• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 769 0

Singapore489, but I hope we shall redeem it ere long.” Instead, however, bad news kept coming. On the fourth a Japanese battle fleet, ranging the Indian Ocean, launched planes to bomb Ceylon. In the days that followed, enemy aircraft sank two Royal Navy cruisers and the carrier Hermes. Mandalay fell, and it was plain that the British must withdraw across the Chindwin River out of Burma, into northeast India. Malta was in desperate straits, under relentless Axis air attack. Convoys to Russia suffered shocking losses from German air and U-boat attack. PQ13 in April lost five ships out of nine. Only eight ships of twenty-three dispatched in the next convoy reached their destination, fourteen having been turned back by pack ice. Churchill urged Stalin to provide more air and sea cover for the Royal Navy in the later stages of the Arctic passage, but the Russians lacked means and competence. There was also little goodwill. British sailors and airmen venturing ashore at Murmansk and Archangel were disgusted by the frigidity of their reception. Nowhere, it seemed, did the sun shine upon British endeavours, and the prime minister’s spirits suffered accordingly: “CIGS says WSC is often in a very nasty mood these days,”490 noted John Kennedy on April 7.

Even at this dire period, it was remarkable how many newspaper column inches were devoted to the needs and prospects of postwar reconstruction. This galled the prime minister. He expressed exasperation at having to bother with what he called “hypothetical post-war problems491 in the middle of a struggle when the same amount of thought concentrated on the question of types of aeroplane might have produced much more result.” Yet many ordinary citizens found the war a less rewarding, more dispiriting experience than did Winston Churchill. The present seemed endurable only by looking beyond it to a better future.

Articles and correspondence constantly appeared in print, addressing one aspect or another of a world without war. As early as September 4, 1940, a letter writer to the Times named P. C. Loftus urged that “this nation not be found unprepared for peace as we were found unprepared for war.” A correspondent signing himself “Sailor” wrote to the New Statesman on February 21, 1942: “Men wonder what they are fighting for. The old empty jingoisms about ‘Freedom’ and ‘Homeland’ no longer satisfy. There is a suspicion that all will not be well after the peace—that, after all, we are fighting for property and private interests.” The prominent socialist intellectual Harold Laski complained of Churchill’s refusal to declare a commitment to social change: “He does not seem to see that the steps492 we take now necessarily determine the shape of the society we shall enter when the war is over.”

Gnawing dissatisfaction extended well beyond the confines of the political left. “This nation has become very soft,”493 John Kennedy wrote sadly in his diary on February 23, 1942. “The people do not want to fight for the Empire. Mostly, I suppose, they do not care whether they have an empire or not so long as they have an easy and quiet life. They do not realise that German domination will be very unpleasant … I think something more is wanted on the political side. There is a great lack of any sense of urgency everywhere. We do not know what we are fighting for. The Atlantic Charter is not good enough an ideal up against the fanaticism of the Germans and the Japs.” Officers commanding two army primary training centres told a morale investigator that the great majority of their recruits “lack enthusiasm and interest in the war494 and betray ignorance of the issues involved in it.”

On March 6, 1942, an editorial in the Spectator declared: “The national fibre is today unmistakably different from what it was in those days of 1940 which the Prime Minister could speak of, in accents which carried universal conviction, as our finest hour. No one can pretend that we are living through our finest hour today.” The writer, like his counterpart on the New Statesman, felt that the British people lacked a core