Britain goes to war, part 1

As I'm sure you already know, this podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History magazine, Britain's best selling history magazine, and if you haven't had chance to get hold of our magazine recently, we'd like to offer you the chance to get a copy of our next issue, absolutely free. Please text the word "history" to 78070 to request your free magazine today. One of our team will be in touch to organise delivery direct to your door. This offer is available for a limited time only and only available for UK residents. So please don't miss out text "history" to 78070 to get your free copy today. Just a quick note, texts are normally charged at your standard network rate. Please check with your provider for further details. Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine, Britain's best selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Corthon. Today, the 3rd of September sees the publication of Britain at Bay, the first volume in a major new history of Britain's Second World War. It's written by Alan Allport, who's a historian based at Syracuse University in New York. In the book, Alan covers the years 1938 to 41, exploring the build up to war, the opening salvos of the conflict, and dramatic events, such as the evacuation from Dunkirk, the battle of Britain and the Blitz. In this interview with our editor Rob Attar, he offers his take on these and other key developments in the conflicts. Now because this interview explores the war years in some depth, we've decided to split it into two episodes. You'll be able to hear the second half in tomorrow's episode. Okay, so Alan, a major theme of your book is this concept of the British as a shy afoke. Could you explain what you mean by that and how this idea runs through World War II? Sure. Well, it strikes me that the war is seen by many Britons today as a war in which national character played an enormous role in the outcome of events. And in many ways that the book deals with these extremely dramatic first three years of the war, of the period immediately before the war in starting in 1938 and then going to 1941. What it tries to answer is three fundamental questions, which I think keep coming up again and again in the memory of the war, which is how did the war break out in the first place? Why did Britain do so badly in the first couple of years? And why, however, nonetheless, did Britain survive and go on to potential victory? Now there are a number of answers which are proposed for those questions in the popular memory of the war, but I think national character plays a particularly important part in that. And I've tried to describe that concept of a kind of mid-trial 20th century national character with this idea of the Shia folk, which of course is an illusion to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which were of course written. The Hobbit is written in the 1930s. The Lord of the Rings is written immediately after the second World War. And although Tolkien explicitly disavowed the idea that he was writing allegory, that he was writing about contemporary events, nonetheless, it's fairly clear that people certainly read into Tolkien's books, echoes of the real world and the recent past. Tolkien's Shia folk, you know, The Hobbits are very much a kind of affectionate parody in some ways of a particular way that the British look at themselves. So the Shia folk are in many ways very nice, gentle people rather detached from events, particularly events in far off places. Perhaps a little bit slow to understand the wickedness that comes from outside their own very parochial civilization. Ultimately, of course, in The Lord of the Rings, you know, they are stirred into action by heroic external leadership and they are able to win through in spite of the humble character, in spite of the rather meek appearance because of a number of innate qualities that they possess. A kind of inspired amateurism, a kind of ability, a sort of native genius for muddling through for stoicism in the face of hardship and so on and so forth. And, you know, it strikes me and it struck people at the time, you know, that there were obvious parallels between the saga that the Hobbits go through in Tolkien's story and the way in which the British remember the Second World War, they remember their own part in the Second World War. Like all myths, one of the reasons why I think it's been so successful is because it's not completely untrue. There is a kernel of truth to it. There are sort of echoes of half truths at least to it. But I think it can also be deeply misleading. And I think particularly because the war is such a benchmark for understanding the British presence as well as the past. It's important to address these kinds of myths and to ask, well, did the British really survive the worst years of the Second World War because of their native character, because of their national character? Or were there all the reasons? Is that an unsatisfactory explanation in itself? And that is part of what drew me to write in the book in the first place. Now I wonder if we could talk a little bit about Britain prior to the war, just prior to the war. What kind of a country was Britain in 1938, early 1939? That's a great question. And of course, the answer I suppose is, well, it depends which Britain you're talking about. Again, there is a sort of powerful myth which is invoked in a lot of literature and cinema during the war itself and then immediately after the war which presents Britain as the peaceable kingdom as some historians have called it. Again, the kind of Shia folk idea of event, very gentle, perocule, inward looking civilization, uniquely meek and mild in lots of ways and a little bit naive as a result perhaps. But one that is unprepared for violence that is repelled by violence, finds it mystifying how to understand. And again, you know, there are elements of pre-war British life that sort of that have an association with that. It's not that it's completely untrue. Certainly, you know, we look back at the 1930s today and we look at the aggregate crime statistics and so forth. And we do see a country which in many ways seems very much more at peace with itself. On the other hand, however, of course, that leaves out an enormous amount. One of the reasons why the book begins with a few chapters which you might call this sort of state of the nation chapters, to sort of think about, you know, what was Britain like on the eve of the Second World War. One of the reasons why I start the first chapter deliberately not in England or indeed in Great Britain at all, but I started in Northern Ireland. It's because it's a part of the story which gets almost completely overlooked. Northern Ireland was just as much a constituent part of the United Kingdom in 1939 as Yorkshire or sorry or anywhere else. And yet it's a very, very different story. This is not a shy of folkland. This is a place of sectarian division, of a great deal of violence, much of which is inspired by the state or at least the state turns of blind eye to it. It's a country of state mandated apartheid in lots of ways in which the Catholic population is very much treated as the second class population with second class citizenship. It's a surveillance state which has extraordinary powers of policing and the ability to intervene in the lives of ordinary people. It's a place in lots of ways which looks an awful lot more like Mussolini's Italy than, for example, or Franco's Spain than it does this kind of image of a very gentle Liberal Britain. Now it's not the whole truth any more than anything else is the whole truth, but it is a different way of thinking about Britishness. Plenty of people thought the Second World War for a kind of idea of Britishness, which most of us would probably find unrecognizable today. And it's not that that version of Britishness was any more authentic or inauthentic than the one that we have, it was just different. And we need to understand historians, of course, are always banging on about the fact that we need to remember that the people at the past were not like us, even though some of the language and phraseology and images that they may have used were maybe very similar, but they understood these things in different ways. The British in 1939 did not fight the Second World War for exactly the same set of values that we regard as being paramount today. And we need to understand that in order to be able to understand how they got into the war in the first place. And to some extent ultimately, to understand how they got through it. Now, one of the key figures in the early part of your book is, of course, Neville Chamberlain, who's long been characterised as the architect of the disastrous appeasement policy. But what's your take on him? And do you think that the criticisms of him that last until today are fair? Well, that's a great question. And Chamberlain seems to be there appears to be only two politicians, historical politicians who exist anymore, Churchill and Chamberlain. And they existed this sort of permanent kind of manachee and opposition to one another. So if a politician is compared with favourably with someone in the past, they're compared with Churchill. If they're compared unfavorably, they're compared with Chamberlain. And nobody else actually exists. I found actually reading about Chamberlain because he was the wartime prime minister about whom I probably knew least when I started the project. I found reading about him fascinating because the real Chamberlain is very, very different, both for good and bad reasons than the kind of the popular caricature. Chamberlain is perceived today as having been an extremely weak, rather frail kind of leader, rather sort of woolly minded. Again, there is this idea that he sort of exemplified some of the worst characteristics of the Shia focus, overly gentle, overly naive, too willing to believe the lies of others and so forth. Chamberlain is not that is not the Chamberlain that people saw at the time. One of his contemporaries in the Commons described him as a man of steel. And that was very much the way that both his friends and his enemies actually saw him. A man of extremely uncompromising values, he was a tyrant in many ways over the conservative party and over the House of Commons. Someone described his debating style in the Commons as being dropping a bunch of bricks on top of you and seeing what happens. One of the reasons he was detested by the Labour Party was because of his unrelenting approach to them. He described them as scum. He refused to compromise in lots of ways with the Labour opposition. Chamberlain had many of the characteristics that we now regard as being those the politicians ought to have. He's a principal man. He's a man of conviction. He is a man who believes very much in his own iron will and his own destiny. He believes, just as Winston Churchill believed, that he and he alone is the man who is destined to save the British Empire in the 1930s. And his failures and his follies, and he has plenty often to be sure, come from that, not from weakness, but from a very, perhaps an over self-regard for his own abilities. And a determination that he is right, that he uniquely understands the situation. And that he is the man of destiny who is there to lead Britain when others cannot see the dangers. So after the failure of appeasement and then the German invasion of Poland war breaks out in September 1939, what was the public response in Britain to the outbreak of war? Well, when war breaks out in September 1939, it's very different to the situation that it existed when war broke out in August 1914, so a generation before. When the first world war had broken out, it had been a genuine shock in that Britain a few weeks earlier had been apparently at peace and suddenly it finds itself engulfed in a war. It's a very different situation in 1939 because in many ways Britain has been drifting to war for some time before then. One of the reasons why I began my book in 1938 rather than 1939 is because you can argue that effectively by say mid to late 1938, Britain is in a kind of quasi-war time situation anyway. Certainly in terms of its rearmament program and its military preparations for war, it is in a semi-war time state. This again is sort of with your question about Chamberlain. The popular view of Chamberlain is that he completely neglected all military preparations for the war, that he sort of naively assumed that everything would be for the best, and that Britain found itself completely wrong-fussed when it actually found itself at war in September 1939. Well, this is an enormous caricature. Chamberlain had embarked upon a very ambitious rearmament program which had gone on for several years and was really beginning to hit its stride by 1938. Indeed, one of the reasons why Chamberlain was so eager to try and still find a deal with Hitler by 1938 was because of the cost of Britain's rearmament program and because of the fact that he was terrified about the effect that this was going to have on the economy and on society as a whole. So in many respects, Britain has been gearing up for war for quite some time, large military expenditures. The program of air raid precautions, ARP, has been mobilised for some time. The public has been deluged for a long time with warnings about air raids, about what to do and so on and so forth. Conscription, military conscription had been introduced in the spring. The crisis over Poland, which is the approximate reason for the war, had been dragging on for months. So when war breaks out, of course, in many ways it's not particularly surprising. Many people are simply resigned to it. When the actual first weeks of the war are a puzzle, however, in that everything that was supposed to happen doesn't happen. Everyone had been had anticipated that the opening days of the war, even the hours of the war, would begin with massive air raids against London and other British cities, the expectations were that there would be hundreds of thousands of casualties within the first 24, 48 hours. There would be huge numbers of people, millions of people would be fleeing the cities, panic stricken. There would be massive numbers of mental health casualties as people broke down, psychologically onto the stress of bombing. All of these fears, and these were both popular fears and also fears which to some extent were believed by the elite class as well. There had been serious preparations for catastrophic opening days of the war in which local councils would be required to bury bodies on mass in mass graves with with lime and cardboard coffins and so on and so forth. And of course, none of this happens at all. The outbreak of war is greeted with an air raid warning which turns out to be a false alarm and no German planes appear over British skies for many months to come. Instead, you've got this peculiar situation which later becomes known as the Fony War, or at the time it was the Boar War BORRE in which all the fighting such as it exists takes place overseas, takes place in Poland. There's a little bit of fighting on the high seas in which Britain is generally successful. But other than that, not much is going on and this period really stretches out for another seven or eight months. And it's one in which you get curious tensions which actually remind me a little bit in a funny kind of way of the last year in Britain. People are always comparing the current situation, the current crisis with the blitz, which I don't really think is quite right. I think in some ways you can compare our current situation more to the Fony War in which there's definitely a kind of threat, but it's a rather it's a somewhat inculporial threat. It's hard to ignore bombs falling on your house, but the threat that exists during the Fony War is a little vega. A lot of people don't believe in it. A lot of people feel that the literally that the war is either a kind of fiction or that it is something that is going to go away very shortly that some kind of deal will be done with the Germans. And what you have is the situation where again somewhat analogous with today is that you have a great deal is asked in terms of sacrifices. So people have to embark on these rather cumbersome safety preparations. You have to black out your curtains at night. You have to avoid the risk of farmers being able to see targets at night. En rationing is introduced at the beginning of 1940. There are all these inconveniences that take place. And yet there isn't much of a kind of compensating drama to make it all worthwhile, to make it seem as though that these sacrifices are worthwhile. And by the spring of 1940, we're again, from a military point of view, very little has really happened at this point. You're getting increasing frustration. You see it in the press. You see it in some of the public comments as well about what's the point of fighting a war going through all of these kind of day-to-day inconveniences when it doesn't seem like we're doing any fighting anyway. So let's either take the war to the enemy or let's call it quits basically. Let's call it a day. And I think that sort of frustration both plays a part in Neville Chamberlain's ultimate fall because it's partly because of the sense that the government needs to do something, that it needs to sort of kickstart the war in some ways that the government is encouraged to start embarking on schemes which are not particularly well thought out. And the most important of these is ultimately the expedition to Norway in April of 1940, which can be seen in some ways as an attempt to try and do something even though it's military virtues are right from the beginning are somewhat questionable. And it's the failure of that Norway campaign which in part ultimately leads to Chamberlain's fall and Churchill's rise to power. Still to come on the history extra podcast. I think in many ways the popular memory of 1940 is one in which French defeat is almost seen as being a good thing. It's been something that allows the British to return to their own nasi-genius to be able to fight the war on their own terms rather than those of having to rely on a very unreliable continental partner. Now of course the big event happens later in the spring of 1940 when Nazi Germany invades France and we have this great battle and you've described the fall of France in your book as the single most consequential event in the 20th century which I thought was a really interesting phrase and I just wonder why you feel that was such an important moment. Well I certainly won't claim in any way to have come up with that idea. David Reynolds has described the fall of France famously as the fulcrum point of the 20th century and I agree with him. The thing about the fall of France is that in some ways it's the most over-determined event in the Second World War. In the sense that people tend to write it off as an inevitability. They tend to assume that in some ways it was bound to happen right from the very beginning that the opening months of the war are just this sort of prologue that we need to get through in order for France to inevitably fall inevitably collapse and then get on with the with the main events. Now that's certainly not the way it's seen at the time and I don't think that the evidence stacks up well with regard to that either. France had the most powerful army in the world in 1939. France was one of the great powers of the world. France had gone through an enormous ordeal, military ordeal in the First World War and had prevailed. In many ways what happens in 1940 is that the Germans take an enormous risk in attacking France at a point in which they are in many ways much weaker in 1940 than they had been say in 1914 for instance. Hitler is aware of the fact that he's very well aware of Germany's weaknesses that it doesn't really have the army that he would like that Germany is facing in a number of economic difficulties and he feels that he must strike out. He must take this all or nothing gamble which is very much his approach to war and politics and risk all on the throw of a dice. And as it turns out the dice come up in his favor. The French for although in many ways they do have a strong position in 1940, their weakness is I think is greatly exaggerated but they make a number of operational decisions which prove to be extremely unfortunate given the decisions that the Germans have made. Essentially everything the Germans do just happens to turn out in the right way and everything that the French do just happens to turn out in the wrong way. It's not difficult however to see a few small relatively minor decisions that had gone the other way that the Battle of France would have turned out very differently and to sort of get back really to your original question about why this is so consequential. I think if you think about an alternative 1940 I think that helps to explain a little bit about why it's so consequential. Imagine that France does not fall in late spring early summer of 1940 which I make the case certainly in my book and I'm not alone in this and thinking as it was entirely plausible this is not a far-fetched counterfactual. If France does not fall well first of all it probably means that Germany falls not too long later. Germany's chances in a war in which it fails to defeat France in 1940 are probably not very good and it's very easy to imagine the war ending in some form or another in say late 1940 or 1941 or something like that. But the more important point I think is that the war does not end as it does of course in real life with the military domination of the United States and the Soviet Union in Europe. The war ends with the original alliance partners Britain and France remaining in many ways the fulcrum of European power and for that matter world power much less diminished in their imperial power than they were in real life because of the very drawn out difficult circumstances of the war that actually happened. I think you also see a different story elsewhere in the world as well. If France does not fall then the future of the British and French empires remains much less clear because it's unlikely for instance that Italy would have gotten involved in the war which expanded the Second World War into the Mediterranean into Africa and second of all perhaps even more importantly it's much less likely that Japan would have taken its great gamble at creating an autarkic empire in East Asia and therefore you would not have seen the conquest of in French into China of British Malaya and Singapore of Burma and so on and so forth. So you're seeing an imperial polity which survives the Second World War in a much less diminished condition than it's actually the case. Now again with counterfactuals historians of course it's a slightly naughty kind of parlor game to take these counterfactuals too far. We don't know ultimately what the world exactly would have looked like if France had not fallen but it's not difficult to see it seems to me entirely reasonable to look at that potential alternative world and see this as being one which looks enormously different to the world that we actually had in 1945. We see a United States which likely would have remained much more isolated in the Western hemisphere much less focused on global events. We see a Soviet Union which would not presumably have dominated Eastern Europe and we see to European states Britain and France to world imperial powers which in many ways are going to try and continue on as they had done in the 1930s. So the the fall of France ends fairly ignominiously for Britain as well with evacuation from Dunkirk and in the book you contrast this moment to the thinking of a French ship that was also called Dunkirk and I was interested in why you chose to describe it in that way and to put those two events against each other. So the comparison I make is between Dunkirk of course the French town from which the British Expeditionary Force evacuates in late May of 1940 and Dunkirk which is the French battle cruiser which is sunk by a Royal Navy fleet in July of 1940 in Harbour in Algeria. Now in some ways it's meant to be a slightly provocative kind of comparison. But the point I was really trying to make was that there are two Dunkerks in 1940. There is the town and there is the ship. And which Dunkerque you remember is important. It helps to shape the kind of narrative of what you see happening in 1940. The British I think think about 1940 very much in terms of, again, national character and this idea of exceptionalism. And I think the kind of morality tale in some ways which is told about 1940 is one in which Britain has gotten into its difficulties by over reliance on a continental level. And it's on a continental partner that the alliance with France is seen because of the disaster on the continent in 1940. As seen in many ways it's having been a fundamental mistake from the very beginning. That what Britain does through the Dunkerque experience through it, evacuation back to the safety of the British Isles, brings its army back. And it's kind of release, a kind of liberation from European entanglements. And I think in many ways the popular memory of 1940 is one in which French defeat is almost seen as being a good thing. It's been something that allows the British to return to their own nasi genius to be able to fight the war on their own terms rather than those of having to rely on a very unreliable continental partner. During the last few years with the Brexit debate this was brought up often in not very subtle terms. Now of course there is a completely different way of thinking about 1940. And I do think that it would be who vocationally the British to think a little bit about the French attitude to all of this. What happens in July of 1940 when the Royal Navy attacks the French fleet is in many ways a justifiable consequence of the defeat a few months earlier. The British are reasonably concerned that France having surrendered that the French fleet will be turned over to the Germans that it might compromise their own ability to defend their home waters and so on and so forth. So I mean there is a plausible argument for why this is a grim thing that must be done. Nobody takes any pleasure in it. The British admiral who actually has to think these friendships later describe himself as a butcher, Churchill weeps about it several times and so on and so forth. But nonetheless I think the British tend to look at this in rather defensive terms and think well we really didn't have any choice. There is almost an overtone of well this is a consequence of your own failings. This is something that we were forced to do. The French can look at what happened in 1940 and certainly are not shy about seeing their own failures. You can look at the defeat as being an allied failure. It's not purely a French defeat. The French can reasonably look at what happened in 1940 and see it in many ways that the British never really taking the continental alliance all that seriously, which is one of the reasons why they send a rather rushed small military force to the continent in 1939. Rather than the larger land force which in theory they might have been able to prepare had they been willing to to think more seriously about their their their alliance earlier on. The French can again reasonably look at British actions in the spring of 1940 from the point of view of being fairly self-centered if not outright selfish. Not that the French view is right and the British view is wrong or vice versa. It's just that if we want to try and understand the war I think it would be useful to take a slightly less parochial attitude and remember that there are other ways of thinking about what went wrong. It could be argued that the defeat in 1940 is partly as a result of the British never really being willing to face up to the fact that France's fate and Britain's fate were connected in very intimate ways. Britain ultimately is able to survive French defeat so in that sense it's it is true that you know the French is full does not inevitably mean Britain's full. But as I was saying earlier you know what it does mean is that the outcome of the of the second world war for Britain because of France is full will be very very different and in many ways it will mean that Britain's role in the world will have to change in a fundamental way. In a way that it would not have had to do had the French the angle of French alliance prevailed in 1940 so again you know at the point I'm really trying to make is not to scold or to you know to to get rid of of one type two dimensional way of thinking about things and simply replace it with another one. The point is simply to reflect on it a little and to understand first of all that there is there is another point of view about what happened in 1940 which is no less legitimate than the British one and also that focusing too much on Britain and Britain's needs and Britain's own goals arguably cost the British a great deal in 1940. And not really thinking about European partnership turned us be a very very dangerous thing. And so once France has fallen we have this idea of what to use your books title Britain at bay Britain fighting Nazi Germany alone and obviously this isn't entirely true because there's the British Empire. But how important was this idea at the time in Britain of this England alone or Britain alone against the Nazis. That's a great question it's a rather hot topic right now because historians have been writing about this a good deal because of course it's both an interesting question and it's also one which has an enormous amount of contemporary resonance as well. There is an argument and historians such as David Edgerton have made it recently for instance that at the time the British always sort of knew that they were not really alone that of course there was this thing called the British Empire that was out there that was one quarter of the world's land surface and was an enormous global power in its own right. And the Canadians South Africans the Australians New Zealanders and of course the Indians enormous role in Britain's military power as well you know these things were all there. That there was the role of the the emigrate powers the governments and military forces that had come from Europe and so forth. People knew about this they were they were not naive and one of the reasons why the government was willing to fight on in 1940 was because of the fact that it was well aware of the fact that it was it was not just Britain fighting against the against Joe it's not just the British Isles it was in fact you know the the global Britain which was much larger and much more powerful. Now I think there's something to this on the other hand I think people also drew a kind of ironic consolation from the idea of fighting on the loan after all plenty of British historical myth draws on this idea of you know the the gallons. Particularly the English it doesn't fit quite so well with with a conception of Britain but but certainly the English I think can think of themselves as having been through this experience many times before they had been there in 1588 with the Spanish Armada they had been the against Louis the 14th they had been there against Napoleon of course in in 1805. And there was a I think there was a kind of way of being able to mobilize history in 1940 and say don't panic we've been here before we actually fight better when we're alone again this talks back to the this idea that the French Alliance has been a mistake in some ways you know that we do but we do best when we are you know when it's when it seems like the 11th hour when all all appears to be falling apart actually you know this is when our own native genius really shines through. So I think people went back and forth about it at the time really I think people were able to both think of themselves as being part of this large global Britain which provided power for them but also sometimes to reassure themselves by this idea that well actually you know Germany's made a big mistake by by by defeating us so badly because this is actually the kind of situation in which we do best. The thing that really strikes me about the this question about a loneliness is that it tends to leave out the United States we tend to focus about this exclusively about the British Empire and about you know the polls and the checks and the free French and so on. And we don't talk very much about the Americans. And yet it was the assistance and the cooperation of the United States, which was regarded by the British government in the summer of 1940 as being the single most important factor in being able to continue the war. The chiefs of staff were relatively confident that they would be able to hold out for the time being. So if the Battle of France is kind of overdetermined, everybody just assumes it was a foregone conclusion. I think in some ways, the Battle of Britain is probably underdetermined in the sense that everybody's convinced that it was a close run thing that almost certainly could have gone wrong. That's probably an exaggeration. I mean, it's not as though victory was absolutely guaranteed. But Britain was actually in many ways in a pretty strong situation in the summer of 1940 in terms of Germany's aerial threat and the possibility of an invasion. And the government sort of knew this. They knew that for the time being, they were probably going to be OK. The bigger question there was what would happen in the longer term. Britain relied to an enormous extent, especially following the fall of France, on active American cooperation. Of course, America is still actually a neutral power at this point. And the Chiefs of Staff warned Churchill that unless continued American assistance can be guaranteed, that there is no long-term ability to actually imagine a victory. And this is very precarious for a couple of reasons. One is because in the summer of 1940, America's neutrality laws mean that any material assistance that continues to come from the United States has to be paid for in hard currency. So gold or dollars. And Britain very simply is running out of gold and dollars by the late summer early autumn of 1940. And whether the United States will continue to assist Britain once it runs out of hard currency is not at all clear. It certainly doesn't have to. And whether it's willing to do so, is largely going to be determined on whether the Americans decide that Britain is a good bet, that continuing to assist the British ultimately is in the American interest. And there are voices in Washington that are raising real concerns about this, that continuing to assist Britain is just throwing good money after bad, that maybe the British are washed up anyway. And surely, at a time when, of course, the United States military forces badly need material equipment and resupply of their own, surely the focus should be on dealing with that first, and then worrying about the British later. Surely the best thing for the United States to do is to focus on Western hemispheric defense. And if the British can hold out, that's great. But if not, ultimately, that the Americans need to look after their own territory, they have to have an America first policy, of course. Which has resonances for our own time. And ultimately, President Roosevelt by very late 1940s convinced that Britain is a good bet, and that it is in the interest of the United States to maintain the British Isles free from Nazi domination. But again, there was no reason why this necessarily had to happen. It could have gone the other way. Had it gone the other way, we get into counterfactual territory again. And of course, again, you have to be somewhat hesitant about how far you can go with that. But it is very hard to see how Britain continues the war with a United States that withdraws further into a kind of neutral position. I certainly find it hard to see how the war goes on much beyond 1941, without the very least some kind of compromised deal with the Germans. So again, it's this question about the memory of the war is both overdetermined and underdetermined. People assume that things which actually could quite easily have worked out the other way were inevitable. And they also, I think, tend to regard things that probably were going to work out the way that they did as being a much more open thing. That was Alan Allport. As I mentioned before, we'll be resuming this discussion into Moro's episode. Alan's book, Britain at Bay, the epic story of the Second World War, is out now published by Profile. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Ben Youitt and Jack Bateman.