by Angus Calder
By 1945, $27,023,000 worth of American military and industrial equipment had come to Britain free of payment. Because of Lend-Lease, Britain no longer needed to earn its own living, nor wage war within its own means and could devote human and industrial resources to the war effort to an extent impossible for any other power. By 1944, 55 per cent of Britain’s labour force was in the armed forces or doing war work, compared to the USA’s 40 per cent, and British exports had fallen to less than a third of the 1938 figure. Meanwhile, before and after ‘Lend-Lease’, Britain depended absolutely on US supplies of steel; between 1940 and 1944, despite the attention of U-Boats in the Atlantic, 14,570,000 tons came from America, equivalent to more than a quarter of Britain’s own production. In the second half of 1940 steel shipments ‘constituted the heaviest single charge on hard-pressed Atlantic shipping capacity’.5
Churchill gave to nothing more thought than British–US relations. While still First Lord of the Admiralty, he had begun a private correspondence with Roosevelt, and this greatly expanded after he became Prime Minister, providing, as Taylor puts it, ‘the vital channel for Anglo-American relations throughout the war’.6 Roosevelt himself doubted at first that Britain could survive, and even as he began to believe it could, he was not sure whether the American electorate would accept war. It was crucial that Britain should convince US public opinion that it was a gallant and morally worthy ally, that it could and would survive whatever kinds of Blitzkrieg the Nazis attempted, and that US assistance was necessary.
Hence any pronouncement by Britons, official or unofficial, published or broadcast in 1940 was likely to be made by someone acutely mindful of the USA. This was certainly the case with Churchill’s famous speeches. ‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job’, he called out in a broadcast of 9 February 1941 – he was speaking to the Americans, as it were, over the heads of his own people, and he had been doing this less explicitly ever since he had become Prime Minister. His ‘Dunkirk’ speech of June 1940 was and is remembered for its stirring promise that the British would fight on the beaches, in the streets and in the hills, but its actual conclusion was this:
and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.7
His ‘Finest Hour’ speech of 18 June was designed to rally patriotic, belligerent feeling in the Commons and in the nation at large, and his statement that ‘we are now assured of immense, continuous and increasing support in supplies and munitions of all kinds from the United States’ would certainly have helped to dispel faintheartedness. But his penultimate sentence was an appeal to US opinion itself, disguised as a friendly warning: ‘if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science’.8
His broadcast of 14 July 1940 had, by intention or in effect, a subtler sub-text. He conceded that it was easily understandable that ‘sympathetic onlookers’ across the Atlantic might have ‘feared for our survival’. He reaffirmed that Britain would never surrender: ‘The vast mass of London itself, fought street by street, could easily devour an entire hostile army; and we would rather see London laid in ruins and ashes than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved.’ He went on to stress that he led a government representing ‘all creeds, all classes, every recognisable section of opinion’, and concluded:
This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a War of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers not only in this island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this War, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors; but let all strive without failing in faith or in duty, and the dark curse of Hitler will be lifted from our age.9
US opinion – even, or in some cases especially, liberal, anti-fascist, left-wing opinion – was likely to be less than wholehearted in supporting Britain, because that country was seen as undemocratically dominated by antiquated class divisions, and dedicated to the repression of subject peoples in a vast empire which it was selfishly concerned to defend against a rival German imperialism. Churchill’s insistence that the war was one of causes – the great ‘cause’ being democratic freedom – his claim that all classes were ranged behind him, and his stress on peoples, sketched out, as it were, an agenda for sympathetic US journalists in Britain. We shall see later how they followed it. Meanwhile, we may note in passing that Mollie Panter-Downes’s epistles to the New Yorker served, and were doubtless intended to serve, the aim of convincing US readers that Common People in Britain were united in a Common Cause, that ‘unknown warriors’ were bravely doing their duty, and that it was for them that the USA should provide help – that such help would not be diverted merely to serve the ends of snobs and exploiters.
On 20 August, Churchill spoke to the Commons on the war situation, and chose to make a rousing climax out of the recent bases-for-destroyers agreement with the USA. He pointed out that:
these two great organisations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage. For my own part, looking out upon the future, I do not view the process with any misgivings. I could not stop it if I wished; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.10
There was a lengthy tradition within British thought about Empire of looking to the USA as an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘English-speaking’ ally rather than a dangerous rising rival. Charles Wentworth Dilke, a brilliant young Liberal, had toured the ‘English-speaking countries’ in 1866 and 1867 and had published a popular book, Greater Britain, in which he had argued that ‘the English race’ could and would dominate the rest of the world for its own good: ‘No possible series of events can prevent the English race itself in 1970 numbering 300 millions of beings – of one national character and one tongue. Italy, Spain, France, Russia become pygmies by the side of such a people.’ While Dilke believed that Britain would swiftly lose ‘manufacturing supremacy’ to the USA, as a man of republican views, as well as imperialistic ones, he wrote as if no less pro-American than pro-British.11 Kipling showed kinship with Dilke’s spirit in 1899 when he urged the USA to ‘Take up the White Man’s Burden’ in the Philippines. Churchill’s mother had been American. He would make it his task after the war to publish a History of the English-Speaking Peoples. In A. J. P. Taylor’s judgement, ‘he supposed that nearly all Americans were pro-British and that an Anglo-Saxon alliance was in the making. He never understood that even those Americans who wished to defeat Hitler were not equally anxious to save the British Empire.’12 In fact, US officials were mostly convinced that British imperialism was iniquitous. In the latter stages of the war, the head of the British Foreign Office’s Far Eastern Department complained that the Americans were ‘virtually conducting political warfare’ against the British in Asia.13 Goebbels tried on behalf of the Nazis to exploit the obvious fact that America, pressuring Britain to concede independence to India, was in effect taking over world hegemony. For instance, he commented on the Anglo–American landing in French North Africa late in 1942 that ‘Britain has readily given her consent to this seizure of European property by America, since America is gradually taking over Britain’s colonial possessions anyway.’14
The greatest single fact suppressed by the Myth of the Blitz is this: in 1940, because Churchill refused to give in, world power passed decisively away from Britain to the USA. And, ironically, the creation of the Myth, by Churchill and others, was i
ntended to secure the US involvement in the war which would produce that very effect. However, the Myth accorded Britain, standing alone, a moral victory over Germany. As Keynes put it, Britain ‘helped to save the world’. Exulting over this triumph, the British, from Churchill downwards, could ignore the realities of bankruptcy and lost pre-eminence. And this had a valuable side-effect. It defused latent resentment against the USA itself. Had the British public realised that their nation was now a US dependency and that their war effort was destroying the Empire, some might have suffered great confusion of feeling.
There is plenty of evidence that the British public knew, and by implication cared, very little about British colonies. In October to December 1940 the Ministry of Information ran an ‘Empire Crusade’ campaign in the press: ‘At its highest point, after ten weeks of large-scale advertising, under a third of a large sample were aware of the campaign’s existence. But of these, only a part remembered what the copy was about. One person in twenty had studied the copy closely in any one week – sufficiently closely to be able to recall at all clearly what it was about.’ Even among the upper and middle classes, of whom over a third had read the advertisements, the campaign attracted more unfavourable than appreciative comment. At its end, ‘there was no significant improvement in the number of people who knew, for instance, the difference between a Dominion and a Colony’.15
This ‘Crusade’ had been largely the brainchild of an Oxford don, H. V. Hodson, who was director of the Empire Division of the Mol. Its aim, as Ian McLaine puts it, was ‘to educate the public about the empire and the commonwealth and in so doing convince them of the moral superiority of Britain’s way of ordering the world’. The hope, as Hodson expressed it, was that a ‘positive and dynamic faith’ in the Commonwealth and its future would replace the ‘comparatively negative sentiment of “defeating Nazi Germany”’. So newspaper readers on Sunday 13 October were told, ‘We, who are members of the British Commonwealth, hold in our hands the future of the world … We are the builders at grips with the destroyers. We stand for healthy unhampered growth, fighting the disease of tyranny.’ Whereas the Nazis were creating a ‘slave empire’, the British Empire was ‘a family of free nations … the hope of the future’.16 Clearly this high-flying idealism lacked the force of Churchill’s much pithier evocations of ‘Empire’ as simply a ‘fact of life’.
Which is what it was. John M. Mackenzie has argued in his Propaganda and Empire (1984) that ‘an imperial nationalism, compounded of monarchism, militarism, and Social Darwinism, through which the British defined their own unique superiority vis à vis the rest of the world’ was the ‘dominant ideology’ in British society from the late-nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth century. ‘Advertising, the theatre, the cinema, broadcasting, the Churches, youth organisations, ritual and ceremonial, the educational system, and juvenile literature of all sorts’ spread this ideology throughout life. The British working class, underdogs at home, were reminded, for instance, ‘by the containers of every beverage they drank’, that they were the fortunate overlords of coloured masses overseas, while ‘The great imperial epics of Alexander Korda and Michael Balcon were amongst the most popular films of the 1930s, and they were repeatedly reissued during and after the Second World War.’ The complacent habit of superiority ‘created what might be called “projected markets of the mind” in Britain, intellectual shells which were only really shattered, like their economic equivalents, in the 1960s’.17 Only unrepresentative middle-class intellectuals reacted against it. Imperialist ideology not only survived but advanced between the wars, and through the Second.
For instance, V. C. Clinton-Baddeley’s very successful version of the pantomime Aladdin contained much imperial matter, including a song, ‘Mothers of Empire’:
Methinks I see beside the campfire sitting
Many an Empire Mother at her knitting …
This originated in the thirties and was staged by the Bristol Old Vic as late as 1947–8. The imperialistic boys’ stories of G. M. Henty, originating in Victorian Britain, were all still in print in 1955. The Empire Day Movement, which could not secure official recognition in Britain until 1916, waxed in power between the wars and reached its apogee during the Second. The King became its patron in 1941, when Empire Day was linked with the war effort as the culmination of War Weapons Week, and the Home Guard and the civil defence services participated in parades and religious events. At the beginning of the war, subscriptions to the movement had barely reached £200. In 1943 they totalled £6,840. In 1944 a Sunday newspaper, Empire News, helped sponsor a massive Festival of Empire at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The King and Queen and the two princesses were in a full house of 8,000. Thousands more tried and failed to get tickets. The second half was broadcast to the Empire. Meanwhile the rival Empire Youth Movement, founded by a Canadian, Major Ney, in 1937, held Commonwealth services every year in Westminster Abbey, and these too were often attended by the Royal Family and broadcast. While the American Office of War Information refused Hollywood permission, after 1940, to make any more films about the British Empire (these had been mightily successful in the thirties), Mackenzie argues that the spate of British official films on the armed forces and their campaigns ‘gave the Imperial adventure tradition a further boost’.18
Mackenzie, I think, goes too far. His conflation of ‘imperialism’ and ‘racialism’ with ‘monarchism’ and ‘patriotism’ in one dominant ideology oversimplifies a complex cultural situation in which even a non-‘intellectual’ might be intensely patriotic without sympathising with ‘imperialism’ in any positive sense. But by showing the great popularity of imperially orientated films, pageants and movements in the forties he does confirm that perhaps because of their lack of curiosity about what went on in the Empire, it was something of which millions of Britons approved, and which they took for granted. Its existence confirmed that Britain, outclassed by the USA in population and productivity, nevertheless remained at least equal as a Great Power to any country on earth.
Attitudes to America and Americans, as exposed by studies of opinion during the war, were ambivalent. Before Pearl Harbor, the Mol’s Home Intelligence reports showed that while Roosevelt was esteemed, and US help was appreciated, American neutrality was widely resented. The Republic was letting Britain fight the battle for it. America had come late into the First World War, and that still rankled. But Home Intelligence concluded that America was ‘not really regarded as a foreign country, to be wooed with praise, but as a close relative, to be chided freely for her shortcomings’. Pearl Harbor provoked expressions of ‘malicious delight’ that at last Americans would get a taste of war. Home Intelligence noted that ‘while the public are prepared to make any sacrifices necessary to help Russia, it is pointed out that they have no such disposition towards America … America is “too damned wealthy” …’19
A Mass-Observation sample survey in February 1942 suggested that three-fifths of Londoners had a favourable opinion of America, only a quarter a hostile one. Everybody was in favour of co-operation with the USA after the war, yet now, following British military collapse in the Far East, there was a ‘new tendency’ in opinion, a ‘fear that in any such co-operation we shall be in a too inferior position’.20
I shall return later to the subject of British feelings towards America. In relation to the mythologising of 1940, the point which I hope I have established is that there was a fund of patriotism identified vaguely with Empire which was inherently right-wing in, so to speak, its gravitational pull, and that this was inherently at loggerheads with public acceptance of alliance with the USA as a subordinate power. Strangely, this meant that left-wing publicists, for whom national power was far less important than justice for the world’s poorer people, found it easier than right-wing ones to mythologise in ways favourable to the USA. Half the Mass-Observation sample just referred to thought Americans were ‘more democratic’ than the British themselves, and Churchill himself was pulled left-ward ideologically by a simi
lar perception, as his rhetoric invoked ‘unknown warriors’ and ‘the forward march of the common people’.
America under Roosevelt – who was very popular in Britain – seemed a ‘progressive’, even a ‘left-wing’ country in its domestic policies. In the twenties, British left-wingers had clearly perceived that New York had taken over from London as the prime centre of international capitalism. When Britain’s minority Labour government fell in 1931, pressure from US bankers was plausibly blamed: to get a loan from New York, the Cabinet would have had to make cuts in spending unacceptable to most Labour Party opinion. The USA itself at that time had presented a fearsome picture of the results of unbridled capitalism – breadlines bizarrely coexisting with agricultural surpluses. But from 1935, Roosevelt’s New Deal began to be inspirational for thinkers on the left centre of British politics. It seemed to represent what ‘planning’ could achieve without the wholesale overthrow of capitalism.
John Maynard Keynes expressed enthusiasm for Roosevelt as early as 1933, and in the same year Walter Citrine, General Secretary of the Trade Union Congress, persuaded that body to pass a resolution praising FDR. H. G. Wells visited him in 1934 and described him as ‘the most effective transmitting institution possible for the coming of the New World Order’. Gradually, more and more British socialists were disarmed by what could be discerned across the Atlantic: Roosevelt’s impact seen in a big development of trade unionism; the elimination of company unions; progressive social security measures; and successful public works like those of the Tennessee Valley Authority. In 1939, Jennie Lee, wife of the Labour Left’s rising star Aneurin Bevan, was ready to declare, ‘There are flags of freedom flying higher and wider in America than anywhere else in the world.21