Jonathan Freedland: Enemies Within ... Even in 1940, At its Finest Hour, Britain Was Not United on the Side of Good Against Evil

Jonathan Freedland writes a weekly column for the Guardian. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, and presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series, The Long View.

The Americans have 1776, the French have 1789 and we have 1940. The date is not official for us the way it is for them; it marks no formal founding of a nation or republic. But the events of that year — specifically, Britain’s lonely stand against the Nazi menace — have acquired the status of a creation myth, the heroic and finest hour in which modern Britain was born.

Our children study the second world war in school and when we vote for our Greatest Briton we choose the hero of 1940, Winston Churchill. When David Cameron deployed his quasi-veto in Brussels in December, the headline-writers and cartoonists instantly reached for 1940 and the image of the solitary Tommy: ‘Very well, alone.’ Meanwhile, an unlikely Twitter sensation, with more than 200,000 followers, is RealTimeWWII, providing 140-character updates of what happened on this day and at this hour in 1940.

It’s not hard to fathom this centrality of the war, and particularly 1940, in our collective memory. It was, we tell ourselves, the moment — perhaps the last — when Britain stood unambiguously for good against evil. Others surrendered, others dithered, but we fought, even at a great and enduring cost in blood and treasure, for what was right.

That is the national, founding narrative of modern Britain. The United States has a version of it too, even if it does not enjoy quite the same mythic status. In this Saving Private Ryan picture of America, the US was the lead force on the side of justice, represented by a ‘greatest generation’ which played the crucial role in defeating Hitler. It was all but a matter of manifest destiny: where else could America be but on the side of freedom against tyranny?..