All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [66]
Yet such triumphalism was premature. Germany’s 1940 victories created an enormous empire, but while this could be pillaged to considerable effect, it was administered with dire economic incompetence. Germany, contrary to widespread perceptions, was not an advanced industrial state by comparison with the United States, which it lagged by perhaps thirty years. It still had a large peasant agricultural sector such as Britain had shed. Its prestige, and the fear it inspired in the hearts of its enemies, derived from the combat efficiency of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, the latter being much weaker than the Allies knew. Time would show that these forces were inadequate to fulfil Hitler’s ambitions. If Britain at the end of 1940 remained beleaguered, Germany’s might rested on foundations more precarious than the world supposed.
Winston Churchill in the winter of 1940 persuaded his people that they had achieved something heroic and important when most were bemused to learn they had done anything at all. ‘The Prime Minister has been saying nice things about us fighter boys in the House of Commons,’ wrote Spitfire pilot Sandy Johnstone. ‘He says we have just won a famous victory although, to be honest, I don’t think any of us has been aware that there has been that sort of battle going on!’ Churchill imbued with grandeur Fighter Command’s triumph and the nation’s resilience under German bombardment. He did not, however, say how Britain might advance from defying the Luftwaffe to overcoming the Nazi empire, because he did not know.
Edward R. Murrow, the American broadcaster, told his CBS radio audience on 15 September that there was no great outpouring of public sentiment following news that bombs had fallen on Buckingham Palace; Londoners shrugged that the king and queen were merely experiencing the common plight of millions: ‘This war has no relation with the last one, so far as symbols and civilians are concerned. You must understand that a world is dying, that old values, the old prejudices, and the old bases of power and prestige are going.’ Murrow recognised what some of Britain’s ruling caste still did not: they deluded themselves that the struggle was being waged to sustain their familiar old society. The privileged elite among whom Evelyn Waugh lived saw the war, the novelist wrote, as ‘a malevolent suspension of normality: the massing and movement of millions of men, some of whom were sometimes endangered, most of whom were idle and lonely, the devastation, hunger and waste, crumbling buildings, foundering ships, the torture and murder of prisoners … [which] had been prolonged beyond reason’. Few of Waugh’s friends understood that the ‘suspension of normality’ would become permanent in its impact upon their own way of life.
Churchill’s single-minded commitment to victory served his country wonderfully well in 1940–41, but thereafter it would reveal important limitations. He sought the preservation of British imperial greatness, the existing order. This purpose would not suffice for most of his fellow countrymen, however. They yearned for social change, improvements in their domestic condition of a kind which seemed to the prime minister almost frivolous amidst a struggle for global mastery. Lancashire housewife Nella Last groped movingly towards an expression of her compatriots’ hopes when she wrote that summer of 1940: ‘Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled