The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  The man who directed Bomber Command was Sir Arthur Harris, known to history as ‘Bomber Harris’ but known to his crews, so many of whom died, as ‘Butcher’. He had fought in the Great War as a pilot and commanded imperial bombing squadrons after it ended. Energetic, coarse and direct, other service chiefs feared he had too strong an influence on Churchill – though Churchill seems to have found Harris a little too much. Once he was stopped by a police constable for racing his Bentley at breakneck speed between his headquarters at High Wycombe and London. ‘You might have killed somebody, sir,’ the policeman told him. ‘Young man,’ replied Harris, ‘I kill thousands of people every night.’ He was a devoted believer in the ability of bombing to end the war. It was the only way of defeating ‘the Boche’, he said; an offensive of the right weight for long enough would ‘be something that no country in the world could endure’. He added that it was anybody’s guess what effort, and how long, would be needed. One of the earliest raids under him was on Lu¨beck, an ancient medieval port which was lightly defended and, said Harris, built more ‘like a fire-lighter than a human habitation’. He had wanted his crews to be well ‘blooded’, as in fox hunting, and was delighted at the carnage caused to a gentle and unimportant place. This was not a subtle fighter.

  By the end of the war he had a thunderous, awesome fleet of four-engined bombers, some 1,600 of them, under his command. It has been estimated that building, sustaining and using this giant fleet took up to a third of the country’s resources during the war, a vast amount. This was aluminium and steel, factories and skill, machine-tools and oil that might otherwise have gone into long-range aircraft to protect the convoys, or into new British tanks and weaponry for the coming invasion. A choice was made. More than 55,000 Bomber Command aircrew were killed and nearly 10,000 shot down and taken prisoner. This made serving on a British bomber more dangerous than any other job on either side except crewing a German U-boat. Though Bomber Command had some glamorous and famous figures, including Leonard Cheshire and Guy Gibson, most of its people were lower-middle class and less glamorous than the ‘Brylcreem Boys’ of Fighter Command. They suffered terribly but their morale held.

  For this expense – what? It is estimated that as many as 600,000 men, women and children were killed by Bomber Command and by the American bombers which began to arrive in East Anglia from 1942. Most were not soldiers or even vital industrial workers. Many were refugees or slave labourers from other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe. After Lu¨beck came Cologne, Hamburg, the Ruhr, Essen, Berlin and Dresden. The slaughter harrowed and shocked Germans and led to a flood of bitter anti-Goering and anti-Hitler jokes, but German citizens had no way to topple the regime. There were major diversions from the carpet-bombing of cities. At different times the RAF was ordered to concentrate on oil supplies, transport networks and pre-D-Day military targets. Yet, thanks to the German industrial leader Albert Speer’s dispersal of industry and similar makeshifts to those used in Britain, the bombing is estimated to have cut German industrial production by only a tenth or less. Only once the land war was being lost did German industry collapse. The bombing diverted Luftwaffe forces and much artillery from the Russian front, which pleased Stalin, and therefore bought Churchill more time before D-Day. We cannot know what battles it saved, but it emphatically did not win the war. It did not break the spirit of Germany any more than the Blitz broke the spirit of the British.

  The thing ended, in effect, with Dresden, on 14–15 February 1945. By now Germany was teetering on the edge of surrender, essentially defeated. Bomber Command and the Americans returned again and again with massive fleets, creating a firestorm in Germany’s seventh largest town and burning or blowing to pieces up to 100,000 people. The purpose was to interrupt German communications to the east and to harm ‘morale’. Dresden had been one of the loveliest cities of old Germany, a cultural and artistic centre known throughout the world, almost on the scale of Venice. Its destruction sent, if not a shudder, then a thin shiver of unease, even through the overlords of the Allied war effort. Churchill, who was as responsible for Dresden as anyone – he had spoken of east German cities as ‘especially attractive targets’ – now changed his tune. He wrote to the chief of the air staff that, ‘The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing’ and ordered ‘more precise concentration upon military objectives . . . rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive’. The military historian Max Hastings has justly commented: ‘It is impossible to regard this memorandum as anything other than a calculated political attempt by the prime minister to distance himself from the bombing of Dresden and the rising controversy surrounding the area offensive.’ Bomber Command was awarded no campaign medal. Harris was not given the kind of honour heaped on similarly senior military leaders – in protest at his men’s treatment he refused a peerage. Churchill insisted on a baronetcy eight years later. In 1992 when a statue was unveiled to him by the Queen Mother, no member of the cabinet attended.

  The End of the Affair

  The period from the great build-up of American forces in Britain to the end of the Hitler war in Berlin was long and bloody. The Overlord landings on D-Day at five French beaches by American, British and Canadian forces from 6 June 1944 were an astonishing achievement, technically and in terms of courage and subterfuge. The secret had held. Phantom armies of inflatable tanks, ambitious misinformation and extraordinarily tight security meant that von Rundstedt, the German commander-in-chief, believed until the last minute that the invasion would come far to the east, between Calais and Dieppe, though Hitler always suspected it would be Normandy. Nevertheless, the Allies’ armada, giant though it was, was limited by the landing craft and the size of the beaches so that only nine divisions could reach France in the first attack. This compares with fifty-eight defensive German divisions, of which ten were fast-moving Panzer commands. True, the Germans had a long line to defend and, by spring 1944, had been thoroughly beaten in the air. But had German commanders moved faster, and had their intelligence been better, it is perfectly possible that they could have flung back the invaders within the first few days. This was a horrendously dangerous operation, and no amount of planning could have made it anything else.

  As in North Africa and Italy, there were rows between British and American commanders and much later argument about mistakes made. Montgomery had been placed under Eisenhower, the supreme commander, as the commander of all the Allied ground forces for Overlord. At St Paul’s School in west London he had laid out a ninety-day plan to take the coast and break out, with the British forces drawing the main German attack to the east, leaving the Americans to wheel round further west and head for the heartland of France. Bad weather delayed the full plan, and there was much controversy about whether Montgomery’s tanks, having achieved a major advance near Caen, then missed a great opportunity to break through. Certainly, British forces got stuck, and the near destruction of Caen by bombing has since been criticized as a war crime. American commanders, notably Montgomery’s old enemy General Patton, argued that he had been too slow and could have smashed a weak German line.

  Later on, with British forces reaching Antwerp in Belgium, less than a hundred miles from the Rhine, there was another British pause. In fact it turned out that there was only a paltry German defence prepared – including, in the words of one military historian, ‘policemen, sailors, convalescent sick and wounded, as well as boys of sixteen’.157 With an Allied majority of twenty to one in tanks and near complete air superiority, there was a golden chance to finish the war in September 1944. Had it been taken, a further half million British and American soldiers might not have died – certainly, the British First Airborne Division would not have been sacrificed in the failed Arnhem operation. Uncountable numbers would have been saved from concentration camps or immolation in bombed cities and the Russians would have ended the war far further east than they did. Arguments about why this chance was lost founder in mutual recriminati
on about intelligence, strategy, tactics and courage between British and American commanders.

  All the British public knew at the time was that after the heroic news of the invasion itself, advances seemed to be frustratingly slow, as in Italy. Why? The truth seems complicated, a failure caused by divisions in the command, bad transport systems – including a mere 1,400 British-built lorries unusable because of faulty pistons – and a certain complacency about the inevitability of German collapse. This was based on a misunderstanding of Hitler’s power and of the continuing devotion to him in the minds of millions. The German army, told they were fighting to protect their nation from annihilation, fought hard, cleverly and tenaciously. Nowhere, from the hedges of Normandy to the banks of the Rhine did the Allied armies have it easy. In December 1944, pursuing a wild ‘Hitler Order’, the German army hit back with a surprise counter-attack in just the same place as the 1940 blitzkrieg on France, and with the same intention of cutting off the British army and forcing a second Dunkirk. It took the Americans completely by surprise and, though it was contained, was a further bloody shock.

  There had been a parallel shock for British forces in Asia. After the early and humiliating defeats by the Japanese, most of the advances had been made at great cost in the Pacific by American forces. In Burma, Orde Wingate’s guerrilla force of Chindits – the name taken from a half-lion, half-eagle mythological Burmese beast – had restored some British pride and shown that it was possible to learn new ways of fighting. But in March 1944 the Japanese, who, like the Germans, were now heavily outnumbered and had lost command of the air, counter-attacked from Burma, a daring last-throw operation designed to lead to the invasion of India. They broke across the Indian border and desperate defences at Kohima and Imphal succeeded only thanks to air drops. Luckily the British imperial forces, which included Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Gurkha and African troops, were superbly commanded by General William Slim. Slim, a burly and much-loved Indian Army officer, then doggedly pursued the broken Japanese across Burma, fighting in appalling conditions. It has been argued that this was all unnecessary, merely intended by Churchill to restore British pride after the imperial humiliations of the previous few years. Yet Slim’s army, the ‘Forgotten Fourteenth’, who never felt they got the admiration they deserved after the war, greatly helped the US forces by drawing in tens of thousands of Japanese, who were therefore not available to defend the Pacific islands.

  So the final acts of the war brought ambiguous messages for Britain. Outside the worlds of boys’ comics and self-serving memoirs, it was hard to argue that the British were inherently better fighters than other nations. In France, Germany and Burma it seemed that tattered enemy armies, without air cover, without the huge industrial support of the US and without as many troops, could still give British forces nasty surprises. Who was ‘superior’ now? It is eloquent that, after the war, the dominant images from the Far Eastern campaigns were of the savagery of Japanese prisoner camps. There followed books, drawings and films in which the British depicted themselves almost masochistically as haggard, beaten and sometimes degraded survivors. These celebrated the triumph of the human spirit under atrocious conditions. They were hardly the martial epic of a living empire. Japan was defeated by the vast US war machine and finished off by atomic bombs. The memory of ‘little yellow men’ with bicycles shattering the defenders of the Raj would not be erased: Indian and Pakistani independence would have followed at any event, but it was made certain by the Japanese war.

  Nor could the war be claimed to have ended in every way gloriously. The devastated cities of Germany and the horror of the camps cast a grey pall over things, apart from the eruption of joy and relief on VE day itself. The Russians squatted over half of Europe and those who wanted to look at the record knew what that would mean. In October 1944, at a summit with Stalin in Moscow, Churchill had acquiesced in the first stage of the carve-up, asking the Soviet leader, ‘How would it do for you to have ninety per cent predominance in Romania, for us to have ninety per cent of the say in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Yugoslavia?’158 He then drew up a handwritten paper listing the percentages of influence for these countries, plus Hungary and Bulgaria, which Stalin simply ticked with a blue pencil. Worse, perhaps – since Soviet control of most of those areas was a military fait accompli – Churchill joked with Stalin about the unspeakableness of the Poles. It was a far cry from his early anti-Bolshevik crusading and a far cry too from the day Britain had declared war in 1939 in response to the invasion of Poland. This would be a new world, torn down the middle, with little space for a British Empire, or even a strong independent British voice. At home, in a series of by-elections, independents and socialists had trounced Tory and National Government candidates. As early as 1944 Tom Harrisson, whose Mass Observation system had done so much to record the real feelings of the British in wartime, wrote that voters would distinguish between ‘Winston the War Leader, Bulldog of Battle’ and the prime minister who was ‘no man of peace, of domestic policy or human detail’.159

  We could call this the end of the Age of Churchill. At no time in history had the British played a more important role than during 1900 to 1945, when the world’s worst wars were fought. It measured up to the age of Elizabethan England, the winning of empire, and the high noon of Victorian inventiveness, though the country’s aggression and even vitality had waned. This was a time, barely more than half a modern lifetime, during which Britain changed from being an imperial island, with essentially aristocratic values, glaring outwards, to become the more inward-looking nation we still are. We had gone out into the world. Now, the world would come home to us. We had been the noisy, red-jacketed, grossly unequal Royal Navy-worshipping land of Young Winston. Now we were the crumpled, relieved and bolshie democracy of VE day, frightened and freed to become the modern British. The crowds cheered ‘Our Winnie’ and gave him his V-for-victory sign but they were saying goodbye. He was already a picture from an old story. In researching this story, I found myself haunted by the references by Churchill and his military leaders to the lack of fighting spirit they found in British soldiers. These private comments were forgotten after the war was over, pushed out of sight. We moved on. Yet sometimes the most important truths come from the side of the mouth. The truth is that after the First World War the British had become less willing to fight. Far from being shameful, as Churchill thought, this was a reasonable, modern response. Only nations traumatized by humiliating defeats and perverted by ideological mania were still keen fighters. By the beginning of the Second World War, the British were not among them.

  By the time it ended, Britannia had become Britain. It had taken the worst wars in human history to shake away the illusions of superiority over lesser breeds and give ‘the common man’ a slightly better break. Britannia had been grand. Her servants had been high-minded, decent people more often than they were bullies or sadists. But she had not shown the vigour of the evil empires, Nazi and Soviet, nor the swirling energy of America. At home she was homely. Abroad her people had lost their appetite for territorial expansion or for keeping other peoples down. So, at last, one of the largest and least likely empires in all human history was dying. Yet Britannia’s finest hour really had come as she expired. In 1940 the British under Churchill had not done the obvious thing and walked away from the fight. They had drawn together, and together they had stupidly, unimaginatively and unreasonably fought on. This was ridiculous. Modern Britain is our share of the reward.

  Notes

  Part One: Living in the Future, 1900–1914

  1. See Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria: A Personal History, HarperCollins, 2000.

  2. See R. C. K. Ensor, England, 1870–1914, Oxford University Press, 1936.

  3. Winefride Elwes, The Feilding Album, Geoffrey Bles, 1950, extracted in The Faber Book of Reportage, ed. John Carey, Faber & Faber, 1987.

  4. Illustrated London News, 26 January 1901.

  5. Fred Kaplan, Henry James, quoted in Roy Hattersley, The Edwardians
, Abacus, 2004.

  6. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. I, Youth, 1874–1900, Heinemann, 1966.

  7. The Times, 1 September 1902, quoted in Asa Briggs, Seebohm Rowntree, Longmans, 1961.

  8. Quoted in Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol. II, Young Statesman, 1901–1914, Heinemann, 1967.

  9. All quotations from Nature, October 1901, which reproduced Galton’s lecture, with diagrams, in full.