Advance Britannia

INTRODUCTION: IMPERIAL NIGHTMARE

‘My ideal is narrow and limited. I want to see the British Empire preserved for a few more generations in its strength and splendour.’

All through dinner on the evening of Sunday, 7 December 1941, Winston Churchill had been uncharacteristically quiet. He remained just as dis­tracted when a radio was brought into the dining room at his country residence, Chequers, for the nine o’clock news. The usually loquacious prime minister seemed ‘tired and depressed [and] immersed in his thoughts, with his head in his hands’, as one of his guests that weekend, the American special envoy Averell Harriman, put it later. As the radio bulletin went on, the prime minister did not seem to be paying much attention. The war news that night did not, admittedly, seem very interesting at first. The BBC announcer spoke of more fighting on the Eastern Front and in Libya. Nothing new. But right at the end of the bulletin – due to a bizarre editorial decision at Broadcasting House, it had been left as the very last item – the newsreader told his audience: ‘Japanese aircraft have raided Pearl Harbor.’

Harriman and one of his fellow guests, the American ambassador John Winant, ‘looked at one another incredulously’. Not everyone knew what or where Pearl Harbor was, let alone its significance as the Hawaiian base of the US Pacific Fleet. Churchill’s aide-de-camp, Tommy Thompson, sug­gested that perhaps the BBC announcer had been talking about China and had said ‘Pearl River’. But then the prime minister’s valet, Frank Sawyers, came into the room. ‘It’s quite true,’ he said. ‘We heard it ourselves outside. The Japanese have attacked the Americans.’ Churchill remained impassive, not appearing to have taken in what had just been said. Only after a long pause did he seem to stir from his long, silent self-absorption. He raised his head, announced to the group, ‘We shall declare war on Japan,’ rose to his feet and headed for the door.

Before Churchill could reach a telephone, Winant suggested that the prime minister confirm the news with the White House: it might not do to declare war on another Great Power solely on the evidence of a domestic servant, even one as reliable as Sawyers. Churchill conceded the point and a call was put through to Washington. President Roosevelt quickly came on the line. It was all ‘quite true’, he told Churchill. The American Pacific Fleet had been attacked. The United States was at war.

After the two leaders had spoken for a few minutes, Churchill’s prin­cipal private secretary, John Martin, pulled his boss aside to give him some additional news. A Japanese troop convoy in the South China Sea which had been spotted by an RAF reconnaissance aircraft the day before had begun disembarking invasion forces on the north-eastern beaches of the British colony of Malaya. Churchill had been thinking about the myste­rious convoy all evening, hence his gloomy reticence at the dining table. Now its destination and purpose were made clear. Whether to declare war on Tokyo was, it turned out, a moot point. As the president said: ‘We are all in the same boat now.’

Throughout Britain that Sunday evening, other politicians and dip­lomats reacted with the same stunned disbelief. ‘We’re all astounded over Japan,’ wrote Oliver Harvey, senior aide to foreign secretary Anthony Eden, in his diary. ‘She must have gone mad.’ Harold Nicolson, the writer and aesthete who was serving as a junior minister in the wartime government, admitted to being ‘dumbfounded’. The Japanese action seemed ‘as insane as Hitler’s attack on Russia’. ‘The Japs are in,’ wrote Hugh Dalton, Churchill’s minister of economic warfare. The surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor, not preceded by any formal declaration of war, would, he thought, ‘unite the Americans in one great warlike fury’. But the entry of Japan on to the Axis side would ‘lengthen the war by two years. We must now begin to make plans for 1946.’

Millions of ordinary Britons were also taking in the news. Edie Ruther­ford, a Sheffield housewife, wondered at the ‘impudent little yellow men’ who had attacked the United States with such effrontery. ‘Just like their sauce,’ she thought: ‘I hope USA won’t use our kid glove methods but will go for JAPAN quick and hot.’ At a hospital in Woolwich, south London, Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) orderly Henry Novy noted that few of his comrades had much sympathy for their new allies under assault by ‘the bloody little yellow monkeys’ in the Pacific. ‘It’ll do the bloody Americans good’ was the consensus among the RAMC men. Meanwhile, in Bromley, Kent, diarist George Springett recorded his neighbour’s opinion that ‘They’re all mad. Well, let USA ’ave a taste of what we’ve ’ad – see ’ow they like it! They ain’t ’ad nothing to put up with.’

The news was also percolating out to the wider British world at war. Major-General Henry Pownall was in Cairo, en route to Singapore, where he would become British commander-in-chief in the Far East, when he heard what had happened. ‘From our point of view it saves a lot of bother that the war should start in this fashion,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Our night­mare has always been that we should find ourselves at war [with Japan] with the Americans hanging back.’ Nonetheless, with his own ill-prepared command in Malaya already under attack, Pownall conceded that ‘I can’t say that I think this is a convenient time to have it out with Japan.’ Mean­
while, encamped somewhere in the vast Libyan desert hundreds of miles west of Cairo, Private Reg Crimp, serving with the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, heard the news on the radio. ‘The Japanese, gone berserk, have struck in the Pacific, joined up with the Axis, declared war on us,’ he wrote that night. ‘So the Yanks are now our comrades in arms, and the whole world’s ablaze.’

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For the American people, December 1941 was the opening month of the Second World War. But for the United Kingdom it was just the twenty-eighth month of a conflict in which over 100,000 British servicemen and civilians had already been killed and the country had already experienced multiple military disasters, the collapse and capitulation of allies, deadly aerial bombardment, maritime blockade and the prospect of invasion and occupation. Pearl Harbor was not a beginning, but merely the latest episode in a bloody drama that seemed likely to go on and on for years to come – a gloomy prospect for a people already familiar with blackouts, bombing, austerity and the immense physical and psychic fatigue of war.

Indeed, there was something existentially wearying about the thought that there was now scarcely a place left on the globe not caught up in the fighting. Edward Stebbing, an ex-soldier living in Essex, wrote in his diary after Pearl Harbor: ‘So now the whole world, with negligible exceptions, is at war, and the prospect, which had begun to look a little brighter, now seems darker. One feels that it would be pleasant to be an Eskimo or a member of some other uncivilised community which does not know war.’ Kathleen Hey, a shop assistant in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, tried to hold back a private fear ‘that this war will never be won, it will come to a stand­still from sheer exhaustion’.

Churchill had not even been a member of the British government on that distant Sunday morning back in September 1939 when the whole tragic saga had begun. It was his predecessor Neville Chamberlain who had declared war on Nazi Germany in response to Adolf Hitler’s attack on Poland. Chamberlain, with his severe corvine silhouette and starched Edwardian wing collars, is a distant, antique, unattractive figure to modern eyes. He had become premier in spring 1937, and during the first two and a half years of his administration he had tried and failed to persuade Hitler to seek territorial redress in Europe through diplomacy rather than violence – a policy of ‘appeasement’ which posterity would condemn as a mixture of naïveté, timidity and fatalism. Yet Chamberlain’s views have generally been misunderstood. He abhorred war, but he was not a pacifist. Even at the height of his appeasement campaign, he always accepted that there were certain vital national interests for which his country must and would fight if necessary – the defence of British territory and the empire’s lines of com­munication and the preservation of Britain’s ‘liberties’ and its way of life. He was, after all, just one of a very small number of democratic statesmen who ultimately declared war against Hitler as a matter of principle.

Chamberlain went to war in September 1939 in a mood of gloom. This was not because he expected Nazi Germany to defeat Britain or its ally France. On the contrary, he always believed that if it came to a straight fight, then so long as it could withstand any initial Nazi ‘knockout blow’ the Anglo–French alliance, with its massive global reserves of money, manpower and industrial potential, would surely win. His fear, rather, was that it would not be a straight fight – that a war with Germany would not remain a geographically restricted affair. His senior military advisors in the British Chiefs of Staff Committee (COS) had been warning about this ever since Hitler’s rise to power. If a war with the Third Reich extended beyond two years, then

Italy and Japan would seize the opportunity to further their own ends and in consequence the problem we [would] have to envisage is not that of a limited European war, but of a world war … without overlooking the assistance we should hope to obtain from France and possibly other allies, we cannot foresee the time when our defence forces will be strong enough to safeguard our territory, trade and vital interests against Germany, Italy, and Japan simultaneously.

If such a truly world war began in which the British Empire was faced with a grand coalition of enemies on the European mainland, across the Mediterranean Sea and throughout the Indian and Pacific oceans, then Chamberlain still believed his country would probably win in the end, especially with aid from across the Atlantic. But the struggle would prove so exhausting that even a triumphant Britain, having spent all its reserves of wealth and strength in the cause of victory, would emerge relegated to the status of a second-class power. That is why he had been so reluctant to get into another major war in the first place. ‘I must in any given situation,’ he wrote, ‘be sure in my own mind that the cost of war is not greater than the price of peace.’

Having failed to avert war in September 1939, Chamberlain still clung to the hope for months afterwards that the conflict could be limited. ‘My policy continues to be the same,’ he wrote to his sister Ida that October: ‘Hold on tight. Keep up the economic pressure, push on with munitions production and military preparations with the utmost energy, take no offensive unless Hitler begins it. I reckon that if we are allowed to carry on this policy we shall have won the war by the spring.’

Germany had built up an impressive modern mobile army and air force. But its economy was fundamentally fragile and (so Chamberlain hoped anyway) Hitler’s hold on power was precarious. If the western Allies could buy time, then the Nazi Third Reich might collapse from within – perhaps there would be a popular revolution, perhaps a court putsch. Either way, some more reasonable figure might emerge from the chaos to replace Hitler and a compromise settlement could be brokered.

It nearly worked. Hitler, too, understood that time was not on his side. Temperamentally drawn to an all-or-nothing strategy at the best of times, by spring 1940 the German dictator had decided that he must act with speed and boldness or else lose the war. He chose to mount a knockout blow in the west, thrusting his Panzergruppen, the small but well-equipped tank and motorised infantry vanguard of the German Army, through the Belgian Ardennes woodland to outflank the Franco-British armies on the frontier. By all rights, his plan should not have succeeded. His own generals expected it to fail. The much-vaunted Blitzkrieg (lightning war) of 1940 was an expression not of confidence but of desperation – of the need to try anything, no matter how reckless, to bring the war to a rapid end on Nazi terms.

Anglo-French incompetence turned what ought to have been an Allied victory into catastrophe. The German tanks broke through in the Ardennes. The Franco-British armies scattered in confusion. Britain’s ground forces on the continent, representing almost all the empire’s trained white soldiery, fell back to the Channel coast and were nearly annihilated in what was probably the one occasion in the war in which the UK faced the possibility of total military defeat at a single stroke. As it was, the Royal Navy got most of the troops back to England. France was left prostrate and alone. Its government capitulated on 22 June 1940. It exchanged bel­ligerence with Germany for the sullen collaborative demi-alliance of the ‘Vichy’ regime.

By this point, Churchill, who had served for the first eight months of the war as First Lord of the Admiralty, had replaced the now-discredited and terminally ill Chamberlain as prime minister. The emergency meant the end of the ‘National’ government which had been in power since 1931 and which had been dominated by Churchill’s own Conservative Party. It had been supplanted by a much broader coalition which included members of the opposition Labour and Liberal parties in key ministerial positions. Churchill had created an inner executive War Cabinet with, at first, five members: Churchill himself, Chamberlain, the foreign secretary Lord Halifax, the Labour Party leader Clement Attlee and his deputy, Arthur Greenwood. The new War Cabinet briefly debated (at Halifax’s insistence) and then rejected the possibility of peace talks at the height of the Dunkirk crisis. Hitler’s vague overtures to discuss terms were ignored.

In fact, notwithstanding the debacle in France, Britain’s short-term situation was less desperate than it seemed. The Germans had no simple way to subdue the United Kingdom. Hitler’s core military strength lay in his Panzergruppen. He lacked the specialised air-sea power necessary to conquer an island. The remaining months of 1940 and the first of 1941 cer­tainly did not lack for drama: a daylight campaign against RAF airbases in southern England known as the Battle of Britain; a night-time bombard­ment of London and other port and industrial cities – ‘the Blitz’ – that killed more than 40,000 civilians; and a submarine blockade of the British Isles called the Battle of the Atlantic. But only the last of these was ever truly dangerous strategically, and while the Royal Navy’s ability to protect Britain’s merchant shipping was seriously stretched for a year, the German Navy (Kriegsmarine) simply had too few submarines or ‘U-Boats’ to prop­erly exploit its window of opportunity.

Hitler’s situation in spring 1941 seemed transformed. Yet in many ways his victories the previous year had not fundamentally resolved his empire’s basic dilemma. He now controlled most of continental Europe either directly or through obedient proxies. This was territory with a total population of 290 million people and a peacetime Gross Domestic Product (GDP) exceeding that of the British Empire and the United States put together. But Europe’s pre-war economy had been organised around a steady flow of maritime inputs from overseas, and these were now inaccessible due to the Royal Navy’s control of the sea lanes. Thrown into economic dysfunction, the Nazi-occupied continent was barely capable of keeping its citizens fed, let alone producing munitions orders for its German con­querors. The acquisition of western Europe had not resolved Hitler’s basic material problem but in many ways had made it worse.

Frustrated by his inability to finish a war in the west he had only half-won, Hitler began to look to the resource-rich USSR instead. Stalin had, since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, been cautiously complicit in the German seizure of continental hegemony. Either he could be elevated to the status of full partner in the new European order, or – more likely, given Hitler’s murderous conspiracy fantasies about ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ – the Soviet regime would be the next victim of the Panzergruppen. Another all-or-nothing play beckoned in the east.