The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  If the first phase of Churchill’s great diplomatic victory was wooing, the second was an endless dance of titillation, teasing and delay, which led to great American frustration. Roosevelt decided early on that, despite Pearl Harbor, the main enemy was Germany and that Japan would collapse if the Nazis were defeated. But where and when to defeat them? His military commanders wanted an early landing in France. So did Stalin, hard pressed. He certainly did not want to help shore up the British Empire. Churchill and his key military strategists, led by Sir Alan Brooke, thought differently. Shaken by the effectiveness of Hitler’s soldiers, and never forgetting the slaughter of the Great War battles, they did not believe any landing in France in 1942, or perhaps even 1943, had much chance of success. Only overwhelming superiority, in troops, tanks and in the air, as at Alamein, would be worth chancing. Yet Churchill and his generals could not afford to say this openly. Had they done so, Roosevelt might have turned away and concentrated on the Pacific. Somehow the British had to lure the Americans into sending vast numbers of troops to the United Kingdom, committed to a ‘Germany first’ strategy, while not actually being prepared to invade France for a long time to come.

  In tense summits in Washington and London Churchill effectively bamboozled his new and closest ally. He persuaded the president to agree to concentrate early US landings in North Africa, the Torch operation referred to earlier. Then he bound them into a strategy of striking north through Italy. Meanwhile, he managed to allow the US garrison to keep growing inside Britain while delaying all plans for an early assault on France. The details of this brilliant dance, with Churchill apparently agreeing to US ideas while always pushing them gently off, need not concern us here. Historians and armchair generals (plus some real ones) will argue for ever whether an earlier Allied invasion could have worked, and therefore ended the war in 1943. It seems highly unlikely. It would have meant the British army playing the dominant role. This was an army which had been recently beaten by the Wehrmacht and whose commanders had private doubts about its fighting ability, even after Alamein. It was poorly equipped in tanks and landing craft. A failed invasion and defeat, as Churchill constantly pointed out, would hardly help the Russians. It may have been embarrassing and difficult, but the strategy of delaying until victory was likely was surely the right one.

  Yet it came close to lying. Churchill had constantly to spew out a cloud of oompa-oompa verbiage about the coming ‘crescendo of activity’ in Europe, which was designed to cajole but also to deceive. Some Americans realized this early on. Roosevelt seems not to have done. Later some of the British commanders who were party to the game expressed regret. General Ismay, another veteran of the trenches, said in his memoirs that ‘I think we should have come clean, much cleaner than we did and said: “We are frankly horrified because of what we have been through in our lifetime . . . We are not going to go into this until it is a cast-iron certainty.” ’153 Certainly, this long delay had consequences. It meant Americans as well as Russians wondering whether Britain any longer had the courage and self-confidence for a full-scale land war. It chipped away at the reputation of the British Empire, and it would eventually mean that victory was more Russian – particularly Russian – and American than British. When the Overlord landings in Normandy were finally being prepared, it was Eisenhower, not Brooke, who was appointed supreme commander. Part of the shape of the post-war world was revealed in these meetings – Britain deferring to the US from a position of weakness while trying to wheedle and dodge towards a better result; and the Russians regarding both Western powers as liars. On the surface, Churchill was full of praise for the valour of the British fighting forces and brimming with pugnacity and confidence. Meanwhile, he was conducting a stubborn and exhausting operation to delay the big fight. Inglorious, in a way; yet this was also Churchill at his finest, and wisest. Ripeness is all.

  Three thousand American soldiers, or GIs, arrived in Belfast in January 1942 almost immediately after the US entered the war. They were the pioneers for a vast build-up of men and materials which turned large corners of England into military camps and would alter for ever the mutual attitudes of the British and Americans. The GIs accounted for more than a million of the 1.4 million foreign troops crowding into Britain by spring 1944, joining Poles, Free French, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Dutch, Czechs and even a few Russians and Chinese. If Britain today is the ‘world’s island’, it had a brief foretaste then. Yet from the first it was the Americans who stood out. They were taller, louder, better dressed and richer. They had chocolate bars and cigarettes and plenty of money to spend in pubs and clubs. With them they brought millions of condoms as well as razor blades, nylons and other hard-to-get commodities. Their jive and swing music had already taken Britain by storm in the thirties and their Hollywood stars were as well known in Leicester, Glasgow or Portsmouth as they were back home. Their imported forces radio stations soon drew local British listeners. Their comics were passed from hand to hand until ragged and their jargon spread like a fever.

  While US camps the size of market towns sprang up, and unfamiliar, too-big-to-be-true trucks, tank transporters and cars pushed their way through the country lanes of Devon and Wales, and while vast tracts of East Anglia were given over to the United States Air Force, the Americaning was also about sex, sounds, tastes and friendship. If the US held the future leadership of the free world, the GIs just looked and sounded like the future. Not surprisingly, all this went down badly with British men, including soldiers with their baggier, dowdier uniforms and their sparse pay packets as wives and girlfriends ogled something better. ‘Over-paid, over-sexed and over here,’ went the British jibe. ‘Under-sexed, under-paid and under Eisenhower,’ the GIs replied. It is estimated that around 20,000 children were born from relationships between British women and American servicemen. More than 100,000 ‘GI brides’ would emigrate to the US from Britain after the war.

  There was one particular issue which became a public talking point and certainly provided a foretaste of post-war Britain. More than a tenth of the GIs, some 130,000 men, were black. To understand just what a shock this must have been, the total black population of Britain before the war was estimated at just 8,000. The US authorities tried to retain the ‘color bar’ or ‘Jim Crow’ regulations which at home kept black and white men from drinking or socializing together.154 In Britain, some expressed horror. The War Cabinet decided that the Americans should not expect British civil or military authorities to help segregation: ‘So far as concerned admission to canteens, public houses, theatres, cinemas and so forth, there would and must be no restriction of the facilities hitherto extended, to coloured persons.’ A public opinion poll in 1943 showed strong British hostility to segregation. Yet Britain too was a racist society. It was markedly anti-Semitic, even in the middle of the Hitler war, and the Empire was underpinned by a residual belief in the hierarchy of races. So it is hardly surprising that there were references to ‘jungle behaviour’ in the papers after reports of black GIs and white women fraternizing, or that British men too found the idea of black Americans in nightclubs threatening. If they were to be treated equally, what about Indians and Africans from the Commonwealth? Here the ‘new attitudes’ of a more liberal and leftish country taking stock in the middle of war clashed with the old attitudes of an imperial power in which the white man was top dog – old attitudes that would take a terminal battering from the Japanese in Malaya.

  The Americaning of Britain was intimate as well as political. It would last, as the pro-Soviet mania of 1942 did not. It meant that post-war Britain would be more conditioned to the American goods and attitudes which would soon begin to colonize the Western world. Many families kept in touch with Americans who returned home. Churchill became almost as much an American hero as a British one and his sentimental belief in the spiritual oneness of the two English-speaking peoples was widely accepted through the fifties and sixties. In turn, Roosevelt’s death in 1945 was treated in Britain as the demis
e of a British leader. The mourning here was widespread and intense, as it would not be for any modern U.S. president. Just as important, with key Labour leaders now bound into the alliance, Attlee and Bevin would be co-creators of the post-war world of NATO. The wartime summits, rows, games and agreements had consequences which touch our lives still. They are barely history.

  The War on Germany

  The second phase of the war showed what the British could do if they were well supplied (by America) and sufficiently bossed about by a determined government. Britain became a country organized around a single aim. It was partly an armed camp but also partly a nationalized industrial giant. Of the 32 million Britons of working age, which then meant over fourteen, 22 million had been mobilized in one way or another. As the official Ministry of Information booklet put it after the war, with no exaggeration, ‘Britain has been fanatical in stripping herself for war.’ Government controls seemed to apply to everything except poetry, sex and dreaming. Under 5 per cent of spending was on goods that were not controlled, either by rationing or by price. State-set wages and conditions spread from Ernie Bevin’s Ministry of Labour in all directions, covering farm labourers and tea-shop assistants, railwaymen and bricklayers. Country girls and older men in the cities could find themselves ordered scores or hundreds of miles away to work where they were needed. Around 100,000 men were compelled to become coal miners. From December 1943 onwards, a ballot picked out one in ten seventeen-year-olds to serve the country down the mines, rather than in the forces, causing great resentment, though in the end only 21,000 boys actually served in that manner.

  Of all the industries partly rationalized and taken under Whitehall control, aircraft production was the most famous. By the middle of 1944 more than 1.7 million people were engaged, one way or another, in building bombers and fighters: British production rose from 3,000 planes a year before the war to 26,000 by 1944, and they were much more complicated aircraft, too. Engine production rose nearly five-fold. Production of aluminium, iron ore, timber and steel jumped. Overall, an astonishing 102,000 aircraft, from Spitfires and Mosquitos to the vast Lancaster and Halifax bombers and the new Meteor jet, were built in Britain during the war. Doing this meant extraordinary changes in British industry. At the top end, rivals had to cooperate. Rolls-Royce, producers of the vital Merlin engines, teamed up with the mass car maker Ford, who built a new factory in Manchester, staffed partly by women workers, where they stripped back the painstaking Rolls-Royce production process in Derby to make the engines faster and almost a third cheaper. It was one small example of the kind of jump in efficiency Britain had failed to show before the war, and would fail to show again soon afterwards. Indeed, the overall pattern was of desperate if ingenious extempore flexibility. Chains of sub-contractors were involved, ranging from housewives in back rooms and tiny woodworking firms right up to the main factories in Southampton or Castle Bromwich. To make the Mosquito, church-pew carvers and piano makers were roped in. Lancaster bombers were assembled on a Northampton airfield from parts made in shoe factories and bus garages. Firms that once made roll-down blinds for shops or printed cardboard boxes, or built fat-fryers for fish and chip shops, found themselves building fuselages and gun turrets. This was a mobilized country: but it was a mobilized country of craftsmen and small traders, not the Soviet Union or National Socialist Germany.

  The effect on the millions working on wartime production was both exhausting and liberating. Women entering factories for the first time found friendships and pride in their achievements, as well as aching feet and boredom. Men who had been classed as unskilled before the war were hurriedly trained and found their pay packets fattening. Young trade union activists or shop stewards found the weight on them from their union officials higher up the chain suddenly lifted. Many of the latter had become government functionaries, leaving a power vacuum. Though striking had been made illegal at the start of the war, strikes continued, particularly in the coal mines and the very same engineering works producing aircraft, guns and tanks. There were more than 1,700 strikes in 1943 and nearly 2,200 the following year – small beer by pre- and post-war standards but enough to worry both Churchill and Bevin. They were the result of long hours, old-style managers irritating new workers and skilled workers trying to stay ahead of the new arrivals. Far from strikes being caused by communist agitators, the communists were in general keen to keep production thriving in order to help Moscow. To keep up industrial morale, canteens, resting places and entertainments were laid on, from radio’s Music While You Work to the travelling singers and musicians of ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association) and CEMA, a more highbrow version, which would eventually morph into the Arts Council. ENSA provided comedians and stars such as Vera Lynn and George Formby, who would tour factories and perform lunch-hour concerts, but also some rather lower-grade fare, much complained of. CEMA offered classical recitals, and even stripped-down operas.

  This was not the start of a permanent industrial shake-up of Britain. It was temporary, perhaps even more temporary than it seemed at the time. The spiders’ webs of industrial cooperation formed under war pressures would break in peace. Old rivalries reasserted themselves. The 1945 government’s nationalizations brought some rationalization too, but never came near the heart of the new industries. Above all, the great focus on winning the war was bought at the price of bankrupting Britain as an international power. Her empire would fall away and previously vital overseas assets would have to be liquidated to pay the Americans for their help. Industrially, Britain’s war was an exhausting one-off sprint by a scared creature in late middle age, not the appearance of a freshly trained athlete on the world arena. In some areas British industrial achievement was still world-class. The great Mulberry harbours, vast steel erections completed in secret on the Kent marshes and at Southampton by tens of thousands of welders and labourers, to be towed out to the Normandy beaches to provide instant D-Day ports, were perhaps the most spectacular examples. The jet aircraft, sophisticated radar systems, superb bombers, bouncing bombs and vastly more powerful engines produced during 1939–45 showed that Britain retained her ingenuity. What all this hid was a creaking industrial base and bleeding financial position, both of them revealed only too starkly when peace came.

  For those directing the war, the great questions were about how the mighty but temporary national force should be used. It does not help to increase production of the wrong things. We have seen how Churchill fought to delay the invasion of France. He spewed out other ideas all the time for new ways to get at Germany – through the Balkans, via Rome, or Norway – but until D-Day his real options were limited. This led to the most controversial and least defensible of all the big choices Britain made: the concentration on heavy bombing of German cities. In the early phases of the war, bombing by the RAF was generally ineffective and low key. British bombers were too small and too few to do a lot of damage. Unlike Germany, Britain had concentrated on defensive radar, rather than offensive radio-beam tracking, so British accuracy was worse than the Luftwaffe’s. Sending out the RAF’s bombing squadrons was more a morale-booster than serious warfare – a defiant raspberry from a country on her back, not a punch from a standing man. But as the long waiting of the besieged went on, the notion that the war could be won by bombing grew stronger. It had been firmly held by military thinkers and scientists in the thirties. The RAF, developing as an imperial police force, was overexcited by the power of light bombers – handy to flatten Iraqi villages and terrify native horsemen, but of less use against a modern power. By 1941 it had a new generation of long-range bombers, but they did not have direction-finding equipment sufficiently accurate to hit military bases or factories from a high altitude. Nor were they well enough protected to fly low. During that year, Bomber Command was suffering horrendous losses for little impact in Germany. According to one of its historians, ‘the entire front line of Bomber Command had been statistically wiped out in less than four months’.155 How, then, should they be used
– and where?

  By the spring of 1942 the aircraft factories were delivering hundreds of new, four-engined bombers to the RAF equipped with better direction-finding radio systems. There was also a new policy: destroy German cities. It came from Frederick Lindemann, the German-born scientist who was now Lord Cherwell. He was one of Churchill’s closest friends and advisers: Churchill used to muse that Cherwell’s brain was ‘a wonderful piece of mechanism’. The mechanism now turned to destruction. Based on what he said was careful analysis of the effect of raids on Hull and Birmingham, Cherwell wrote to Churchill forecasting that Britain’s output of heavy bombers could make a third of the German population homeless in that country’s fifty-eight main towns: ‘There seems little doubt that this would break the spirit of the people.’ The memo became known as the ‘de-housing paper’ since Cherwell spoke of Germans being ‘turned out of house and home’. Of course, given the effects of incendiary and high-explosive bombing, de-housing would also mean mass killing of non-combatant men, women and children. Straightforward language was avoided. Anyway, would it work? Morale had not broken in Britain.

  A feud began. Cherwell, an arrogant and opinionated man, had fallen out badly with that other favoured adviser Tizard, who had lost his job after returning from his Washington mission. The two were in many ways similar. Like Tizard, Cherwell had spent time in the Great War trying out his radical theories about aircraft with himself as test pilot, and both men were devoted to the idea that technology could win this war. Neither was soft on the ‘Boche’, though Cherwell was the more extreme – he was also a supporter of proposals to ‘pastoralize’ post-war Germany, returning it to a pre-industrial farming country. Tizard was more cautious, less arrogant, and now he hit back at the Cherwell paper, accusing him of being ‘extremely misleading’ and reaching ‘entirely wrong decisions . . . with a consequent disastrous result on the war’. He did not say destroying German towns was immoral. He did say it would not have the decisive effect Cherwell thought, and he feared that to devote Britain’s resources to carpet-bombing would leave the battle for the Atlantic dangerously close. Cherwell snorted. He could afford to snort. He had Churchill’s ear. What Tizard did not know at the time was that Cherwell had deliberately misquoted the effects on Hull and Birmingham.156 In fact the relevant document had found no signs of panic in either city, nor any great effect from bombing on their morale or health. It was a shabby piece of evidence-tweaking that would have awesome consequences.