03 September 2020
‘Extraordinary’ – Richard Vinen
‘Will make you think anew not just about the war, but about the Britain and Britons that fought it’ – Daniel Todman
In the bleak first half of the Second World War, Britain stood alone against the Axis forces. Isolated and outmanoeuvred, it seemed as though she might fall at any moment. Only an extraordinary effort of courage – by ordinary men and women – held the line.
The Second World War is the defining experience of modern British history, a new Iliad for our own times. But, as Alan Allport reveals in this, the first part of a major new two-volume history, the real story was often very different from the myth that followed it.
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Lessons from Alan Allport
The main lesson from my book for today’s reader is how the British keep trying to navigate crises – whether they be political like Brexit or natural like Covid-19 – by falling back on wartime tropes about national character.
These are supposedly unique and unchanging traits of Britishness which ‘explain’ why we won the Second World War and ‘explain’ why, as a result, we will weather our contemporary problems as well. The Queen drew on exactly these tropes in her broadcast to the nation when she said ‘those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any, that the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet, good-humoured resolve, and of fellow feeling still characterize this country.’ I call this the Shire Folk myth in the book. Central to this myth are ideas of innocence, gentleness, parochial detachment from foreigners (especially continental Europeans) and an amateur genius for ‘muddling through.’ But the British were not innocent or gentle at all in the Second World War. They had conquered the largest empire in the world and maintained much of it with ruthless force. They planned and carried out a strategic bombing campaign which killed 300,000 German men, women, and children (about five times as many Britons as were killed in the Blitz). Unwillingness to cooperate with European neighbours, an insistence on our own splendid isolation, was not a virtue but a catastrophic error. British unwillingness to think seriously about the alliance with France caused defeat in spring 1940 and almost cost us the war. And it was professional competence, not amateurism, which brought victory. Every time the British succeeded during the war it was because of experts. Every time we tried to muddle through it was a disaster. Misunderstanding why Britain won the Second World War will lead to misunderstanding of today’s problems – with profound and dangerous consequences.