Great Britain
Publié le 22/02/2012
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As World War II approached, Britain was at the
center of an empire that, although it was about to
enter its twilight, covered a quarter of the globe. At
the outbreak of the war, the United Kingdom,
encompassing Great Britain and Northern Ireland
(the six northeastern Irish counties that remained
part of the United Kingdom after the creation of
the Irish Free State in 1922), had a population of
only 47,700,000, but the territory and peoples tied
to Britain were vast. These included the dominions
of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South
Africa, since 1931 having the status in international
law of independent nations that shared the same
monarch with Britain (in the World War II era,
King George VI). Also in Africa, Southern Rhodesia
functioned as a self-governing British colony.
India had been agitating for full independence
since early in the century but was, at the outbreak
of war and throughout the war, governed by a viceroy
who worked closely with a secretary of state for
India within the British cabinet. The viceroy
directly governed about two-thirds of the Indian
subcontinent, the rest being governed by Indian
princes who were, in effect, political clients of the
viceroy and of Britain. Beyond the dominions and
India were the far-flung colonies, which were variously
governed, some closely by the Crown, others
more directly by their own legislatures. Added to
these constituents of the British Empire, all of long
standing, were the recent additions of the League
of Nations mandates. These were territories
entrusted to the governance of Britain under the
Treaty of Versailles following World War I.
They had formerly been parts of the German or
Turkish Empires. In addition to British mandates,
various Pacific territories were mandated to Australia
and New Zealand, and Southwest Africa (formerly
a German colony) was mandated to South
Africa. Finally came the British protectorates, the
most important of which at the outbreak of World
War II was Egypt. Legally and nominally independent,
Egypt was, in fact, a British client state, which
meant that Britain had the right to garrison the
country. With Egypt, Britain shared a protectorate
over Sudan.
The British took comfort in their empire,
believing that it gave them control over a vast portion
of the world. In fact, it is unlikely that the
nation would have prevailed in the conflict without
its empire, whose troops and resources were invaluable
in World War II. By the same token, the vastness
of the British realm and of British interests
was also a heavy burden of responsibility in the
war. Nor did the Crown take into account the precarious
political status of much of the empire. The
king's declaration of war on September 3, 1939,
was simply assumed to bind India and the colonies.
In fact, while many Indian troops participated in
the war, the high-handed assumption that India
was bound by Britain's declaration brought the
issue of Indian independence to a head, and, in
1947, shortly after the war ended, India became
independent. As for the dominions, Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, and South Africa, King George
VI's declaration did not legally bind them, but their
participation was taken for granted. All declared
war within days after the British declaration. Ireland
remained neutral.
Like its closest ally, France, Great Britain
between the wars was suffused with a kind of
national malaise compounded of economic depression
and an urge to avoid a new war at all costs.
Unlike France, it was the British government that
took what it perceived as positive steps to avoid
such a war. This amounted to sometimes unilateral
disarmament as well as attempts to establish a parity
of arms among nations. Under Prime Minster
Stanley Baldwin, British pacifism produced a
state of collective denial, as the government closed
its eyes to German and Italian aggression, the rise
of Nazism, and the build-up of German arms and
the military. Under Baldwin's successor, Neville
Chamberlain, Great Britain began to prepare for
war by increasing its domestic arms production,
but Chamberlain simultaneously adopted an active
Appeasement Policy, hoping to satisfy Adolf
Hitler's aggressive expansionism by not contesting
his claim to the Czech Sudentenland. The
policy, of course, turned out to be disastrous, effectively
encouraging Hitler's greater and wider
aggression. However, it was not as craven as it appeared on the surface to be. Although a military
build-up had begun in Britain, Chamberlain recognized
that the nation was woefully unprepared
for war, and he hoped that appeasement would buy
time to build up a credible defense against the two
nations generally believed to offer more menace
than Germany: Italy and Japan. In the meantime,
Hitler's aggression notwithstanding, Chamberlain
regarded military action against Germany as preventive
war, and he refused to engage in it.
The opposition, whose most eloquent and committed
spokesman was Winston Churchill, saw
appeasement for the disaster that it was and urged,
first, preparedness and, later, military action. In the
end, it was the German invasion of Poland on
September 1, 1939, that brought a British declaration
of war against Germany. By that time, Germany
was fully mobilized, and both Britain and
France were in far weaker positions than they had
been at the time of the German Anschluss of Austria
and the annexation of the Sudetenland. Moreover,
as in France, widespread pacifism continued
to pervade the civilian population of Britain, and
the government was not unanimous on the necessity
of war, with a sizable faction advocating a settlement
with Hitler.
While war raged on the eastern front, the period
from September 1939 to April 1940 was static in the
west and so quiet that the British dubbed it the
Phony War. Britain had hardly roused itself from
the severe unemployment of the Great Depression,
yet enlistment rates remained low and pacifism
high. It was not until the failure of the Norwegian
Campaign that the war began to hit home. That
military disaster resulted in the removal of Chamberlain
and the elevation of Churchill as prime
minister. On the very day that Chamberlain
resigned, May 10, 1940, Belgium and the Netherlands
were invaded, and the Battle of France
commenced. This quickly brought an end to the
Phony War, and Churchill began to raise the collective
war will of the nation with speeches and broadcasts
of unparalleled eloquence and vigor. Britain
suffered one major defeat after another and was
under imminent peril of invasion, saved only by the
slim Royal Air Force (RAF) victory in the Battle
of Britain. U.S. entry into the war following the
Battle of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941,
brought new hope, as did Bernard Law Montgomery's
success against Erwin Rommel in the
North African Campaigns. Despite disastrous
defeats at the hands of the Japanese, the defeatism
of the Phony War and the anxiety that had followed
the fall of France were replaced by a wildly overoptimistic
confidence in an early victory, which soon
gave way to a grim but resolute determination to
prevail, no matter how long it took.
Britons endured serious food shortages and the
Blitz, which killed some 43,000 civilians and injured
another 139,000. Beginning in January 1942, they
also endured the presence of thousands of American
GIs. While the Anglo-American alliance was
extremely effective, it was not always smooth, and
despite a very real mutual affection between the
American and British peoples, there was also significant
friction between the American troops and the
British population. Britishers said that there were
just three things wrong with Americans: they were
"overpaid, oversexed, and over here."
Whereas France had failed miserably to mobilize
its people for war, Great Britain mobilized a
greater percentage of its citizens than any other
nation in World War II. At the peak of military service,
22 percent of the population were in the
armed forces and another 33 percent were directly
involved in civilian war work. In addition, many
thousands more worked as civil defense volunteers.
Ernest Bevin, head of the Ministry of Labor,
exercised central control over civilian manpower
resources, and citizens were required to register for
mandatory assignment in the workforce. Men over
41 were liable for such service (younger men were
liable for military service), as were women between
the ages of 18 and 60. Unemployment vanished,
and, as in the United States, women assumed a
major role in war production, working in virtually
every industry except coal mining. A Women's
Land Army (WLA) was created, ultimately 80,000
strong, to organize women for agricultural work.
Although, early in the conflict, war production
was criticized as inefficient, it soon rose to a very
impressive height. For instance, whereas British firms had turned out 3,000 military aircraft in
1938, they produced 15,000 in 1940, 24,000 in
1942, and 26,500 in 1944. Some 52 major combat
vessels were launched in 1940, 114 in 1942, and 76
in 1944. While high employment brought prosperity,
strict rationing severely limited what one could
purchase, but many people made up for personal
food shortages by planting vegetable gardens in
whatever spaces they could find.
As much as any other factor, the failure of
French morale had brought about the collapse of
that country before the German onslaught. In Great
Britain, the onset of war and the Phony War were
likewise characterized by problems of public morale,
but the ascension of Churchill and the imminence
of invasion rapidly coalesced the public will. If Hitler
had hoped to break the British war will by
bombing London and other cities, he badly misread
the British public. If anything, the Blitz served to
unite Britons all the more and strengthen their
resolve to see the war through to total victory.
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