Devoir de Philosophie

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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