 2017 was Dunkirk.
It made 45 million. Beauty & the Beast made 72.
But it made no attempt to explain to a new generation why the entire British Army was standing up to its armpits in salt water, being strafed by the German air force,
Was it because the French are cheese eating surrender monkeys?
having wrecked, burned or dumped arms and equipment worth billions in today’s money.
they got better arms and equipment soon enough
Nobody wants to know. Perhaps it is time they did.
Cheese eating surrender monkeys should kindly go fuck themselves. The UK had already voted for Brexit. Soon, we'd be as rich as Singapore.
