The Baleful Legacy Of The War

Although he is wrong about public ownership (which is British ownership, and which safeguards the Union), Daniel Hannan writes:

Two anniversaries fall today. Seventy years ago, German tanks tore into Pomerania, plunging Europe into more than five years of horror. The effects on the United Kingdom were beyond calamitous. We entered the war in the front rank of the world’s powers, but ended it exhausted and impoverished, our young men decimated, our cities turned to debris, our Empire unsustainable, our Treasury empty, our national debt that standing at two-and-a-half times our GDP, our government engorged to a degree that, in peacetime, would have been unthinkable. State powers that had been assumed on a supposedly contingent basis - rationing, identity cards, tax hikes, mass nationalisations - remained in place long after the war had finished. Some of them linger still.

Such was the impact on Britain, the only European state that came through the war without, at one time or another, losing it. Other nations - Poland, Russia, Greece and, not least, Germany - suffered far worse. On such days as today, we Euro-sceptics should acknowledge the essentially decent motives of those who turned to European integration in the 1950s. They may have been wrong - quite how wrong becomes clearer with every passing year - but they were, after their fashion, selfless.

Equally, I hope they might acknowledge something about the United Kingdom. It is often claimed that Britain has a stand-offish attitude to Europe, that we cling to an old-fashioned patriotism when others have moved beyond it. But look at what that patriotism has given the world. Twice in the twentieth century, we embarked on ruinous wars, not because we had been attacked, but because the sovereignty of a friendly country had been violated. On both occasions, we told ourselves - and we meant it - that we were fighting for the cause of all nations. That, surely, is the highest form of patriotism: a genuine commitment to the liberty of others. We, of all people, need no lectures about being anti-European.

The other anniversary? It’s my 38th birthday.

Peter Hitchens (a lot of him today) adds:

On the question of whether we should have fought in 1939, several people suggest that if we had not done so, Hitler would have attacked us anyway. Why would he have done that? He wanted the land, wheat and oil of Ukraine and the Caucasus, not the British Empire. He never constructed a Navy remotely capable of challenging ours, though German capital ships were individually powerful. He did not even build many U-boats until the war had already begun. His plans for an invasion of this country were sketchy, belated and never seriously pursued. Had he wished to destroy us, he could have turned West rather than East in 1941, when most of our military equipment was still rusting on the beaches of Dunkirk. He didn't. His interests always lay to the East. From Dunkirk until D-Day, four long years, British troops and German troops only engaged each other in distant theatres at the edge of the main conflict, North Africa, Greece and Italy. Otherwise we just dropped bombs on each other (in the end we bombed Germany far more than Germany bombed us).

Likewise Stalin. What interest had he in a war with the British Empire? He already had a land empire from Minsk to Vladivostok, and from Finland down to the borders of Iran. If he could beat Hitler, he could also have had a central European defensive zone against any repeated attack from the West, including the Baltic Republics and the Polish territory lost in the 1920 war. We flatter ourselves if we think that we were crucial to his plans.

Why was Singapore such a disaster when, say, Isandlwana wasn't? Partly because Isandlwana (like the 1857 Indian mutiny) was swiftly and decisively reversed, whereas Singapore was not reversed for almost three very long years. But also because Singapore in 1942 took place in the age of film, and millions all over Asia were shown the defeated British, hitherto the masters of Asia, being marched off into slavery by the victorious Japanese. I think the spectacular and disastrous sinking of the 'Prince of Wales' and the 'Repulse', the first being one of our most modern warships, was also a warning of the rapid decline of our naval power in the age of the bomber aircraft.

I'd also say that it must have been obvious by 1947 that the military recovery of Burma, Malaya and the rest of the lost Far East was not a permanent political recovery. The amazingly swift scuttle from India (itself an indirect result of 1942) was as powerful a message as poor General Percival's capitulation in the Singapore Ford factory. I was interested, travelling round Uttar Pradesh a few years ago, to see that statues of Subhas Chandra Bose, a collaborator with the Japanese, were common in Indian cities (the statues were complete with spectacles). The story of Bose and the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army, is not very well known here because it suggests that we were less loved in India than we like to think. Also we much prefer to think that we were defeated by the saintly figure of Ghandi. But it is not that simple. Admirers of Burma's beloved Aung San Suu Kyi are often likewise surprised to learn that her father, the revered General Aung San, was also a collaborator with Japan - until the tide turned the other way.

As for the development of the Atomic Bomb, this required truly immense resources, probably only available in the USA, and did not really get them till after Pearl Harbour in December 1941. German scientists, as is shown by the Farm Hall tapes (Operation Alsos) in which their conversations were secretly recorded once we had rounded them up, were nowhere near as advanced by 1945 as the Allies had feared. Russian scientists piggy-backed on the work of the American Manhattan Project and of British research at Harwell, on which they spied with the aid of Communist sympathisers. I think there is much doubt as to whether Igor Kurchatov could have built the Soviet bomb without the help of western traitors.