Review: 1940: Myth and Reality, by Clive Ponting

Reading Clive Ponting's World War II history Armageddon it seemed to me that its value lay not in its bringing new facts to light, but rather in his attentiveness to those facts that do not fit in with the conventional wisdom; in his gathering them together and recognizing that they add up to a quite different picture from the one we normally get--less romantic and less comfortable for many, but where Ponting succeeds, also more nuanced and truthful.

So does it go with his more tightly focused study, 1940: Myth and Reality. The conventional wisdom among Britons (and I suppose, the English-speaking world generally) regarding that fateful year is that, following the final demise of the appeasement-minded and incompetent Chamberlain government, a united Britain, brilliantly led, tough, resolute, singlehandedly holding off the Nazi juggernaut at its seeming peak, and in so doing saving the world.

The image Ponting presents is instead of a Britain that was a shell of its former self in economic terms--its industry too puny and obsolescent after many decades not just of American and German expansion but its own slipping competitiveness to support its war needs, its once fantastic financial might depleted (by failures in other areas, by world war, by Depression). It was also badly overstretched militarily, even before the war. Meanwhile the half-hearted and incompetent leadership did not end with the replacement of Chamberlain by Churchill in the Prime Ministership, let alone the broader elite, which had rather more sympathy for the extreme right-wing government they were facing than is usually admitted, while Winston Churchill's oratory, another myth in itself, fell far short of bringing together a country deeply divided and in some quarters deeply alienated (class mattered, mattered greatly), and contact with the terror of the Luftwaffe (the fight against which was in ways very badly mismanaged) produced defeatism as well as defiance. A far cry from the legend, it was a far narrower thing than people would like to remember, in any event Britain quickly ceased to be able to rely on its own resources (already dependent on imports from, among other places, Germany, for its rearmament in the late '30s, and on the edge of insolvency by 1941, after which only American support let it continue), and it fell to the combined industrial and military might of the United States and the Soviets to not just finish the job, but do most of it in the four and a half long years that followed the end of 1940, as Britain went from great power to client state.

Ponting's argument adds up to a satisfactorily comprehensive, alternate image of 1940, satisfactorily grounded in the indisputable facts of the situation--as I am now even more convinced after grappling with a good deal more of the history in trying to explain Britain's rise and decline as a great power myself.1 And while by the time I came to the book I had already encountered not just the bulk of the facts but most of what he had to say about them, his fluency in his subject, and in conveying it, made it far and away the most striking summing up of what they mean, while being highly accessible. Meanwhile, with the myth of 1940 he tackles perhaps stronger than ever (not only in the fashion for politically convenient historical revisionism, but the way the neverending stream of movies selling the myth has recently overflooded its banks, with Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour and the rest), his debunking of misconceptions that are not only wrong but dangerous remains at least as relevant now as it was when Ponting first published it.

1. This was the subject of my recent paper "Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity," which you can read over at SSRN.