STANDING ALONE – THE FORGING OF A LEGEND
Nations need myths. Their peoples have to believe in something, take pride in something, draw inspiration from something. The national myth is a unifying force allowing populations to see themselves as one people, united against a common foe. That foe need not be a military enemy (although it often is) and for the British, Jim Laker’s nine wickets in the first innings and all ten in the second against Australia at Old Trafford in the 1956 Test series brought an outpouring of national pride, as did England’s only ever victory in the football World Cup, over Germany in 1966. Britain was a superpower once, indeed the only superpower from the end of the Napoleonic Wars until the outbreak of the First World War, and there are still residues of her greatness in every continent: Indians drive on the left and there is a statue of Queen Victoria in Calcutta; English is the international language of air traffic control, and even the Americans call the language English and not American. Imperialism may no longer be fashionable, but most Britons (and a great many of their ex-subjects) look back on the days of the Empire on which the sun never set with some pride.
Were there to be a poll which asked modern Britons what they considered to be the most significant event or series of events in the last hundred and fifty years of British history, the replies might, in no particular order, include the death of Florence Nightingale, Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, votes for women, the rise of the Labour party, the conquest of Everest, the establishment of the BBC, the Jarrow March, the discovery of North Sea oil, joining the EEC, Scottish and Welsh devolution, the recovery of the Falkland Islands, the end of the Cold War, leaving the EU, the discovery of the atom and the inventions of penicillin, television, the jet engine and the World Wide Web. All these, and undoubtedly many more, would be included, but it is a reasonable supposition that top of the list by far would be Britain’s lonely and gallant stand against the Fascist aggressors during the early stages of the Second World War. Paradoxically, Britain as the architect of victory over Germany in 1918 would probably not feature in the poll at all, so much has that war been distorted in the national consciousness. Everyone thinks they know that the First War was unnecessary and ineptly conducted by incompetent generals who were nothing more than crude butchers. The Second War is a different matter altogether. There is no doubt that it was justified, no question that Britain was firmly on the side of freedom, truth and justice, and there is still considerable pride that in the dark days of 1940 and 1941 the British stuck at it when everyone else had succumbed.
That pride in not giving in, that defiance when everyone else had put their hands up, the image of the British bulldog snarling from his island, Churchill’s inspirational rhetoric, all these directly affect what Britain is today. Britain was the only country to be in at the beginning of the Second World War and to still be there at the end. All the others surrendered or came in late: we did not. That is why we have a seat on the Security Council of the United Nations while Germany and Japan with greater populations and arguably larger economies do not. That is why we were a founder member of NATO and still have considerably more command appointments within that organisation than the size of our armed forces can justify. That is why what Britain says counts in the Europe of the twenty-first century, even after Brexit and even if very few Europeans actually like us. It is not only the sharing of a language that persuades the United States to regard the United Kingdom as her major ally, rather than France or Germany. The so-called special relationship, a commonality of purpose and belief supposedly forged in fire but actually a calculated piece of realpolitik, is often questioned and sometimes shaken on both sides of the Atlantic, but still survives because somewhere in the deep recesses of American policy making is the knowledge that over eighty years ago the British stuck it out, when nobody else did.
On 3 September 1939 Britain declared war against Germany in accordance with her avowed obligations to Poland. A few hours later France too declared. Nine months later, and after only a few weeks of fighting, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France were defeated and had surrendered, and Italy had entered the war on the German side. A year later Germany attacked Russia and Britain was no longer alone. In that year of standing alone Britain had extricated her army from Europe, avoided invasion, won the Battle of Britain, withstood the Blitz, given the Italians a bloody nose in North Africa, sunk much of their navy at Taranto and driven them out of East Africa. She had raised the Home Guard, set up the Special Operations Executive and founded the Commandos. At the same time she had sunk the French fleet at Mers el Kebir as ostensibly the only way to prevent the Germans getting it, had abandoned the Channel Islands, had failed to take Dakar from the Vichy French, been kicked out of Greece and been unable to hold Crete and had been chased out of Libya and back to Egypt by Lieutenant General Rommel’s newly arrived Africa Corps. These reverses, however, have been all but expunged from the race memory: the disaster of Dunkirk, where the Royal Navy played one of its traditional roles in evacuating a beaten army – beaten by a better trained, better led, more professional army - is translated into the ‘Miracle of Dunkirk’. But what matters is that we stood alone.
Even when Russia entered the war in 1941, Britain was still indisputably the leader of the free world, and remained so until eventually the United States with its far greater resources of manpower and economic might assumed that role. That the period 1940 to 1941 would be the last time that Britain would wear that mantle was unknown at the time, but even that the political and financial consequences of the war were such that we never regained it does not matter: we stood alone. The German ambassador to the Court of St James may, with some justification, complain today that the British seem fixated on the Second World War and the Nazis; FIFA may remind British football fans attending World Cup matches in Germany that the Nazi salute is illegal there (a law that proves only that the Germans really do lack a sense of humour), and object to English spectators chanting in countries other than Germany: ‘If it wasn’t for the English you’d be Krauts’, but the reason they do it is because standing alone was the last time in our history when we were indisputably, unarguably and without any question great, at least in our own minds: the only country standing up to German aggression and dictatorship. Britons are still very proud of that, even if they may be rather hazy on the detail. The same ire and teasing is not directed at the Italians, presumably because Italy is just too ridiculous a nation for anyone to bother.
Of course it was not as simple as that. We were not quite alone: the Empire was with us, despite its armed forces with the exception of India being negligible, although Canada, Australia and New Zealand swiftly provided significant contributions. The rejection of Hitler’s peace offer on 22 July 1940 was not quite as much of a given as we would all like to think; Roosevelt’s announcement in December 1940 that America would be the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ did not mean that weapons and equipment would be provided at no cost, although even the heavy price that Britain had to pay was at least better than not getting anything at all, as the US ambassadors in both the UK and in France would have preferred. The Norwegian campaign was a disgrace, the Battle of France an unmitigated defeat, even if most of the men, if not their weapons and equipment, were brought back by the navy; the Battle of Britain was a close-run thing, perhaps closer than anyone outside the higher reaches of government and the RAF imagined at the time. No one knew how civilian morale would stand up to the Blitz; as an importer of around a third of the food her people ate, Britain was horribly vulnerable to U Boats and with a purse that was no longer inexhaustible it was problematic whether we could even afford just to keep the war running. There were a number of occasions when we could easily have lost the war, and given some of the decisions made by British politicians and commanders, perhaps we were lucky not to.
That first year of war was the last period of British independence, the last time that Britain directed her own destiny, from the outbreak of war until the entry into it of the United States. Of course military decisions, internal and external political considerations and economic factors dictated the pace of events, but not everyone cheered good old Winnie, and not everyone was impressed by the Queen’s claim that she could look the East End in the face. However, as the great Helmuth Moltke, architect of the German Great General Staff, subsequently copied by just about every other nation that mattered, said: ‘it is a duty of piety and patriotism not to destroy traditional accounts if they can be used for inspirational ends’. So let us continue to take pride in standing alone, even if it wasn’t really quite like that.
Gordon Corrigan
https://gordoncorrigan.com