It is not this volume’s place to give an account of the Second World War. It is best said that the reasons for the war and why it was a world war are briefly as follows:
In 1937 Japan invaded China. The victors of the First World War badly handled the European peace. German nationalism increased. In 1939 Germany invaded Poland, a State supported by the British. President Wilson’s 14-point peace plan was never accepted by the Europeans and Congress never accepted his idea to join the League of Nations. There is evidence that the German people felt the peace had let them down. The liberally inclined German Weimar Republic tried to govern Germany between 1919 and 1933 although it did put down Hitler’s coup attempt in 1923. Hitler assumed the Chancellorship in January 1933 and within three months had total control of Germany. In March 1936, ignoring international treaty law, Hitler took over the Rhineland. In 1938, Austria was annexed as part of Germany. The British and French had opposed the annexation (the Anschluss) but were powerless to stop it. Moreover, Hitler was demanding the integration of German-speaking Sudetenland, which included a large part of Czechoslovakia (Bohemia), with Germany. In Munich, September 1938, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) accepted the limited annexation so that some form of peace would be preserved. This was seen by many as appeasement. In return, Hitler promised he would make no further territorial claims in Europe. In March 1939, Germany ignored any Munich agreement and invaded Prague. In August 1939, German and Russia signed a non-aggression treaty known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact after the signatories. Neither country trusted the other and were right not to do so. The Pact simply allowed Russia and Germany to divide up Finland, the Baltic States and Poland between them. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Britain and France declared war. Russia invaded eastern Poland on 17 September. The world was at war. (This ignores the wars between Russia and Japan, Italy and Albania and so on but sets a simple timetable of events for our parochial purpose here.) A few points remain to be mentioned:
1940
Churchill becomes Prime Minister
Battle of Britain
Rationing introduced
1941
Operation Barbarossa – Germany attacks Russia
Pearl Harbor. US enters war
1942
Auschwitz exterminations start
1943
Germany surrender at Stalingrad
Allies succeed in North Africa
Battle of the Atlantic starts
1944
Anzio landings
D-Day
1945
Russians enter Berlin
Hitler suicide
Germany surrenders, 7 May
Roosevelt dies
Truman becomes US President
Labour wins British General Election
Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Japan surrenders, 14 August
War ends
The war had changed Britain visually, socially and politically. Cities were scarred with bombsites, purple buddleia sprouting incongruously from upper floors of gaping tenements. War debris, from rusting machinery to no longer needed Anderson shelters, littered every city, town and village in England at least. Until 1947 certainly, women’s fashion had barely shifted from the late 1930s and even the Princess Elizabeth had to count coupons for her wedding clothes. While horses still plodded furrows, the biggest revolutionary sight in agriculture, the tractor, was now to be seen throughout the land, but the new ideas of farming that the diligent but too often forgotten Agriculture Minister Tom Williams (1888–1967, later Baron Williams of Barnburgh) was bringing about were not yet paying dividends. Bread was rationed now, but had not been during the war. A common enough admonition to peckish mouths was muttered at kitchen and dining tables throughout the land, ‘Careful! That’s butter.’ The people knew the value of ‘bread and scrape’ just as they became used to the phrase ‘War Damage’ as repairmen and builders scrapped for permissions and resources to patch up and rebuild the austere and make-do society that came out of the 1939–45 conflict. It was a society that understood that the cost of war had left Britain on its uppers. The adage ‘To the Victors All’ did not ring true. Most significantly, immediate post-war Britain was dominated by politics and ideological ambition. There had never been, in British political history, a more significant step-change than that of the election of the Labour government of Clement Attlee (1883–1967).
Attlee was not a cloth-cap caricature of the Labour Party as many of the Conservative nomenklatura would have wished him to be seen. He was a public-school man (Haileybury) who after Oxford was a London School of Economics lecturer and convert to the socialism of William Morris and John Ruskin. His political formative years were as Mayor of the London borough of Stepney and in 1922 he was elected as MP for Limehouse. He refused to serve in the National (coalition) Government but by 1935 had become leader of the Labour Party. For the first two full years of the war, he was Lord Privy Seal under Churchill and later Deputy Prime Minister and Lord President of the Council. In 1945, he became the first Labour Prime Minister with an overall Commons majority. Under Attlee, Britain’s home and foreign policies changed out of all recognition. The pattern was set for colonial independence, Britain became a founder member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations (UN), and the country went to war in Korea. At home, the social revolution was accomplished by the 1950s – nationalization and the welfare state. Under Attlee, the government did everything that a Churchill government would not have done.
The story of the 1945 General Election has two strands: Churchill’s political miscalculation and the British people’s demand for better times. Churchill utterly misjudged the people; he totally failed to believe that the voters would abandon their hero of the Second World War. There is anecdotal evidence that many who voted Labour believed Churchill would be Prime Minister – perhaps a hangover of a generation living with National Government. However, it became manifestly clear that the British wanted change. They remembered the miserable economic times prior to the war; they had fought for freedoms and better times and Attlee offered a radical future whereas Churchill only offered Churchill and promises of a welfare state that the people did not believe he would provide if he stayed in office. Churchill was a symbol of much that was fine, but he was nothing more than that and proved so when he eventually returned to power to loud cheers but few new ideas that would continue the truly radically different way of life that Attlee had shown.
During the war, the 1942 Beveridge Report of the sometime director of the London School of Economics (LSE) William Beveridge (1879–1963) detailed the national insurance system that would fund a National Health Service (NHS), social security benefits and State-funded pensions, developed from the non-contributory and means-tested pensions of Lloyd George in 1908. Here was the prospect of a cradle-to-the-grave compassionate welfare state that swept Attlee into power. But how did the people react to Labour’s idea of mass nationalization? Was there not a little thought that this was socialism too far? Certainly crusted Conservatives felt that was the case but the general electorate had just lived through five years of State control and so nationalization did not appear such a constitutional ogre. The millions of servicemen and women were far more inclined to vote Labour. They had a sense that change was all they wanted; anything but the life that had promised little or nothing.
Labour won 393 seats, the Conservatives 210 seats and the Liberals 12 seats – only 9 per cent of the vote. Attlee’s team had the freedom of a massive majority. Everything they wished to do was possible. Ernest Bevin (1881–1951), the General Secretary and founding member of the Transport and General Workers’ Union before the war, became a distinguished Foreign Secretary and European mastermind of the founding of NATO. Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) was the far Left Health Minister who set up the National Health Service (and resigned over cuts in the Service in 1951). Ellen Wilkinson (1891–1947), the Education Minister, is another too of
ten forgotten Labour figure. She failed to get the education reforms she thought essential and the right of the young English and Welsh, including raising the school leaving age to sixteen – a most radical (and expensive) idea of the time. However, she drove through much of the school reforms imagined by the Butler Report during the war. Yet it was not enough. A sometimes erratic personality, Wilkinson died from an overdose.
The Left wing of the party did not quietly get on with the job of government. It demanded what were sometimes seen as extreme reforms and Attlee, with Ernest Bevin’s help, could barely control their demands. It was as if the revolutionaries had, at last, come out of the bush and down from the mountains, only to find their leader too wrapped in a respectable cloak of burdensome office. Whatever their disappointments, the single effort of nationalization – taking industries and services into public ownership – was in the election manifesto and would not be forgotten. The coal mines, employers of 700,000 workers, fell into public ownership; so did iron and steel, transport, including the railways (almost immediately becoming inefficient), hospitals (part of the emerging National Health Service) and even the Bank of England. Here was the establishment of new bureaucracies and bewildering inefficiencies.
The institution of State-run industry should have reassured future populations. It did not. When, later on, Thatcherism sold off much of what had been nationalized, there was not glorious hope that all would be better. The British had lost interest, and therefore faith, in many of their most important institutions. That was a legacy of the Second World War. The 1945 electorate hoped that all would be well in the changed world. They soon became disillusioned, then cynical and then indifferent. By the time of the Me Society attributed to Thatcherism, the English (not the Scots, Welsh nor the Irish) were losing their identity anyway. Much of the post-1945 disillusionment had a great deal to do with the single fact that the islands were penniless. Yet there was a sense that Britain wanted to have a social revolution without really rethinking and making an effort. This was partly because of the relative lack of destruction in England especially. True, cities and industries were bombed and thousands killed. Yet, there was always something obvious in the debris. Unlike Germany, a nation and a State having to rise from its own ashes with half its people in Stalinist Eastern Europe, the British were not so crushed that too many could simply think that all they had to do was dust themselves down and carry on as before. The socialist revolution that was State-ownership, with the exception of the NHS, helped too much. In 1945, Britain may have wanted, but in economic reality did not need, the Labour socialist order of doing things. Britain would have been better off with rampant capitalism, not overwhelming socialism. The nation, having Dug for Victory, needed to get out there and dig for the peace dividend. From having to live by its wits and resources, the British were becoming a nation fast believing that they had the medals to prove that they had fought for freedom and cradle-to-grave comfort. They had not. The NHS was a brilliant concept that rightly became the envy of much of the globe; but it became a way of thinking that suggested to too many that the State would always provide and that government should pay, whereas they forgot that government coffers came only from one source.
The further irony of the revolution was that by the start of the 1950s and the need to go to the country, Attlee’s government had theoretically done all that it set out to do. It had no new ideas that would inspire a nation grumpy with austerity and disturbed that it was once again at war (in Korea). Moreover, much of the funds government might have used for regeneration were being distributed back into the military system that was deployed as an occupying army in West Germany and, of greater test, throughout the colonies with huge bases and a constant throughput of an increasingly expensive National Service conscription.
If the NHS was the momentous step-change in British domestic life of that Attlee government, then the significant foreign policy event was the independence movement of British possessions in Africa and the Indian sub-continent. The 1940s truly felt the wind of change in British colonial history.
The Edwardians had ruled Britain’s overseas possessions and dominions for their original purpose: the economy. The idea was simple: cheap and rare goods in and British goods out. This trading principle did not always run smoothly but by the death of Victoria and the reign of her son, Edward VII, the British Empire was at its strongest and most profitable. Without the breadth of colonial trading Britain would have been financially embarrassed. Nation-states tumble from historical peaks yet the early years of the twentieth century did not obviously suggest it was right to talk of the Empire sliding away; in fact, there is evidence to suggest that the British Empire was even expanding certainly in terms of its influence in the conduct of the Great War. The 1914–18 conflict was a world war because it was a battle of empires: the British Empire, the German Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Japanese and to a lesser extent, the Italian colonies. When the war ended, the colour-coding of the globe changed.
The cultural and economic swathe from Turkey down through the Levant, Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Jordan to the Persian Gulf, was no longer the Ottoman Empire ruled by the Caliph of the Faithful. The San Remo conference of the ‘victors’ of the First World War was held in 1920 and confirmed the ruling of the newly formed League of Nations that Britain and France should have an international mandate to rule this region. France administered Syria and Lebanon. Britain administered Iraq, Palestine and what became Jordan. From 1914, Egypt had anyway been a British protectorate. The American President, Woodrow Wilson, did not want the colonial powers to expand their empires, hence the concept of mandates. The difference was lost on the British, for whom the candle of imperialism still flickered; the British were part of the global ruling class, even if they were strapped for cash.
The illusion of Empire supporting Britain was obvious to economists, but not to the industrial and political classes. Trade was reasonably good, but special rates and duties distorted the real value. Colonies were places from which the British could import goods at a profit and to which they could export at a global profit. Globalization began with the British Empire. Moreover, Britain may have been forced into sterling devaluation but, along with its white dominions, the Empire had almost overnight become yet again the most powerful trading block in the world. Exploitation of colonial markets in, say, 1631 was not much different from that in 1931. As a consequence of Britain’s devaluation, similar devaluation by the dominions and preferential trading between them all, Britain was back to where the investors of the seventeenth century had always hoped to be – almost 50 per cent of British exports were going to the colonies. This was a far cry from the cynical concept of some who believed that without their colonies and the resultant imports, the British would be living in a cold and unimportant little island group, work weary and living on herrings and potatoes. Certainly that was the reputation of the British among the Indian princes when they saw the first envoys from England in the early 1600s.
The British were quite comfortable with the idea that some were inferior and then there were the British. The vision of India, the apparent success in the Boer War, Mafeking, the crushing of the German Empire, Lawrence of Arabia, the stream of features and editorials in the Harmsworth and Beaverbrook newspapers – all of this worked on the minds of the British who, of course, could metaphorically strut through a quarter of the globe at a time when, for example, 99 per cent of the people of New Zealand were British by birth and had gone out there to work and then rule the Empire; hence the irony in the determination of the political and religious leaders from India preparing to descend on Westminster in 1931. Their message was not one anticipated in British high streets. The Indians were telling the British that it was time they left the subcontinent. The 1931 Westminster Conference became one of the most important dates in the later British Empire. It was the moment when imperialism was ended.
The conference itself came about because the imperial ways were waning. The structure was theo
retically the same. Colonies and dependencies were totally ruled by Britain as if they were shires. Colonies with home rule governed themselves but had little say about defence and foreign affairs. Some, like Canada were moving on from that; Canada was a dominion so decided her own foreign policy. In the Imperial Conference of 1926 and then in 1931 five other colonies – Australia, Newfoundland, New Zealand, the Irish Free State and South Africa – were offered the same dominion status. These were the white colonies. The kith and kin. The extended family refused to be treated like children. But the jewel of the British Empire, India, was excluded. Britain had a different relationship with India than it did with the rest of the Empire. For example, one-third of the British army was garrisoned in India. Who paid? India. That wasn’t the case in any other colony. And although the British Crown had run India since 1858, there were few commercial concessions. So militarily and economically the British never wished to devolve real power. Furthermore, Indians were not kith and kin.
Yet how could the Third British Empire, the post-war empire, be constitutionally restructured if India were excluded? For many in India, exclusion was fine. Some wanted independence and others parity with the dominions at the very least. To them, this was very possible. And collectively they pointed to a declaration made by Lloyd George’s India Secretary Edwin Montagu in August 1917. Semantically it was as debatable as Balfour’s Declaration on a Jewish Homeland:
The policy of His Majesty’s Government, with which the Government of India are in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire . . . I would add that progress in this policy can only be achieved by successive stages. The British government and the government of India, on whom the responsibility lies for the welfare and advancement of the Indian peoples, must be the judges of the time and measure of each advance, and they must be guided by the co-operation received from those upon whom new opportunities of service will thus be conferred and by the extent to which it is found that confidence can be reposed in their sense of responsibility
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