[4.0] Decline & Fall

released 12 apr 06 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain

* Although British power was unequaled at the beginning of the 20th century, shadows were beginning to fall, in the form of new technology, new rivals, and increasing doubts. British power would be significant in two global wars, but the conflicts would also spell the end of the British Empire.

[4.1] EVENING OF THE EMPIRE

* The early years of the 20th century made the threat to the British Empire very clear. The threat was not a surprise, since it had been building for decades. German unification in the 1870s had made Germany a rising power, one that by the turn of the century was fast outpacing Britain in population, economic power, and increasingly in military might. Britannia still ruled the waves, but the Germans could field armies that dwarfed those of Britain.

At first, Britain had been friendly to the up-and-coming German state, but uncertainties set in and drove the British into the arms of France, establishing an "Entente Cordiale" in 1904 in which the two settled most of their differences on colonial questions. On inspection, it is a bit puzzling that Britain should have chosen France over Germany, since the French were historically the biggest rivals of the British, while there were many areas of agreement and cooperation with the Germans. It appears that the British were simply afraid of the way Germany seemed to be going from strength to strength.

Britain could continue to outmatch Germany at sea, though the Germans were determined to create a fleet that could at least stand up to the Royal Navy. There were also Britons who proposed that Britain implement conscription to match German power on land, but the Liberal government thought the idea wouldn't go over well with the public and rejected it. The government retained a military commitment to support the French, though in reality it was a bluff: if the Germans called that bluff, Britain had nothing much on hand to back it up.

Kitchener saw this clearly, saying later when push finally came to shove: "No one can say my colleagues in the Cabinet are not courageous. They have no Army and they have declared war against the mightiest military nation in the world." Stephe Baden-Powell did his bit to mobilize the younger generation to meet the challenges of the future by establishing the Boy Scouts, whose eventual worldwide success would tend to conceal the fact that it was defined as a semi-military organization. However, even Baden-Powell would have been hard-pressed to think it a substitute in any way for a real army.

* The Boy Scouts were one symptom of the increasing insecurity of the British over their empire. Popular thriller novels of the period, featuring resourceful British heroes wrecking the schemes of German agents and other troublemakers, were other evidence. In actual fact, the British Empire was beginning to suffer from ailments whose effects remained subtle for the moment but which would come to the surface with a vengeance in a matter of decades.

The modern point of view tends to assign the end of the British Empire as the result of the struggle of national liberation movements. It is difficult to argue that they didn't play a part, but it is much more evident that the biggest threat to the British Empire was other empires. Their opposition was hardly heroic, since these alternate empires would, as a rule, make the British Empire seem positively benevolent in comparison.

The worst example was the Congo. As mentioned, it was effectively the personal preserve of King Leopold II of Belgium, though on paper it was an independent state. The Congo was run as a huge slave plantation with a total disregard for human life and dignity, with the result that millions of locals died. One of the architects of the system was Henry Stanley, demonstrating just how different his "methods" really were from those of David Livingston. The French also controlled parts of the Congo and ran them much in the same way, and conducted themselves little better in Algeria, Indochina, and New Caledonia. The Germans made little attempt to conceal the iron fist in the management of their colonies, and uprisings against their rule were dealt with using unapologetic scorched-earth / kill-them-all tactics. An up-and-coming imperialist, Japan, was demonstrating the same approach in Korea and had its eye on other parts of mainland Asia.

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[4.2] THE FIRST WORLD WAR

* In hindsight, the various insecurities between the nations of Europe were leading to an explosion. It wasn't a question of anyone particularly hell-bent on aggression, but of mutual fears and rivalries. It was as if there were a number of heavily-armed men in a room, each of whom feared that some of the others were going to take a shot at him if they saw the chance. That made everyone jumpy, prepared for a fight, and with a strong urge to hit first if the threat became too immediate.

Under such circumstances, anything might set off a shootout. When Serbian terrorists assassinated the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on 28 June 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia; Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary in defense of Serbia; and Germany declared war on Russia and Russia's ally France in turn. The Germans performed holding actions in the East while they swept down through Belgium into France in the West.

Britain might have sat it out, but decided to jump in on the side of the French, citing treaty obligations to Belgium as justification. In reality, it was traditional British policy to keep any one power from becoming too dominant on the Continent, and since Germany was clearly becoming the biggest kid on the block, that meant helping the French. The German offensive was halted. Although the combatants were expecting things to be concluded quickly, the fighting settled down into a trench conflict, a hideous war of attrition that ground up soldiers endlessly to little gain for either side. The Maxim gun, artillery, barbed wire, mines -- and innovations such as radio communications, aircraft, airships, flame throwers, and ghastly poison gases -- did not give anyone a permanent advantage: they just increased the number of maimed and dead.

The war spilled outside the borders of Europe. Africans were put into the fight in large numbers in the struggle for the African colonies, mostly serving as porters. A fifth of these human beasts of burden died of disease, deprivation, and exhaustion. There were those who had claimed that European colonization brought the benefits of civilization to the ignorant natives of Africa. A German doctor saw all the misery and knew it was a lie: "We are no longer the agents of culture; our track is marked by death, plundering, and evacuated villages, just like the progress of our own and enemy armies in the Thirty Years' War."

* Britain's army was laughably tiny at the beginning of the conflict, and so Britain's obvious contribution to the war was the Royal Navy. Royal Navy admirals who dreamed of a grand shootout between the dreadnoughts of the two fleets were generally disappointed, the only such encounter -- the great naval battle of Jutland in 1916 -- resulting in a draw, in which the British got marginally the worst of it but encouraged the German high seas fleet to go back to port and stay there. The Royal Navy's real contribution was in more mundane and practical military actions: setting up a tight blockade that choked off imports to Germany.

The Germans retaliated, attempting to enforce a blockade against Britain using submarines, the "U-boats". This might have seemed a fair enough response, though the Royal Navy's admirals found submarine tactics distasteful, since they were based on ambushing surface ships with torpedoes or strewing mines around to catch the unwary. Kitchener had protested what he saw as the unsporting tactics of Boer commandos; no doubt he thought it even more unsporting when the cruiser he was riding on, the HAMPSHIRE, hit a mine in 1916 and went to the bottom, taking him with it. The British did adjust to such new notions of warfare, sending their own submarines into the Baltic and setting up a huge minefield across the North Sea.

However, the British weren't the only ones who found submarine warfare unsporting. A surface blockader could order a merchantman to stand to and fire a shot across its bow if it didn't, then board it and check it for contraband; if the ship was to be sunk, the crew could be ordered into the lifeboats before the vessel was scuttled. A submarine operating in defended waters, such as those around Britain, often could not afford the luxury of surfacing and politely asking a merchantman at gunpoint to stand to. The alternative was to torpedo the vessel without warning. This approach had a name: "unrestricted submarine warfare".

Unrestricted submarine warfare infuriated neutrals, and the Germans were reluctant to provoke the Americans. When the ocean liner LUSITANIA was torpedoed and sunk just off the Irish coast in May 1915, a hundred Americans drowned, and in the wake of diplomatic protests the Germans had to call off unrestricted submarine warfare, at least for the time being. There was considerable resentment in Britain that the incident did not provoke the US into coming into the war, but American President Woodrow Wilson was not eager to join into the mindless slaughter in Europe. If the US was provoked again, however, he would not be able to resist the pressures to declare war.

* Britain's army didn't stay tiny for long after the outbreak of war. Masses of men were pulled into the ranks, a full third of them from the British Dominion -- Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India. As the Indian contribution showed, not all these troops were white, with about a million Indians fighting in the conflict with a generally high level of enthusiasm. Even a rising Indian nationalist activist, a lawyer named Gandhi, believed the British cause was just and honorable.

Soldiers from the Dominion were often put to the most severe tests, and none was more severe as that endured by Australian and New Zealand (ANZAC) troops at Gallipoli, at the gates to the Dardanelles. The Ottoman Turks had thrown in their lot with the Germans in November 1914, and Winston Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty, pushed a scheme in which Britain would seize the Dardanelles, keeping open a lifeline to Russia and striking a severe blow to the Turks.

It might have worked -- but it didn't. The whole operation was not well-planned, partly because of overconfidence and partly because of the most classic blunder of military planning: a divided command. The Royal Navy and the British Army did not work together, and neither service thought things out as well as they should have. Following a naval attempt to breach the Dardanelles that went wrong, in April 1915 ANZAC troops were landed on the rugged Gallipoli Peninsula. The operation was badly done and the Turks, with German advisors, responded swiftly and energetically. The ANZACS never got off the beach, such as it was:

  Y Beach!  Y Beach!
  This ain't no beach -- it's a goddam hill!
  Why Beach?

An attempt to invade Mesopotamia -- now Iraq -- was also a fiasco, if on a much smaller scale. The British had another ace up their sleeve to play against the Turks, however: they contacted desert Arab tribes and encouraged them to revolt. One British agent engaged in this activity, T.E. Lawrence, would become famous as "Lawrence of Arabia", though many now suspect that he was a self-glorifying fraud who greatly exaggerated his influence on events. Even if that were so, the events were important, since the Arab revolt, backed by British forces, knocked the foundations out of the Ottoman empire in the Middle East.

On 9 December 1917, General Allenby entered Jerusalem with his troops. It was a significant victory in the war, and one that would have far-reaching consequences through the rest of the century and beyond. However, the conflict in the Middle East was a sideshow. In fact, it was a sideshow everywhere, including Russia where the Central Powers won victory after victory -- except along the endless trenchline that snaked through northern France and into Belgium. It was there that the war would be won or lost.

By the end of 1917, Imperial Germany was desperate enough to reinstate unrestricted submarine warfare in hopes that Britain could be brought to her knees before America threw its weight into the conflict. It was betting the farm. Woodrow Wilson reluctantly declared war and America's industrial might geared up rapidly to support the Allied cause. Although unrestricted submarine warfare presented a great threat to Britain's survival, the convoy system, familiar in Nelson's time, was re-instituted, and increasingly effective antisubmarine technologies -- hydrophones, depth charges, and patrol airships -- helped neutralize the U-boat threat.

After knocking the Russians out of the war and concluding a victor's peace on the new Bolshevik government in March 1918, the Germans made one last big push in France in the spring of 1918 in hopes of knocking out the British and French before American "doughboy" reinforcements arrived, but though the British and French were sorely pressed, the offensive ran out of steam. Germany had shot its bolt.

With the arrival of the Americans, there was little chance left of victory, the troops were becoming insubordinate and disobedient, and in November 1918 the demoralized Germans called it quits. Germans were understandably humiliated by the defeat and blamed it on traitors at home. In fact, the British Empire was simply too much for the Central Powers, both in terms of the massive amounts of resources available to Britain and in the skills, born of long experience, in dealing with exotic cultures in the Middle East and elsewhere. Adding in the weight of the American branch of the British tree was just the final blow. Had British leadership been better, it is unlikely the war would have lasted as long as it did.

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[4.3] A PAINFUL VICTORY

* The Treaty of Versailles that formally ended the First World War made much noise about high principles such as "national self-determination" and "collective security", but it was in practice just another land grab. The British and the French took all of Germany's colonies, as well as the large chunks of the Middle East torn away from the Ottoman Turks. New nations were formed up in the region with somewhat arbitrary boundaries, under the domination of the foreign powers.

Arabs who had sided with the Allied cause had been promised self-determination after the war, but well before the end of the war the British and French had betrayed that promise, signing the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 to carve up the Middle East into "mandates" under their control. Britain obtained the land of Palestine. Encouraged by Chaim Weizmann -- a Jewish chemical researcher who had developed an ingenious and extremely critical biotech process to help manufacture acetone for explosives, giving him considerable influence -- and other "Zionists" who wanted to restore the ancient home of the Jewry, the British government had issued the "Balfour declaration" in 1917, encouraging Jewish settlement of the land. The Balfour declaration would have momentous consequences.

In all, the British Empire had grown once again, but as it turned out it wasn't anything to celebrate. The Germans had been near the back of the line in the colonial land-grabs of the 19th century, and the new British colonies ended up costing more to maintain than they paid back. Even ignoring that, the price of victory had been ruinous, both in terms of the treasures spent on the conflict -- estimated at about ten billion pounds, with the interest payments on the debt taking up a major portion of postwar government revenue -- and the ghastly casualties. Postwar Britons lived in what has been described as a "generation of no young men". That was possibly an exaggeration, but the population of menfolk in their prime had certainly been decimated, with large numbers of those who had not been killed outright still blinded, crippled, disfigured, or otherwise maimed.

It didn't take much foresight to realize, to modify an ancient saying, that with one more victory like that the British Empire was finished -- which would turn out to be literally true. The Treaty of Versailles had imposed a punitive peace on Germany that, in hindsight, made another round of the fighting almost inevitable.

* That is getting ahead of the story. In the postwar years, the British did continue to at least try to glorify their Empire, staging a grand imperial exhibition in Britain in 1924 and 1925 that had heavy attendance. However, the exhibition ran at a loss, and such enthusiasm as there was for it was more contrived than real.

In fact, the people who were still trying to run the Empire were starting to weary of the show. One, Eric Arthur Blair, born into family from the colonial service, went to Burma as a policeman to find himself torn by conflicted emotions -- sympathizing with Burmese who hated British colonialists while repressing the urge to bayonet the locals when they jeered at him. As George Orwell, his pen name, he reflected on the absurdity of his situation when he was forced to shoot a rogue elephant -- doing a botched job of it, too -- simply because he was the center of attention of a crowd of Burmese who expected him to do so and he would lose face if he did not.

Orwell wasn't the only example, either. Harry Saint John Bridger Philby had been one of the British agents who inspired Arab revolt in the Middle East; after the war he tried to defy British policy in the region and ended up being told to resign. He converted to Islam, hired on with the Saudi court, and brokered a 1933 deal between the Saudis and Standard Oil that began a linkage between the desert kingdom and the US that would have long-lasting consequences. Harry Philby's disillusionment rubbed off on his son Kim Philby, who would become one of the most notorious Red spies of the Cold War.

The novelist Evelyn Waugh skewered the Empire and its cast of supporting characters in his hilarious novels. Waugh's books were overshadowed at the time by the fat figure of David Low's Colonel Blimp, a cartoon character who stood for all that was fossilized and backwards about the Empire. To be sure, there was still man-on-the-street enthusiasm for the Empire, with the movie studios in Pinewood and Hollywood churning out imperial potboilers -- but they were tinseltown glitter on a structure that was becoming increasingly broken-down.

* Oddly, the Great Depression of the 1930s proved, if not exactly a benefit, at least as not as much of a hardship for Britain as it was elsewhere. Misguided economic policies -- primarily an attempt to cling to the gold standard -- had the effect that Britain had missed out on the Roaring Twenties, things remaining difficult there while places like America boomed. In 1931, the policies were reversed, and the free flow of trade through the Empire helped keep the economy afloat. Of course, not everyone benefited; Orwell would make his name writing in his clean and brutal prose of the poverty and desperation of the British underclass in the 1930s in books such as THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER.

There was also not enough money to support the armed forces needed to prop up the Empire, and the British military withered during the postwar years. Nowdays this decline is often blamed on the Colonel Blimps in the command structure, but Britain did have its military visionaries; it was the lack of funds that made things particularly difficult. Besides, after the hideous slaughter of the Great War, who but a madman could possibly want to start something like that again? During the 1920s there was no evidence that anyone had the capability or inclination to try it, and no reason to be prepared for it. For the time being the only threats to the Empire seemed to be internal, and the British were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the use of armed force to resolve such matters.

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[4.4] REPRESSION & REVULSION

* On 24 April 1916 -- a Monday, the day after Easter Sunday -- a group of about a thousand militant Irish nationalists occupied public buildings in Dublin and proclaimed an independent Irish republic. They were led by socialist James Connolly and the poet Patrick Pearse. Three days of brutal fighting followed, the rebels proving no match for British artillery and other heavy weapons. They surrendered and the leaders were quickly executed. Connolly had been badly wounded in the fighting, but was hastily propped up in a chair to be shot before he could breathe his last on his own.

To keep the Irish nationalists in line, the British government formed up goon squads, the "Black & Tans", that took whatever measures necessary to deal with troublemakers, answering terror with terror. It was a dirty business, and the British found they had no stomach for dirty business any more. In 1920, in an attempt to calm things down, Ireland was partitioned, with the six Protestant counties in the north split off from the 26 Catholic counties in the south, and in 1921 a peace deal was signed, with authority devolving to the Irish. In 1948, the southern part would become a free state.

* The same sort of pattern would be followed in India. Although many Indians died for the British Empire during the Great War, British assurances that India was headed for "eventual self-rule" were increasingly perceived by Indian nationalists as placing an excessive emphasis on "eventual". Mohamas Ghandi had emerged as the leader of the independence movement, focusing on nonviolent resistance to British rule. Nonviolent resistance amounted to being as big a nuisance as possible without resorting to vandalism or bloodshed, and as per design the authorities didn't like it at all.

It was also difficult, no matter how hard Ghandi and his lieutenants tried, to keep hotheads from responding in kind to being roughed up, or simply flying off the handle on their own. An intensive nonviolent resistance campaign was conducted in India in the spring of 1919; it consisted mostly of peaceful demonstrations, but violence began to boil up around the edges. When an Anglican missionary named Manuella Sherwood was beaten up by a mob in Amritsar on 11 April 1919, the military took over, in the form of Brigadier General Rex Dyer.

Dyer was a classic no-nonsense shoot-first sort of military man, not noted for subtlety or good humor, his inclination to severity being greatly aggravated by the persistent pain of the large number of wounds and injuries he had acquired in the course of his career. He banned demonstrations, and when a crowd of tens of thousands defied him and participated in one in Amritsar on 13 April, he took decisive action. He went to the demonstration with two armored cars and fifty soldiers, lined them all up, and told them to start shooting. The crowd was not told to disperse and no warning was given; the demonstration was in a walled area and the people couldn't even flee. 379 were killed and about 1,500 were wounded.

At first, just like in Ireland, there was general "that's the stuff!" sort of approval for Dyer's actions. However, when those sympathetic to the victims managed to get Dyer to testify before a board of inquiry, he made his "kill them all" attitude shockingly clear. The result was a political firestorm. Even Winston Churchill, not noted for his sympathy for either Indian nationalism or that "naked fakir" Ghandi, was furious, savaging such a demonstration of "the strength of civilization without its mercy." The fatuous Colonel Blimp paraded the Dyer mindset to show it had no clothes: "We should explain to the natives in India that British troops are there only to protect from massacre, and if they don't accept that, then shoot 'em all down." Dyer had his defenders and wasn't prosecuted, but he had become an embarrassment: he was promptly removed from the service on medical grounds.

The British Empire had not been established on the basis of such squeamishness. Certainly somebody along the lines of Clive wouldn't have been much bothered by killing a few hundred unarmed civilians who had the nerve to get in his way. Still, once again, the British Empire that Clive and others like him had founded was in many ways the wrong empire, at odds with the British love and tradition of liberty, and now many Britons were beginning to really see it was the wrong empire. The shadow falling on the British Empire resided, above all, in the minds and hearts of the British.

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[4.5] ANOTHER GLOBAL WAR

* There was at least one person who still admired the British Empire, even as he was becoming its greatest threat. The up-and-coming German dictator Adolf Hitler respected strength, at least strength of the sort displayed by grinding a boot in the face of the helpless, and found the British Empire inspiring. He believed that Germany should carve out its own Empire in the East, with the superior German race exterminating or subjugating the subhuman Slavic peoples who inconveniently happened to live there. Hitler liked his imperialism straight, no chaser, saying that: "If we took India, the Indians would certainly not be enthusiastic and they'd not be slow to regret the good old days of English rule."

Britain and France were slow to react to the threat posed by Hitler and his Nazi Party. Nobody raised a finger when he rearmed Germany, then militarized the Rhineland in 1936, both in blatant violation of the Versailles Treaty. In early 1938, Germany occupied Austria, again without resistance from the British and French, and Hitler immediately began to call for the absorption of the Sudetenland, the German-speaking portion of Czechoslovakia, into his Greater Germany. The Sudetenland contained Czechoslovakia's critical border defenses and its loss would leave the country helpless, but Hitler assured everyone that this was "the last territorial demand I have to make upon Europe."

British Prime Minster Neville Chamberlain, Joe's son, believed Hitler. Only a madman would want to start another Great War, after all. Chamberlain went to Munich to sign a treaty ceding the Sudetenland to Germany. After taking ownership, Hitler immediately occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. Now he began to agitate against the Poles, but the British and French were no longer so agreeable, having finally understood that Hitler really was a madman, and were now scrambling to rearm. There was little they could do, however, but declare war when Hitler conquered Poland in the fall of 1939, and they did not do much more than sit by idly until Hitler overran most of Western Europe, including France, in the spring of 1940.

Neville Chamberlain resigned, to be replaced by Winston Churchill, who was determined to fight, even though the British Empire stood alone for the time being. Hitler did not understand such defiance; he thought he could make a deal with the British, and some of the British elite felt the same way. Churchill would have none of it. He loathed everything Hitler stood for, and more to the point Hitler really had no bargaining position. The only deal he had to offer was to suggest that Britain sit by idly while he carved out his New German Empire, with the British paid off only with the promise that he wouldn't turn on their empire next. This was a deal? How stupid did he think Churchill was?

Churchill would have had to be all the more stupid so because Hitler's promises were obviously worthless. He was a proven liar, he had made a fool of Neville Chamberlain for all history to come; with that example, Churchill would have been an even bigger fool to have believed a word Hitler said. Churchill had read Hitler's ranting biographical tract MEIN KAMPF, to be disgusted by Hitler's unbalanced hatred of the despicable Jews, while understanding him perfectly. Hitler had no ethics. They were for the weak and foolish; dishonesty, cruelty, and callousness were strength, outright virtues. That was not only why his promises were worthless, it was why he was loathesome. The British Empire was a mixed sort of thing, but even at its worst it was hard-pressed to go low enough to match the vision of the likes of a Hitler: the world as seen through the eyes of an insect.

By the summer of 1940, German bombers were hammering Britain in daylight raids while the British Royal Air Force (RAF) fought back fiercely. Orwell was compelled to compose an essay, "England Your England", that began: "As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me."

Orwell was a man of the Left, an anti-imperialist to the core, and in "England Your England" he did not spare his criticisms of the British Empire. Still, he understood that there was a divide, a big one, between the British Empire and those empires that sought to replace it. Orwell had fought in the 1936:1939 Spanish Civil War, in which the Nazi-backed Spanish Nationalists had fought against the Soviet-backed Republicans, with Orwell serving as a Republican volunteer. The Republicans lost, not only because of the ruthlessness of the Nationalists, but because Soviet dictator Josef Stalin seemed more concerned with ideological correctness than winning the fight, and the Republicans spent a good portion of their effort in savage purges of their own ranks.

Orwell saw both the Nazis and the Soviets for the thugs they were. He summed it up in his description of the goose-step so liked by tyrants, calling it "one of the most horrifying sights in the world" and elaborating:

BEGIN QUOTE:

It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is "Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me", like the bully who makes faces at his victim.

END QUOTE

He then went on to ask: "Why is the goose-step not used in England?" -- and answered: "It is not used because the people on the street would laugh." He went on to list the failings, both real and imagined, of his land, but even at their most damning the British Empire was not as low as the wretched slave empires of Hitler and Stalin. In the end, Orwell said of his people that come what may: "The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with suet puddings and misty skies ... England will still be England."

On 4 June 1940, Churchill called up all the considerable skills of oratory at his command to spit in Hitler's face, saying that "we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender ... " -- and added, even more memorably, on 18 June: "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'this was their finest hour'."

It certainly was.

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[4.6] BRITAIN STANDS FAST

* During the summer of 1940, the British Royal Air Force (RAF) fought with the bombers and fighters of Hitler's Luftwaffe in the skies over Britain. The RAF was hard-pressed, with the Luftwaffe targeting their airfields until a Luftwaffe attack went astray and bombed London on the night of 24 August. Churchill ordered RAF bombers to attack Berlin in reprisal and Hitler, enraged, refocused bombing raids on British cities. This shifted the pain from the RAF to British citizens, but it was a good if rough bargain: the RAF got the upper hand in the "Battle of Britain", and by mid-September the Luftwaffe had been forced to call it quits for daylight attacks, switching to inaccurate night bombing raids. The night "Blitz", as the campaign was called, was destructive but not a threat to Britain's survival. Hitler, unable to obtain air superiority and unable to directly challenge British supremacy at sea, called off his invasion plans.

Britain was still threatened by slow strangulation from German U-boats, though the battle between the submarines and the submarine hunters kept tipping back and forth, with one side gaining the advantage for a time and then losing it again, over and over. US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sympathetic to Britain but Roosevelt, an instinctive politician, straddled the fence, trying to reassure the American public that the US wouldn't get involved in the war, while taking such actions as he felt he could get away with to improve American military preparedness and back the British.

After the outbreak of fighting, Roosevelt established what he ingeniously referred to as "neutrality patrols", in which US Navy escorts protected shipping to the mid-Atlantic, helping reduce the burden on the Royal Navy. American warships would find themselves sometimes engaged in shootouts with Hitler's U-boats in an undeclared war, with sailors killed in combat and the whole thing kept very quiet from the public. A peacetime draft was implemented in 1940 and American defense spending ramped up rapidly. In March 1941, Roosevelt pushed through the "Lend-Lease" act, which provided weapons to Britain on the condition that they be returned at the end of the war. The condition was a pure fiction: warfare devours equipment at an insane rate, and anybody with sense saw the Lend-Lease name for what it was, a cover for a straightforward military assistance program.

Churchill, knowing full well that he needed American help to defeat Hitler, did what he could to encourage it. In the late summer of 1940 he had sent a mission to the US to share British secret technology, particularly radar, a far-sighted exercise that would pay off handsomely over the long run. However, for the moment the US was not ready to actively join the fight, though American public opinion was being strongly swayed by dramatic radio news reports from London under attack by Luftwaffe bombers.

* By the spring of 1941, the Luftwaffe attacks on Britain had generally ceased. British intelligence, backed by a remarkable code-breaking organization, knew why: Hitler was preparing to invade the Soviet Union. The British tried to warn Stalin, but since Britain had an interest in turning the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany -- the two tyrannies were joined in a cynical friendship of convenience for the moment -- Stalin unsurprisingly didn't believe them. More surprisingly, he refused to listen to his own agents.

The invasion of the USSR began on 22 June 1941 and achieved total surprise. The Germans swept forward with victory after victory. Now Britain had an ally against Hitler, though Churchill knew perfectly well that Stalin was not someone he would have wanted for a friend under other circumstances. However, defeating the Nazis took priority; when Churchill was reminded of the bad things he had said about Stalin, he replied: "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."

The Soviets would always be surly, demanding, suspicious allies, and more to the point at the outset Stalin's regime seemed unlikely to survive. At the very least the war in the East helped drain Hitler's energies, however, and the British did what they could to help, though they didn't have much to spare at the time. Still, when the government of Iran seemed to be playing much too cozy with Nazi agents, the British and Soviets collaborated to occupy the country in late August 1941. The southern lifeline to the USSR was secured; if realities demanded ruthlessness, Churchill would be ruthless.

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[4.7] AMERICA JOINS THE WAR

* On 7 December 1941, Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. America declared war on Japan; conveniently, on 11 December Hitler declared war on America. US Ambassador to Britain John G. Winant was with Churchill at dinner when the radio announced the news of the Pearl Harbor attack, and Churchill went from a state of gloom to one of exhuberance: "We shall declare war on Japan." Winant was shocked: "Good God! You can't declare war on radio announcement!" They called Roosevelt, and Churchill greeted him with: "We are all in the same boat now."

The war in the Pacific went shockingly badly at first. The Japanese, generally dismissed as a second-rate power, swept across the Pacific and through Southeast Asia for six months, crushing all Allied resistance in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Burma, and the Dutch East Indies. To be sure, at the time Japan wasn't even as strong in comparative economic terms as the country is now, but the Japanese had acquired a modern, well-equipped, superbly trained navy, and though the Japanese army's equipment was not the best, from the top to the bottom almost every Japanese soldier was aggressive to the point of suicidal. By mid-1942, Japan was pounding at the door to India from Burma and threatening Australia from New Guinea.

That was as far as they went. For all the fighting spirit, economically Japan really was a second-rate power, having achieved military might only with the greatest exertions, and the string of lightning victories against unprepared adversaries had stretched Japanese resources to the limit. Their overextended empire would be dangerously fragile when the Americans and their allies regrouped and counterattacked.

* For the moment, however, the Japanese were sitting on top of the world. They had humiliated the white imperialists, even capturing 130,000 British imperial troops at Singapore when the city surrendered on 15 February 1942. The whites were, with gloating irony, reduced to slaves, put to work on constructing a railroad in the wilds of Burma. It became the "railroad of death". The story was famously told as a clash of cultures in Pierre Boulle's novel THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI and the Alec Guiness film made from it, but barely conveyed the brutality of the exercise: about a quarter of the prisoners died.

In some places, particularly Burma, the Japanese were welcomed as liberators. The welcome was generally short-lived. The Japanese turned out to be just another gang of imperialists, much more heavy-handed and brutal than the British ever thought of being. The Japanese tried to instigate uprisings in India and failed. They did manage to raise an army of Indian troops in Burma, inspired if not led by the son of Jakaninth Bose, Subhas Chandra Bose, who had liking for Axis militarism and adopted fascist trappings and attitudes.

Although even today Subhas Chandra Bose remains admired in India for his resistance to the British, he was never really a serious challenge to British rule there. In fact, the war showed just how solid British control over India was, at least for the moment. When the Indian National Congress became uncooperative with the war, they were simply locked up. More to the point, Indians understood that British rule over India was fading away, while the Japanese had proven through their savagery in China that Indians would be foolish to expect anything resembling a deal from them.

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[4.8] DEFEATING THE AXIS

* By the end of 1942, the Axis was on the retreat everywhere. The British, backed by a rising flood of American weapons and supplies, defeated the Germans at El Alamein in North Africa, and in a vastly greater battle the Soviet Union encircled a full German army at Stalingrad, ultimately wiping it out completely. In mid-year, a US Navy fleet handed a superior Imperial Japanese Navy force a stinging defeat at Midway, and in the Solomons and New Guinea the Americans and Australians were getting the upper hand over the Japanese. All through 1943 and into 1944, the Allies pressed their advantage, and the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt.

British and American cooperation was one of the elements in winning the war. The two nations worked well together, particularly in comparison to the mutually suspicious Axis powers, but Anglo-American cooperation had its limits. There was a clash of styles and deep divisions in mindset. The Americans disliked colonialism and imperialism, and though the Yanks were making common cause with the Tommies to defeat the Axis, that didn't translate to any desire to prop up the British Empire in any way. The attitude ran down from the top: when Roosevelt questioned the legitimacy of British rule in India, Churchill grew hot and shot back that Britain should just as well investigate conditions in the American South.

Whatever the frictions in the grand alliance, the goal remained the defeat of Hitler. In an amphibious operation of unprecedented size and grandeur, on 6 June 1944 a combined American and British invasion force landed in Normandy. Josef Stalin had been single-mindedly badgering the Western Allies to open up a real second front since 1942; ironically, now that they had done so, he saw the invasion as an interference in his hopes to dominate Europe. In the end, that was precisely what it was. Hitler would have been defeated sooner or later in any case, but the D-Day invasion ensured that Western Europe did not fall under Communist control.

With Allied armies pouring into the East and West, Hitler committed suicide at the end of April 1945, and a few days later Germany surrendered. Japan kept on with the struggle until August, when the Americans, in a fearsome demonstration of their economic and technical superiority, dropped two atomic bombs on the islands. The Japanese ran up the white flag. Hitler had predicted that the Soviets and the Western Allies would have a falling out; it was accelerating by this time, though much too late to help him. Within a few years East and West would settle into an uneasy "Cold War", confronting each other with all means short of a full-blown shooting match. In the Cold War, the alliance between Britain and America would, after a period of difficulties, reestablish itself and possibly even become stronger.

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[4.9] FALL & RISE?

* Americans inclined to flag-waving never tire of proclaiming that it was the almighty USA that won World War II. There is some truth to this -- as noted, Churchill knew he needed American involvement to defeat Hitler -- but even ignoring the obvious fact that it was the war in the East that did the lion's share of grinding up the German Army, it had been the British who had held the fort, by themselves, until reinforcements could arrive, and after they did Britain's contribution to victory was far from negligible. Britain had passed on significant new technologies to the Americans -- advanced gunsights, powerful piston engines, microwave radar, jet engines -- and if the USA was clearly the predominant world power by the end of the conflict, America hadn't got to that position unaided.

As a reward for victory, Britain was stripped of her Empire -- or, much more correctly, stripped herself of it. The First World War had left Britain in difficult financial circumstances; the Second World War all but bankrupted the country. Churchill was voted out of office almost immediately after the end of the war, to be replaced by Labour's Clement Atlee, who desired to establish a welfare state. The dismal economics meant a choice between Empire and welfare; welfare won.

The Empire disintegrated with astonishing speed. India was supposed to have become independent in 1948, but it was moved up to 1947, with Motilal Nehru's son Jawaharal Nehru becoming the first prime minister. The abrupt departure of the British resulted in widespread social chaos that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. The British pulled out of Palestine in 1949; the nation of Israel resulted, with Chaim Weizmann becoming the first president, with a seemingly endless history of conflict between Arab and Jew to follow. The British were less driven out of their colonies than they just packed up and left as fast as they could: knowing there was no future in colonialism, there was nothing else to do but cut and run.

In 1956, Britain took her last stab at serious imperialism. In that year, Egyptian President Abdel Gamal Nasser nationalized the Suez canal. The British secretly met with the French and the Israelis to see what could be done about it. The scheme that resulted, codenamed OPERATION MUSKETEER in keeping with the three-party nature of the thing, was imperialism of the old school: Israel would attack Egypt, and then Britain and France would intervene to "restore order". MUSKETEER was put into motion and everything went according to plan at first, with the Egyptian army crushed and British and French troops grabbing the canal. Then the US and the USSR reacted, bluntly ordering the foreign powers to get out. They crawled off in humiliation. British colonies continued to gain independence for a time, until by the end of the century all that was left of the Empire was a smattering of islands and other isolated bases.

* It could be said that Britain had sacrificed her Empire to help save the world from much worse empires, and in doing so did much to atone for her sins. It was hard to say that the average Briton lost much: as noted, it was never clear that the average Briton actually got much benefit from imperialism. To be sure, in the decades following World War II Britain languished and Europeans talked of the "British disease", but in the 1980s Britain rallied and came to the front again. It is arguable if Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher -- much admired, much hated -- was a cause or a symptom of this resurgence, though her Churchillian leadership when Argentina seized the Falkland Islands in 1982 gave Britons a justly inspiring victory over a new, if much less formidable, gang of totalitarian thugs that felt pretty good after a generation of decline and discouragement.

It could also be said that what Britain had discarded was the wrong Empire. Britain pioneered concepts of liberties, civil rights, rule of law, and democracy that, whether rejected or accepted and however imperfectly implemented, remain at the top of political debate everywhere. The Empire led to the spread of English culture: if it hadn't, we'd all be communicating in French on the Internet today (though there are certainly those who would find that a good thing).

* Of course, the universality of English owes much to American predominance as well, but however much some Americans (and some Britons) might want to deny it, America is a branch of the British tree. The United States has become the caretaker of an empire of sorts, with military bases and an economic presence around the world, but the Americans have always been ambivalent about their power even while they work very hard to maintain it. As 1960s humorist Tom Lehrer put it in his satirical tune "Send the Marines":

   They've got to be protected --
   All their rights respected --
   Until somebody we like is elected!

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