ADVANCE BRITANNIA: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945, by Alan Allport
In the annals of finest-hour mythmaking, there are two abiding articles of faith: first, that the United Kingdom bravely fought on “alone” after the fall of France, and second, that the New World ultimately came to the rescue of the Old.
The British prime minister Winston Churchill is the primary author of this narrative. In his memoirs, he claimed that not until Pearl Harbor had he recognized that Britain would survive the Nazi onslaught. With the United States finally involved, “we had won the war,” Churchill wrote. “The Empire would live.” Fighting alongside the Americans, he wrote, had proved “the greatest joy.”
Alan Allport skillfully subverts both these myths in “Advance Britannia,” the second volume of his elegant and unsparing history of London’s role in World War II. As he shows, Washington’s involvement was not an unqualified boon. Churchill had wanted Franklin D. Roosevelt’s help in Europe — not in the Pacific. Since their meeting aboard the U.S.S. Augusta in the summer of 1941, the American president had been urging Churchill to abandon Britain’s “backward colonial policy.” Compared with the conservative Churchill, Allport writes, Roosevelt was “a thoroughgoing Robespierre, a world revolutionary.”
Churchill’s “small island,” as the prime minister liked to call it, also never truly fought alone: To help pay for the war, it ruthlessly exploited its worldwide empire of more than 13 million square miles and 491 million people. Britain’s haughty imperiousness, along with the financial strain it caused, left the colonies vulnerable and meant fighting in East Asia would almost certainly menace London’s positions in Burma, India and elsewhere. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces swiftly fell upon Britain’s Asian colonies, including the vital island of Singapore.
Singapore had long served as a redoubt of clubby expat comforts, even as locals suffered under the abuses of imperial life. The English socialite Diana Cooper, who arrived in Singapore in 1941, worried that the colony had slipped “into a euphoric coma.” The economy of the Malayan Straits Settlements, of which Singapore was a part, was fueled by what Allport calls British “narco-colonialism,” a brisk trade in inch-long tin tubes filled with black opium paste. By the beginning of the Second World War, Malaya had 300,000 addicts.
Allport, a historian at Syracuse University, does a good job of including the perspectives of the victims of British colonialism as well as its perpetrators. When the war broke out in the Pacific, some 85,000 British troops there quickly surrendered, and soldiers who fled south along the Malay Peninsula destroyed fuel pumps and other property as they went — ignoring the local inhabitants they had pledged to defend. “That’s the end of the British Empire,” a young Lee Kuan Yew, the future prime minister of Singapore, was said to have remarked. Malayans, for their part, put up little resistance as they watched Japanese soldiers herd white civilians into internment camps.
Churchill had vowed that no British dominion would be “overwhelmed by a yellow race.” But the empire’s entrenched bigotry blinded it to the vulnerability of its Asian possessions. Still, Allport writes, “the problem with focusing exclusively on Churchill’s personal sins is not that it is unfair to him: It is that doing so lets the rest of the British people off the hook.” A racist imperial politics suffused every aspect of British life. Scottish soldiers harassed Black servicemen for dancing with white women; a senior British officer derided Japanese soldiers as “subhuman specimens.”
Roosevelt’s intentions were not entirely pure either. In Allport’s telling, the American leader’s rhetoric about self-determination, while genuinely felt, also masked his ambitions to dominate the postwar order. An increasingly assertive Washington had come to resent “the last tiresome motions of an independent British foreign policy,” Allport writes.
Again and again Washington clashed with London over policy in Asia and the Mediterranean. American efforts to bolster Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist forces, for instance, were partly motivated by a desire to control trade in the region. By the final years of the war, Allport observes, the so-called special relationship had morphed into one of “patron and client.”
Allport is a fluid writer, a conjurer with the rare ability to sustain a gripping narrative without resorting to Vaseline-lensed sentimentality. He overturns one piece of conventional wisdom after another — quarrelsome, occasionally, to a fault. In the first volume in the series, “Britain at Bay,” Allport is so truculent that he sometimes seems like the uncle who will argue anything at the family table just to get a rise out of grandfather. This second volume is smoother and more measured, less jarring if more conventional.
In a book about a global conflict, there are drawbacks to Allport’s narrow focus on Britain’s role alone. By the end of the war, American policymakers had increasingly marginalized British commanders. Even a pivot point as consequential as the choice to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, Allport acknowledges, “falls outside the scope of this story,” though he does note that the world’s first government nuclear weapons program had been started by British scientists.
The introduction of American troops and leadership — of American might — ultimately validated Churchill’s greatest fears about his empire’s vulnerability. Allport’s title, “Advance Britannia” — an exhortation from the prime minister’s speech celebrating the end of the war in Europe — rings with irony.
“Our Oriental Empire has been liquidated, our resources have been squandered,” Churchill later remarked. “Our influence among the nations is now less than it has ever been in any period since I remember.” Allport’s unblinking history shows us why that happened: Having treated so many in foreign lands with neglect instead of generosity, as vassals instead of partners, the British had ensured their own decline before the fighting began.
ADVANCE BRITANNIA: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945 | By Alan Allport | Knopf | 631 pp. | $40
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