Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [90]
This experience was a national, not an individual one, and it is possible to trace it throughout the British handling of the Second World War. Compared to the continental powers, Britain had always been weak in manpower, but strong in geography. She had traditionally fought her wars at sea, and used the profits therefrom to subsidize continental allies against her enemies. William of Orange had started the fashion by taking over England not because he loved the British constitution, but because he wanted British gold to fight his lifelong enemy, Louis XIV. The pattern he set had been followed for two and a half centuries. It was British money that raised coalition after coalition against Napoleon, and eventually brought him down. The British always made their military contribution too—Marlborough in the Low Countries, Wellington in the Peninsula—but they usually kept it secondary; they lacked the manpower to do more than that.
In World War I, this policy had gone awry. Germany proved so strong that she nearly defeated both Russia and France, and the British found themselves dragged increasingly into a large-scale land commitment in Flanders and northern France. It ended up nearly ruining her, and in World War II a major concern of her leaders was that they did not have the manpower that the United States or Russia had. Much had been made of the British preference for a peripheral strategy, nibbling around the edges as it were, but once France went out and Mussolini came in, Great Britain, as we have already seen, had little choice.
By the middle years of the war, Britain was relatively weak in men and resources, given the massive strength of Russia, and the even more massive potential of the United States. She made up for this by mobilizing far more fully than the United States did, and by being much more sophisticated militarily than the Russian war machine ever became. Through 1942 and 1943, Britain dominated the wartime coalition through her seniority, her experience, and her expertise. Unfortunately for her, her relative strength declined as the war went on. In 1944 and 1945, as Russia survived and turned the corner to victory, and as the full power of the United States was mobilized, Britain and British interests became less important to the conduct of the war. The ultimate effect of this was to go far toward robbing Britain of the fruits of victory that she paid such a high price to win.
Both Britain’s past and present were magnificently summed up in Winston Churchill. It is little disservice to Roosevelt, and certainly none to Stalin, to say that Churchill was probably the one indispensable leader among the Allied Powers. The product of a classical education and an already long career in public life and affairs, he was pre-eminently the right man at the right time. His leadership and oratory rallied Britain when there was precious little else for her to rally behind, and through the early years of the war he dominated the Allies as no one else could have done. Stalin remained a Russian rather than a world figure, and Roosevelt the leader of a neutral or at best still very junior partner. As the war went on, however, Churchill found himself outpaced by the growing strength of his allies. If he did not perceive the “Red menace” as fully and as early as he later said he did, he nevertheless found himself increasingly frustrated, through 1944 and into 1945, by the Russian and the American insistence on their own policies. Ultimately, just as the war was ending, his leadership was repudiated by his own war-weary people; even the British could