BRITAIN AT BAY
The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941
By Alan Allport
“In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. … History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes.” Those were Winston Churchill’s words in one of the greatest, though least remembered, speeches of his life, his elegy for Neville Chamberlain days after Chamberlain had died in November 1940. They remain singularly apt for the years before and after Churchill spoke. That story, of how the British found themselves at war and then how they survived it, is the subject of Alan Allport’s “Britain at Bay.”
The author of several books, including a valuable study of British servicemen in 1939-45, Allport begins with a chapter called “Shire Folk.” This allusion to Tolkien becomes a riff on which he then plays throughout the book, and an unfortunate one for this reviewer, who has since boyhood suffered from acute Hobbitophobia. But the point Allport wants to make is a good one: The British saw themselves as a kindly, gentle, puzzled people, like those cute little critters in the Shire, which was not how others always saw them.
In a sharp turn, when this unusually informative and stimulating book really gets going, Allport takes two snapshots of violence. Coventry was bombed by the Luftwaffe in November 1940, but it had already been bombed by the Irish Republican Army in August 1939, when five people were killed by an explosive planted in a shopping street. The English had tried to forget or ignore Ireland since 1921, as Allport reminds us in a chapter called “Ulster Kristallnacht” (he likes provocative phrases: Another chapter is called “American Lebensraum”). A second snapshot, of Palestine during the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, shows shocking reprisals by British soldiers.
If this sheds a sharp light on English complacency and self-esteem, Allport queries other myths as well, like “the Hungry Thirties”: By the end of the decade the country “was far more prosperous than it had been a generation earlier.” One man who could take much credit for that was Neville Chamberlain, as chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 to 1937, and before that as minister of health from 1924 to 1929, when he had been responsible for much more of the system of public welfare than is usually remembered. Instead he is reviled for trying and failing to prevent war, and Allport joins in, calling Chamberlain “vain, mean … spiteful, obstinate.”
They say there’s no disputing taste and, just as I don’t share Allport’s fondness for the Shire, I don’t share his loathing for Chamberlain, who had another side, a deep love of nature: the man who, as a chancellor wrestling with a severe crisis, could write to The London Times in January 1933 to say that, walking through St. James’s Park, he noticed something he had never seen before in London, “a gray wagtail … picking small insects out of the cracks in the dam.”
Not that his affinity with the natural world did him any good when he had to deal with Hitler, who was quite beyond his comprehension. Allport correctly recognizes that the Munich Agreement was an expression of Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination, and he makes the interesting point that “skepticism about democracy in the 1930s was felt particularly strongly among those who opposed the National Government’s appeasement of Hitler.” Richard Law, an M.P. who bitterly attacked the Munich Agreement, thought that the enfranchisement of women had “brought nothing but degradation and dishonor to politics,” while Churchill, who had opposed the vote for women until 1918, had “surprisingly complicated” views about democracy.
Quite a few other received ideas are deftly skewered. Churchill was wrongheaded about the kind of forces and arms needed. “A larger land army was the one rearmament measure the British could have carried out that just possibly might have made Hitler pause for thought in the 1930s,” Allport writes, but Churchill was just as unwilling to support that as any appeaser. And this sets the scene for the Finest Hour. Churchill’s ascent to power was as remarkable as it may have been providential, since in his 40 years in Parliament he had become one of the most disliked and distrusted politicians of his age. If he became an admired national leader it was “because he happened to fill a role that very badly needed filling at that moment.”
While the 1940 triptych of Dunkirk, Battle of Britain and the Blitz became the founding epic for our damp little island ever since, there is another and important theme here. Latterly the Americans seem to have persuaded themselves that Churchill’s Finest Hour was part of their own story: See the runaway success three years ago of the films “Dunkirk” and the ludicrous “Darkest Hour,” and also what Allport calls saccharine tales of Franklin and Winston. In fact, Franklin Roosevelt had met Churchill in 1918, and disliked him. He was now told by his ambassador in London, the horrible old corrupt anti-Semite and defeatist Joe Kennedy, that Churchill was useless and England was finished.
Nor was Kennedy alone. In late June 1940 a poll found that only one American in three expected the British to win the war, and Roosevelt himself was not much more confident until later in the year. Allport has some sharp and well-chosen words about Americans who deride Chamberlain, “flattering themselves and their own fortitude in comparison.” He adds that “the United States was going to have a very fortunate Second World War,” suffering relatively modest casualties before emerging hugely richer and more powerful from a war that bankrupted England.
By the end of 1940, and after the first months of the Blitz (or “The Scouring of the Shire Folk”; oh well), more British civilians than soldiers died, as was still true in late 1942. Quick success in North Africa was followed by endless defeat, there, in Greece, and in Crete in May 1941. (A personal memory: My mother’s brother, my Uncle Bob, was one of more than 10,000 British soldiers left behind in Crete to spend four years in prison camps.)
Besides, there were two contrasting campaigns. Bombing Germany, not surprisingly, was popular with the British (“R.A.F.’s giving it to ’im worse than what we ’ad it”), but it was a disastrous failure for more than two years, epitomized by a raid in September 1941 that killed 36 Berliners while 15 aircraft with 87 crew members were lost. Even when the kindly English finally destroyed every town in Germany and killed hundreds of thousands of women and children, it made little difference to the outcome of the war. But the Battle of the Atlantic was crucial, heroic and ultimately triumphant. Churchill claimed afterward that the U-boat threat was “the only thing that ever really frightened me,” forgetting what he had said in 1939, that “the submarine has been mastered.” Allport calls Churchill “the most self-assertive, disputatious and dogmatic prime minister in history,” demonstrating that his military judgment before and during the war was often wildly wrong.
In June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia, ultimately sealing his fate, although that was far from clear at the time, and in August Churchill and Roosevelt met off the coast of Newfoundland. For over a year “Churchill had been assuring his colleagues in London that Roosevelt was itching to fight,” Allport says, but after the meeting he “had to come to terms with the possibility that the president really meant it when he said he wanted to keep America out of the war.” He still didn’t go to war in September, when American warships were fighting U-boats, which Allport calls one of three critical episodes that month.
Another was the private agreement of the Japanese leadership that war might now be necessary. And the third was the decision taken by Churchill and his colleagues to proceed with what a group of scientists had said would be feasible, making a bomb from uranium that was “equivalent … to 1,800 tons of TNT” and whose radioactive aftereffect “would make places near to where the bomb exploded dangerous to human life.” The gentle English became the first people “to commit to a nuclear weapons program,” Allport writes. He ends his valuable book a little bathetically but correctly: “The war was going to be very different from this point onwards.”
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