Alan Allport On Britain's Road To WW2 | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra (Part 1)
"‘What kind of country was Britain in 1938, early 1939?’
‘That's a great question. And of course, it, the answer, I suppose, is, well, it depends which Britain you're talking about. Again, there is a sort of powerful myth, which is invoked in a lot of literature and cinema, during the war itself, and then immediately after the war, which presents Britain as the peaceable kingdom, as some historians have called it. Again, the kind of Shirefolk idea of event, very gentle, parochial, inward looking civilization, uniquely meek and mild in lots of ways and a little bit naive as a result, perhaps, but one that is unprepared for violence, that is repelled by violence, finds it mystifying, hard to understand. And again, you know, that there are elements of pre war British life, that sort of that, that have an association with that.
It's not that it's completely untrue. Certainly, you know, we look back at the 1930s today, and we look at the aggregate crime statistics, and so forth. And we do see a country which in many ways, seems very much more at peace with itself. On the other hand, however, of course, that leaves out an enormous amount. One of the reasons why the book begins with a few chapters, which you might call this sort of State of the Nation...
One of the reasons why I start the first chapter deliberately not in England, or indeed in Great Britain at all, but I start it in Northern Ireland, is because it's a part of the story, which gets almost completely overlooked. Northern Ireland was just as much a constituent part of the United Kingdom in 1939, as Yorkshire or Surrey, or or anywhere else. And yet, it's a very different story. That this is not a Shirefolk land. This is a place of sectarian division, of a great deal of violence, much of which is inspired by the state, or at least, the state turns a blind eye to it. It's a country of state mandated apartheid, in lots of ways, in which the Catholic population is very much treated as a second class, second class population with second class citizenship, it's a surveillance state, which has extraordinary powers of policing and the ability to intervene in the lives of ordinary people. It's a place in lots of ways which looks an awful lot more like Mussolini's Italy. Than, for example, of Franco’s Spain, than it does this kind of image of a very gentle liberal Britain. Now it's not the Whole Truth any more than anything else is the whole truth but it is a different way of thinking about Britishness.
Plenty of people thought, the Second World War for a kind of idea of Britishness, which most of us would probably find unrecognizable today. And it's not that that version of Britishness was any more authentic or inauthentic than the one that we have. It was just, it was different. And we need to understand, you know, historians, of course, are always banging on about the fact that, you know, we need to remember that, you know, the people of the past were not like us, even though some of the language and phraseology and images that they may have used were maybe very similar, but they, they understood these things in different ways. The British in 1939, did not fight the Second World War for exactly the same set of values that we regard as being paramount today. And we need to understand that in order to be able to understand how they got into the war in the first place, and to some extent, ultimately, just to understand how they got through it...
There appears to be only two politicians, historical politicians who exist anymore, Churchill, and Chamberlain, and they exist in this sort of permanent kind of Manichaean opposition to one another. So if a politician is compared with favorably, with someone in the past, they're compared with Churchill, if they're compared unfavorably they're compared with Chamberlain, and no, but it seems like nobody else actually exists…
There is this idea that [Chamberlain] sort of exemplified some of the worst characteristics of the Shirefolk, you know, overly gentle, overly naive, too willing to believe the, you know, the lies of others and so forth. Chamberlain is not, that is not the Chamberlain, that people saw at the time. One of his contemporaries in the Commons described him as a man of steel. And that was very much the way that both his, his friends and his enemies actually saw him. A man of extremely uncompromising values. He was a tyrant, in many ways over the Conservative Party, and over the House of Commons. Someone described his debating style in the Commons as being dropping a bunch of bricks on top of you and seeing what happens…
Chamberlain had many of the characteristics that we now regard as being those that politicians ought to have. He's a principled, I mean, he's a man, he's a man of conviction. He is a man who believes very much in his own iron will, and his own destiny. He believes, just as Winston Churchill believed that he and he alone is the man who was destined to save the British Empire…
The sort of popular view of Chamberlain is that he completely neglected all military preparations for the war, that he sort of naively assumed that everything would be for the best, and that Britain found itself completely wrongfooted when it actually found itself at war in September 1939. Well, this is an enormous caricature. Chamberlain had been, had embarked upon a very ambitious rearmament program, which had gone on for several years and was really beginning to hit its stride by 1938. Indeed, you know, one of the reasons why Chamberlain was so eager to try and still find the deal with Hitler, by 1938 was because of the cost of Britain's rearmament program and because of the fact that he was terrified about the effect that this was gonna to have on the economy and on society as a whole’...
‘David Reynolds has described the Fall of France famously as the fulcrum point of the 20th century. And I think that I agree with him. I think the thing about the Fall of France is that in some ways, it's the most over determined event in the Second World War in the, in the sense that people tend to write it off as an inevitability, they tend to assume that in some ways, it was bound to happen right from the very beginning. That it's, you know, the, the opening months of the war are just this sort of prologue that we need to get through in order for France to inevitably fall, inevitably collapse, and then get on with the, with the main events. Now, that's certainly not the way it was seen at the time. And I don't think that the evidence stacks up well, with regard to that either. France had the most powerful army in the world, in 19, certainly in 1939. France was one of the great powers of the world, France had gone through an enormous ordeal, military ordeal in the First World War and had prevailed. And in many ways, what happens in 1940, is that the Germans take an enormous risk in attacking France at a point in which they are, in many ways, much weaker in 1940 than they had been say in 1914…
France was one of the great powers of the world, France had gone through an enormous ordeal, military ordeal in the First World War and had prevailed. And, in many ways, what happens in 1940, is that the Germans take an enormous risk in attacking France at a point in which they are, in many ways, much weaker in 1940 than they had been say in 1914. For instance. Hitler is aware of the fact, that, he is very well aware of Germany's weaknesses, that it doesn't really have, the army that he would like, that Germany is facing in a number of economic difficulties. And he feels that he must strike out. He must take this all or nothing gamble, which is very much his approach to war and politics. And risk all on the throw of a dice. And as it turns out, the dice come up in his favor. The French for, although in many ways, they do have a strong position in 1940, their weaknesses, I think is greatly exaggerated.
But they make a number of operational decisions, which prove to be extremely unfortunate, given the decisions that the Germans have made, essentially, everything the Germans do just happens to turn out in the right way. And everything that the French do, just happens to turn out in the wrong way. It's not difficult, however, to see a few small relatively minor decisions that had gone the other way, that the Battle of France would have turned out very differently. And to sort of get back really to your original question about why this is so consequential. I think if you, if you think about an alternative 1940, I think that helps to explain a little bit about why it's so consequential.
Imagine that France does not fall in the late spring, early summer of 1940, which I make the case certainly in my book, and I'm not alone in this in thinking is entirely plausible, this is not a far fetched counterfactual. If France does not fall. Well, first of all, it probably means that Germany falls, not too long later. Germany's chances in a war in which it fails to defeat France in 1940are probably not very good. And you could, it's very easy to imagine the war ending in some form or another in say, late 1940, or 1941, or something like that. But the more important point, I think, is that, the the war does not end, as it does, of course, in real life, with the military domination of the United States and Soviet Union, in Europe. The war ends with the original Alliance partners, Britain and France, remaining, in many ways, the fulcrum of European power, and, for that matter, world power, much less diminished in their imperial power than they were in real life, because of the, you know, the very drawn out difficult circumstances of the war that actually happened.
I think you also see a different story elsewhere in the world as well. If France does not fall, then the future of the British and French empires remains much less clear. Because it's unlikely, for instance, that Italy, would have gotten involved in the war, which, which expanded the Second World War into the Mediterranean, into Africa. And second of all, perhaps even more importantly, it's much less likely that Japan would have taken its great gamble at creating an autarkic empire in East Asia. And therefore, you would not have seen the conquest of French Indo-China, of British Malaya, Singapore, of Burma, and so on and so forth’...
'The popular memory of 1940 is one in which French defeat is almost seen as being a good thing. It's seen as something that allows the British to return to their own native genius, to be able to fight the war on their own terms, rather than those of having to rely on a very unreliable, continental partner. And, you know, during the last few years, with the Brexit debate, this was brought up in often in not very subtle, subtle terms'...
'There is an argument... that at the time, the British always sort of knew that they were not really alone, that of course, there was this thing called the British Empire that was out there, that was, you know, one quarter of the world's land surface and was an enormous, you know, global power in its own right... that there was the role of the the emigre powers, the governments and military forces that have come from Europe and so forth. We know people knew about this, they weren't, they were not naive. And one of the reasons why the government was willing to fight on in 1940, it was because of the fact that it was well aware of the fact that it was it was not just Britain fighting against the, against Germany...
On the other hand, I think people also drew a kind of ironic consolation, from the idea of fighting on alone. After all, plenty of British historical myth draws on this idea of, you know, the gallant, particularly the English, it doesn't fit quite so well with, with a conception of Britain but, but certainly the English I think, can sink think of themselves as having been through this experience many times before. They had been there in 1588 with the Spanish Armada, they had been the against Louis XIV, they had been there, against Napoleon, of course, in 1805. And there was a, I think there was a kind of way of being able to mobilize history in 1940, and say, don't panic, we've been here before, we actually fight better when we're alone. Again, this harks back to this idea that the French Alliance had been a mistake in some ways… when it seems like the 11th hour, when all appears to be falling apart, actually, you know, this is when our own native genius really shines through…
[This] tends to leave out the United States. We tend to focus about this exclusively about the British Empire and about, you know, the Poles and the, and the Free French and so on. We don't talk very much about the Americans. And yet it was the assistance and the cooperation of the United States, which was regarded by the British government in the summer of 1940 as being the single most important factor in being able to continue the war. The Chiefs of Staff, were relatively confident that they would be able to hold out for the time being. So the Battle of France is kind of over determined, you know, everybody just assumes it was a foregone conclusion. I think, in some ways, the Battle of Britain is probably under determined, in the sense that everybody's convinced that it was a close run thing, that, you know, almost certainly could have gone wrong, that that's probably an exaggeration. I mean, it's not as though victory was absolutely guaranteed. But Britain was actually in a, in many ways, in a pretty strong situation in the summer of 1940, in terms of Germany's aerial threat and the possibility of an invasion, and the government sort of knew this, they knew that that for the for the time being, they were probably going to be okay. The bigger question, though, was what would happen in the longer term…
The Chiefs of Staff warn Churchill that unless continued American assistance, can be guaranteed that there is no long term ability to actually imagine a victory. And this is very precarious, for a couple of reasons. One is because in the summer of 1940, America's neutrality laws mean that any material assistance that continues to come from the United States has to be paid for in hard currency, so gold, or dollars, and Britain very simply is running out of gold and dollars, by the late summer, early, early autumn of 1940. And whether the United States will continue to assist Britain once it runs out of hard currency is not at all clear. It certainly doesn't have to, and whether it's willing to do so is largely is largely going to be determined on whether the Americans decide that Britain is a good bet. That continuing to assist the British ultimately is in the American interest. And there are voices in Washington that are raising real concerns about this, that you know, that you know, continuing to assist Britain is just throwing good money after bad that, you know, maybe the British are washed up anyway. And surely, at a time when of course, the the United States military forces badly need material, you know, equipment and resupply of their own, surely the focus should be on on dealing with that first and then worrying about the British later. Surely, the, the best thing for the United States to do is to focus on Western hemispheric defense’"
Alan Allport On Britain's Road To WW2 | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra (Part 2)
"‘The thing that the German invasion of the Soviet Union does is that in some ways, it makes it much more possible for Britain to actually bring the war to a victorious conclusion. On the other hand, it also means that the world will never be so morally straightforward, ever again. Neville Chamberlain had gone to war in September 1939, against the totalitarian powers of, the chief totalitarian power of Europe, which was very much in league with the Soviet Union. Now, of course, Britain is on the side of one of Europe's great totalitarian powers, one in which, you know, Stalin has had no compunction about murdering millions of his fellow citizens’...
'The question of the Australians and the New Zealanders. If Singapore falls, if Malaya falls, this will jeopardize greatly Australia's security situation. Now, Churchill had before the war, and actually in the early stages of the war, had always reassured the Australia and New Zealand governments that if the, if the situation finally arose in which Britain had to make a decision between defending, say, Egypt on the one hand, or Singapore on the other, that it would always defend Singapore, because ultimately, Egypt falling would be, would be a major defeat, but it wouldn't necessarily mean the end of the British Empire. Whereas a defeat in East Asia might potentially lead to a Japanese invasion of Australia or New Zealand. And so he reassures the Dominion governments, that this is one of the reasons why they're willing to send troops to fight the Italians in the Mediterranean, because they know that ultimately Britain will back them.
Now Churchill's changed his mind. By early 1941. He's ultimately decided, if he can't defend everywhere, he will skip defending Singapore. His argument is that, first of all, the Germans and the Italians are not in Singapore, they're in Egypt, that is where the war is actually going on. And he has to deal with the war that's actually taking place, not a speculative war against the Japanese that might happen in six months or a year, or might not. He has to impress the Americans, remember that the Americans are still, you know, are still a little cagey about, you know, Britain's long term chances. He has to impress the Americans with the idea that Britain is serious about winning the war, which means continuing to fight in the only place in which it's really possible, which is Egypt in early 1941. Which means sending the bulk of supplies which are available to the Mediterranean and not to East Asia…
Singapore is not in a position to defend itself, if the Japanese launch a full throated invasion. Churchill hopes that it won't happen, that ultimately the Japanese are bluffing. And that even if they're not bluffing, well, maybe the United States will step in anyway and ultimately defend Britain's territories in East Asia...
How are we going to win the war and survive as a great power? Neville Chamberlain's great fear, about war with Germany had never in a way been about defeat, he had always, just as Churchill, you know, had always believed that Britain would be victorious. Well, in a, in a funny kind of way, Chamberlain did, too. He always actually had confidence that ultimately, Britain would prevail in a long war against Germany. What he was frightened of wasn't defeat, but it was what would victory look like? Chamberlain had always worried that Britain would be so diminished by the cost of victory, it emerged, the British Empire would never be the same again, that ultimately, real power would move, would shift towards Moscow and Washington DC, that they would you know, the Soviet Union and America would be the real victors.'"
