Robert McCrum: The Second World War: six years that changed this country for ever
[Robert McCrum is assistant books editor for the Observer.]
When I was born in 1953, just after the coronation of Elizabeth II, I had a ration book. This flimsy, red cardboard log now looks like a passport to another country. Many things about that postwar Britain have become unrecognisable: cod liver oil, steam trains, rag-and-bone men, bobbies and telegram boys on bicycles and standing to attention for the national anthem at the end of cinema programmes.
Looking back, the black-and-white postwar images seem appropriate. Life in peacetime Britain was grey, threadbare, dreary and hopeless. There was a national sense of "Was this what we fought for?" As one American commentator put it, the British certainly believed they had won the war, but they behaved as though they had lost it.
Seventy years have gone by since the Second World War began and 64 since it ended. That dwindling minority of Britons, some 3 million, who lived through those six extraordinary years remember them as the most vivid moment in their lives and still refer to "the last war". So do the 11 million baby boomers and the 20 million over 60. Even some of their grandchildren will articulate this instinctive reflex. Britain has fought in some dozen wars and "emergencies" since 1945, but it's the Second World War that casts the longest shadow. As the D-Day anniversary celebrations indicate, this is one war that has not gone away.
Seventy years on, the experience and memory of wartime boil down to perhaps five myths that continue to condition our responses to everyday life.
First, Dunkirk. This has come to stand for the idea that in any national endeavour, especially sporting or military, Britons are almost certain to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory.
At the same time, for millions of British children, separation and loss became the defining experience of total war – evacuation, a trauma that lies at the heart of a classic like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The evacuation to the countryside links to a third, pastoral element of Britain's wartime inheritance, expressed in the phrase "Dig for Victory". This was the idea that by the sweat of honest brows, the British could somehow survive. Shovels and spades would also be deployed in the cities, to rescue the victims of the Luftwaffe's bombardment.
The Blitz, fourth, is an essential element of Britain's wartime legacy. After the 7/7 bombings in London, the "spirit of the Blitz" was referred to ad nauseam by press and public. In contrast to the near-hysteria of many Americans after 9/11, many Britons from generations born decades after the Blitz proudly advertised the stoical repression of their feelings in a fierce display of national character .
The fifth and final inheritance of war – perhaps the ultimate peace dividend – is the sustained sense of moral superiority derived from standing alone against fascism. Roosevelt's secretary of state, Cordell Hull, wrote in his memoirs: "Never have I admired a people more than I admired the British in the summer and autumn of 1940. Even the children seemed to realise that upon their indomitable spirit depended not only their own fate, but also that of the whole democratic world."...
Read entire article at guardian.co.uk
When I was born in 1953, just after the coronation of Elizabeth II, I had a ration book. This flimsy, red cardboard log now looks like a passport to another country. Many things about that postwar Britain have become unrecognisable: cod liver oil, steam trains, rag-and-bone men, bobbies and telegram boys on bicycles and standing to attention for the national anthem at the end of cinema programmes.
Looking back, the black-and-white postwar images seem appropriate. Life in peacetime Britain was grey, threadbare, dreary and hopeless. There was a national sense of "Was this what we fought for?" As one American commentator put it, the British certainly believed they had won the war, but they behaved as though they had lost it.
Seventy years have gone by since the Second World War began and 64 since it ended. That dwindling minority of Britons, some 3 million, who lived through those six extraordinary years remember them as the most vivid moment in their lives and still refer to "the last war". So do the 11 million baby boomers and the 20 million over 60. Even some of their grandchildren will articulate this instinctive reflex. Britain has fought in some dozen wars and "emergencies" since 1945, but it's the Second World War that casts the longest shadow. As the D-Day anniversary celebrations indicate, this is one war that has not gone away.
Seventy years on, the experience and memory of wartime boil down to perhaps five myths that continue to condition our responses to everyday life.
First, Dunkirk. This has come to stand for the idea that in any national endeavour, especially sporting or military, Britons are almost certain to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory.
At the same time, for millions of British children, separation and loss became the defining experience of total war – evacuation, a trauma that lies at the heart of a classic like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The evacuation to the countryside links to a third, pastoral element of Britain's wartime inheritance, expressed in the phrase "Dig for Victory". This was the idea that by the sweat of honest brows, the British could somehow survive. Shovels and spades would also be deployed in the cities, to rescue the victims of the Luftwaffe's bombardment.
The Blitz, fourth, is an essential element of Britain's wartime legacy. After the 7/7 bombings in London, the "spirit of the Blitz" was referred to ad nauseam by press and public. In contrast to the near-hysteria of many Americans after 9/11, many Britons from generations born decades after the Blitz proudly advertised the stoical repression of their feelings in a fierce display of national character .
The fifth and final inheritance of war – perhaps the ultimate peace dividend – is the sustained sense of moral superiority derived from standing alone against fascism. Roosevelt's secretary of state, Cordell Hull, wrote in his memoirs: "Never have I admired a people more than I admired the British in the summer and autumn of 1940. Even the children seemed to realise that upon their indomitable spirit depended not only their own fate, but also that of the whole democratic world."...