Dan Snow's History Hit - Britain's Fightback

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

Daniel Todman is a Professor of Modern History at Queen Mary. He has just published his epic study of how during the Second World War Britain fought back from near disaster to triumph. It opens with the fall fall of Singapore Feb 1942 and ends with Britain’s post war experiment in social democracy well underway. Speaking to him amidst the Covid crisis was particularly fascinating. I was able to ask just why states are able to do and pay for in moments of extreme drama. Dan always encourages me to think differently about the past. This episode was certainly no exception. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about the bombing war featuring James Holland and other historians, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV We have got a special offer on at the moment- use code 'pod1' for a month free and the first month for just £/€/$1.

Hello and welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got Dan Todman on the podcast on this episode. Dan Todman is a bit of a legend. He is a historian of war and its remembrance. He's specialised in the history of Britain and the Commonwealth and Empire during the two world wars. He's a professor at Queen Mary University of London and he's head of the School of History there. He's been on the podcast before. He talked to me on the 100th anniversary at the end of the First World War talking about how we remember it. He He's been on the podcast before. He talked to me on the 100th anniversary at the end of the First World War, talking about how we remember it. He's also been on the podcast talking about his giant first volume history of the Second World War and Britain's War, A New World, 1942 to 1947, is out now. His second long-awaited instalment of that masterpiece.

There's no one better to talk to about the Second World War. And in fact, it was very special talking to him during this corona crisis, because I was able to talk about the things that governments are able to do when they have to, in terms of reorganising society and the economy. As ever, you can listen to all these podcasts without the ads. You can exclusively, you can go and listen to all our back episodes. The only place in the world where they are is History Hit TV. It's our subscription TV channel. There are all the back episodes of the podcast on there, plus hundreds of history documentaries. Use the code POD1, P-O-D-1. You get the first month for free, and then you get the second month which is one

pound euro or dollar so go go and check that out keeps you company in these lonely and potentially quite boring times hope everyone's staying well out there thank you everyone for listening to the pod thank you for all the feedback and for those of you in the uk that saw me and my dad wrestling with his isolation on tv over the weekend thank you for all your kind comments he and my dad wrestling with his isolation on TV over the weekend. Thank you for all your kind comments. He and my mum are doing fine and I'm doing all right too. So enjoy Dan Todman. Go and check out historyhit.tv. Stay inside and wash your hands. Dan, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. A privilege to have you back on.

Absolute pleasure. We're talking in the spring of 2020. We're in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, the build-up. There's a sense of anticipation now in the UK. The government is spraying money all over the place, because governments all over the world are. And I want to start this podcast right there. Lots of people have been saying to me I didn't think there was a magic money tree. How do governments facing unprecedented challenges like those you see in the second world

war, how do they pay for guns and bullets and bombs and food and trains and aircraft, long after the current account has been cleaned out? Well, that's a good question. Basically, they do it by pushing the burden onto future generations. And that's a strength that modern states have, particularly when they can borrow at very cheap rates, is that they can spread out the cost over time. But obviously, that can create problems about what's fair and who's paying and

who's benefiting. So opening the money hoses is a really good idea. But it's always part of a political moment, too, because it raises questions about whether things are fair. Are those questions that were raised during the course of the war? Was anyone in Parliament, anyone in Britain, let's come to the Axis countries later on, but Britain, which still had access to global financial markets and stuff, bond markets. I mean, did anyone say, we've got to spend so much money? Well, it's an interesting comparison between the First World War and the Second World War. And the thing that the British state really learns, I think, with the approach of the Second World War, is that it should borrow a bit less domestically and tax more so that you avoid that question of the future debt hanging over the economy

after the conflict. So if you look at the way that tax goes up in the UK, even before the war starts, you see big tax rises to pay for rearmament. The other thing that's happening is control of money markets, so the government can control the rate of interest that will be charged on its bonds, and what other loans will be issued. So it's got quite a lot of control in that regard. And then internationally, of course, Britain can effectively borrow from most of the countries in the sterling area. So other countries that use the pound as the basis for their currency, countries in the sterling area, so other countries that use the pound as the basis for their currency, and it can do that on terms that it will set. So during the war, you'll see Britain borrow a huge amount from India and from Egypt, debts that won't be repaid until very long after the war,

and in some ways won't be repaid at all. And the question that's asked about fairness during the war is about domestic fairness, mostly, not about how the cost is being spread across the empire. Indian economists are very concerned about that. Egyptian nationalists are concerned about it. But the debate in the UK is, are the rich doing well out of this or are the poor? Is this incipient socialism? Who's going to own things when the conflict is finished, when the state's invested so much cash in preserving the nation. And actually, I think, so the very moment that we're talking now is a bit like 1939, the very beginning of the war, that autumn. You see a lot of panic buying, people acting in ways that seem to be selfish,

not quite sure what they want to do or what they ought to do because the government, they feel, hasn't given them a clear line and that soon creates a political moment where the government has to do more now the government might want to do more anyway but it's an interesting relationship there between demand and supply when it comes to state action you start your book in the nadir you start your book in in december 41 september 42 and and that's when the battle atlantic is not going brilliantly it's when japan comes into the war singapore falls one of the most embarrassing defeats of the british empire was there any ever a point during that period when the british government's credit worthiness was questioned uh no that's amazing

isn't it is that the kind you know, the long history of the fiscal military state stretching back to the late Stuarts and everyone trusts the British government to repay their debts? You're right to say it's about continuity. It's also about tremendous confidence in the continuation of something that you'll be able to charge some money to. So it might not look exactly like what you've got in the present, but it'll still be there somehow. If you look back to the crisis of the summer of 1940, the amazing thing is it's the point when national savings really takes off and goes through the roof. So there's lots of British people who, even at the moment when it does seem like a possibility that Britain won't win the war, are willing to put their money into the government, basically. So they obviously don't have too much lack of faith that they're going to get it back.

So that's one of the benefits of being a long-term great power, is that people have faith in your system still working. What about the Axis powers? What about Germany in late 1944, when no one on Wall Street is going to lend the German government money? So how does the German government make things happen? Well, one of the things that I think is really interesting and really helps to explain the whole dynamic of the end of the Second World War is the way that Germany keeps on fighting, even when pretty much everybody's convinced that Germany's going to lose. And you can see really, I think, from the autumn of 1943, that a lot of important elements within Germany think that it's pretty unlikely they're going to win the war. And yet,

the system keeps working. And partly it keeps working because it's one who's defining ideal is fight or perish. So, you know, the ideology is going to be keep going. And if the Germans can't win, then they deserve to go down in flames. Partly that means that you can keep exploiting the resources of occupied Europe more and more ruthlessly. But it's also because actually, I mean, there's also an idea that there will be something afterwards for economic actors within the German war economy. So, you know, industrialists by 1944, lots of them don't think that Germany is going to win, actually. But what they are thinking is, well, when it finishes, how can we still make sure that we've got some money, some resources, and things that we might be able to trade off?

We don't want to completely shut down, because that's the one thing that might stop you stockpiling more materials or something like that. So it's really interesting the way in which you build up so much momentum within a wartime state. It's actually very hard to stop. There's those accounts in the First World War of sort of industrialists and financiers going, the war will end on this date, because this is the date at which we've worked out that Germany will run out of money. And that doesn't appear to happen. Wars end for political reasons or military reasons. You know, the First World War ends really because there's a political moment at which the Germans realise they can't win. In the Second World War, even though

it's pretty clear they're not going to win, it's going to take a military, decisive military defeat for the fighting to actually cease. Talk to me about, you know, your book's called Britain's War, and you deliberately spend a lot of time on, not just at the battlefront, but well, all over the world in an extraordinarily comprehensive study of it. I meet a lot of people who go, you'll never believe it. But, you know, my grandma and my grandpa met, they were working like in a holiday resort. And they, you know, we assume that there was this unprecedented level of mobilisation. Everyone was in khaki and like the whole country was doing nothing except fight wars. How extensive was that

mobilisation really in Britain? And would it have been possible to be like Jane Austen during the Polar Wars and sort of almost live a life detached from war? Well about 55% of the adult male population is in uniform, a much smaller percentage of the adult female population. So that means that there are quite a lot of people who remain civilians and in comparison with other total war economies I think there's a striking degree of continuity. Lots of things that people need for a basic standard of life to keep going, keep happening.

An awful lot of daily life continues. What you see is a shift of a certain section of the male population, particularly in certain areas of the country. So if you're a man between about 18 and about 31, and you're in an area where there's not a lot of heavy industry or war industry, a lot of those men are going into the military. So there's definitely a sense that in those bits of the country, that something is profoundly different. But if you go somewhere like Clydeside, nearly all the men are working in protected industries, in shipbuilding.

More of them are employed, many more of them are employed than before the war. You're going to see some more women moving into those shipyards, although not that many. But the big difference there is what people are doing, how much money there is going around, whether parts of your city have been bombed, but not actually the sort of work in which people are engaged. So I think it's very regional. And one of the things that struck me writing the book is that although it's called Britain's War, actually one of the things you have to try and get across

is the variety of individual and regional experience. And it's not a society which is as connected as ours is. It feels very connected because, you know, you've got a big mass national newspaper market, It feels very connected because, you know, you've got a big mass national newspaper market, you've got radio broadcasts, you've got newsreels sharing visual as well as audio information. But actually people's experiences tend to be much more confined to the area in which they live. I don't think you can go through that war and not feel that you're at war because so many people are affected by it in one way or another, above all economically. So the standards of life, the things that you were expecting,

good or bad, before the conflict are altered by it. Like all the best modern accounts, Britain's war is strongly emphasised in the global role, the global approach of the scholarship. How important is the fact that Britain is able to plug into the global economy, global mineral deposits, whatever it might be, and Germany is, to a certain extent, trapped on the continent of Europe? Well, that's absolutely crucial. That's the thing that determines the outcome of the conflict, really, from the moment it begins. moment it begins. And in a sense, that's the reason that Germany goes to war, because one of the consequences of the First World War, lots of the totalitarian states that come out in that interwar period believe that war is inevitable. You've got to have the resources to fight the conflict. The way to get those resources is to go to war. But the problem that Germany will always have is not

being able to access a global maritime network in the way that Britain can. And although it's very expensive for Britain, although that maritime network seems to come under threat at different points, really, it's always the resources are always there. It's just a matter of how they're going to be paid for. And in particular, it's the ability to tap into US industry and US production that will make a really big difference. And, you know, for all that that is something which causes complications for the British state, that will ultimately lead to paying quite a significant price in terms of its control over the world's financial system, they're always pretty certain they're going to get it. As always, we read and think about history from our position in the present.

And now we're all thinking about governments and supply chain and development and delivery of ventilators or whatever it might be. I mean, are there people in the British government that you've identified that are the unsung heroes of the Second World War, that are as important as your Pattons and your Montgomery's and your battlefield commanders. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the

tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think you could look at people like Sir John Anderson, who's in his Home Secretary, he ends up as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he's Lord President of the Council during the middle years of the war. I mean, there's somebody who, although his views are very conservative with a large and small C, is seen as a non-party politician, civil servant, a bureaucrat,

but he's somebody who really coordinates this extraordinary mobilisation of the home front in a way that makes sure that big sectors of the population aren't disadvantaged in a way that endangers consent with the war effort. I think you could also look at some of the ways that industrialists and trade unionists and civil servants work together. I have to say it's a different sort of country then to the one it is now. I have to say it's a different sort of country then to the one it is now. It's easier for big institutions to take control and to manage.

The news cycle isn't as fast. It's more communal. All those things, I think, make it mean that it's easier to get consent. One of the things you see now is a real loss of faith in institutions, I think. And that means that sending out a coordinated message and expecting that the majority of people will follow instructions is just much harder. What the world needs now is not another hot take from a historian drawing contemporary parallels. But I think those parallels are dangerous in any case, because the world's moved on. The similarities, the points of comparison might be about the importance of international cooperation. And that I think is going to be a key factor in the response to the coronavirus

pandemic. Can the nations of the world work together or do they withdraw into isolation? It's a very clear parallel there with what happens in the 1930s versus the 1940s, so a shift to a much more international moment in the middle of the war. And the other one is the way that it completely changes politics and creates political opportunities. So the people you might not expect to step forward, if they're the ones that can seize this new political moment, then they can reshape politics in the aftermath of a crisis. Well, let's go there because you've raised it in your book, interestingly, for a book which is about the Second World War ends in 1947. So you regard the gigantic social upheavals and political upheavals at the end of the war as sort of critical to the story, clearly.

Why did the British people surprise everybody in 1945 and elect the first majority left of centre socialist government in Britain? Well, one reason is the long lasting anger at what was seen as the incompetence of the conservative dominated administration, the national government, which took Britain into war, and then was displaced immediately before the crisis of the summer of 1940. So I think that's the party which is seen to deal badly with a national security threat that can leave a legacy around its neck for a long time. And the Conservatives don't really recover from that until the very end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. Another reason is the way that a crisis makes people think about the

future. So what's going to come next and who they place their trust in. And it's quite clear that from the middle of the war, trust is placed more in a Labour government, a potential future Labour government than it is in a conservative alternative. And then the last, I think, is about whether people seize political opportunities or not. And I don't think that that 45 Labour victory is inevitable. I think some of the policies that that government ends up following about increased state action in the economy, increased state control, improved welfare systems, all of that is probably inevitable, because those are all the things you need to persuade people to fight in the way that their expectations have been set. But, you know, if Churchill had seized control of that agenda in the summer of 1942, when a lot of his advisers are telling him that he needs to do that, you could have seen a post-war coalition government led by the great war leader or by a different moderate Conservative replacement, somebody like Anthony Eden. And that seems fanciful now because we build our

expectations very much on the shock of Labour victory in 45. But all the way through the 20s and 30s, Conservative Party have been very good at stealing the opposition's clothes, finding out where the political centre ground was, occupying it, had a very efficient vote winning machine. So all of that stuff could have happened again in 1945, if you'd had the political leadership at the top to take it. And it's impossible to imagine somebody like David Lloyd George, you know, the Prime Minister during the First World War, impossible to imagine that he wouldn't have seized that opportunity. Because unlike Churchill, he gets and enjoys and is kind of inspired by the democratic moment in national politics. Churchill loves running the war, but he's never really that interested in democracy as a chance to grab and express the will of the people, I think.

One thing I love talking to you about is we often don't talk and sort of great man theories of history. You've mentioned Churchill. How do you think he comes up? You know, because obviously his apotheosis is sort of the summer of 1940. He finds the right language. He delivers some of the most extraordinary oratory and does some of the best politics in British history, mobilising the country behind the effort to stay in the war, what looked slightly hopeless at that time. By 42, when your next volume begins, up through and including the election, what is your, sorry about the big question, what is your judgment on Churchill's leadership? Do you know, I became more sympathetic to Churchill over the course of writing this book. And that doesn't mean that I liked him because

I'm not somebody who finds him an enthralling or even a heroic character, really. And I find a lot of his attitudes, even for the time, distasteful, slash disgusting. But he was somebody who had an extraordinary instinctual grasp for really grand strategy. I mean, he understood, I think, partly because of his experience during the First World War, the way in which national and international power could be developed. He was very sensitive to the changing nature of national power and how it could be wielded. And he was, once encouraged by his advisors, he was trying to fit all these different pieces of a post-war puzzle together. And that's incredibly complicated. So for anybody to try and grapple with it is in itself impressive. So how are you going to think about

the resumption of an ideological conflict with the USSR, the threat that that might pose to European security, what's going to happen to the empire after the conflict, how is the British economy going to be rebuilt, what compromises will you have to make with surging American power. None of those things are easy for him. But in the end, the way that he manages to play them all does put Britain into a relatively advantageous position. So it could have been much worse for Britain at the end of the Second World War. Not that it could have been defeated,

but things with the Americans could have been more antagonistic. The price that Britain paid could have been more. So just watching somebody trying to do all of that at the same time, you can't help but feel a sense of awe at the ability to try and just encapsulate it all at the same time, you can't help but feel a sense of awe that the ability to try and just encapsulate it all at the same moment. I don't think he comes politically out of the conflict very well. And you know that for those who think he's a great man, that will be a positive, right? That he wasn't somebody who was adept at playing party politics, even when he knew he ought

to. And you really see that, I think, from the summer of 1942 onwards. I think that's the bit where you'd say that he's not the greatest war prime minister that Britain had in the 20th century. The thing that makes Lloyd George so distinct is that in 1917 and 1918, he's able to do all of those things that Churchill's doing. He fiddles a bit less with strategy and interferes less with the military. And what that does is free up this space to also think about the politics of reconstruction. And politically, that's, I think, a much more impressive performance than Churchill manages. The sort of poetic arc of the Churchill story, this is this Victorian imperialist

who destroys the thing that he loves most of all, the British Empire, in order to confront an evil that he identifies as almost unique in the history of the world, which is the perverted science of Nazism. Is that a useful way at all of thinking about what Britain, its empire and Churchill goes through from 1939 to 1955? and Churchill goes through from 1939 to 1955. That makes it sound like a deliberate choice. I think plenty of people in the 1930s realised that if Britain got involved in another global conflict, there'd be severe implications for its national and imperial power.

But I don't think that they think of it in terms of a kind of sacrificial trade-off, that Britain will do the right thing by giving up the empire in order to fight Nazism. In fact, what Britain wants all the way through is to do both, to have its cake and eat it, as some people might say. You know, what Churchill wants is to try to hang on to the empire as much as possible, at the same time as recognising that he has to compromise with American power and want to defeat Hitler. And that leads to a lack of forward planning, which will have dire consequences for all sorts of people after the conflict, most of them Indian.

So I think had Churchill grappled with the idea that, again, it's accepted by most moderate British politicians that you're going to have to make significant concessions to Indian nationalists and put India on the path to independence if you want it to play a part in the war and that the wars transformed those, you know, that politics of what Indian nationalism and Indian independence will mean. You know, had he grappled with those in a meaningful way, there might have been a route out of India that didn't result in the suffering and carnage that you see in 1947. You know, there's lots of other factors there besides the actions of any one individual. Lots of factors operating on the subcontinent, which would have led, I think, to violence and horror in any case. But I don't think that you can sort of see this as a grand moral sacrifice on Britain's part. I think power is taken away from Britain, whether it liked it or not. You're talking about the world changing implications of the years that you describe

in the book. It strikes me thinking about it and reading it, that a lot of people like to look back on the summer of 1940 as foundational moment for the modern British state or project. Do you think it's the back end years of the war and the first years of the peace that are actually where our Britain, and to an extent our world, is shaped? What I would say is that if people understood this period of the war better they'd have a better handle on on everything that happens to britain afterwards and right up to the present day i mean it's a long time um between 1945 or 1947 and where we are now and maybe you know i would say that britain's v-shaped two or three times in the interim but i think what you get what you get from

studying this period is an appreciation for complexity. 1940 is very, very simple. It's morally simple. Are you a good guy who's going to stand up to Hitler? Or are you a baddie who's going to give in? And that leads to really simple answers. And when people imagine themselves back in that moment, they always like to imagine that they too would have been defiant. 1942 to 1947, there were no easy answers. And Britain's already in a situation where its power is going to decline, where there are going to be bad consequences, whether for the British people or for people over whom they have power. And it's about how individuals try to navigate that. So how do politicians try to keep some elements of national power by compromising? Sometimes they see the need to compromise in advance and they take action for it. Sometimes compromises are forced on them, whether they like it or not. the level of individuals grappling with this new and complex world. How are they going to react when new demands are placed on them by the state? How are they going to react to the

new opportunities or the shocking cultural changes that happened during the war? And if I can try and get across one thing in the book, it was that none of this is easy, and that people make their own path through it. Well, there I think there are really powerful lessons for people thinking about the present moment as well. Well, that message comes across. None of it is easy. The prose, the reading experience, very easy, I should say, Dan.

So everyone should go and buy the book. But the message, that central message is certainly there. Thank you very much, Dan Tobman. The book is called? Britain's War, 1942-1947, A New World. I highly recommend it. Go and buy it, everyone. Thank you very much, Dan Tobman. The book is called Britain's War, 1942 to 1947, A New World. I highly recommend it. I'm going by everyone. Thank you for taking the time. I know that you are leading the effort to pivot to digital, I guess we would say, in other industries, but you're now teaching your history department remotely. So good luck with all those efforts

and let us know at History Hit if there's anything we can do to help oh i really appreciate that dan thank you dan hi everyone it's me dan snow just a quick request it's so annoying and i hate it when other podcasts do this but now i'm doing it i hate myself please please go on to itunes wherever you get your podcasts and give us five star rating and review it it really helps basically boosts up the chart which is good and then and then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour. Thanks.