The myth of the Bad War

It is 80 years since Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allied powers. In his speech broadcast from Downing Street on 8 May 1945 – otherwise known as Victory in Europe Day – Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, struck a suitably triumphant note. ‘My dear friends, this is your hour’, he declared. ‘This is not victory of a party or of any class. It’s a victory of the great British nation as a whole.’

Since VE Day, Britain’s role in the greatest and most lethal war in human history has changed and grown in stature. It has become key to our sense of national identity. It has given us the metaphors we reach for to give shape to our national character, our supposed Blitz Spirit, our ‘Keep calm and carry on’ stoicism. It has provided the heroic reference points, from ‘our finest hour’ in the skies above Britain to the collective pluck of the evacuation of Dunkirk. And, in the fight against fascism, it has gifted Britain a moral legacy and future purpose. Invoking the war has become the last semi-acceptable form of patriotism.

There is, of course, a strong element of elite myth-making around Britain’s role in the Second World War. We really were not ‘all in it together’ during the Blitz, as the urban working classes huddled in makeshift shelters and Tube stations, while the establishment retreated to the comfort and safety of their country houses. Britain was also guilty of many brutal acts during the war, from the bombing of Dresden to the Bengal famine, in which three million were allowed to starve to death, in order to sell vital rice supplies to the US and feed British forces stationed in Burma.

Yet, for all the wartime and later peacetime propaganda about a conflict that cost the lives of some 75million, especially on the Eastern Front, Britain’s war effort really was marked by courage, fortitude and purpose. The heroism of the millions mobilised across the empire should never be in doubt. In Britain and beyond, people really were fighting for something that mattered. For their communities, for their ways of life and, ultimately, for their nation. A nation (and, in the case of the colonies, nations-to-be) that was often very different to that of Britain’s ruling classes. Without this, without Britain’s determined resistance to Nazi Germany during the first couple of years of the conflict, the Allies would not have been in a position to push for victory after the Axis powers dragged the US and USSR into the war in 1941.

So, while other elite sources of national pride, of patriotic attachment, have slowly dried up since 1945, the war has understandably remained a rich and popular resource. It has been sustained by comic-book heroes, war-obsessed TV programming and book publishing, and a political and media class increasingly willing to invoke the fight against fascism to justify all manner of state actions, domestic and foreign alike. The anniversaries of the key moments – the Blitz, Dunkirk, Dieppe, D-Day – swelled in importance in the final few decades of the 20th century. And VE Day itself became a moment of celebration, a chance to wave the Union flag without shame, and to recall the heroism and sacrifice of our forefathers as if they were our own.

Until now, it seems. As Mary Dejevsky has noted on spiked, British officialdom’s approach to the 80th anniversary of VE Day has been strikingly muted. There was little in the way of pre-publicity in the run-up to this week’s commemoration, and no long-trailed programme of events.

Indeed, the first many of us became aware that the British government had arranged anything at all was little more than a fortnight ago, when prime minister Keir Starmer announced that pub opening hours would be extended on VE Day itself. And then, a couple of days later, the government quietly revealed that this year’s May bank holiday was going to double-up as the first day of a four-day celebration.

This ought to be a significant anniversary, especially after then prime minister Boris Johnson’s plans for the 75th anniversary had to be shelved due to Covid. After all, the war is now quickly passing from living memory. This ought to have been an opportunity to pay tribute to those surviving veterans before they all pass on. Yet the Labour government seems to have treated this anniversary as little more than an afterthought.

The events themselves have still looked the part. There has been a military parade in front of a saluting King Charles, and a Typhoon and Red Arrows flypast over Buckingham Palace. Union flags have dutifully fluttered on either side of the Mall, giving us a short reprieve from the Progress Pride flags. But it has all felt so perfunctory, as if officialdom has just been going through all-too-familiar motions – a feeling reinforced by the sight of actor Timothy Spall reviving his role as Churchill from The King’s Speech to deliver a stiff rendition of the wartime leader’s VE Day address.

The last-minute plans and the sheer lacklustreness of the anniversary events speak to something deeper than incompetence or poor organisation. It touches on our political establishment’s ever deepening estrangement from Britain’s history, its separation from even a residual stream of patriotic pride. Our political elites have long cringed in the face of most displays of popular patriotism, but they have always been eager to identify themselves with Britain’s role in the Second World War – eager, that is, to associate themselves with the ‘Good War’, to use the war as a source of present-day legitimacy, or to conjure up some sense of unity and nationhood.

But no more. It seems that even the Second World War, so long the central plank of modern Britain’s national mythos, now appears increasingly alien to our political elites. Such is its disconnection from the nation and above all its Brexit-voting, largely patriotic citizenry, that today’s political establishment struggles to celebrate this victory, apart from in the most superficial way.

This all speaks to the new elites’ awkward relationship with nationhood. It certainly hasn’t always been this way. On the original VE Day in 1945, Churchill was keen to stress this was a celebration for ‘the British nation as a whole’ – not least because he hoped to keep a lid on simmering class conflict brought to the fore by the war and the heavy toll it took on the working classes. And so, even amid the drunk, party-like atmosphere in London’s West End (which stood in stark contrast to the quiet restraint of most of Britain), Churchill’s morally charged address boomed out of loudspeakers and nearby radios. ‘The evil-doers now lie prostrate before us’, he declared to gasps from the crowd. He then barked out the archaic command, ‘Advance Britannia!’.

This isn’t to say that VE Day was always an occasion for elite displays of national pride. The 25th anniversary in 1970 was hardly marked at all. There was a royal reception at Lancaster House for former members of the French Resistance and British intelligence services. There was also a special service at St Clement Danes to commemorate the efforts of all those who resisted the Axis powers. But there was little beyond that. No parades. No flypasts. No sing-alongs.

Labour’s Denis Healey, then Britain’s defence secretary, explained the decision not to stage any national commemorative event to parliament: ‘We have come to the conclusion that such an event could not add to – but only detract from – the significance of the Cenotaph service on Remembrance Sunday, which represents the unique recognition of the ending of both world wars.’

The then government’s decision not to officially mark VE Day on any grand scale was driven by reasons very different to those at work in Westminster today. At that point, just 25 years after the war’s end, VE Day played a far less significant role for Britain’s political class. After all, Healey and most of his political contemporaries had lived through and fought in the war. It was a lived reality rather than a serviceable national myth.

More importantly, he was part of that generation of often working-class, grammar-schooled Labour politicians who had risen to power in the war’s aftermath. They identified less with victories on the Western front than with victories on the home front, from the creation of the welfare state to Labour’s 1945 election victory. They looked not to VE Day and the defeat of German Nazism for their patriotic myths and stories, but to the achievements of the labour movement.

Yet, while Harold Wilson’s ageing Labour government may have had little use for the Second World War, that was less true of the political establishment more broadly. Indeed, it was during the 1960s that the moral meaning and significance of the Second World War began to shift. Britain’s victorious part in it had always provided a wellspring of national pride. But as the Holocaust slowly and rightfully became the war’s defining horror, so Britain’s part in the historic struggle against its perpetrators looked ever more virtuous. This was no longer just a war, it was now also a just war – indeed, the ‘Good War’. As AJP Taylor put it in his 1965 bestseller, English History: 1914-1945: ‘No English soldier who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade.’

From that point on, the Second World War became ever more crucial to Britain’s political and cultural elites. The idea of the Good War, of the noble crusade, became the part of Britain’s history that spoke to them most clearly, justifying positions and actions at home and abroad – especially during the New Labour years, and often with disastrous results.

Not that the idea of the ‘Good War’ played much of a role in the thinking of John Major’s desperate Conservative government, when it organised events for the 50th anniversary of VE Day in 1995. Instead, Major’s politically and ideologically exhausted Tories were far happier seeking refuge in nostalgic national kitsch. In 1993, Major even gave a speech defining England with a George Orwell quote. England, Major suggested, is a nation of ‘long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and… old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’. Talk of old maids and warm beer didn’t exactly strike a nerve in the urban centres of 1990s Britain.

Major’s government seized on the 50th anniversaries of the D-Day landings in 1994 and VE Day in 1995 to push its sepia-tinted vision of the nation. It saw the anniversaries, as Churchill saw the original VE Day, as a chance to forge some sense of national unity, and to provide a tired administration with a bit of purpose. Unlike today’s government, Major’s was not shy in coming forward about its plans, announcing them months in advance. Still, the launch of the D-Day plans in early 1994 was a disaster. Veterans rounded on proposals for nationwide sandcastle-building competitions and even a Spam fritter cooking contest (a staple during wartime rationing). Celebrities due to take part backed away in embarrassment.

The announcement of the initial plans for VE Day in January 1995 went little better. Spam featured heavily again, as did officious calls for street parties across a nation loath to celebrate anything under the sleaze-ridden, recession-riding Tories. Amid widespread criticism, the government thought again, and came up with new plans. And so outside Buckingham Palace, on a warm, sunny day in May 1995, the 78-year-old forces’ sweetheart, Dame Vera Lynn, serenaded the royals and a crammed Mall with ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, while Spitfires staged a thunderous flypast overhead.

Europhile Major had been desperate to avoid it appearing to celebrate victory over the Germans, with Downing Street officials at the time talking up the ‘pro-European’ tone of the planned events. Hence, the focus on domestic wartime nostalgia, rather than victory over the Nazis. Yet nonetheless, as shallow and naff as Major’s appeal to the war was, he was still part of a political class that just about retained a sense of continuity between Britain’s ‘then’ and ‘now’. A sense that Britain’s past still had something positive to say to us in the present. Little wonder that in spite of the events themselves, the public still managed to find plenty to commemorate and celebrate on that boozy bank holiday 25 years ago.

In the years since, there has been a crucial change in elite attitudes to British nationhood and history. The idea that Britain’s national past has anything positive to say to us has slowly but surely become anathema among large sections of our political and cultural elites. Having long cleaved to globalist institutions, be it the EU and the ECHR or the IMF and the UN, they have come to view the nation, its institutions, its history and especially its own citizens, as a problem, an impediment to the realisation of a brave new progressive world order. They treat displays of patriotism, such as England flags hanging from a house in Rochester, with snobby contempt. And they view Britain’s history as a source of shame.

The elite cultural shift has been something to behold. In broadsheet op-eds and academic tomes, TV shows and movies, pundits and politicos are not simply critical of aspects of British history, pointing out the negatives amid the positives, the regress amid the progress. No, they are engaged in a one-sided, rotten-cherry-picking disavowal of the entirety of Britain’s past. They flatten out its history, reducing it to the singular evils of imperialism, racism and other species of bigotry.

And it seems as if Britain’s role in the Second World War has not been spared. Churchill himself is dismissed as a drunk racist, his statue the subject of activist animus, while the war effort has been reduced to an atrocity-laden exercise in empire preservation. The heroism of conscripts is erased, the ideals for which many fought are ignored. The elite myth of the Good War has arguably now been replaced by something just as false – the new elite myth of the Bad War.

All this has gone down well among a bourgeois left desperate to leave the grubby democratic politics of the nation behind for the gleaming transnational structures of the EU and assorted international climate-change treaties. But it has stuck in the throat of the majority of Brits who remain attached to their nation, for all its flaws, and soberly appreciative of its history. This is a division that has played itself out in several recent elections and, of course, in one famous referendum in 2016.

Having recognised just how unpopular this simplistic assault on Britain and its history is, Starmer’s Labour Party has tried to resist it. Starmer himself rarely seems to make a public appearance without a Union flag lurking, Triffid-like, in the background. Yet, as spiked editor Tom Slater has pointed out, Labour’s patriotic posturing rings hollow. Starmer’s attachment to the nation runs little deeper than flags and sporting allegiances. His is a skin-deep patriotism, one lacking in any political charge or historical consciousness.

This is hardly a surprise. Try as he might, he himself is cut from the same elite cloth as those decrying Britain’s past and attacking its nationhood. He is, after all, a politician who famously declared he prefers Davos to Westminster. A politician who consistently tried to overturn the vote for Brexit. A politician who would rather Britain was an EU member state ruled and regulated by Brussels than a nation state governing itself. No wonder his patriotism is so superficial, his national sympathy so shallow. It has to coexist with a deep-seated technocratic distrust of those who actually live and vote here.

This week’s muted VE Day anniversary celebrations capture well the tortured relationship our political establishment now has with British nationhood and its history. Labour is wilfully estranged from Britain’s culture and history, yet obliged to acknowledge it. This has culminated in a by-the-numbers events programme for an anniversary that one suspects many in Labour would rather not acknowledge at all.

Britain’s role in the Second World War may have been mythologised, its meaning constructed and warped over time. But right now it’s in danger of being deprived of any meaning at all.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.