How the World Looked From London on July 1, 1940

From how the world order looked from the vantage point of London in July 1940 (if only from the editorial page of one news outlet, however high-profile and telling) it was just a short step to considering how the more immediate military fortunes of Britain also looked--plausibly a different thing from what we know them to be now, and have come to rather take for granted as the virtually certain outcome (arguably, to the point of being rather complacent about it).

Today we take it for granted that in July 1940 Germans lacked the air, naval and amphibious assault capability required to defeat Britain through a strategic air campaign, cut the island of Britain off from its sea lanes, or mount a successful invasion of the island. We also know that if Britain's resources were insufficient for more than a year's resistance at best (and that indeed Britain was bankrupt by March 1941) the United States did not permit a British collapse, stepping up to keep Britain in the fight.

However, all this was plausibly not taken for granted at the time. Germany's pre-war and wartime propaganda, and the myth of German and especially Nazi ultra-efficiency it exploited, created profoundly exaggerated impressions of the country's military strength that its succession of military victories reinforced--not least the shocking fall of France in mere weeks. (Indeed, I recall George Orwell in "H.G. Wells and the World State" referring to Germany as having "tens of thousands of tanks"--a multiple of the real figure.) This exaggeration certainly extended to the air, where the impression of greater capacity intersected with a perception that countries were much more vulnerable to aerial bombing than they proved to be in the event (in the West, at least, questioned only by such far-seeing persons as the aforementioned Wells, whom, ironically, Orwell wrote the piece cited above to dismiss as having long since become "irrelevant"). It was also the case that if Britain's aerial defense in the Battle of Britain, for all its imperfections, proved to be superbly organized by a command-and-control system making the best possible use of the country's radar network, that system was untested--while the strategic and tactical ineptness of the Luftwaffe in that battle, so much at odds with the flair the German army and air force showed in their prior victories, had not yet been seen. Meanwhile, if the impression of Germany's naval capability was rather less-established than German capability on the ground and in the air, it was the case that "the water barrier" did not keep Germany from a swift conquest of Norway, in spite of the great advantage the Royal Navy was supposed to have in virtually any naval contest. (Indeed, German naval weakness itself did not seem a thing to be too much counted upon at a moment in which Italy had entered the war, and France and its considerable navy fallen to the Germans--the latter fact prompting Britain to mount a ruthless preventive attack on the French fleet from Plymouth to Alexandria in "Operation Catapult" to capture or sink a large portion of its warships before Germany could lay hands on them, acts not yet begun, and whose success, again, could not be taken for granted.)

At the same time, if the U.S. did not allow Britain to fall, the fact remained that American aid was slower in coming and America less open-handed than Britain's leadership hoped, while 1940 was an election year in a country where there was still considerable "isolationist" sentiment--and even a short-lived turn in that direction (were, for example, the election of 1940 to see an isolationist administration in office retreat from support for Britain for even a few months) potentially decisive for the course of the war.

Observers of the scene from that vantage point also knew well what tends to be downplayed now--that British society was not the unified and resolute thing of wartime propaganda and post-war myth. The sentiment behind the slogan "Better Hitler than Blum" among the privileged and powerful was neither superficial, nor confined to France, and the matching of deeds to words made many a German military victory easier than it would otherwise have been, all as there was no reason for Britons to expect their leaders to be more stalwart than those of their continental counterparts, but rather less, since in their short-run at least their interests were less endangered by Hitler's aspirations. After all, in contrast with those countries, Hitler's conservatism made him a great respecter of the British Empire and its "role" in the world, such that since at least Mein Kampf he had been insistent that he preferred that Empire stand, all as his principal objectives were continental and to his east anyway. And indeed many in the country's Establishment--the "Guilty Men," "the Cliveden Set," to say nothing of England's own King Edward VIII--were quite prepared to come to terms with Hitler not only in adherence to pure realpolitik calculations but as a matter of their Anti-Communist and in cases flatly Fascist sympathies, to such a degree that even as with the war with Germany already on that elite showed more taste for a war with the Soviets than the Nazis (planning an intervention on Finland's side in the Winter War), while, contrary to the propaganda of his cult, the hard-right Churchill himself was anything but a firm champion of anti-fascist values (himself calling Mussolini "the greatest lawgiver among living men"). Meanwhile if pre-war images of modern societies quickly cracking under aerial bombardment were exaggerated, the reality of the Blitz was a far cry from the "We can take it!" claptrap of the "Ministry of Information" and the images of dignified "carrying on" so beloved by promulgators of romantic images of the conflict, while any Allied commitment to "unconditional surrender" in the Casablanca conference was still two and a half years of hard struggle and many, many victories, away, and more controversial than many remember. (It was Roosevelt's idea, not Churchill's--or Stalin's--and neither happy with it because of how it made the German leadership much more likely to fight to the bitter end.)

The result is that if what we know now has meant that while counterfactuals which have Hitler winning the war often seem as badly strained as they seem cliché in conceiving the situation (to the point of often being about something other than an interest in genuine "might have beens," with some seeing hints of rather dark prejudices), the situation looked different to many observers at the time. That contrast between perception and actuality seems well worth remembering as the resurgence of great power conflict today has policymakers and publics again dealing with the confusions of propaganda and the fog of war in a way they have not done in a very long time.