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see a free Poland, plus recognition of national identities in Austria-Hungary and in parts of the Middle East. There were vague references to a “League of Nations” in Lloyd George’s speech. His remarks were aimed mainly at British voters, but he was also directing his statement to the American audience. On January 8, 1918, in a speech to Congress, President Woodrow Wilson announced his famous Fourteen Points, which outlined a more expansive agenda: no secret treaties; freedom of the seas; free trade; reduced armaments; settlement of colonial and national ambitions on a fair basis; evacuation of territory seized in the war; and adjustment of frontiers, plus an international body to protect integrity of all states.

In spring 1918 the allied armies held off a last German offensive, and by summer U.S. forces had joined an allied assault that forced the German army back. With serious political instability in Berlin, and fearing for the collapse of his army, General Ludendorff advised the government to sue for peace. An armistice was declared on November 11, 1918.

In all, the great powers had mobilized about 56 million men, and the total casualties amounted to approximately 7.7 million dead and more than 28 million wounded. From Britain’s standpoint, another major global aspect was the participation of British Empire forces, and later of the United States. Britain began the war with its small regular army. A highly successful volunteer campaign drew a million men by Christmas 1914. But as the war dragged on, casualties mounted, along with criticism of Britain’s war leaders. Conscription was implemented in 1916. Compared to the U.K. total of 5.7 million, India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa provided 2.77 million soldiers and another 1.3 million auxiliary workers.

Several major developments altered British politics during the war. Generally these were emergency acts intended only to enhance the war effort and to be dismantled in peacetime. But the effects were sometimes long-lasting. In the first days of the war, ministers assumed dictatorial powers with the Defence of the Realm Act. This allowed the government to seize property and to control individuals in the name of prosecuting the war. The basic act had to be spelled out in detailed Defence of the Realm Regulations. These were in most cases rescinded at war’s end, but the process of legislative command followed by regulatory elaboration, a practice used slightly before the war, was employed much more extensively thereafter.

The executive was reorganized: a “war cabinet” of five members was formed, which oversaw all major decisions. Traditional cabinets, with 20 or more members, each operating more or less independently, were simply not considered capable of running a war. Consultation with the larger cabinet continued, but there ceased to be regular interaction with Parliament. In order to maintain more careful records and to keep track of complex issues, a cabinet secretariat (staff and clerks) was established in 1916. That body continued after the war and has become a permanent part of what is now regarded as a more “presidential” executive.

A cardinal feature of the war at home was the eventual involvement of the whole population in the war effort. After the success of the Ministry of Muni-

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tions, the government control model was applied to whole sectors of the economy: coal mines, railways, and shipping were put under emergency state control. An agreement was made with unions to suspend strikes in exchange for a guarantee of collective bargaining (1915), and while this was violated in a number of instances, the step was a notable one.

More important to British subjects was the degree to which individual lives had been subject to control, such as conscription after 1916. Meanwhile, daily life marked by rationing and regulation was also greatly altered by radical new developments. There were measures for housing and public health during the war, and there was a huge expansion in employment for women in nursing and related work and in replacement positions in industry. Within a month after the war’s end, the Representation of the People Act of 1918 seemed to acknowledge the huge contribution from all sectors of society. The road was open to universal suffrage.

BETWEEN THE WARS, 1919–1939

Although the victory in 1918 brought euphoria for a time, it did not bring peace for very long. The reasons why may be found in the settlement of 1919, the nature of politics in the 1920s and ’30s, the faltering world economy in the ’30s, and finally in the rise of totalitarian states in the period.

The Paris Peace Conference convened in January 1919 amid signs of hope and scenes of devastation. Added to the destruction and economic dislocation, there were massive numbers of refugees and the horror of an influenza pandemic that crossed the continent in 1918–19. Called the Spanish flu because of its ferocity in that country, the illness killed far more than the war, perhaps as many as 25–30 million.

In the peace conference, the Council of Four (Britain, France, the United States, and Italy) had the greatest influence, and a plenary body of the 27 states represented ratified their decisions. In that larger body were representatives of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Separate treaties were drafted for each of the defeated powers (Germany, Austria, Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria), who were not invited to participate. Russia, which had become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was also not present. Each of the treaties laid down terms for peace, including concessions of territory, arms limitations, and reparations. Each treaty also had embodied in it the covenant of the League of Nations: a new international body in which member states promised to provide protection for each other, submit disputes to binding arbitration, and pursue general disarmament as well as solutions to a range of social problems. When the drafting was complete, delegations of the defeated powers were told to sign; there was no negotiation. Germany accepted the Treaty of Versailles in June, having complained that it was not in line with the conditions of the armistice. The German government was forced to accept the famous “war guilt” clause (article 231), admitting responsibility for the war. In turn, this was the pretext for levying heavy reparations and drastically limiting German arms and military strength. The other four treaties were signed over the next 12 months.

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Britain’s delegation at Paris, led by Lloyd George, followed a policy between the vengeful French, led by Georges Clemenceau, and the idealistic Americans, led by Woodrow Wilson. Lloyd George had stayed at the head of his wartime coalition government, which won a decisive victory in the general election of 1918. This was derisively called the “coupon” election, for those Liberal candidates who backed the prime minister were given a letter of endorsement, which Herbert Asquith dubbed the “coupon” in a sarcastic reference to wartime rationing—a reminder that the government was perpetuating wartime alignments as well as capitalizing on the glory of victory. Lloyd George’s followers swept all others, taking 478 seats, while Asquith’s Liberals won a mere 28. The fledgling Labour party took 63 seats and proceeded to adopt its formal party constitution.

Party politics was not as stable as the 1918 results seemed to suggest. A number of scandals and postwar problems shook the government, and the Conservatives belatedly withdrew their support from Lloyd George in 1922. A series of elections came over the next three years, and they showed a rise in Labour’s vote and a fall in the total for Liberals. There was a minority Labour government in power briefly in 1924, before the Conservatives returned to office in 1924–29. Several key events highlighted this period.

When the provisional government was set up in Dublin in 1919, the British countered by sending troops to Ireland, and the unionists in the North refused to recognize the rebels. A period of raids and atrocities was finally ended by a truce in 1921. Meanwhile, the British Parliament had passed a Government of Ireland Act in 1920, enabling the formation of two legislatures; one had already been convened in Belfast. Late in 1921 an agreement was reached for the formation of an Irish Free State, a dominion with a governor general and with its own parliament responsible for domestic affairs. The more radical members of Sinn Féin, led by Eamon de Valera, a hero of 1916 and former president of the provisional regime, held out for independence and began an assault on the Free State government that continued for two years. De Valera would eventually return to regular political activity and head the government, leading the Free State on an independent political path, beginning with a new, self-proclaimed constitution in 1937.

The most serious domestic problem facing the British government in the 1920s was the reestablishment of a peacetime economy. This seemed to be well under way in 1919–20, because there was a brief period of growth caused by the postwar need to restore stocks of goods. In 1921 this momentum stopped, business faltered, and unemployment rose to high levels that only began to recede in the late 1930s. One of the most troubled industries was coal mining. Government had taken over the industry and had provided subsidies to mine owners during the war. When it tried to terminate the arrangements, the owners planned to cut wages, the miners opposed the cuts, and there was a stalemate. Several government commissions studied the industry and recommended reforms, none of which were adopted. In 1926 the owners prepared to cut wages as the subsidy ran out, and the miners’ union, together with its allied unions, declared a general strike in May. Its object was to bring the economy

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to a halt and force the government to intervene on its behalf. But the government instead used troops, police, and mobilized civilians to drive trams and fill in for other strikers. Winston Churchill, who was then the chancellor of the exchequer, published a government newspaper (The British Gazette) and directed other antistrike operations. After 12 days the strike ended, but the miners stayed out until the fall, when they were forced to return to work on the owners’ terms. The next year the government passed a trades disputes act, which prohibited general strikes and sympathy strikes.

The overall picture for the economy and for employment did not improve in the late 1920s. After the first majority Labour government took office in 1929 (Labour was in the minority in 1924), there was even worse news. A financial crisis meant choosing between cutting spending or increasing taxes; according to economic orthodoxy, the budget had to be balanced. A dispute within the cabinet ended with the resignation of the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, in 1931. However, he immediately resumed office at the head of a coalition government, in effect turning his back on his party in order to retain power. For this he was expelled from the Labour Party, the only sitting prime minister in British history to suffer this fate. The “National” government proceeded to end free trade by adopting a policy of preferential tariffs at the Ottawa Imperial Conference in 1932. But neither this nor any other economic measures were able to soften the impact of the depression. Unemployment doubled the already high levels of the 1920s, and it did not begin to recede until 1936. Pockets of destitution were tragic: some shipyard and factory towns had upwards of 70 percent unemployment. Strikingly, real wages increased throughout the years 1920–38 (by about 20 percent), but this was small consolation to those out of work.

Similar economic conditions prevailed in other countries, and in some of them the political consequences were alarming. By the 1930s there was an alignment of autocratic states—“totalitarian” in that they claimed popular political majorities that they used as a pretext to assume broad dictatorial powers. In postwar Italy, Benito Mussolini headed a Fascist movement that took power in 1922. In Germany, Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. In Spain, Francisco Franco led a victorious National Front in that country’s civil war in 1936–39. These ominous events formed the background for a major foreign crisis in the 1930s.

Britain in the 1920s had reduced its military strength, partly in keeping with the aims of the League of Nations and partly for reasons of economy. The government adopted a general policy known as the “Ten-Year Rule”—namely, that no war was expected for at least 10 years. Consequently, army and navy budgets were cut, the country agreed with others at the Washington Naval Conference (1921–22) that there would be limits on warship construction, and the process of general disarmament negotiations was given support in the years 1926–32. Besides this trend, there was an effort to fulfill the League’s goal of using arbitration to settle international disputes. That target was in sight in 1924, when the organization debated but failed to approve the Geneva Protocol, which called for binding arbitration for international disputes. Meanwhile, many states lost faith in the League’s ability to protect them, and a wave of

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international agreements were made to assure security. Britain did not enter into any of these, not out of nostalgia for “splendid isolation,” but because she did not want to be bound to any military alliance.

From about 1935, diplomatic and military concerns and threats began to change this picture, producing the British response of “appeasement,”—that is, a policy of meeting some demands so that there were fewer chances of open warfare. The main source of pressure came from the German desire to right the wrongs of Versailles. Why should Germany be the only power to be disarmed? Why should German territory still be demilitarized? Why should Germany not annex territory inhabited by Germans? These were views which Hitler manipulated to bring himself to power, and they served equally well to embarrass and unbalance his western diplomatic adversaries.

In 1935 the British government made a naval agreement with Germany, allowing an increase in German ships, limited to one-third of the tonnage of British vessels. But this came only months after Germany had unilaterally repudiated the arms limits of the Versailles treaty and had announced the formation of the Luftwaffe. There was little security gained for Britain, though there also was little chance that German naval construction would have been controlled otherwise. In 1936 Hitler announced that he was going to send German troops into the demilitarized Rhineland. Britain and France had no response to this additional treaty violation. Germany, meanwhile, introduced conscription and entered into military alliances with Italy and Japan (1936). By 1938, Nazi sympathizers in Austria and Czechoslovakia actively supported German expansion. In March a planned plebiscite on unification to be held in Austria was preempted by an unopposed German invasion and annexation.

In the next few months, German troop movements on the Czech border caused alarm, the Czech army mobilized, and talks were held on the subject of autonomy for the Sudeten Germans. But Hitler demanded the annexation of the Czech border, and in September British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Edouard Daladier flew to Munich to meet Hitler and Mussolini. There an agreement was signed to allow the annexation, and Hitler gave Chamberlain a signed statement that he had no further territorial ambitions. This proved worthless in March 1939, when Hitler annexed the rest of the Czech state. With appeasement a failure, Britain made an alliance with Poland, which seemed to be the next target on Hitler’s list. But in August 1939 Stalin trumped this with an agreement to divide Poland with Hitler. This “nonaggression” pact sealed Poland’s fate, and the subsequent German and Russian invasions signaled the beginning of World War II in Europe in September 1939.

Actually, the war may be said to have begun two years earlier, when Japan, with no formal declaration of war, attacked Chinese forces in 1937, seizing Beijing (Peking), Shanghai, and Nanjing (Nanking). Indeed, the Japanese had seized Manchuria as far back as 1931–32, capitalizing on the deteriorating state of internal affairs in China. But soon the Japanese government began a more ambitious campaign of expansion in the western Pacific, highlighted by the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines in December 1941.

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The British governments of the 1930s have been criticized for their foolish policy of appeasing the dictators. They had no formal allies, but they did begin to increase military spending in 1936. The “Ten-Year Rule” no longer applied, but the nation’s economy could not begin to catch up in the few remaining years of peace. It seemed likely that any policy that could stall the aggression of Germany was a worthwhile expedient. Unfortunately, Germany was not operating in a vacuum: Italy, Japan, and the USSR were eager partners in the race to expand and build military machines in the 1930s. Among the most outspoken opponents of appeasement was Winston Churchill, the former head of the admiralty and political maverick, somewhat of an outcast in his own (adopted) Conservative party in the 1930s. When the war began, he was summoned back to the admiralty in September 1939.

HOLOCAUST, 1939–1945

World War II saw far higher levels of destruction than the First World War. There was also greater loss of human life, far more of it in the civilian populations and much of it due to deliberate policies, including genocide. The later war was truly a global event, with very few places in the world untouched. This magnitude accounts for the more sweeping impact of the war on Britain and its empire by 1945.

Britain did not see major fighting for eight months after the invasion of Poland. This period was called “the phony war” by some, but it would end soon enough. In fact, preparations were begun as soon as war was declared; a “war book” had been created after the experience of 1914, and many wartime regulations were implemented swiftly. But there was little contact with the enemy. After Germany invaded Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940, a British naval assault at Narvik (April 13) briefly took that port; and an Anglo-French force landed in the south (April 20) but was driven out in two weeks. Norway fell in early June.

By then the main German invasion was launched (May 10) on the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Having lost the confidence of the House of Commons, Chamberlain was forced to resign, and Winston Churchill was appointed prime minister on the same day. He inherited a grim military situation: German mechanized units were conquering Belgium and overwhelming the French. Large armies were trapped near Dunkirk, and only by an incredible effort were 335,000 British and French troops rescued from the beaches (June 4). France signed an armistice on June 22, and Britain faced Germany alone.

The swiftness of France’s defeat caught everyone by surprise, including Hitler. He had no immediate plan for an invasion of Britain, and in any event he was only now in possession of airfields to use for preliminary attacks. A campaign against Royal Air Force (RAF) installations began in August, but before there was time to seriously disable British air power, the targets were shifted to London and other major cities in September. This “Blitz” lasted through the winter and killed some 43,000 civilians, but its military effectiveness was dubious, in that civilian morale was if anything stronger afterward. That experience,

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contrary to the apostles of air power, was to be repeated many times throughout the war.

The other major aspect of German attack was at sea, where U-boats threatened to cut Britain’s lifelines in the Battle of the Atlantic. The United States, still neutral, provided weapons and ammunition as early as June 1940; in September a deal was made to send 50 destroyers from the First World War in exchange for leases to British bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and the Caribbean; and sharing of American arms production was arranged in November. Further aid was authorized by the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, and large food shipments helped Britain stave off the worst effects of the submarine war. Britain had begun the war with 21 million tons of shipping in 1939. By summer 1941 shipping losses were estimated to be over 7 million tons. (It would get worse: over 800,000 tons would be lost in a single month, twice, in 1942). By that time the United States had launched a major shipbuilding program, and its navy was gradually patrolling farther into the Atlantic to protect convoys bound for Britain. In August, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met on a warship in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, where they signed the Atlantic Charter, a lofty statement of peace aims. The occasion was an odd one, given that America was still a “nonbelligerent,” but the meeting presented an opportunity for the military staffs of both countries to begin to work together.

Before the top-level meeting, one of the first critical turning points of the war came on June 22, 1941, when Hitler launched an invasion of his erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. This major miscalculation immediately created an ally for Britain, though Churchill found that dealing with Stalin was a special challenge. In any case, Britain no longer fought alone. In December the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor instantly brought the United States into the war. Several days later, Hitler declared war on the United States. Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that the first priority was victory in Europe, but that was not an easy proposition. Much to the dismay of Stalin, who wanted early attacks on mainland Europe, the Anglo-American allies began a campaign of defeating the German and Italian forces in North Africa, after which they invaded Sicily and Italy. These long and bloody campaigns took over two years, and the invasion of occupied France only came in June 1944. Within a year, the Western forces and the advancing Russians met in Germany, completing Hitler’s defeat (May 1945).

In the Pacific, the Japanese had conquered vast island and mainland territories by 1942. At the same time as Pearl Harbor, Japan attacked the Philippines and British stations in Hong Kong and Malaya. Britain lost Singapore and was forced out of Burma in 1942. That same year the United States began a series of naval battles and island invasions (Coral Sea, May; Guadalcanal, August; Solomon Islands, November). Advancing across the Pacific, the American were able to begin attacks on Japan and on the home fleet by the end of 1944. The most devastating blow came with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. These fierce assaults brought a Japanese surrender and the country’s occupation by U.S. forces.

When Churchill took power in 1940, he assembled a small war cabinet and appointed himself as minister of defense. This naturally put him at loggerheads

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with military commanders, and his active interference (including some notably dangerous schemes) forced intense debate, but most of the time Churchill acceded to the professional judgment of his chiefs. The British generals were fortunate to have access to German communications via the secret decoding of the Enigma machine, known as the “Ultra Secret.” It had been Britain’s good luck to get possession of a German encoding machine in Poland in 1939, and a special secret office was set up in Bletchley Park, where cryptographers worked out the machine’s operation. Intercepted messages were then deciphered and turned over to Churchill and the highest-ranking officers of his staff; the information was later shared with the United States. Allied commanders often enjoyed an advantage over their adversaries because of this intelligence asset.

Churchill’s deputy prime minister was Clement Attlee, the head of the Labour Party. That group had recovered from its self-destruction in the early 1930s and was now the second-ranking party. However, there had been no general elections since 1935, and thus it was seen as urgent to return to peacetime politics as soon as Germany was defeated in May 1945. The election was held in July, with a delay in counting so as to include the votes of servicemen. The stunned public—and their prime minister—learned that Labour had won with 393 seats. Churchill resigned and was replaced at the postwar Potsdam conference by Attlee, the new prime minister. The upset could be attributed to Churchill’s campaign, which compared Attlee and his socialist policies to the Nazi regime. There had also been a long interval since the last election, and the equally long memories of the depression era were associated by many with the Tories (or at least with the incumbent government).

Even as Churchill was being hailed as a victorious war leader, it was hard for him to avoid the negative impressions that the war had left on so many. While there were many more in uniform in this war (from 2 million in 1940 up to 5 million in 1945), there were fewer who died (360,000). Civilian populations had carried a tremendous burden, most of all in central Europe and Asia, where policies and programs had brutalized whole populations (Jews, Chinese, Koreans, and others). By those standards, British suffering was minor, though there was unprecedented loss of life and limb from enemy bombs, and 30,000 merchant seamen lost their lives. There were heavy losses of homes and material goods, topped by strict rationing, shortages, and scrap drives. Through it all, patriotism was not diminished, even on the Left, but there were rising expectations. The government multiplied its spending by a factor of six between 1939 and 1945, defying all conventional wisdom. Of course, it did so in large part by borrowing and raising taxes. The income tax was raised to a standard rate of 50 percent, and a purchase tax was introduced along with a compulsory deduction from employees’ wages and salaries. Early in the war Churchill appointed William Beveridge to head a committee to review Britain’s social services. Some 600,000 copies of his report were in circulation in December 1942. It elicited a powerful response: comprehensive social services were now seen as a practical goal— though not by Churchill’s government, which did not accept the report.

In foreign affairs, Britain had become a member of the Big Three; the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom. While it might seem a mark

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of status (and by 1945, many thought it was an exaggerated position), in the longer view this was a demotion. Britain had stood supreme 50 years earlier; and even in the 1930s, with her empire at its greatest size in population and territory, she had cause to feel superior. The events of 1940–41 had destroyed those illusions. For the duration of the war, it was expedient for the United States and the USSR to keep this valuable, but junior, ally in their company. Once victory was achieved, all that would change. But the first diplomatic task after the Japanese surrender was to make arrangements for postwar government.

This postwar planning had a long pedigree. It began in the waters off Newfoundland in 1941, when Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter. It started to take more practical shape in 1943 with the organizing of refugee and relief assistance in a conference of 44 nations (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration). In July 1944 the Bretton Woods conference (United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference) created the International Monetary Fund and a bank for reconstruction and development to stabilize currencies and exchange rates. In October 1944 the Dumbarton Oaks conference prepared a proposal for the United Nations, and its first meeting was held in San Francisco in April 1945; the 50 nations there adopted the organization’s charter in September. Meanwhile the great powers meeting at Potsdam in July and August had begun to arrange the terms of surrender and occupation of Germany.

Victory in the Second World War came at the cost of losing an empire and relegating Britain to the second rank of world powers. Hints of her former greatness were still visible, in her position as a great power in the United Nations, in her possession of atomic secrets, and in her “special relationship” with the United States. But these only thinly disguised a seriously weakened state. The war had consumed 28 percent of Britain’s national wealth and left her with a debt of £3 billion and a deficit in the balance of payments of £1 billion in 1945. The United States was her major creditor—a very special relation- ship—but lend-lease was terminated abruptly in 1945, and further loans would be needed. The debts in 1945 were all the more serious because so much property had been lost and so many foreign investments had been sacrificed in the war. These losses were the bleak background to the celebrations in 1945. Soon the business of postwar reconstruction was under way, and with it an ambitious new program of social reform amid a gloomy scene of economic distress, bread rationing, coal shortages, and currency crises.