A New World, 1942-1947, Daniel Todman’s second volume of Britain’s War – the first was published four years ago – picks up the story after the entry of the US into the conflict following the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor. A truly worldwide conflict had thus begun, with interlocking complexities that, nearly 80 years later, continue to challenge our understanding of modern British history.
Todman brings youth, energy, industry and, above all, rare historical talent to his formidable task. But he is not, of course, the first British author to offer us a history of the conflict in more than one volume. Winston Churchill published six expansive and influential tomes in The Second World War, and only in his third volume in 1950 did the great man get us to Pearl Harbor. “So we had won after all!” Churchill enthused, retrospectively free to express feelings that, at the time, the British prime minister had kept decently veiled from American eyes. “Once again in our long island history,” Churchill now assured his readers, “we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious.” When Churchill thus appealed to history for vindication, it was in the knowledge that he intended to write that history himself.
It is a tribute to the resilience of the Churchillian myth that such rhetoric still seems all too familiar in the era of Brexit. But historians of Todman’s generation are right to move on beyond triumphalism and to speak to the times in which we live today. For Britain’s role in the world is now nothing like what it was before Hitler invaded Poland, when the British empire comprised a quarter of the global population. Thus there were really two wars: one against the Nazi threat to the whole of Europe and the other to protect the British empire, most crucially in Asia. Broadly speaking, the first of these wars proved to be a moral and military success; the other turned out to be a failure. And in each case it had needed the intervention of the new superpowers, the USSR and the US, to retrieve the British from embarrassment.
Baldly put, this is the frame for the story as Todman tells it. However magnificent Churchill appeared in his commitment to saving Europe, the futile war to preserve the British empire mattered to him fully as much. Hence the searing impact of the sudden fall of Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942, exposing Churchill’s naive illusion that because this island port and naval base was always called “a fortress”, it was one that could withstand a siege. Todman’s comment elsewhere that Churchill was a “man who liked to make big plans on small maps” captures some of his frailty in formulating grand strategy.
It was a point that General Sir Alan Brooke as chief of the Imperial General Staff often had cause to lament, not least in his diaries. If Churchill never mentioned Brooke in his six volumes, Todman certainly makes up for it in his citations. Brooke’s protege, Montgomery, is depicted in generally favourable terms, but definitely warts and all, with no blindness towards the “witless self-aggrandisement” that could so easily and so often offend the Americans. Conversely, when it comes to the D-day invasion and the ensuing campaign, Eisenhower is given his due as supreme allied commander, if only for his patience in keeping the peace between his own allied generals.
All this forms one strand in Todman’s story. But the extent to which Britain was a “warfare state”, with an economy and technology built around national strategic priorities, is also brought out well. His account cites relevant statistical evidence that helps us to appreciate the texture of people’s lives in an era when rationing constrained consumption.
Above all, we are given a realistic appreciation of the texture of people’s lives at a time when, as one official survey put it, most British workers, now no longer fearing imminent defeat, were “carrying on quietly rather than urgently”. Government claims that there was no black market in 1943 met with 90% scepticism in one opinion poll. But this was not actually a black-and-white issue; there were markets of various shades of grey, as when housewives swapped ration coupons with neighbours – technically illegal – or their husbands quietly acquired goods of uncertain provenance. “This was the era in which ‘it fell off the back of a lorry’, as a euphemism for illicit acquisition, entered the popular lexicon.” Not very Churchillian, perhaps; but this was a demonstrably well-fed prime minister for whom wartime food rationing was a problem that beset other people rather than himself.
This second strand, binding together Todman’s “total history”, helps to establish the broader social context and mentality of the wartime period. A New World conveys the experience of millions of people in Britain for whom Churchill was the toff with the big cigar who made those clever speeches on the Home Service of the BBC. It recaptures the perspective of the millions for whom “Monty” was the little man in a beret, as shown in the newsreels, standing on a tank in a faraway desert in North Africa, where our boys were – at last – giving Rommel what for. Here is the story of some of the big, world-shaking events as they were perceived by a mass audience – and electorate – at the time. Like other recent historians, Todman draws heavily on the archives of Mass Observation, an organisation improvised at the time to record popular experience.
It would be wrong to give the impression that Churchill is diminished in this story. But he is rendered as mortal rather than iconic. He was more closely bound by backward-looking assumptions than were some of his new Labour colleagues in his coalition government. The stature of Clement Attlee, who became Churchill’s trusted deputy prime minister, is fully recognised here. Likewise the role of Stafford Cripps, who briefly emerged, in the black days of 1942, as the most plausible potential challenger to Churchill’s wartime pre-eminence (though he never chose to mount this challenge). Ernest Bevin, already the country’s most important trade union leader, came to the fore in mobilising the workforce, and Churchill had no more robust supporter in necessary wartime measures. But it was also Bevin who spelled out the political consequences in 1942: “This is a people’s war: it must lead to a people’s peace.”
The road to 1945 (as the historian Paul Addison felicitously termed it) thus portended a domestic political future in which the postwar displacement of the mighty Churchill by the underestimated Attlee ought not to have been such a shock. Charismatic leadership has its place, as the British people were not wrong to recognise in the great existential crisis of 1940. But it was in the succeeding years that the full reckoning came.
One brute fact was the extent of Britain’s economic dependence on the US. Churchill’s rhetoric clouded the issue here, notably when he hailed Franklin Roosevelt’s proposal for Lend-Lease for its “unsordid” character. Roosevelt’s bright idea, originally cooked up in the winter of 1940-41, when the US was still officially neutral, was indeed a lifesaver for cash-strapped Britain, now at the centre of an empire that was not just broken but broke. After American entry into the war, Lend-Lease burgeoned as an ingenious method of securing sufficient supplies for Britain, once its own resources were exhausted. The short-term effect was to make Britain reliant on the US not just for military needs but for domestic consumption.
But the longer-term implication of this deal, in American eyes, was that some quid pro quo was due, sooner or later. The art of the deal was second nature to Roosevelt, famous for his own New Deal. So the quid pro quo for Lend-Lease, as became painfully clear by the end of the war, was that the Americans insisted on the ending of imperial preference on trade within the British empire: an empire that the US had no interest in perpetuating, having been the first to escape from it. Such were the terms demanded for entering what Churchill was to dub a “special relationship”. All told, victory did not bring quite what he had hoped for, as this book makes sufficiently clear.
Peter Clarke’s The Locomotive of War: Money, Empire, Power and Guilt is published by Bloomsbury. Britain’s War: A New World 1942-1947 is published by Allen Lane (RRP £35). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
