Never Have So Many Owed So Much to Such a Fib

Map with scary-looking red arrows. Wikipedia.

I would have thought I knew just about all there was to know about the Second World War, from the grand strategic perspective. To my generation, the Baby Boom, it was the foundation myth, and so we devoured all we could about it.

But William Manchester and Paul Reid, in the recent final volume of their comprehensive biography of Winston Churchill, told me something I did not know.

It turns out that the Battle of Britain was not the big deal we thought it was. Win or lose, there was little practical possibility that the Nazis were going to land on British beaches at any point during the war.

It was the Royal Navy, not the RAF, that was crucial. The catastrophic blunder of Hitler in shifting to terror bombing was perfectly reasonable after all. The catastrophic failure of Goering to take out the RAF was no great failure after all; it hardly mattered. There was no real chance of the British government evacuating to Canada to carry on the fight.

The problem for the Germans was that they had virtually no surface fleet. Pile their troops into their quite limited sea transport, and they would in all probability have been blown out of the water by the vast strength of the Royal Navy as they bobbed in the Channel. Sure, air superiority would have helped, but it probably would not have helped enough. It was not a militarily viable option, and Churchill always understood this. His own notes referred to it all as the “invasion scare.”

The real danger was British complacency. Knowing they were secure behind their great moat, a right little, tight little island, the general population might have been happy to let the continent go hang, to avoid the bitter costs and suffering of a long war, and so to seek peace with the Nazis after the fall of France. Churchill, probably quite rightly, felt this would be a disastrous as well as an ignoble policy in the long run, a Munich writ larger by a factor of ten.

And so he spun a good story. One so good we have hung on to it ever since.