How the myth of “Britain alone” overshadows VE Day

A longer version of the article below appeared in the New Statesman 15 May 2020

On VE Day the streets of British towns and cities were bedecked with flags. If one looks carefully at the films and photographs it is clear that not only Union Jacks were flying. It is especially obvious in colour pictures that there were also flags of the United Nations, the countries fighting the Axis countries. Especially prominent were those of the US, but also the USSR and China.  

In its last years, the Second World War was a profoundly internationalist war. This was reflected by propaganda and in film. One of the most compelling expressions is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s extraordinary 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death, in which a heavenly world assembly of all the nations decides on who lives and who dies. 

That we forget all this is no accident. The UK and US governments have long downplayed VE Day and played up D-Day. It is striking how little date recognition there is for 8 May in the UK, compared with, for example, France. The reason is simple: VE Day highlighted victory in a war against fascism in which the USSR played a pivotal role. D-Day had a different ideological message – it was a joint UK-US liberation of Europe from tyranny.  It rather left out the Canadians, Poles and others, and most dramatically of all, the complementary Operation Bagration on the Eastern Front. In the summer of 1944, the Red Army advanced very much faster, and with much heavier casualties, than the United Nations forces in the west.  

More important still for our forgetting is the British emphasis on defeat and resistance in 1940 rather than on victory in 1945. That deliverance at Dunkirk, the heroics of the Battle of Britain, and the cheerful coming together in the Blitz, are at the heart of the story of Britain standing alone and beginning to fight a people’s war. 

Curiously enough, the story of the nation standing alone was essentially created in 1945. In his official VE Day declaration in the House of Commons, Winston Churchill recounted: “After gallant France had been struck down we, from this island and from our united Empire, maintained the struggle single-handed for a whole year until we were joined by the military might of Soviet Russia.”

Churchill used the standard Conservative imperial “we” as he also did when addressing what was sometimes known as the Imperial Parliament. As the USSR was one of the big three, he could not but mention its role. After leaving the Commons, however, he spoke to the crowds in Whitehall from the balcony of the Ministry of Health in very different terms. He struck a very different and long resonating note: he now maintained that the “British nation” and the “ancient island” had been alone, not the Empire as a whole.   

This was also the story told in “Mr Churchill’s declaration of policy to the electors”, the 1945 Conservative Party election manifesto, which although much concerned with Empire and imperial trade, used a national rather than imperial “we”. Churchill went on to use this term alone in his best-selling and influential history of war, which chided the US for being late to enter the conflict. It stands in stark contrast to what he said in 1940-44, when if anything was alone it was the Empire, but the usual emphasis even then was on having allies. 

There were important reasons for insisting that the nation was alone in 1940-41. The first was that the British role in combat in 1940-41 was much greater than in 1945. The UK had declined relatively since 1940 and now stood in the shadow of the US and the USSR. Nor was the Empire what it had been in 1940 – it was now much more of a commonwealth of nations (outside of the colonies) who were part of the United Nations in their own right. Malaya, British Borneo and Hong Kong were still under Japanese control on VJ Day, when Japan formally surrendered.

There was also a pressing financial reason to insist that the nation, and not the Empire, was alone in 1940-41. As peacetime approached, the British government knew it could not immediately pay for its vital imports, not least food, by exporting. During the war, most imports had not been paid for: the US and Canada supplied them for free, while the rest of the world, including parts of the Empire, in effect lent them. The British government wanted the US to maintain its support into the peace. 

The argument it used was that the UK was owed a debt. It went like this: from 1939 with France, but from June 1940 to the end of 1941, alone, the UK was fighting for a common cause. Others, specifically the US, should also have already been in the fight from the beginning.  Moreover, the UK had bought, for ready money, large quantities of arms and supplies from the US in this period, and had even paid for the building of arms factories in the US (something too often forgotten today). Furthermore, went the argument, it had reduced its exports and in effect borrowed from the Empire and British-linked territories to finance its contribution.  The notion of Britain “standing alone” was thus a claim on the US, a standing rebuke to a Johnny-come-lately ally.    

The US was having none of it. Lend-Lease stopped with VJ-Day in August 1945. The new Labour government was forced to negotiate a US loan, which was paid off in 2010 (and misleadingly described as paying off Lend-Lease), to pay for essential food and raw materials. It was to go on to exhort people to work hard to achieve “economic independence”. 

Thus what was understood as a war of allies, an imperial war, an internationalist war, came to be seen very differently after 1945. What developed was a picture in which a new nation was created as it fought alone. The Empire was airbrushed out, as were the United Nations, not to mention the great Anglo-French alliance which declared war in 1939. 

The war that had been a war of many countries’ people fighting together became, afterwards, a British “people’s war”. Lest we forget, the war was not as it came to be remembered.