How delusions about WWII fed Brexit mania

Four days ago, Britain completed the process of quitting the European Union, a major act of foreign policy that most of the world finds bewildering, and considers ill-advised.
It brought to mind comments at an Anglo-German conference some 15 years ago made by the then-chairman of Mercedes-Benz: “I want to tell our British friends how much we hope they will remain partners in the EU. Should they decide to leave, however, I hope you will not consider it impolite if I suggest that, in an age of giant trading blocs, you may find it cold out there.”
So why has Britain taken this leap into the unknown? What follows is a rumination on the British character, rather than on our government. Nonetheless, we shall begin with a remark last month by Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, who possesses the fiercely contested distinction of being the least impressive member of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s cabinet. Asked why Britain had been the first nation to authorise a Covid-19 vaccine, he compared the quality of US and European scientists and regulators, then said, “We’re a much better country than every single one of them, aren’t we?”
Underpinning almost everything Britain has done since 1945 is a belief among most of its people that we are special, different, important. Many middle-sized nations cherish this conceit in some degree — think of France — but few allow it to influence their political courses as doggedly as do Winston Churchill’s inheritors.
World War II still dominates British self-image. As a historian of the conflict, I am sometimes driven to despair by my fellow-countrymen’s determination to preserve nationalistic myths about it, rather than to acknowledge harsh realities. The phrase “Grand Alliance,” coined by Churchill, fitted the glorious, largely fictional pageant of which he became the most influential literary begetter, through his six-volume history of the conflict.
In truth, the US, Britain and the Soviet Union waged war with very different objectives, and emerged in much different conditions. The US was an indisputable victor, and the only one to emerge from the war in a vastly strengthened economic condition. Russia suffered unspeakable human losses — 27 million dead, against fewer than half a million each for the US and Britain — but the capture of Berlin enabled the Communist leadership to claim its only unequivocal national success between 1917 and its collapse in 1991 (with the possible exception of the 1957 launch of the Sputnik satellite).
This goes far to explain why Russia still makes more of annual commemorations of its “Great Patriotic War” than does any other nation.
Britain, meanwhile, was financially ruined by the war, which also rang the tocsin for its empire. Yet no postwar event or success, including attainment of a modern standard of living that would seem sybaritic to our fathers and grandfathers, has matched the magic, in national folklore, of our lone 1940-41 defiance of the Nazis. Modern Brexiteers warm to King George VI’s wonderfully foolish remark to his mother, after France surrendered, that he was happier that “we have no allies to be polite to and to pamper.”
I have written books in which I point out that Churchill himself saw absolutely nothing glorious about Britain’s isolation. Before the French acknowledged defeat, he made the desperate, hopeless gesture of offering their prime
minister, Paul Reynaud, “indissoluble political union” between the two countries, if only France would
fight on.
Most of the British upper class despised Americans almost as much as they did Continentals. Their prime minister was among the few who sincerely respected the US. He recognised that victory over Hitler was unattainable without American belligerence.
A middle-class Londoner named Vere Hodgson wrote in her wartime diary, acknowledging a debt to the prime minister’s half-American parentage, “Had he been pure English aristocracy he would not have been able to lead in the way he has.” She recognised that many of Churchill’s fellow members of the upper class regarded him as a vulgarian, but she observed wisely: “We need more than good taste to save Britain at this particular moment.”
Churchill himself wrote of the night following Pearl Harbor, when he knew that America was in the war, “I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”
Wartime opinion surveys nonetheless showed the British far less enthusiastic about their transatlantic allies than was the prime minister, and still in love with their vision of plucky little Britain, crying defiance from the White Cliffs of Dover.
Richard Weight, author of a 2002 study of the modern British search for identity, has written of the wartime era that many politicians, poets, historians and newspapers drew explicit parallels with the Elizabethan and Napoleonic eras: “They portrayed Hitler as the latest in a long line of jumped-up, power-crazed Continental dictators, and they emphasized the unshakeable continuity of ‘the island story.’”
What is remarkable is not that this thesis exercised such power over British imaginations in 1940, but that it continues to do so 80 years later.

—Bloomberg

Max Hastings is a Bloomberg columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the BBC and newspapers, editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, and editor of the London Evening Standard. He is the author of
28 books, the most recent of which are “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy” and “Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943”