Britain's War Machine

David Edgerton, 2011
(April 2012)

The idiosyncrasies of the English education system mean that I’ve not been formally taught History since I was 14 years old. I’ve tried to make up for lost time since then, but I can’t recall that much from school. The Norman Invasion, The Spanish Armada, and The Somme were pretty much it. No WWII, though.

That seems like a fairly odd ommission, given the cast-iron grip it still holds over the national imagination. Dunkirk, The Blitz, The Battle of Britain. I’ve talked about nationalist myth-making before, but sometimes you don’t need to invent stuff, just cherry pick the best bits and ignore any inconvenient contra-indicators like, say, willful and indiscriminate obliteration of civilian targets on a biblical scale.

But the good stuff is actually good, at least. Plucky Britain as the Atticus Finch of mid-twentieth century global relations, taking on an unwinnable fight simply because it was the right thing to do; standing alone against the wave of tyranny sweeping across the civilized world; beggaring and bankrupting ourselves as the sole defenders of freedom and democracy until the Americans finally realized that actually, yes, Nazis are bad, and they should probably pull their finger out and lend a hand.

Except of course that at that point Britain still had a vast empire, however rapidly its twilight was approaching. Hard to square the ‘brave little island nation’ concept with the fact that we still ruled a quarter of the globe. We do love an underdog though, despite being top-dog for a good few centuries. It’s hardly like our own history prior to 1939 consisted of unblemished millennia of peace and love and fairy cakes.

Despite the slightly dick-waving, Boy’s Own title this is a very persuasive book, aiming to counteract the, ‘idea of a weak Britain which made only a minor contribution to victory’, and it succeeds admirably. As with other popular histories written by academics more used to scholarly journals, there’s a tendency towards long lists of unnecessarily explicit facts and examples which doesn’t help the flow; it's not really necessary to write out ICI's name in full quite so often. I get that it's short for Imperial Chemical Industries, no need to ram it home quite so unsubtly. Shades of Obama's 'British Petroleum' after Deepwater Horizon there, and just as heavy-handed. Even so, you’d rather have too much evidence than too little, and it all adds up to a fairly compelling case.