UK

UK

1. Introduction

At 1100 on Sunday 3 September 1939, the UK's ultimatum to Germany expired and, for the second time in 21 years, the two countries were at war. The mood of sombre determination with which the UK entered the Second World War—in marked contrast to the rapturous en thusiasm people had displayed in August 1914—reflected not only apprehension about the future but also a recognition of the failure of British policies and British politicians over the previous decade.

Between 1931 and 1935 the UK's global security was shattered by the appearance of three potential enemies. Japan's invasion of Manchuria in September 1931 (see Manchukuo), Hitler's accession to power in Germany in January 1933, and Italy's attack on Abyssinia in October 1935 produced a situation in which appeasement of one or more of these ambitious powers was unavoidable. The contemporaneous collapse of the European security system, marked by Germany's withdrawal from the Geneva disarmament conference in October 1933, the re-militarization of the Rhineland on 7 March 1936 and the discrediting of the League of Nations in the wake of Japanese aggression in Manchuria and the Italian conquest of Abyssinia, caused British politicians to focus their efforts on Germany as the greatest threat. To meet it, the UK developed a dual policy of arms limitation and appeasement. Both Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) and Neville Chamberlain sought to allay Germany's ruffled feelings, return it to the international fold, and at the same time prevent an arms race.

Between 1934 and 1936, when the occupation of the Rhineland signalled the start of a more aggressive phase in German policy, the UK put much of its faith in the parity deterrent: a policy of limited bomber construction at a rate Germany could not outpace which was calculated to deter Hitler from unilateral repudiation of the 1919Versailles settlement. Hitler's announcement of German rearmament in March 1935, and his claim that the Luftwaffe was already the equal of the RAF, vitiated this policy, though the conclusion of an Anglo-German naval agreement in June 1935 and the temptation of a western air pact (which was never secured) encouraged British statesmen to put continued faith in the prospects for arms limitation.

Events in the Rhineland and Abyssinia, combined with the evident bankruptcy of the parity deterrent, forced a reconsideration of British defence policy; in December 1937 the government allocated £1,500,000,000 for defence over the next five years and switched priority from bombers to an integrated air defence system. At the same time, Chamberlain made it plain that the UK was prepared to see possibly extensive changes in Austria and Czechoslovakia in Germany's favour, provided they were achieved by peaceful means. This policy was influenced by the hostility of the Dominions to any war in Europe and by Chamberlain's desire to avoid unrestrained rearmament, which would distort the British economy and mean the loss of exports. It was also the preference of a man with a profound horror of war who misread the temper of his opponent.

After Germany's absorption of Austria on 12 March 1938 it became plain that Czechoslovakia was next on Hitler's shopping list. Military unreadiness and the UK's detachment from European affairs in general and eastern Europe in particular led to the Munich agreement of 30 September 1938—the high point of appeasement and the low-water mark of British foreign policy. After the Anschluss rearmament was at last allowed to go ahead unfettered; but in March the British Chiefs of Staff decided that nothing could be done to help Czechoslovakia (not least because they were unwilling to enter into military conversations with the French) and thereafter they urged the government to appease the UK's opponents. British policy at Munich was in part the inescapable consequence of military vulnerability: in September 1938, the cabinet knew that the Luftwaffe could not launch the much-feared ‘knock-out blow’ from the air, but it was also aware that British air defences were still in disarray (only four radar stations were operational and all the guns on Spitfires needed modification before they could fire at heights at which German bombers would probably be encountered). A second strand in British policy was the view that Germany had a moral right to the Sudetenland. Whether the Munich agreement was also a conscious policy of buying time remains debatable.

Chamberlain's return from Munich with ‘peace in our time’ was greeted with popular relief; but he remarked privately to Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, that in three months the wild celebrations would be over. His pessimism was fully justified. Germany's occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939 demonstrated that British policies could neither deter Hitler nor assuage his mounting territorial appetite. Guarantees to Poland and Romania in March, the imposition of conscription in April and the rapid development of joint military plans with France signalled a late turn in the UK's attitude. By July the final details of the concentration areas of the British Expeditionary Force in France had been agreed. Already, in February 1939, the Chiefs of Staff had evolved a long-term strategy for war against Germany which involved exerting economic pressure (see economic warfare), building up British strength, and using command of the sea to strike at vulnerable points.

In 1938, Chamberlain had regarded war against Germany to preserve the European balance of power as ‘preventive war’ and had opposed it; in September 1939, faced with the German invasion of Poland (see Polish campaign) and a tide of national anger, he was forced to commit a country which was by no means fully prepared to a war in defence of France, of the concept of a European balance of power, and ultimately, of democracy.

John Gooch

2. Domestic life, war effort, and economy

(a) Attitudes on the home front

As people in the UK perceived it, the war presented several distinct phases:1. September 1939– April 1940: the phoney war when mobilization seemed sluggish, unemployment remained high, and, in the absence of major war news, the pacifist minority was still quite numerous and vocal. However, the mass evacuation of children and the imposition of a blackout at nights meant sharp departures from peace-time normality.2. April 1940– May 1941: military disaster in the Norwegian campaign precipitated a political crisis in which the Conservative prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, despite his party's huge parliamentary majority, was forced into resignation on 10 May 1940. On that very day, the German Army moved into the Low Countries (see FALL GELB). Its rapid successes produced an atmosphere of extreme urgency, in which the new ruling coalition led by Churchill had to be seen to act decisively. An extension of the Emergency Powers Act introduced the previous year gave the government, from 22 May 1940, ‘complete control over persons and property, not just some persons of some particular class of the community, but of all persons, rich and poor, employer and workman, man or woman, and all property,’ as Attlee, now deputy prime minister, explained to the Commons. The leading trade unionist, Ernest Bevin, who was appointed Minister of Labour by Churchill, could now direct any person to do any job, and set wages, hours, and conditions. Excess Profits Tax, designed to prevent profiteering, was raised to 100%. The basis was laid for what some called ‘War Socialism’. After the fall of France in June 1940 the UK and its empire fought on virtually without allies, and the battle of Britain in the air that summer and early autumn inspired those working overtime in war factories. Fear of invasion, at this time not unjustified, gave everyday life a febrile quality. Many parts of the country experienced bombing, and on 7 September the Blitz began when the Luftwaffe attacked London's East End in force. Thereafter London was bombed for all but one of 76 consecutive nights. A heavy raid on Coventry on 14 November marked a shift in the Luftwaffe's attentions away from the capital, though London continued to receive intermittent heavy attacks. Certain western ports, vital to the country's links with overseas, were especially hard hit—Plymouth, Merseyside, Southampton, and Portsmouth. But Clydeside experienced only one major raid and production of munitions and other war essentials was not greatly affected. The conviction that the UK was ‘taking it’ as London had ‘taken it’ helped to alleviate depression in the grim early months of 1941. In May, after a particularly heavy raid on London, the Luftwaffe let up, as Hitler moved his forces to the Eastern Front. The heroic phase of the civilian war—the country's ‘finest hour’, as Churchill had called it—was over.3. May 1941– November 1942: though Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA) gave the UK a popular new ally, and Japan's strike at Pearl Harbor on 7 December brought the economic might of the USA fully into the war on the UK's side, this was a phase of discontent. War news, mostly bad in 1941, was still worse in 1942 when Japan overran the Far Eastern portions of the British Empire, and Rommel's forces were rampant in the Western Desert campaigns. According to opinion polls, approval of Churchill as prime minister never dropped below 78%, but between February and October 1942 his political position was believed insecure: for much of this period Sir Stafford Cripps seemed to some, in and out of high political circles, to be a likely successor. Cripps was applauded for his calls for further austerity. Rationing of food, clothing, and petrol was now intense, yet there is ample evidence that such controls, to help win the war, were not resented. However, there was much well-publicized discussion of inefficiency in industry, the coalition government lost four by-elections to independent candidates, there was clamour for a Second Front in Europe to help the USSR, and public opinion was generally truculent. Montgomery's victory over Rommel at El Alamein early in November came as a vast relief, and reconsolidated Churchill's position as war leader. From now on, over-optimism about early victory replaced anguish over frequent reverses as a ‘morale problem’.4. November 1942– August 1945: with the fear of invasion entirely dissipated, talk of a better world after the war serged to the headlines. On 1 December 1942 the Beveridge Report was published (see government, below). William Beveridge (1879–1963) gathered to a head the widespread conviction that Planning (now so often given a capital P), such as had governed the country's now successful-seeming war effort, could guarantee a secure post-war life for all citizens. Since 1941, many official and non-official committees had been devising post-war schemes for various areas of economic and social concern (including blueprints for the rebuilding of blitzed cities). While Conservative businessmen protested that ambitious undertakings such as the Beveridge plan would have to be paid for by improved export performance, public opinion swept past them. Churchill's lack of enthusiasm for post-war planning confirmed the widespread belief that he was a great war leader, not suitable for peacetime. In May 1944 parliament passed an Education Act (rationalizing and broadening school provision on lines prefigured by pre-war planning) which was the most that Churchill would concede in the way of immediate major reform, though family allowances were introduced before he left office in July 1945.

In less than two and half years, from January 1942 to D-Day in June 1944, more than a million and a half US servicemen arrived in the UK. The lifestyle and values of their homeland were well-known already through Hollywood films, and American dance music was very popular. Nevertheless, ‘oversexed, overpaid and over here’, the GIs provoked friction. Many women, from teenagers to grandmothers, seem to have been eager to trade their virtue for luxuries from the PX stores and nights out dancing to the excellent bands which served the US bases. But this increased resentments felt by men, in and out of the UK services, who saw that GIs were better paid and better dressed than they were. Despite the tragic courage of the USAAF's ‘mighty Eighth’, which flew daylight bomber sorties out of East Anglia during the strategic air offensive against Germany, and sustained more than 45,000 casualties, the slur that the ‘Yanks’ were cowards was commonplace. As in the First World War, it was said the USA had entered late, after others had born the brunt of the battle. While the US ‘occupation’ increased mutual understanding in some quarters it also generated anti-American feeling. A symptom of the complex factors at work was the general sympathy for black GIs (see African Americans)—subjected to colour bars in their own army—expressed by British civilians who contrasted their kindly courtesy with the arrogance attributed to white GIs.

The Normandy landings of 6 June 1944 (see OVERLORD) produced high hopes of swift victory, dampened by the arrival from 13 June of V-1 ‘flying bombs’ over south-eastern England, followed by V-2 rockets from 8 September (see V-weapons). These preyed on the nerves of war-weary civilians, caused considerable casualties, and aggravated the housing problem which was a legacy of the 1940–1 raids. However, high spirits were everywhere seen on V-E Day. On 23 May the coalition ended, after the Labour Party's National Conference had refused to continue in it and Churchill's ‘caretaker’ Conservative government was decisively defeated in the ensuing general election, in which Labour swept to power with 393 Commons seats out of 640. The public had opted for a ‘planned’ peace.

(b) Manpower and war production (see Table 1)

The UK mobilized civilians more fully than any other combatant nation. In June 1944, when 22% of the country's labour force was in the armed services, 33% was in civilian war work. Even this impressive figure omits the efforts of part-time volunteers in Civil Defence (see below) and the WVS and the work done by pensioners, while women occupied in household work (nearly 10 million out of a population of 47,700,000) were in a truly essential occupation when there were 9 million children under 14 and some 6 million old people to be looked after, not to speak of husbands and lodgers who worked in mines and factories.

Since May 1940 control over manpower—including ‘womanpower’—had been exercised at the top, by Ernest Bevin. In December 1940, his ministry of labour was still under fire for not making sufficient use of its powers of compulsion. In that month, Sir William Beveridge unveiled in secret a report on manpower requirements which was as much a turning-point in the economic history of the war as its author's report on social security was to be in its political history. It pointed out that one and a half million women would have to be drafted into war industry from housework and from less essential work. From March 1941, the registration of women began, eventually extending to all between 18 and 60, along with that of men over 41. In the same month, the Essential Work Order tied workers to jobs in establishments deemed vital. By the end of 1941, under the provisions of this order, nearly six million workers had been guaranteed job security with decent minimum pay and conditions.

The war abolished unemployment, to the point where many people—such as factory workers who were in the Home Guard, bank clerks who were ARP volunteers—were, in effect, doing more than one job. This gave new strength to the trade union movement: between 1938 and 1943 the number of unionized workers increased by over a third, to 8,174,000, and Bevin's own Transport and General workers became the first union to top a million members.

By 1943, it was almost impossible for a woman under 40 to avoid war work unless she had heavy family responsibilities or was looking after a war worker billeted on her. Scotland, Wales, and the north of England exported ‘surplus unskilled mobile woman labour’ to the munitions factories of the Midlands. Women replaced 100,000 railway workers drafted into the forces. Controversially, they worked as bus conductors, wearing trousers.‘Numbers of passengers believe that the last act of conductress and her driver or motorman each night before going home is the exercise of sexual intercourse’, noted one of these outrageous females—but women wearing trousers were becoming a common sight. Women even worked as welders in shipyards, traditionally almost as macho in ethos as coalmines: in lighter engineering ‘dilution’ by women might reach 80% or higher. The Women's Land Army (WLA) repeated a First World War experiment. In June 1939 there had been 546,000 regular male workers in agriculture and 55,000 regular female workers. By June 1944 there were 150,000 more land workers, though regular men had dropped to 522,000. The WLA stood at 80,000. A former hairdresser won a horse-ploughing competition in Yorkshire against a field of men.

But the filthy and dangerous work of coalmines remained a male preserve. The industry at this time combined, as one critic put it, ‘the worst features of decaying and restrictive monopoly with the most brutal evils arising from cut-throat competition’. Relations between colliers and their employers were uneasy, often bitter; after decades of struggle, strikes were commonplace, absenteeism widespread. During the war the miners were an ageing workforce, depleted by enlistment in the army and not over-willing to co-operate with government's attempts to rationalize the industry. Production of deep-mined coal fell from 204 million tons in 1942 to 175 millions in 1945, though manpower, 766,000 in 1939, had been stabilized at 710,000. Miners' sons were forced down the pits, and from December 1943Bevin boys were employed.

Statistically, however, war industry was a success story. Aircraft production, for instance, rose from 3,000 warplanes in 1938 to 15,000 in 1940. It trebled between January 1940 and January 1942, and doubled again by March 1944. At this time, 1,700,000 were employed by firms under contract to the ministry of aircraft production. But the biggest British factories had only 3,000 to 15,000 employees, compared to up to 40,000 in their US counterparts, and efficiency was accordingly much lower, so the industry was subjected to constant criticism. High wages were one focus for disapproval from outsiders: in the Midlands, where labour was scarce, firms paid huge bonuses, to which overtime was added, and some workers took more in a day than a railwayman got in a week, while servicemen's wives struggled on tiny allowances.

Strikes had all but disappeared in the hectic year of 1940 when the country stood alone, and Bevin's Order 1305 of July that year had made them illegal. Yet 1944 set a new record for aggregate number of stoppages: 2,194, involving the loss of 3,700,000 working days. Two-thirds of those lost were in coal mining, but engineering—that is, war industry—came second. However, most strikes were short: the typical stoppage was a swift outburst over piece rates, in which communist shop stewards—committed, after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, to the maximization of production—would attempt to restrain their aggrieved brothers and sisters. Though a relative handful of workers were fined for striking, Order 1305 was in general ineffectual.

UK, Table 1: The British war effort 1940–4

Source: Contributor.
The following statistical table is subject to familiar caveats. It is based on figures prepared by the Central Statistical Office and published in 1951 in a Statistical Digest of the War to accompany the ‘United Kingdom Civil Series’ of official histories. As victors, the British could afford to be honest, and the official histories are thorough and candid. Indeed, we can learn from them to recognize (for instance) that many of the aircraft built at the peak of production were of obsolescent types unfit for battle, and that statistics about strikes need very careful interpretation. The picture is most clearly seen if 1944, the year of D-Day, is taken as the terminus of ‘total’ war effort. Unless otherwise stated all figures refer to mid-year (June) and are given in thousands. Some have been rounded.
	1940	1942	1944
Total Population of Great Britain,
excluding N. Ireland	47,000	47,000	47,750
Total Working Population
male	15,104	15,141	14,901
female	5,572	6,915	7,107
Total in Armed Forces and Auxiliary Services
male	2,218	3,784	4,500
female	55	307	467
Total in Civil Employment
male	12,452	11,296	10,347
female	5,306	6,582	6,620
agriculture and fishing	925	1,002	1,048
mining and quarrying	886	823	813
metals, engineering, vehicles, and shipbuilding	3,198	4,372	4,496
chemicals, explosives, paints, oils, etc.	361	618	515
textiles	1,074	723	635
clothing, boots, and shoes	748	550	455
food, drink, and tobacco	621	567	508
building and civil engineering	1,064	893	623
national and local government	1,448	1,728	1,809
Civil Defence, Fire Service, and Police	345	384	282
Strength of Home Guard	1,456	1,565	1,758
Annual coal production (000 tons)	224,229	204,944	192,746
Annual imports of petroleum (000 tons)	11,381	10,232	20,176
Annual production of aluminium (000 tons)	57	126	140
Annual aircraft production	15	24	26.5
Annual aircraft production: (structure weight in
millions of lb)	59	133	208.5
Index of Ministry of Supply Munitions Production
(Sept-Dec 1939 = 100), figures for third quarter.
guns, small arms, instruments	212	701	385
filled shells and bombs	214	1,009	529
small arms ammunition	358	2,679	4,188
propellants and high explosives	161	513	480
armoured fighting vehicles	324	1,727	-
wheeled vehicles	343	341	280
radar and searchlight	124	198	670
Naval vessels built annually (no.)
major combat	52	114	76
smaller craft	375	1,049	1,651
merchant vessels completed annually (gross tons)	810	1,301	1,014
Area of arable land by acres (GB)	13,203	16,175	17,936
wheat	1,797	2,504	3,215
potatoes	695	1,116	1,219
vegetables	301	418	499
Numbers of livestock (GB)
cattle	8,361	8,248	8,616
sheep and lambs	25,465	20,764	19,435
pigs	3,631	1,872	1,631
poultry	62,121	43,212	38,481
Monthly milk sales through marketing
schemes (by million gallons)	128	137	143
Working days lost in strikes (annual)	940	1,527	3,714
Absenteeism in coal mines (%)	7.26	10.06	12.89

(c) Rationing and domestic life

Total war progressively diverted resources and labour away from the production of consumer goods, and reduced food supplies from overseas. Like many other policies developed during the First World War, rationing was reintroduced early in the Second. Petrol was rationed from September 1939, with evidence of strong popular support for the move. Chamberlain's government introduced rationing of meat, butter, and sugar early in 1940. Clothes rationing, after prices had soared, came in June 1941. War meant that many commonplace items were in short supply, and generated incessant ‘salvage drives’. When rationing reached a peak in August 1942, each citizen was entitled to 1s. 2d. worth of meat per week (nearly 1 lb./450 gm. per person), to four ounces (113 gm.) of bacon and ham, eight (225 gm.) of sugar, eight of fats, and eight of cheese, though the cheese allowance dropped to a mere two ounces (57 gm.) in April 1944. Over a four-week period a consumer might purchase 16 oz. of hard soap, 16 oz. of jam, marmalade, or mincemeat, and 8 oz. of sweets. Over eight weeks, an adult could get one packet of dried eggs equal to 12 eggs: children under six were allowed two packets and, like invalids and expectant mothers, were guaranteed a pint of milk per day. For each month, a ration-book holder had twenty ‘points’ which could be used on scarce goods ranging from tinned salmon at (say) 32 points for a pound, to dried peas for as little as one point per pound; such items as breakfast cereals, syrup, and biscuits came under the ‘points’ scheme. Tea was also rationed, but important foods such as bread, potatoes, vegetables, fruit, and fish were not.

Rationing tied customers to particular retailers, and bore hard on working-class men who had traditionally been heavy consumers of meat, but it was generally approved of. It seemed to guarantee ‘fair shares’. Cooks became expert in making puddings without eggs, preserving fruit without sugar, and creating dishes out of strange canned meats from the USA such as the famous Spam. While the black market might satisfy a craving for such rare items as oranges, many citizens heeded the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign and grew food for themselves in gardens and allotments (the number of the latter rose from 815,000 in 1939 to 1,400,000 in 1943). Poultry-keeping and pig-keeping increased. Meanwhile, farmers prospered as they put every possible acre to use for food production, assisted in summer by volunteer workers such as schoolchildren and weekending adults.

Overall there is no doubt that in terms of essential vitamins and calories the UK's population was better fed in wartime than before, when malnutrition had accompanied unemployment and low wages. Meals eaten in canteens, often provided for the first time at workplaces, and in the new, cheap British restaurants, were ‘off the ration’, and the government used these to make extra meat and cheese available to workers in heavy industry. However, for most people the diet was restricted and monotonous.

Even after the major disruptions caused by bombing in 1940–1 had ceased, travel on crowded public transport was subject to delays. Housing accommodation was in short supply, particularly in areas where new or expanded war factories brought in many newcomers. Population in the blitzed centres of several cities, including London, fell markedly, but new workers continued to arrive in the engineering industries of Coventry and Manchester. Building workers were largely employed on camp and factory construction. By the end of 1942, some 300,000 families were living in houses unfit for habitation by pre-war standards, and two and a half million occupied bombed houses which had received only temporary repairs.

From the outbreak of war to the end of 1945, some 60 million changes of address took place among a civilian population of about 48 million, an indication of the disruption and inconvenience which war brought to non-combatants. It is hardly surprising that, while some women moving into war work revelled in new experiences, work place friendships, and the freedom given by rates of pay which, though lower than men's, might seem very considerable, many others could not wait to return to civilian life. The end of the war produced a rush back to domesticity, though married couples separated for years by war service, and children meeting fathers they had never known, often found readjustment very difficult.

The UK birthrate had been falling before the war: it rose sharply, from 13.9 per thousand of population, the lowest point in the history of registration, in 1941 to 17.5 in 1944 (see demography). Long-term demographic factors rather than wartime circumstances were responsible for the boom (in 1947, the rate would be 20.6), but the war accounted for a rising proportion of illegitimate births, despite the increased spread of knowledge of contraceptive methods which was promoted. Divorce petitions rose from just under 10,000 in 1938 to 25,000 in 1945. The paradoxical effect of war overall seems to have been that it loosened family ties and eroded moral constraints, while simultaneously creating a yearning for settled home life.

(d) Morale, national unity, and wartime spirit

In 1940 and 1941 approximately 43,000 civilians in the UK were directly killed by bombs, and about 17,000 more over the remaining years of war. About half of these 60,000 deaths were in London. At least 86,000 people were seriously injured (see Table 2). This compares with deaths in the armed forces of 260,000. Both figures are small compared to losses from war causes suffered by European, Japanese, and Chinese forces and civilians. Nevertheless, the sustained nightly bombing of London in the autumn of 1940 was unprecedented in history and represented the fiercest exposure of any section of the UK population to armed conflict in centuries.

Morale was never tested as severely as it was in Germany, where war production soared in spite of raids which killed half as many people again in Hamburg in one night as died from bombing in London throughout the war. Even in Japan, it took a new weapon of devastating power, the atomic bomb, to induce the surrender of a people whose cities had been devastated by the strategic air offensive mounted against it. That British morale survived the Blitz of 1940–1 is not, therefore, at all surprising. Nevertheless, the endurance shown by civilians in that period was a cause for local and national pride at the time, and has been since. Post-raid emergency services were often sadly inadequate. In the absence of deep shelters, and justifiably suspicious of the brick communal shelters erected in city streets, hundreds and thousands of Londoners, in the autumn of 1940, slept in underground stations. Many others evacuated themselves to safer parts. But London was seen to be ‘taking it’ and inhabitants of other cities were generally determined to show that they, too, could ‘take it’. ‘Trekking’ by inhabitants of heavily bombed cities to sleep under cover or without cover in suburban and rural areas was commonplace, but bombs caused surprisingly little voluntary absenteeism from work. In public shelters, communal entertainments were often organized. The shared experience of the raids generated spontaneous fellow-feeling, strangers spoke to each other, neighbours were lavish with cups of tea, publicans gave out free drinks, class divisions (it seemed to many) broke down.

Other factors made for greater national cohesion. Among other effects, the greater mobility of the population brought Scots, Welsh, and Irish people in large numbers to dynamic centres of industry in England, as well as scrambling them together in the armed forces. The BBC before the war had already provided a common standard of information and entertainment for the nation: during the war it became less stiffly genteel, and began to use personalities with regional accents.

The war had the effect of cutting down (though not eradicating) conspicuous consumption by the well-to-do—it was hard to hold on to domestic servants, for instance—and of improving levels of feeding and income among the poorest, now guaranteed work if they could do it. Even the proliferation of ‘red tape’—controls, regulations, and bureaucracy—at least had the effect of uniting the public against their tormentors, the civil servants.

Nevertheless, the war revealed, and confirmed, social problems and fissures between groups and classes. Crime rates rose sharply—there were just over 300,000 indictable offences in England and Wales in 1939, 478,000 in 1945—though increased theft, rather than violence, accounted for this increase. Juvenile delinquency was fostered by the disruption of schooling caused by evacuation and bombing, and by the preoccupation of adults with war work. Evacuation of poor slum dwellers, like the arrival later of refugees from blitzed areas, produced paroxysms of class hatred among well-to-do householders in safe areas, who often did all they could to avoid billeting such riff-raff, and as figures for strikes showed, class feeling remained strong in industry. That Labour in 1951 secured a higher vote than any recorded before or since in a general election by any party, and nevertheless lost to Churchill's resurgent Conservatives, suggests, as analysis confirms, working-class self-assertion confronting middle-class resistance.

But the UK won the war, after ‘standing alone’ in 1940, suggesting to the British public that British ways of doing things were better than those of other people. While the country's actual bankruptcy, a result of the all-out war effort, reduced the empire to the status of a satellite of the globally triumphant USA, British industry maintained its old-fashioned methods and attitudes prevalent during the war. While European nations earnestly created new constitutions, the Mother of Parliaments was now more than ever sacrosanct, and other salient British institutions basked in complacency. Talk, in the 1940s, of wartime social revolution, in hindsight seems ludicrously inappropriate. See also world trade and world economy.

Angus Calder

3. Government

When the war began on 1 September 1939 the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, offered the Labour and Liberal parties a coalition with his Conservative government, which had a comfortable majority of some 250 in a House of Commons of 615 members; they refused. However, they did not oppose any of the wartime legislation the cabinet proposed; and the addition of Churchill and Eden to the cabinet's ranks visibly strengthened it.

UK, Table 2: Civil Defence and civilian Casualties. Casualties to United Kingdom civilians due to enemy action as reported to 31 July 1945

	Total Civilian	Civil Defence workers aon duty
	Total	Men	Women	Children under 16	Unidentified	Total	Men	Women
aCivil Defence General Services, National Fire Service, Regular and Auxiliary Police, also included in total civilian casualties.
Source: Mellor, W. Franklin (ed.), Casualties and Medical Statistics, (UK Official History Series), (London, 1972).
Killed and missing
believed killed	60,595	26,923	25,399	7,736	537	2,379	2,148	231
Injured and detained
in hospital	86,182	40,738	37,822	7,622	–	4,459	4,072	387
total	146,777	67,661	63,221	15,358	537	6,838	6,220	618

Chamberlain had excellent reasons, dating back to the previous world war, for distrusting any scheme put up by Lloyd George (1863–1945, prime minister 1916–22), but nevertheless appointed a war cabinet, nine strong (see Chart); in spite of urgings from Churchill, who sat in it (Eden did not), it took no warlike action for months (see phoney war). In consultation with the French, at the Allied Supreme War Council, the war cabinet did decide to offer covert support to Finland in midwinter (see Finnish–Soviet war); and again acting jointly, nerved itself in the spring of 1940 to sanction an attack on Norway, pre-empted by the Germans.

The Norwegian campaign went so badly that the Commons insisted on debating it, on 7 and 8 May 1940. Several of Chamberlain's old supporters turned against him; one of them, Leo Amery used to his government Cromwell's words to the Long parliament: ‘You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go’. When the house divided, 200 members voted against Chamberlain, including 41 of his own supporters, and 281 for him, showing how unpopular he had become, even in the Commons. On 10 May, having failed to persuade his foreign secretary Lord Halifax to succeed him, he resigned and recommended King George VI to send for Churchill, who became prime minister that evening.

Churchill enjoyed a unique standing. To many Americans, he was the government of the UK. The Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, passed through all its stages from first reading to royal assent on the single day of 22 May 1940, gave the crown power to command any subject to perform any action; the power to be exercised through defence regulations, which would be laid before parliament. Regulations allowed government to control civil unrest and to impose censorship on the media; these reduced public discussion of appeasement policies and muted political discontent. Almost all journalists, moreover, accepted the justice of the war and were happy not to publish anything that might help the Axis, while reserving, and sometimes exercising, the right to criticize government on method and on detail (see press). If they overstepped the mark they were banned, as was the Communist Party organ, the Daily Worker, for two years from January 1941.

Technically, Chamberlain had not lost a vote of confidence; he remained leader of the Conservative Party until ill-health forced him to resign in October 1940 (he died the following month). But his hold on it was weakened enough by the Norway debate for Churchill to be able to form a coalition which included all three of the major parties, Conservative, Labour, and Liberal. The leading dissident Conservatives he rewarded with useful posts; he disposed deftly of the leading appeasers, sending John Simon (1873–1954) to become Lord Chancellor, the height of any lawyer's ambition; Samuel Hoare (1880–1959) to be ambassador in Madrid; and Halifax, after a brief interval, to be ambassador in Washington.

The new cabinet reflected the formal balance of power between the parties in the Commons: fifteen Conservative ministers, four Labour, and one Liberal ( Archibald Sinclair, the air minister who had been Churchill's adjutant on the Western Front in 1916). Among all the government ministers together (not including parliamentary private secretaries), cabinet and non-cabinet, the Conservatives had 52 posts and Labour 16. By 1945 Labour had 27 ministerial posts, but the coalition government was always predominantly Conservative; though it often adopted socialist methods. As the Labour leader and Churchill's deputy, Clement Attlee once put it, ‘When one came to work out solutions they were often socialist ones, because one had to have organization and planning, and disregard vested interests.’ Labour ministers thought that they were unlikely to win the next general election, and decided they should take what advantage they could of the opportunities they got to further working-class interests.

After 1939 many conventions of parliamentary democracy were suspended while the war lasted. Even before the coalition was built, the party leaders had agreed on an electoral truce. The general election, due to be held in 1940, was regularly postponed by amendments to the Septennial Act of 1716—a reminder to the political public of parliament's ancient roots. The Commons whips—those officers of the three major parties who discipline members of the House—agreed not to contest by-elections caused by death or resignation, and to recommend to the electorate the candidate who was put forward by the party which already held the seat. Such uncontested vacancies provided government with a means of admitting potential ministers to parliament. For example, Churchill brought Ernest Bevin into the cabinet (and, later, into the war cabinet) as minister of labour; months later, a seat in parliament was found for him through a vacancy at Wandsworth in south London. The whips also agreed conventions which allowed a number of MPs to be on active military service without resigning their seats. The verbatim record of parliamentary proceedings normally printed in Hansard was from time to time not made public. This gave Churchill a chance to explain confidential details of the war effort to members, with some hope that they would not become known too soon to the Axis.

Churchill held the post of leader of the House of Commons himself, although he devolved the work of it to Attlee. The coalition had a joint whips' office. Formal opposition was provided through an opposition front bench in the House of Commons and through the activities of minority parties in the country. Those Labour MPs who did not hold office in the coalition elected an ‘administrative committee’ to compose this front bench, and the Parliamentary Labour Party elected an acting chairman to perform as leader of the opposition.

The select committee on national expenditure was the principal parliamentary body empowered to scrutinize the workings of the executive. Its chairman interviewed, tête-à-tête, the heads of the various secret services, whose budgets are by convention never debated, to satisfy himself that they were not misspending public funds grossly; the committee inquired much more extensively into the work of the other main spending departments. As the war progressed, some backbenchers from all parties established informal committees. For example, in 1942 a group of Conservatives set up the ‘Active Back-Benchers’, who then agitated for the appointment of a ‘Scrutinizing Committee’ which would examine the statutory rules and orders laid on the table of the house. A combination of Conservatives from both the Commons and the Lords, called the ‘Watching Committee’, became less important after 1941. Opposition in the country, such as it was, was seen largely at by-elections contested by minority parties. The Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party were free to challenge the candidates nominated by the coalition parties.

The communists' position was peculiar. On 2 September 1939 the party secretary, Harry Pollitt, had put out an impassioned pamphlet in which he argued that ‘To stand aside from this conflict, to contribute only revolutionary-sounding phrases while the Fascist beasts ride roughshod over Europe, would be a betrayal of everything our forebears have fought to achieve in the course of long years of struggle against capitalism.’ For this robust stance he was rebuked from Moscow, and demoted. The disappearance of the Daily Worker from the newspaper stalls concealed from the public the extent to which the Communist Party adhered to Moscow's line of support for Berlin, until 22 June 1941 when Hitler attacked the USSR; thereafter the communists, changing sides overnight, flung themselves ardently into support for the war effort and for an immediate Second Front.

The Common Wealth party, formed by Sir Richard Acland in the late summer of 1942 on the news, shocking to the general public, of the fall of Tobruk, enjoyed three by-election successes. Another eleven independents of various political shades were also elected during the course of the war.

Churchill survived every attack on his position as leader of the coalition because he retained ample, indeed overwhelming, support in the House of Commons, backed by enormous popularity in the country. The formal vote of confidence in his direction of the war, at a black moment— 2 July 1942—was carried by 476 to 25: it was the largest number of MPs to vote against him in any substantial division in his first three years in office. His frequent BBC radio broadcasts helped him to retain the respect, even the affection, of the nation at large. Within the coalition itself, his personal supremacy led to difficulties, particularly when he obstructed the consideration of major post-war issues.

Between October 1943 and June 1944 the government machine was geared to two major tasks: the Allied invasion of Europe and the plans for post-war reconstruction. Churchill was prevailed upon to appoint a minister of reconstruction in November 1943. By then the prolongation of parliament's life without a general election could not be disconnected from the plans being made for a transition from war to peace, sometimes called the ‘two-stage ending’, because it was assumed that the war against Japan would continue well after the defeat of Germany. The question arose, whether the coalition could be prolonged under Churchill's leadership into the peace. By October 1944 he was committed to dissolving parliament as soon as the victory over Germany had been achieved. Some Labour ministers would have preferred to continue the coalition, but they were overruled by their party's executive, which called for a withdrawal at the time of Germany's surrender.

There was no equivalent of coalition at the local level. The conventions of local authorities were suspended by statute, which authorized them to fill any vacancy among the body of elected councillors by co-option. There were no local government elections between 1939 and 1946. The local authority associations (national organizations, representing different kinds of council) remained in existence, but became apprehensive about the consequences for local government of wartime emergency regulations and of the formation of national organizations, such as the Auxiliary Fire Service, for civil defence. Part of their anxiety also stemmed from the appointment of regional commissioners, who were empowered to supervise the local authorities under their charge and to create ‘seats of government’ if the country were invaded.

These contingency plans emphasized the importance of co-ordinating the activities in each region of the representatives of the major departments of state. The management of the war effort was undertaken through regional boards of production and their committees, which allocated scarce supplies. County war agricultural executive committees, for instance, so re-ordered English agriculture that the balance of grassland to plough was exactly reversed—more than 17 million acres to 12 million before the war, 11 million to 18 million by 1943. This saved a lot of shipping space.

Critical observers noticed during the first Luftwaffe air attacks on London that there were far too many overlapping local authorities and boards, likely only to get in each others' way rather than to help those made homeless by German air raids. These attacks caused some confusion at first among this plethora of bodies; and the laying of sea mines from the air in the Thames estuary brought on a restructuring of the import distribution system, London being replaced for a time by Liverpool and Glasgow among the UK's busiest ports. The central government machine was mildly, but only mildly, disrupted by bombing: ministers and civil servants alike, in civil as well as in military branches of government, rapidly got used to walking to work across piles of rubble and broken glass; to the shortage of sleep; to the occasional house move, because one had been bombed out of one's home. Getting on with the war was clearly more important than any domestic imbroglio, even at a time when one Londoner in six was bombed out.

Parliament continued to sit at the usual times, bombs or no bombs. The great fires of the night of 10/11 May 1941 burnt out, among many other buildings, the chamber of the House of Commons; MPs simply moved to the Lords' chamber, and their lordships to Church House across the way. Neither house missed a sitting; and Westminster Hall, for centuries the seat of justice, was saved from fire by a passing MP ( Walter Elliot) who saw the danger from some incendiary bombs lodged in its roof, seized a fireman's axe, and hacked open the great north door (of which the key had been mislaid) so that the firemen could tackle the blaze.

When reconstruction was placed on the political agenda in 1943 there were doubts about the future allocation of administrative functions to local authorities. Official descriptions of the wartime structure of British government concentrated on the centre and on its centralizing tendencies, not on the future of the balance between centre and locality. Such accounts divided the structure into military affairs, the Home Front, supply, and, later, reconstruction. In all four areas, government seemed to consist chiefly of administrative controls. Battles were deemed to be won or lost according to the efficiency of the authorities in regulating supply.

The three critical resources were labour, materials, and food. Their flow had to be planned, and they sometimes competed for space. For example, imports of rationed foodstuffs might limit the volume of military matériel that could be carried by ship. Major administrative achievements lay in the design of shipping budgets which allocated cargo space in the most economical manner, and skills in ‘manpower budgeting’ were also developed. Manpower—and womanpower—were indeed more thoroughly organized in the UK than in any other warring nation.

The greatest impact of government on the population as a whole lay in this direction of labour and in the rationing of food and of raw materials. The regulations needed for all this involved an expansion of the civil service, and of the scale and scope of public expenditure. The number of non-industrial civil servants rose from 399,600 in 1939 to 722,200 in 1944, when it was calculated that 5 million people were in the armed services and a further 3.5 million in other public services of various kinds—excluding war industry in private ownership.

Government expenditure in 1944 was 60% of the national total, of which 55% was borne out of revenue. Only New Zealand reached a comparable concentration of financial effort. The basic rate of income tax rose to 50%, and it reached 95% for large unearned incomes. National Savings filled the gap, aided and supplemented by special local appeals, the wartime variant of peacetime pageantry. The RAF received ardent public support, not only during the battle of Britain but thereafter, when a substantial slice of the nation's effort went into servicing Bomber Command. On one day during the battle of Britain, Fighter Command reported the loss of seven aircraft; next morning a blank cheque arrived at the air ministry from a manufacturer, with a request that it be used to pay for their replacements. Similarly, a Scotswoman called MacRobert, who lost a son in the RAF, sent the ministry a cheque for £5,000 to purchase a Stirling bomber, to be called ‘MacRobert's Reply.’ After BARBAROSSA began, support for the USSR also attracted enormous public enthusiasm, accompanied by cash gifts at rallies.

When Japan also entered the war, the Treasury warned—as the Admiralty had long predicted—that the UK could not afford to fight in Asia as well as in Europe. The defence committee of the war cabinet decided that even if national bankruptcy threatened, national honour demanded a full-scale British share in the Asian war: strategy was adapted accordingly.

The major departments of state, like the secret services, recruited extensively in the universities, whose staff and teaching were greatly reduced. Regulations also extended the scope of government activity abroad. British officials in Washington, DC, who collaborated with the Americans on supply and on the administration of Lend-Lease became an essential element in the planned flow of raw materials and food.

The organization of military affairs was dominated by the war cabinet and its defence committee, which was serviced by the Chiefs of Staff. Churchill acted as his own minister of defence, assisted by Major-General Ismay who ran the defence side of the cabinet office. The war cabinet as a rule had six to eight members—ten was the maximum, with two usually overseas—who concentrated on strategy and on major questions of politics. They were deliberately excluded from routine Home Front business. Their officials spent much of their time in an underground bunker, where they also slept, which had been built by the south-east corner of St James's Park, beneath the public offices in Storey's Gate (now a museum). They also handled communications with the prime minister when he was abroad. The Chiefs of Staff had their own committee system, and were closely connected with their American counterparts through a series of joint planning meetings.

In the UK the two key institutions over which Ismay presided were the Joint Intelligence Committee (see also Intelligence, below) and the Joint Planning Staff; they were responsible for effecting analysis of military intelligence drawn from all sources, and for strategic planning for all three armed forces. The decoding of intercepted signals was the work of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, which came under remote foreign office control, via MI6. The circulation of decrypts from the German ENIGMA and Geheimschreiber machines, which were known by the codename ULTRA, was carefully controlled under the direct authority of the prime minister, who ensured that the list of those in the know was kept to a minimum. Even some members of the war cabinet were left off his list.

The Home Front was managed by the Lord President's Committee of the full cabinet. This committee brought together those ministers principally concerned with the administrative controls which regulated the supply of labour, materials, and food. It was also the authority which sanctioned the submission to Parliament of the legislation deemed necessary for the war effort, and of the statutory rules and orders by which so many emergency arrangements were implemented. It was designed to overlap with the civil defence committee, which would have been obliged to instruct the regional commissioners and other provincial authorities if the Germans had landed.

The lord president of the council chosen by Churchill was for a significant proportion of the war ( October 1940 to September 1943) John Anderson (1882–1958), who had been a distinguished civil servant before he accepted ministerial office. He had worked both in Ireland and in India, in turbulent conditions. A significant group of official inquiries and agencies was committed to his charge, including the research unit developing an atomic bomb. Anderson was moved to the Treasury when Sir Kingsley Wood (1881–1943) the chancellor of the exchequer, died suddenly. The line between the responsibilities of the lord president and those of the production executive was difficult to draw. The lord president's committee was directly concerned with all the questions which affected civilian morale. The ministry of information was created in order to regulate the flow of information to the public at large. It devised ways of judging civilian morale, and became the home of a government social survey which conducted regular interviews as a means of testing public opinion.

The expansion of government on the Home Front necessitated the creation of new departments of state, some of which existed as ‘shadow ministries’ before the war began. A ministry of home security was attached to the home office, and one of national service to the ministry of labour (both in 1939). The arrangements for rationing civilian access to food and raw materials were made the responsibilities of new ministries of food ( 1939) and of fuel and power ( 1942). A critically important step in planning the production of war matériel was the setting up the ministry of aircraft production ( 1940). The ministry of production ( 1942) itself was never a major organization; it had to work by persuading other departments to co-operate because they had the statutory authority to create controls. The ministry of war transport ( 1941), created from the mercantile marine department of the board of trade, played an important role in the management of shipping space, particularly that in transatlantic convoys. The ministry of economic warfare ( 1939) was not concerned with rationing civilians, but rather with the best means of depriving the Axis of supplies; it also provided cover for SOE, which came to take up four-fifths of its minister's time.

From the start of the war, even before the coalition was formed, many politicians had been concerned with the definition of war aims and with the opportunities for social reform which mobilization seemed to present. Their discussions precipitated the notion that there was a ‘progressive centre’ in British politics which would encourage all the major parties to consider programmes of social reform. For example, in response to this mood, officials of the board of education, then evacuated to Bournemouth, began in 1941 to draft papers which led eventually to the Education Act of 1944, bringing ‘secondary education for all’.

The most dramatic political event was the reception given to the Beveridge report on its publication in December 1942. Sir William Beveridge, a don at Oxford, had been asked to consider the existing schemes of social insurance—health, unemployment, pensions. He recommended that a single new ministry of social security should be formed to replace the sections of seven different departments which paid cash benefits of various kinds. A ministry of national insurance was created in 1944. Beveridge also assumed that a post-war government would be committed to the maintenance of full employment, the payment of family allowances, and the creation of a national health service. Putting these ideas into practice spanned the general election of 1945. Reconstruction plans from the coalition were taken up by the Labour government at the end of the war.

A major consideration in post-war reconstruction planning was the future of British influence in world affairs. Two official cabinet committees considered, in parallel, ‘internal economic problems’ and ‘external economic problems’. Britain's war effort was dependent on American Lend-Lease; its peacetime reconstruction seemed likely to depend heavily on help from overseas. The foreign office, taking stock of the position at the time of the defeat of Germany, noted that there was a feeling in the USA and the USSR that ‘Great Britain is now a secondary power and can be treated as such’.

When the war in Europe ended, Churchill proposed to Attlee that the coalition should continue until the war in Asia was over, too. The Labour Party insisted on a general election instead, which was held on 5 July. Men serving overseas voted by post; this put off the counting of votes, and the announcement of the result, to 26 July. By that date the Potsdam conference (see TERMINAL) had already begun; Churchill and Eden represented the UK, accompanied by Attlee as an observer.

To the world's astonishment—indeed, to Attlee's as well—the Labour Party won a large majority, with 393 seats in an enlarged house of 640 members. The forces' vote was understood to have been powerfully anti-Conservative. It was not a vote against Churchill as a war leader; it was a vote against the perceived ineptitude of Conservative policy during the great recession of 1929–33 and in the run-up to the war, as well as a vote against Authority, against what Cobbett used to call The Thing, what later radicals called the Establishment. Attlee returned to Potsdam with the new foreign secretary, Bevin, and continued to put the British case.

J. M. Lee / and M. R. D. Foot

4. Northern Ireland

The six north-eastern Irish counties remained part of the UK after 1922 when the Irish Free State—or Eire as it was called after 1937—achieved independence. The most significant wartime role of the province was in providing facilities during the battle of the Atlantic. Londonderry became a major base for convoy protection vessels with by 1943 a shore-based complement of 2,000 servicing some 20,000 British and Canadian personnel in more than 130 warships. An extensive American naval operating base at the port, for which construction began in June 1941, was never fully used by the US Navy, but the repair yard remained open until 1945. Naval units were also based at Belfast and Larne, while RAF Coastal Command squadrons (eventually ten in all) flew from four airfields and a flying boat base. Catalina aircraft from this base played a major role in the operation against the German battleship Bismarck in May 1943. A sustained airfield construction programme provided a further fifteen for the use of British and American forces. From January 1942 the province acted as a bridgehead for American troops and aircraft being sent to Europe. The Eighth US Army Air Force established a very large repair and maintenance depot at Langford Lodge near Lough Neagh and in 1944 the province served as a training area for over 100,000 US troops preparing for Normandy landings.

Socially, Northern Ireland was less harshly affected than some other parts of the UK. Belfast suffered only two major air raids, although the first of these, on 15/16 April 1941 when 745 people were killed, was one of the UK's most costly single bombing attacks of the war outside London. In the second raid three weeks later 150 died. In all 56,000 houses were damaged and 100,000 people left homeless, 15,000 of them permanently. Bomb damage also temporarily held up production at Belfast's substantial shipbuilding, aircraft, and engineering works. During the war years the Harland and Wolff shipyard completed more than 90 warships (including three aircraft carriers) and 50 cargo vessels, as well as building tanks and aircraft. The relative security of Northern Ireland, which for some time was believed to be beyond the range of German bombers, made the province an attractive location for dispersed strategic industries. In 1936 the aircraft company Short Brothers had established a presence in Belfast. During the war their factory chiefly produced Stirling heavy bombers (more than 1,500 in all) and Sunderland flying boats.

In employment terms the war was good for Northern Ireland. The very high structural levels of unemployment before 1939 were greatly reduced, although never entirely eliminated. In June 1943 an estimated 5% remained jobless. Some of the surplus was absorbed by other parts of the UK, with up to 60,000 workers crossing the Irish Sea. Although considered on a number of occasions, conscription was never applied in the province. It would certainly have provoked bitter opposition among the Roman Catholic minority community, and in the end it was reckoned that the manpower gains would have been outweighed by the social and political costs of the measure. During the war, however, some 37,000 men and women from Northern Ireland served in the British forces.

In Northern Ireland the shared experience of the war undoubtedly brought the two local communities closer together and the fact of Eire's neutrality also entrenched the partition of Ireland. But the Northern Unionist government were unwilling—or unable—to exploit the opportunity to draw the minority community more fully into the whole life of the province. For them Eire's neutrality merely confirmed the perceived disloyalty of all Irish nationalists, north and south of the border. At the end of the war Churchill contrasted the vital contribution of loyal Ulster with the position of neutral Ireland. ‘A strong, loyal Ulster’, he asserted, ‘will always be vital to the security and well-being of our whole empire and commonwealth.’

Keith Jeffery

5. Empire

The British Commonwealth of Nations, then still informally called the British Empire centred on the person of the king-emperor, George VI. It covered a quarter of the world's land surface, the largest area ever to submit to a single political control. George VI was king of England by direct descent from William the Conqueror, and of Scotland by direct descent from James I and VI. Wales came under the crown by Edward I's conquest, the Channel Islands (once part of the duchy of Normandy) by inheritance from the Conqueror, the Isle of Man by purchase from the duke of Atholl in 1765, and Northern Ireland by an act of parliament passed as recently as 1922. These territories combined to form the United Kingdom, the empire's core.

Ireland's case was special. Under the 1922 act, six of the nine counties of Ulster formed Northern Ireland (see above), part of the UK. The remaining 26 Irish counties formed the Irish Free State (Eire from 1937), a quasi-independent republic, with its own president, but which did not then issue its own passports. Those of its citizens who needed a passport for travel outside the British Isles had to use a British one (see Joyce); to this extent, it formed part of the empire.

Outside this geographical core were many different types of attached or dependent territories, where links with the UK originated in migrations of peoples of British stock, or in variations of conquest or cession. Closest to the UK in ethos were the four ‘old dominions’: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. These, along with what was then the Irish Free State and Newfoundland, comprised the original Commonwealth of Nations created by the Statute of Westminster ( 1931) which recognized they were all fully independent states in international law while sharing the same monarch as the UK. The old dominions each had a high commissioner in London, as the Irish Free State did; British relations with them were conducted through the secretary of state for the Dominions, usually a cabinet minister. He also dealt with Southern Rhodesia, though it was still officially a self-governing colony. For decades, their politicians had conferred with British leaders on matters of common concern, particularly trade and defence, and this pattern was of great value during the war.

India had its own special status within the empire. The king's representative in the recently opened capital, New Delhi, was the viceroy, formally responsible to the king and working closely in practice with the secretary of state for India, also normally a cabinet minster, who answered on Indian affairs to parliament. The viceroy controlled India's armed forces, police, and civil service and with them governed directly two-thirds of the whole subcontinent that was later divided between India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The remaining one-third remained under various Indian princes, who were politically dependent on the crown and the viceroy. Until 1937, when it was given a measure of self-government, Burma was also governed by the viceroy. Ceylon did not come under India, but was a colony.

The colonies, under their own secretary of state, formed an outer circle: remote alike from the crown and from independent status. Some of the more ancient, such as Bermuda and Jamaica, had their own legislatures, and some say in how they were run; others, such as Gibraltar or Aden, were little more than garrison towns under direct military rule.

Another category of dependent imperial territory was formed by League of Nations mandates. Mandates, predecessors of today's United Nations trusteeships, were created by the Versailles settlement for former parts of the German and Turkish empires. Australia and New Zealand had mandates in the Pacific and South Africa had a mandate over South-West Africa, formerly a German colony. One British mandate, Palestine, was a cause of constant concern. The foreign office did its best to keep it under its own control; as it did Egypt, which was neither a mandate nor a colony, but, until 1922, a protectorate. Protectorates were independent, but client, states. They came under the protection of powers that had the right of garrison in them, and were understood by other powers to be specially interested in their territories; but the protecting power was not responsible for local detail inside the protectorate. Egypt and the UK shared the government of the Sudan. India, too, had a protectorate, Sikkim.

The king's signature to the declaration of war against Germany on 3 September 1939 committed both the UK and the Indian and colonial parts of the empire to war. The mandates' participation seems to have been taken for granted also. By mid-September the four ‘old dominions’ had all resolved to join. Eire remained neutral; the Germans retained a legation in Dublin all through the war.

The automatic assumption that India would go to war, without consultation with Indian politicians, precipitated a major imperial crisis, which was not finally resolved till India—with Pakistan split off from it—became independent in 1947. However, the empire as a whole constituted a far more formidable fighting machine than the UK could ever have been alone. The effort it expended in the war exhausted it: it was fatally affected. Soon after 1945 came a period of de-colonization, a loosening of ties, and a reassessment of its role, but the voluntary association of most of the countries involved continued, and is known as the British Commonwealth. See also anti-imperialism and nationalism.

M. R. D. Foot

6. Defence forces and civil defence

The formation of a defence force, announced on 14 May 1940, was a direct response to the German invasion of the Low Countries. At this stage the new force was called the Local Defence Volunteers, and within 24 hours more than a quarter of a million men had come forward (see Table 3 for total annual figures). Men over the age for military conscription could ‘do their bit’ in ‘Dad's Army’. Organization at first was spontaneous and haphazard, equipment extremely scarce. After the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk, weapons were even scarcer.

Eventually, khaki overalls became standard issue to the force, soon renamed the Home Guard, but in the beginning dress was variable, weapons mostly improvised. Training began on a freelance basis, organized by veteran commanders or provided by training establishments set up on private initiative, such as the one created at Osterley Park near London, by wealthy backers. Run by Tom Wintringham, an ex-communist who had commanded the British contingent in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, this, between July and August, trained 5,000 men before being taken over as ‘War Office No. 1 School’ for the Home Guard.

UK, Table 3: Volunteer defence forces, 1940-5 (000s)

	Home Guard	Royal Observer Corps
Source: Contributor.
	Men	Women	Men	Women
June 1940	1,456	–	27.9	–
June 1941	1,603	–	33.2	–
June 1942	1,565	–	33.1	1.0
June 1943	1,784	4	30.7	2.2
June 1944	1,727	31	28.5	4.1
June 1945	(stood down Dec 1944)	6.6	2.1

In the summer of 1940, when fears of invasion were well justified, the Home Guard performed a useful if humble function, keeping vigil over coastline, airfields, and factories, and manning roadblocks, so giving the army breathing space in which to train its raw soldiers. The fervent desire of some Home Guard to fight, as Churchill had suggested in a famous speech, on the beaches and in the hills against German invaders, was, of course, frustrated, though rounding up Luftwaffe personnel who parachuted from their planes provided excitement during the battle of Britain.

From August 1940, Home Guard units were affiliated to county regiments of the army: in February 1941 ranks, as in the regular army, were introduced. Recruiting was temporarily suspended in October 1942: when this ban was lifted, the government used the Home Guard as a training-ground for boys of seventeen and eighteen prior to call-up. Compulsory service was introduced early in 1940; by the summer of 1943 there were 1,750,000 Home Guards in 1,100 battalions, whose average age was now under 30. Equipment and training in specialist duties (including Civil Defence) progressively improved the Home Guard which continued to show a variety of local colorations: a bus depot platoon would naturally be commanded by a bus driver, former regular soldiers who were commissionaires drilled the higher officials of the BBC. Military exercises were, in effect, a substitute for peacetime sporting activities. Though some of the 140,000 Home Guard serving in anti-aircraft batteries in September 1944 resented the compulsion which had sent them there, the ‘standing down’ of the force in December 1944 marked, for many, the end of a hobby.

Another organization which played an important part in defending the UK was the Observer Corps (later Royal Observer Corps). This had been formed between the wars by civilian volunteers whose main task once the war had begun was to supplement the radar network by reporting the direction, numbers, height, and type of any aircraft which might be hostile. They were especially useful in alerting the fighter defences to raiders which flew under the radar screen. Mostly unpaid, Corps members worked in pairs and by 1944 there were 1,500 observation posts, on duty day and night (for wartime personnel totals see Table 3). These were linked to a number of Group Centres which controlled up to 36 posts, each Centre being linked to the fighter defences in that particular area (see diagram in battle of Britain entry). When Hitler's V-weapons began to fall on the UK, observer posts were concentrated at half-mile intervals where the V-1s crossed the coast. These were equipped with signal rockets to indicate to intercepting fighters the position of the V-1 as it flew over.

In 1937, experts had estimated that in a new war, bombing would feature on a scale vastly greater than the German raids on the UK in the First World War which had killed 1,413 people. They believed that Germany would bomb the UK at once and continue the attack for 60 days, and that each ton of high explosive would cause 50 casualties, killed and wounded, a total of nearly two million casualties. Such fatalism had already inspired a government circular to local authorities in September 1935 which had encouraged them to organize Air Raid Precautions (ARP). In April 1937, an Air Raid Wardens' Service was created and by the middle of 1938 this had some 200,000 recruits. Over half a million more people enrolled in the ARP services during the ‘Munich crisis’ of 1938 (see Munich agreement) when trench shelters were dug in public parks. By the outbreak of war, enough covered trenches were available to shelter half a million people and nearly one and a half million Anderson shelters had been issued free to householders with gardens. Citizens, provided with masks against gas attack, were told how to gas-proof a room in each home, and ordered to blackout their windows.

Since no great raids occurred immediately, air raid wardens' chief duty in the early months was to enforce blackout regulations: not a popular role. However, during the Blitz of 1940–1 wardens and other Civil Defence personnel often performed heroically, and suffered a considerable number of casualties (see Table 2). Their work overlapped with that of people maintaining peace time roles—doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, and policemen—and that of the WVS. At the height of the Blitz in December 1940 most of the 200,000 or 250,000 people serving in various post-raid services and in shelter organizations were volunteers, and volunteer part-timers were preponderant in the designated Civil Defence services. The Civil Defence (General) services included wardens, rescue and stretcher parties, staffs of control centres, and messenger boys. Casualty services embraced emergency ambulance workers and first-aid post staff. The Fire Service included full-time and part-time regular firemen and part-time auxiliaries. Together, all these numbered more than 1,500,000 people. There were also more than 250,000 full-time and part-time policemen, and hundreds of thousands of active WVS volunteers. The duties of the Home Guard often involved its members in raids and rescue work, so that out of the UK's total civilian population at this time up to a tenth were active, or prepared to be active, in Civil Defence.

Air raid wardens operated from local posts—about ten to the square mile (2.6 sq. km.) in London. They mounted regular patrols and reported bombs as they fell, supervised public shelters, and acted as the eyes and ears of Civil Defence. Rescue teams summoned to ‘incidents’ (the euphemistic term for bomb damage) comprised stretcher bearers and ‘heavy rescue men’, mainly peacetime building workers knowledgeable about house construction. Firemen were commonly needed too. From 31 December 1940, after the so-called ‘Second Fire of London’ had exposed the disastrous consequences of leaving small commercial and industrial premises unattended at night, compulsory ‘fire watching’ was introduced. But regulations were hard to enforce, and incendiary bombs kept the Fire Service busy. Its paid full-timers served 48 hours on, 24 hours off: they were joined at night by part-time auxiliaries. During the Blitz, the difficulties of their work were compounded by the division of responsibility between many hundreds of local authorities, resulting in chaos when the fire service of one locality had to call for help from others. In May 1941, when the worst was almost over, all forces were combined in one National Fire Service.

The Civil Defence services were maintained at the ready long after heavy bombing ceased: there were still hundreds of thousands of volunteers in June 1944, though the number of full-time Civil Defence personnel, 127,000 at the height of the Blitz, had fallen to 70,000 by the end of 1943. Women increasingly joined: a fifth of the quarter-million part-time fire-fighters were eventually female. An attempt was made to excite enthusiasm among the millions of citizens now compelled to undertake 48 hours' firewatching per month by naming them the ‘Fire Guard’. But it was said that, ‘anyone not a congenital idiot could easily evade fire guard duty, and in any case a congenital idiot was entitled to exemption.’

Angus Calder

7. Armed forces and special forces

(a) High Command

The UK waged the Second World War with three major independent branches of the armed forces: the Royal Navy, the Army, and the Royal Air Force. Up to the eve of war in 1939 their strategic and operational direction was vested, at the highest level, in the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) which formulated strategy and defence requirements through a number of sub-committees, and reported to the cabinet through the minister for co-ordination of defence. On 1 September 1939 the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, set up a war cabinet (seegovernment, above), as Lloyd George had done in 1916, and dissolved the CID. The minister for co-ordination of defence was given a seat in the war cabinet which also included the three armed services ministers, the first lord of the Admiralty, secretary of state for war, and secretary of state for air. When Churchill succeeded Chamberlain in May 1940 he immediately created an inner war cabinet, making himself minister of defence, as well as prime minister, and excluding the armed services ministers. He preferred to deal directly with the uniformed heads of the armed forces who formed the Chiefs of Staff Committee. The armed forces ministers thus had little influence on operations and largely concerned themselves with organizational matters, operating through their ministries—the Admiralty, War Office, and Air Ministry.

(b) Army

The titular head of the army was the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) and its affairs were, and still are, conducted through the Army Council. Presided over by the secretary of state for war it had six military members, including the CIGS. The others were the adjutant-general, responsible for personnel matters, quartermaster general (logistics), vice-chief of the Imperial General Staff (operations, plans, intelligence, and training), deputy chief of the Imperial General Staff (organization for war), and the master general of ordinance. They exercised their staff functions through the war office.

At the outbreak of war the army was made up of the Regular and Territorial Armies (TA), but limited conscription was already in place, having been introduced in April 1939. Part of the reason for this was the decision, in view of the bomber threat, to create an Anti-Aircraft Command of five TA divisions. At home the army was organized in a number of geographic commands and districts—Aldershot (later renamed South-Eastern Command), Southern, Western, Northern, Scottish, and Eastern Commands, London and N. Ireland Districts (see Map 103). Within these were five regular infantry divisions, and a number of TA divisions, the bulk of which were to make up the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), which began to cross to France in September 1939. There was also a mobile (later armoured) division in the process of being formed, but this would not be ready for action until the end of May 1940, and then only in truncated form. There was a second mobile division (later 7th Armoured Division, the Desert Rats) in Egypt and 8th Infantry Division in Palestine, which had been coping with the Arab rebellion there. Beyond that the British Army overseas was largely deployed in its traditional manner in scattered small garrisons. A large part of the army overseas was in India at the outbreak of war, as each Indian brigade had one British battalion in it, a policy instituted after the 1857 mutiny (see also India, 4(a)).

The main cornerstone of the British Army, in the cavalry and infantry, was the regimental system. Many regiments had been in existence since the 17th century and had long and illustrious histories. Each had its own cap-badge and particular distinguishing features in uniform. The object was that once a man joined a particular regiment he stayed with it throughout his service. It generated in the individual soldier a special sense of belonging, especially since most regiments recruited from a particular part of the country so that he served with men of the same background. In turn this attachment developed both pride and loyalty, which enhanced the regiment's fighting spirit. Nevertheless, as had happened during 1914–18, it became increasingly difficult to maintain regimental ‘purity’, especially when casualties were high. Reinforcements often had to be posted to regiments wearing a different cap-badge.

The army was made up of three main elements. The teeth arms, those that actually closed with the enemy, the supporting arms, and the service arms. The teeth arms were the Royal Armoured Corps (RAC), which had been formed in 1938 from the cavalry, now largely mechanized (although the 1st Cavalry Division, comprising horsed cavalry and yeomanry regiments, was sent to Palestine in 1939 before being later converted to 10th Armoured Division), the Royal Tank Corps, which became the Royal Tank Regiment (RTR), and the infantry. After the fall of France in June 1940 the RAC was rapidly expanded in order to create additional armoured divisions. This was done by converting a number of infantry battalions into RAC regiments, and guards battalions into the Guards Armoured Division. Six additional cavalry and three RTR regiments were also raised. In 1940 the Reconnaissance Corps was formed to provide reconnaissance regiments for the infantry divisions, a role which cavalry had fulfilled, but had surrendered when its regiments were required for the new armoured divisions being raised. The Reconnaissance, Corps did not become part of the RAC until January 1944, and it was disbanded after the war.

The infantry expanded as it had done in the First World War, with each regiment raising additional battalions. Apart from the normal infantry battalion, other types were introduced to fulfil special roles. Each infantry division had a machine gun battalion, instead of the Machine-Gun Corps during the First World War. Motor battalions were created to serve in armoured formations and later in the war a few infantry battalions were also converted to the glider-borne role and became part of the airborne forces. Early in the war when there were plans to aid the Finns in their fight against the USSR (see Finnish–Soviet war), one or two battalions were even trained as ski troops. There were also those battalions which were incorporated in the Chindits in Burma. By mid-1944, however, there was a serious shortage of infantry and a number of battalions had to be disbanded and even surplus RAF personnel transferred to make good the shortfall. Part of the reason was casualties, but also because the increasing sophistication of weapons systems meant ever rising demands for manpower by other arms and services both to operate and to support them.

Of the three supporting arms, the Royal Artillery had the largest proportion of manpower among all the arms and services. Indeed, it lived up to its motto Ubique (Everywhere). Besides manning the artillery (field, medium, heavy) directly involved in the ground battle, it was also responsible for anti-aircraft (known as ‘Ack Ack’) defence and coastal artillery, and manned as well some of the heavier anti-tank weapons. It even, through the Royal Maritime Artillery, provided gun crews for merchant vessels and operated light aircraft as air observation posts to spot targets and direct artillery fire on to them.

The Royal Engineers—the sappers—also undertook a wide range of tasks. Apart from mine laying and clearance, bridge-building, and demolitions, they were also responsible for the construction of defences, camps, airfields, roads, and railways. They became heavily involved in the operation of ports and in the latter half of the war Armoured Engineers became a vital element of armoured warfare (see engineers, 1). Another very important role, especially in overseas theatres, was water purification, and engineers also ran the military postal system.

Finally, the Royal Corps of Signals was responsible for the army's communications—telephone, radio, and teleprinter. The increasing reliance on good communications was reflected in the fact that the Royal Signals increased its strength six-fold during the war.

The main services within the British Army in 1939 were the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC), the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC), and Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). The RASC was primarily responsible for maintaining supplies to the troops in the field. This involved both transportation and handling of fuel, ammunition, and food (including bread baked in the RASC's own bakeries). The RAOC, on the other hand, was essentially responsible for all types of stores. These included clothing, general stores—ranging from tools to barracks furniture—and warlike stores (weapons, vehicles, ammunition, radios). The RAOC was also responsible for the repair and maintenance of warlike stores, but in 1942 this was taken over by the newly formed Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME).

There were also a number of smaller corps. These included the Royal Army Chaplains Department, the Corps of Military Police, Royal Army Pay Corps, Army Educational Corps, Army Dental Corps, and the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps (title changed to Pioneer Corps in 1940), the last performing the same mission as its First World War predecessor, the Labour Corps. Besides the REME, two new corps were formed during the war: the Intelligence Corps, whose function had previously been carried out by the Staff, and the Army Catering Corps, a reflection of the fact that good food is important in maintaining high morale. For every infantryman and tank soldier in the front line there were nine in the supporting arms and services.

Women in khaki supported the army through the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), formed in 1939 and initially composed of volunteers. They fulfilled much the same tasks as the WRNS did in the Royal Navy, but they additionally made a significant contribution to the work of Anti-Aircraft Command, doing everything except actually fire the guns. Army nurses were drawn from two sources, Queen Alexandra's Imperial Nursing Service and the Territorial Army Nursing Service, amalgamated in 1949 as Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps (see also FANY).

After Dunkirk, command of the British land forces in the UK was vested in GHQ Home Forces, which operated through the geographical commands. Based in Cairo, GHQ Middle East Command initially controlled British and empire forces which fought in the Western Desert, East African, and Syrian campaigns, but in August 1941 East Africa Command was formed to administer troops in that theatre. During early 1942 Middle East Command was also required to take responsibility for Iran and Iraq. These countries had previously come under C-in-C India (as did Burma) but in August 1942 Persia and Iraq Command was formed to administer the few troops in them (see Paiforce).

In the UK, when Montgomery took over South-Eastern Command in 1941, he renamed it South-Eastern Army. Otherwise, army commands existed only overseas and were placed, according to the theatre in which they operated, under a British or Allied GHQ. First Army, under Eisenhower'sAllied Forces HQ, was formed for the North African campaign landings; Second Army, ultimately controlled by SHAEF, took part in OVERLORD and the fighting in north-west Europe; Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Armies were all formed within Middle East Command, but the last two never numbered more than a few divisions, never saw combat as formations, and were used to reinforce the Eighth Army when necessary and as cover for the deception operation which created an imaginary Twelfth Army. A real Twelfth Army was also created as part of Allied Land Forces South-East Asia (ALFSEA) in May 1945 to control British troops fighting in the Burma campaign. Finally, there was Fourteenth Army, formed in October 1943 under GHQ Delhi, which fought the Burma campaign until it was withdrawn to India to prepare for the invasion of Malaya, and was replaced by Twelfth Army.

Where two armies operated together, they formed army groups under army group commanders. British armies formed Eighteenth Army Group (First and Eighth), which fought in the North African campaign; British and US armies formed Fifteenth Army Group, which fought the Sicilian (US Seventh and British Eighth) and the Italian campaigns (US Fifth and British Eighth); and a Canadian (First) and British (Second) army formed Montgomery's Twenty-First Army Group which fought in north-west Europe. The exception to this was Eleventh Army Group, based in India. This had Ceylon Army Command and the garrisons of the Indian Ocean bases under it and was also the administrative structure for Fourteenth Army, before ALFSEA, part of South-East Asia Command, replaced it in November 1944.

In all, at the peak of its strength, the British Army had 11 armoured divisions, 9 of which saw action, 34 infantry divisions, of which 9 saw no combat, and 2 airborne divisions. In all, just over 3.5 million men and women enlisted in it between 1939 and 1945, and 144,000 lost their lives (see Tables 4, 5, and 6). For the Home Guard see defence forces and civil defence above.

UK, Table 4: Strength of Armed Forces (000s)

	Navy (inc. Royal Marines)	Army (exc. Home Guard)	RAF
At the outbreak of war the strength of the Royal Marines was 12,390 men. This grew to 74,000 men by 1945.
Sept 1939	180	897	193
Sept 1940	307	1,888	420
Sept 1941	424	2,292	767
Sept 1942	529	2,494	895
Sept 1943	710	2,697	982
Sept 1944	776	2,741	992
Jun 1945	783	2,920	950

	Women
	Nurses	WRNS	ATS	WAAF
Source: Contributor.
Sept 1939	2.4	–	–	–
Sept 1940	7.9	7.9	36.1	17.4
Sept 1941	10.4	15.1	42.8	37.4
Sept 1942	13.9	33.3	162.2	141.5
Sept 1943	17.5	60.4	212.5	180.3
Sept 1944	20.3	74.0	198.2	171.2
Jun 1945	21.4	72.0	190.8	153.0

(c) Navy

The Admiralty is the oldest of the British war ministries, founded during the reign of Henry VIII, and the Royal Navy is the UK's senior service. Its work was directed by the Admiralty Board, which consisted of the First Lord, First Sea Lord, who was also the Chief of Naval Staff, Second Sea Lord (responsible for manning and recruiting), Third Sea Lord, also known as the Controller of the Navy (ship building and repair, naval dockyards), Fourth Sea Lord (victualling, supplies, naval hospitals), and Fifth Sea Lord (Fleet Air Arm matters).

Operations were under the direct control of the First Sea Lord, in his capacity as Chief of the Naval Staff. He exercised this control through the Vice-Chief of the Naval Staff, whose responsibilities also covered intelligence, plans, signals communications, hydrography, and navigation, and three Assistant Chiefs of the Naval Staff (ACNS), Home, Foreign, and Trade. Within these three broad divisions the ACNS looked after local defence, operations, training, gunnery, and minesweeping.

Uniquely, the Admiralty exercised world-wide command and control of naval operations through various commands and stations: these were North Atlantic and South Atlantic Commands, and the China (Singapore), America and West Indies, and East Indies Stations. Each had a varying number of warships, including those of Commonwealth navies (and, during the war, those belonging to the various governments-in-exile) under its operational control. There were also six home commands—Orkney and Shetlands, Rosyth, Nore, Dover (from October 1939), Portsmouth, Western Approaches—which were, with one exception, responsible for the defence of territorial waters around the British Isles (see Map 103). To this end they had light forces of destroyers, minesweepers, and motor gun/torpedo boats under command.

The exception was Western Approaches, whose headquarters was initially at Plymouth, but was then moved to the more central position of Liverpool. This command had direct responsibility for the day-to-day conduct of the battle of the Atlantic, under the overall direction of the ACNS (Trade) at the Admiralty. While the Admiralty Trade Division worked out the routes of the convoys, in conjunction with the Submarine Tracking Room, which was part of the Naval Intelligence Division, the composition of merchant ships within them was the responsibility of the Naval Control Service, which had a representative at each port. Western Approaches controlled and allocated escort vessels, which were organized into groups.

The RN's main offensive power was built round its fleets. Each contained all the warships operating within a fleet's designated area of command. ‘Battlefleet’ was the term used to describe a fleet's battle squadron and all those warships manoeuvring with it. Unlike the First World War, when the Grand Fleet had a number of battle squadrons, there was normally only one battle squadron within each fleet.

At the outbreak of war there were two main fleets, the Home Fleet, which immediately deployed to Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, and the Mediterranean Fleet based at Alexandria, Egypt. A third was formed at Singapore on 2 December 1941 when the post of C-in-C China Station as an operational command was discontinued. Instead, Admiral Tom Phillips was appointed C-in-C Eastern Fleet. This comprised warships which formerly came under the China Station, and Force ‘Z’ (see Prince of Wales and Repulse). In April 1942, when commanded by Admiral Somerville, the Eastern Fleet tried to oppose the Japanese raid into the Indian Ocean. It was subsequently based at Kilindini (Mombasa) in British East Africa, and eventually became the basis of the British Pacific Fleet (see Task Force 57), the largest British fleet of the war.

Ships of all these fleets were organized into numbered squadrons for cruisers and above, and into numbered flotillas for destroyers and below. Squadrons had a minimum of two ships, flotillas a maximum of eight. If there were enough ships, squadrons and flotillas could be divided into numbered divisions and subdivisions. Unlike squadron divisions, the numbers allotted to destroyer divisions had no connection with how many there were in any particular flotilla. There were also, at various times, formations based on major surface vessels which were smaller than a fleet. These were termed ‘Forces’. Two of the best-known were Force H and Force K.

As submarines operated independently, any number could belong to a submarine flotilla which was a purely administrative unit. The most famous was 10th Flotilla, which was based at Malta for much of the war. It suffered heavy casualties in boats lost, but also achieved spectacular successes. Besides attacking enemy shipping, British submarines were also one of the main means of landing agents and Special Forces on hostile shores. Motor Torpedo Boats (MTBs) and Motor Gunboats (MGBs) were termed Coastal Forces and had their own dedicated bases in home waters. However, they also operated overseas, notably in the Adriatic during, 1944–5, and in support of the final ground offensive in the Burma campaign.

The RN also devoted a significant part of its resources to Combined Operations, the organization set up to develop techniques for, and to mount, amphibious warfare operations which involved all three services. All landing ships and landing craft came under the Combined Operations umbrella.

In terms of manpower, the RN was made up of three elements: the standing regular navy, the Royal Navy itself; the Royal Naval Reserve (RNR), comprising officers and men who had previous RN service or were professional Merchant Navy officers; and the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR). This last consisted only of officers, distinguished by the waved rings of rank worn on their cuffs, hence its nickname the Wavy Navy (the ranks of RNR officers were two interlinked wavy rings). RNVR officers were drawn from those who had volunteered for naval service in time of war, and those conscripted and given naval commissions during the war. Conscripted ratings, on the other hand, were merely classified as ‘Hostilities Only’ and wore no distinguishing insignia. The reason for the difference was the traditional Royal Navy view that all officers were volunteers, but that, recalling the press gang, ratings were generally not so in wartime. RNR officers were often Merchant Navy officers of liners, trawlers, and other ships which were taken into Royal Navy service as troopships, armed merchant cruisers, and vessels employed in laying or sweeping mines (see mine warfare, 2). Another category was retired senior Royal Navy officers brought back to active service as commodores of convoys. But RNVR officers accounted for over three-quarters of the total officer strength of the wartime navy. The battle of the Atlantic especially fell on their shoulders, since it was they who almost entirely manned the corvettes, frigates, and destroyers which made up the escorts.

The Royal Navy was made up of a number of branches, reflecting specialities. The largest of these was the seaman's or executive branch, but both ships and shore establishments had others. These included the Engineering, Medical, Supply, Instructional, Paymasters, and Chaplains branches. In terms of insignia, they were identified by different colours between an officer's rings of rank, and by the various qualification badges worn by ratings on the upper arm. Each branch had its own promotion ladder. Both officers and ratings tended to specialize in one type of ship, but could, and did, serve in others.

A unique branch of the service was the Fleet Air Arm. Up until 1937 it had been the RAF's responsibility to provide naval aircraft and pilots on the grounds that the Fleet Air Arm's predecessor, the Royal Naval Air Service, had been absorbed into the RAF when it was created in 1918 and it would be illogical for the navy, or the army for that matter, to recreate its own air wing. It was, however, an unsatisfactory situation, especially since the RAF accorded low priority to the navy's aviation needs. When, to the air ministry's dismay, the Fleet Air Arm was handed back to the navy and responsibility for it vested in the newly created Fifth Sea Lord, aircrew were drawn from the General List, as the seaman's promotion ladder was called. This policy was maintained throughout the war, even though those who joined the Fleet Air Arm stayed in it. It was, like the RAF, organized in squadrons, numbered from 800 upwards to distinguish them from RAF squadrons.

In September 1939 the Fleet Air Arm possessed 232 obsolete aircraft operating in the main from five aircraft carriers. By June 1945 the number of carriers of all types had grown to more than 50 and the front-line aircraft strength was 1,336 organized in 73 squadrons. However, 55% of the aircraft were US types.

Mention must be made of the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS), known affectionately as the Wrens. Founded in 1918, but stood down at the end of the First World War, in 1939 it was reactivated, initially relying on volunteers. As the wartime navy expanded, so did the WRNS, taking over many shore-based tasks from their male counterparts and thus making more menavailable for service at sea. Their contribution to the Royal Navy can best be summed up in the decision in 1949 to make the WRNS part of the standing Royal Navy and it remained in being until 1993. During the war Wrens did, on rare occasions, serve aboard MTBs, but it was not until 1990 that they were allowed to go to sea as part of a warship's complement on a regular basis. The other major contribution made by women was Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service, which had been founded in 1902 and provided the nursing staff at all naval hospitals.

The Royal Marines were also an integral part of the Royal Navy. Their role in time of war had been redelineated in 1923 by the Admiralty's Madden Committee, which recommended that, apart from their traditional role afloat of helping man the guns of the larger warships, the marines should also raise a striking force for amphibious warfare and a mobile force for defending naval bases overseas. These recommendations were not implemented and in September 1939 the marines, then 12,390 strong, had the manpower only to fulfil their role afloat. But steps were immediately taken to raise an RM brigade—expanded to a division of three brigades (101–103) in 1941—which took part in the abortive Dakar expedition in September 1940. Anti-aircraft batteries and an RM Fortress Unit were also raised, as was the first of two Mobile Naval Base Defence Organizations (MNBDO) which fought on Crete. Later, large parts of this MNBDO were sent to defend Indian Ocean bases while the second, formed from the Fortress Unit, took part in the Sicilian campaign in July 1943. In the meantime, the RM Division, whose HQ had controlled the Madagascar landings, began to be broken up, its battalions gradually being converted into RM commandos (see Special Forces, below). The MNBDOs were also disbanded to form commandos or to provide crews for landing craft which participated in the landings in Normandy and on Walcheren Island during the Scheldt Estuary battle. During the course of the war marines also flew with the Fleet Air Arm, formed an RM Armoured Support Regiment and an anti-aircraft brigade for OVERLORD, and raised special units such as Force Viper and the Royal Marine Boom Patrol Detachment (see canoeists).

For numbers of personnel and casualties see Tables 4, 5, and 6.

UK, Table 5: Casualties to all ranks of the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom during the war as reported to 28 February 1946

	Total	Royal Navy	Army	Royal Air Force
aIncluding the following who were still missing on 28 February 1946; Royal Navy 340, Army 2,267, Royal Air Force 3,089; Total 5,696
Source: Mellor, Casualties and Medical Statistics.
Killed	264,443	50,758	144,079	69,606
Missinga	41,327	820	33,771	6,736
Wounded	277,077	14,663	239,575	22,839
Prisoners-of-war	172,592	7,401	152,076	13,115
total	755,439	73,642	569,501	112,296

UK, Table 6: Casualties to the Women's Auxiliary Services during the war as reported to 28 February 1946

	Total	Women's Royal Naval Service	Auxiliary Territorial Service and Army Nursing Services	Women's Auxiliary Air Force
aIncluding 18 women who were still missing at 28 February 1946
Source: Mellor, Casualties and Medical Statistics.
Killed	624	102	335	187
Missing	98	–	94a	4
Wounded	744	22	302	420
Prisoners-of-war	20	–	20	–
total	1,486	124	751	611

(d) Air Force

The Royal Air Force was only 21 years old when the Second World War began, and was thus very much the junior service. This, however, did not mean that it was any less important than its older counterparts. In terms of High Command, it was structured similarly to the other two services, with policy being evolved through the Air Council, presided over by the Secretary of State for Air. The head uniformed member was the Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), who had operations, plans, and intelligence as his remit, besides being the overall commander-in-chief of the RAF. He was assisted in this by the Deputy CAS (DCAS), the focus for planning, and the Assistant CAS (ACAS), who was the day-to-day link between the Air Ministry and the operational commands. The other members were the Air Member for Personnel (AMP), Air Member for Supply and Organization (AMSO), Air Member for Training (AMT), Vice Chief of the Air Staff (VCAS), as CAS's deputy, and the Air Member for Development and Production (AMP). The last-named, lost his seat when the Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP) was set up under Beaverbrook in May 1940, but was brought back on to the Air Council in 1941 as the Controller of Research and Development, and MAP's represent ative on it.

Until 1936 the RAF at home had one operational command, the Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB), but in that year there was a major reorganization and a number of separate commands by role were created: Bomber, Fighter, Coastal, Reserve, and Training Commands. Reserve Command was absorbed by Training Command, which was split into Flying Training and Technical Training Commands, shortly after the outbreak of war, and later additional commands were added. These were Army Co-Operation, Balloon, Maintenance, and Ferry Commands. The last-named, with the Air Transport Auxiliary, was responsible for delivering aircraft from factory to operational units. It was taken over by Transport Command when that was set up in 1943. Army Co-Operation Command was formed in December 1940 to develop air operations in direct support of the ground forces. The main overseas commands were RAF Middle East (later Mediterranean and Middle East), whose main operational element was the Western Desert Air Force, and Air Command South-East Asia. Unlike the commands at home those overseas carried out all operational air roles. Often, too, their forces were merged into Allied air commands. Thus, in the Mediterranean theatre from 1943 onwards British and US air forces operated together under the overall umbrella of Mediterranean Air Command. For most of the war Coastal Command was placed under the operational control of the Admiralty in order to have unified command for the battle of the Atlantic. By the same token, RAF Fighter Command had operational control over the army's Anti-Aircraft Command for the air defence of Britain. In August 1941 Coastal Command (see Map 103 for RAF Coastal Command Group boundaries) assumed responsibility for air-sea rescue operations in the open ocean from the Air Ministry's Directorate of Air-Sea Rescue, but Fighter Command remained in charge of operations around the coast.

Each command comprised a number of groups, each made up of a number of squadrons, except in the case of fighter groups, which, from the autumn of 1940 had an intermediary level of command, the fighter wing. Within the Metropolitan Air Force, as the RAF in Britain was sometimes termed, Bomber Command initially consisted of Nos. 2–5 Groups, which were operational, and No. 6 Group for training. Of these, No. 2 Group was to be largely dedicated to daylight bombing and was passed to the command of 2nd Tactical Air Force, formed in 1943 for support of OVERLORD and replacing Army Co-Operation Command. No. 6 Group was later joined by No. 7. These were then redesignated Nos. 91 and 92 Groups in May 1942. Their purpose was to control the Operational Training Units (OTU), which every command had. These represented the final stage of training for aircrew before they joined operational squadrons. No. 6 Group did, however, reappear in Bomber Command as an all-Canadian Group at the beginning of 1943 (see Canada, 6(d)). No. 1 Group, which had been sent to France as part of the Advanced Air Striking Force (AASF) at the beginning of the war, came back into the Bomber Command fold after Dunkirk. Also formed in January 1943 were No. 8 (Pathfinder Force) Group and, towards the end of that year, Nos. 80 and 100 (Special Duties) Groups, responsible for handling the ever more sophisticated electronic warfare that was fought in the skies above Germany and occupied Europe. Fighter Command had Nos. 10–13 Groups, Coastal Command Nos. 15–19 Groups, Balloon Command Nos. 30–33 Groups, and Army Co-Operation Command Nos. 70 and 71 Groups.

During the war the RAF drew its strength from a number of different sources. First, there was the RAF, the standing air force.There was also the Royal Auxiliary Air Force (R Aux AF), formed in 1924 to provide a reserve of manpower and air squadrons; and it also found the manpower for Balloon Command. In 1937, in the midst of the RAF's expansion, it was realized that the existing organization would be unable to keep pace with the additional aircrew required. Consequently, the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR) was formed to create a pool of aircrewmen who could be brought on to the active list as soon as war seemed imminent. The ‘weekend fliers’ as its members were called, and who numbered over 10,000 at the outbreak of war, were a vital part of the RAF, especially during the battle of Britain.

The Dominion air forces—Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and South African—were also incorporated in the RAF, as were those of continental nations overrun by Hitler. These included the Czech, Belgian, Dutch, French, Norwegian, and Polish air forces, many of whom had their own national squadrons within the RAF order of battle. Lending their support to all these disparate elements were the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and Princess Mary's RAF Nursing Service. Besides providing much administrative support, WAAF personnel performed invaluable service as plotters in the operational control rooms, especially during the battle of Britain, as radar operators, and in the RAF's Y-service, which eavesdropped on airborne radio communications.

Finally, there was the RAF Regiment. The RAF had assumed a ground role in 1922 when, through air control, it had taken over the policing of the British mandates and other territories in the Middle East. It formed armoured car companies, which took part, under army command, in the Western Desert and North African campaigns and ran the Iraqi and Aden Protectorate Levies. During 1939–41 the RAF provided some lighter anti-aircraft weapons for defence of its airfields, but after the fall of Crete in May 1941, a study on the threat of airborne troops was set up. The result was the formation, in February 1942, of the RAF Regiment to protect airfields from this threat. More than 220 RAF Regiment squadrons were raised before 1945, but the armoured car squadrons did not come under the RAF Regiment umbrella until 1946.

While conscription applied to the RAF in the same way as the other two services, throughout the war all aircrew were volunteers. Given their high losses—Bomber Command alone lost almost 56,000 killed—it became clear very early on that resources were simply not sufficient to train the required numbers for an ever-expanding force. The solution was the British Empire Air Training Scheme, established in December 1939. The aircrew training process was, however, a long one. The volunteer initially had to pass medical and intelligence tests and was then sent to the Air Crew Reception Centre at Regent's Park in London. Twelve weeks' ground training at an Initial Training Wing (ITW) followed. Those who had opted for crew positions other than that of pilot were then sent to specialist schools—navigation, wireless, gunnery—while the pilots attended Elementary Flying Training School (EFTS). Here those without the required flying aptitude were identified and remustered in other air trades and the remainder underwent advanced flying training, often abroad, under the Training Scheme. On return they were assigned to the type of aircraft for which they were best suited and then sent to an OTU. There multi-seater aircrewmen formed their operational crews and were posted as such to squadrons. Often it would be eighteen months or more from the time that a pilot originally reported to Regent's Park to his first operational sortie in a squadron. It was this, rather than the rate of aircraft production, that acted as the limiting factor on the rate of increase of the RAF's front-line aircraft strength. See defence forces and civil defence above, for Royal Observer Corps. See Tables 4, 5, and 6 for personnel numbers and casualties.

(e) Special forces

For much of the inter-war period little thought was given to what were called ‘irregular operations’, although T. E. Lawrence had demonstrated in the Near East during 1917–18 how effective they could be. However, the War Office did eventually establish a small branch to study the subject and at the outbreak of war it put forward a number of proposals, including destroying the Romanian oilfields by sabotage, but none came to anything. The first Special Forces units actually raised were the ten Independent Companies, formed in 1940 for the Norwegian campaign with the mission of preventing the Germans from setting up U-boat bases on the coastline between Narvik and Namsos. Five companies were sent; they achieved little. But from them evolved the commandos when, in the summer of 1940, Churchill ordered that hit-and-run raids be mounted against the occupied coastline of Europe—his ‘butcher and bolt’ policy, as he called it. The commandos were initially formed into battalion-sized units called Commandos which were trained to fight as self-contained groups. They were then renamed Special Service battalions but reverted to being called Commandos in March 1941. Numbered 1–9, 11, and 12, each totalled about 500 men. During the early part of the war they mounted numerous raids against the occupied coastline (see Dieppe, Lofoten, and St Nazaire, for example). Later, they were joined by No. 10, an inter-Allied unit made up of anti-Nazi German personnel and others drawn from the forces belonging to the various governments-in-exile No. 14, raised for raids on occupied Norway; No. 30, an inter-service intelligence-gathering unit; and by a number of Royal Marine (RM) Commandos. The first RM Commando, raised in 1942, was simply called the Royal Marine Commando, but this later became No. 40 and Nos. 41–48 were also raised. All Army and Marine Commandos were contained in four Special Service (Commando from December 1944) Brigades, which were in turn controlled by a Special Service (Commando) Group.

However, Special Forces initially thrived in the Middle East. First on the scene was the Long Range Desert Group, quickly followed by the raising of three Middle East Commandos (nos. 50–52) independent of those formed in the UK. But apart from the LRDG, and, to a lesser extent the Special Boat Section, early attempts to employ Special Forces in the Middle East were not overly successful, basically because the higher command had little understanding of them. Out of this frustration was born the Special Air Service (SAS), but other organizations were formed as well, including Popski's Private Army. Indeed, such was the plethora that controlling and co-ordinating their activities proved very difficult (see Layforce and Middle East Commando). Burma, too, generated its own Special Forces. Among them were V-Force and, of course, the Chindits; and after South-East Asia Command was formed in October 1943 it, too, had its own group of Special Forces (see Small Operations Group).

By mid-1943 Special Forces could be categorized in a number of types. First, there were those primarily dedicated to supporting the major Allied landing operations; they came under the umbrella of Combined Operations HQ. These included not just the commandos, but the Combined Operations Pilotage Parties which carried out beach reconnaissance; Royal Naval commandos for organizing the beaches during the landings themselves; and the RAF Servicing Commandos, who made captured airfields operational. Then there were the Raiding Forces, who by this stage in the war had primarily an intelligence-gathering function and included the commandos in part. Finally, there were those who operated behind the enemy lines, with the resistance or partisans (also the function of SOE), or independently, as in the case of the SAS in Italy and France (see Cooney teams) and the Chindits in Burma.

Special Forces provided an escape for many who were frustrated by the strict confines of conventional soldiering, but often they were those that their units could ill afford to lose. The consequent resentment, and the significant number of abortive operations during the first half of the war, gave Special Forces a bad name in many quarters. However, once it was realized that they could be a valuable weapon if their activities were closely tied to overall theatre plans—and that they often required the close support of all three armed forces—they became very much more effective and undoubtedly justified the effort put in to creating and nurturing them.

Charles Messenger

8. Intelligence

Each of the armed services included a few secret or very secret branches—planning staffs, designers of future equipment, cipher staffs, wireless interception or Y-Service staffs. Moreover, there were several secret services, so classified—officially undiscussable in parliament, in the press, in open correspondence, or on unscrambled telephones. Unlike the German Abwehr, these were separate organizations and therefore prone to rivalry and intrigue.

The oldest and weightiest of these, generally known as MI5, the security service, and MI6, the secret (or special) intelligence service (SIS), dated back formally to a cabinet decision in 1909, though both had earlier and deeper roots. They were numbered as being part of the Directorate of Military Intelligence (see Table 7), but were independent of it. In principle, MI5 was a defensive body, whose writ ran within the crown's territories and 4.8 km. (3 mi.) out to sea beyond them, while the more offensive MI6 operated into foreign countries. They were powerful, although if any arrests were necessary they had to be made by the ordinary civil police force. In practice, MI5 needed some outstations outside the empire; there were joint MI5–MI6 missions in New York, called British Security Co-ordination and in Cairo, called Security Intelligence Middle East, as well as in New Delhi and elsewhere.

UK, Table 7: British directorate of militaryintelligence c.1942

a secret service, independent of DMI
b later handed over to Ministry of Information
c absorbed into SOE 1940
Source: Contributor.
MI1	administration
MI2	E. Europe and Asia
MI3	W. Europe and Americas
MI4	maps
MI5	securitya
MI6	espionagea
MI7	pressb
MI8	signals
MI9	Allied prisoners; escapes and evasions
MI10	technical
MI11	field security police
MI12	postal securityb
MI14	Germany
MI15	photographic reconnaissance
MI16	science
MI17	co-ordination
MI19	enemy prisoners; refugees from Continent
MIL	liaison with Allies
MIR	researchc
MIX	intelligence corps

Under MI5, though transferred to MI6 in May 1941, came the Radio Security Service (RSS), which listened to every broadcast made on British soil and investigated any that were unauthorized. Also under MI5 came the Royal Victoria Patriotic Schools at Wandsworth in south London.

Technically under the head of MI6—though, as it developed, both larger and more important than its nominal master—came the Government Code and Cypher School, the cover name for the decipher service which was located at Bletchley Park. This interservice body was of cardinal importance for strategy and quite beyond price (see ULTRA); its diplomatic role, no doubt also important, so far remains largely unexplored.

MI6's supposed monopoly on overseas operations outside crown territories was broken by the formation in December 1939 of MI9 the escape service. MI9's head also controlled MI19, which dealt with intelligence from prisoners-of-war and from refugees from occupied territory; MI19 ran the Combined Services' Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC).

A more formidable rival overseas to MI6 was SOE (Special Operations Executive) set up in July 1940 to organize sabotage and subversion in enemy-occupied territory, which grew to be an almost world-wide body, with a perceptible impact on the course of the war. SOE originally included a propaganda branch, which was wrested from it in August 1941 to become the Political Warfare Executive, also of worldwide reach and closely controlled by the foreign office.

The smallest and most secret service was the London Controlling Section (LCS) which ran deception. It depended largely on Bletchley Park for information about how far the Germans took the baits that it laid, and on a small branch of MI5, B1a (see XX-committee), which handled double agents through whom the LCS could influence German intelligence opinion and even reach Hitler himself.

All these secret services in fact needed to co-operate, though they often purported to be rivals; and inter-service rivalries did sometimes do actual harm—for instance, when MI6 withheld for some months from MI5 decipher material vital for MI5's progress in the business of double-crossing the Germans. A self-appointed body, the W Board, met occasionally to co-ordinate them all. It consisted of the heads of the regular service intelligence departments and of MI5 and of MI6. The XX-Committee was, formally, a sub-committee of the W Board. Later in the war the task of co-ordination was taken over by Victor Cavendish-Bentinck who forged in the Joint Intelligence Committee a body of central significance. A sub-committee of the British Chiefs of Staff committee, it comprised the three service heads of intelligence, and the heads of MI5 and MI6. Between them they analysed such intelligence as was available, advised the Chiefs of Staff about probable Axis moves, and supervised the dissemination of intelligence through the armed forces.

All in all, the secret services deserved reasonably well of their country. Traditionally, work in them was supposed to be its own reward, but they were not wholly overlooked when it came to handing out decorations.

M. R. D. Foot

9. Merchant marine

Britain's dependence on merchant shipping was an economic fact which total war heavily underlined. In addition to the need to import huge quantities of food and raw materials, soldiers and airmen had to be shipped overseas, equipped, and then sustained. The shipping industry—which became the Merchant Navy in wartime—was so stretched that maintenance of supplies to the UK and the armed forces overseas was regularly in crisis for the first four years of the war. It was not until 1944, when regular deliveries of US mass-produced Liberty ships to the British merchant fleet had been established, that shortages were overcome.

The shipping crisis had little to do with the operation and management of merchant ships. Shipowners, though generally conservative, were effective managers and seafarers were competent. In 1939 the British merchant fleet was still the world's largest, accounting for some 33% of total tonnage. The country's share had shrunk by some 12% since 1914, but this was only to be expected as economic development unfolded in other world regions. British shipowners, however, had been slow to build tankers and in the tramp traders had lagged behind in adopting diesel propulsion. Technological backwardness was common also among the cargo liner companies. While they owned the fastest and most up-to-date ships in the UK, they were still outstripped by best practice in Scandinavia, Germany, and the Netherlands. The problem lay largely with the shipbuilding industry. Even in the inter-war period British yards were notoriously inefficient and in the war years they proved incapable of raising productivity sufficiently to make a significant contribution to repairing the losses due to enemy action.

If the first cause of the permanent wartime shipping crisis lay in the deficiencies of the shipbuilding industry, the second lay in the inability of the Admiralty to provide adequate protection for merchant ships in convoy. UK coastal and outward North Atlantic convoying began within a matter of days of the outbreak of war and within a month inward convoys were organized from Freetown, Gibraltar, and Halifax, Nova Scotia. Routine convoy organization of mustering and then controlling merchant ships in formation quickly became efficient. The problem lay in the Royal Navy's lack of suitable escort ships and anti-submarine tactics, resulting in high losses of merchant ships during the battle of the Atlantic. Air cover and statistical analysis of U-boat operations were also critical and it was not until mid-1943 that all the elements were in place (see air gap).

The first phase of managing the shipping crisis saw the gradual integration into the British fleet of shipping from other European countries which had evaded German occupation (see Table 8). Politically unwilling to attempt requisition even where feasible, the British government sought to negotiate with governments-in-exile and foreign shipowners. On average, 26% of the Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and Belgian fleets were in their home ports and captured during German occupation. While none of those ships away on voyages returned home, they did not all rally to the British cause with equal enthusiasm. Most Danish shipowners were pro-German and ordered their masters to put into neutral ports. About half did so. The remaining ships, although still manned by Danes, were seized and sailed thereafter under the British flag. The whole of the much smaller Belgian fleet was made available to the UK. The most significant fleets were the Norwegian and the Dutch and half of each were sailing under British direction by November 1939. Greek ships were a later and important addition. Approximately half a million tons of French shipping came into British hands after the fall of France in June 1940—but this was almost exactly matched by the tonnage of British ships caught in French ports at the same time.

By the spring of 1941 the crisis reached another peak when estimates of importing capacity were steadily reduced from 42 million tons to 28.5 million tons—less than had been imported in 1917. Relief came from the USA as elderly, laid-up ships were released on bareboat charter (that is, without crews) and French, Italian, and Yugoslav ships being held in US ports were requisitioned and handed over to the British. The shipping crisis was not resolved by American entry into the war: indeed, early in 1943, as a result of the shipping needed to mount and supply the Anglo-American North African campaign landings, the situation was worse than in 1941. Again, resolution depended upon American help—this time by the USA agreeing to divert shipping from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

Formal ownership of merchant shipping was left unchanged although the government, via the Ministry of Shipping, incorporated into the Ministry of War Transport (MOWT) in May 1941, had requisitioned all vessels by the summer of 1940 and agreed terms with the owners. The ministry now decided where ships would go and what cargoes should be carried. Senior managers and directors were recruited from shipping companies to ministry posts for the duration of the war while other shore staffs continued to organize crewing, provisioning, and maintenance of ships. Shareholders, for their part, had their dividends regulated. In short, the general direction, management, and operation of shipping remained in the hands of those who had run the industry in the pre-war years.

It was a combination of MOWT direction and Admiralty control of merchant shipping at sea which justified the use of the term ‘Merchant Navy’. This honorific title was conferred on the industry in 1928 when the Prince of Wales adopted the title ‘Master of the Merchant Navy and Fishing Fleets’ in recognition of merchant seafarers' role in the First World War. From 1936 successive monarchs adopted the title. In peacetime the industry had no more coherence than any other and the title had only the substance of rhetoric. In wartime, however, the industry did indeed become a quasi-service and the fourth arm of the state.

In the first nine months of war, 150 ships were sunk. These early losses were made good through new building and captured Axis ships. The need for additional ships did not become a matter of pressing urgency until after the fall of France and Italy's entry into the war. The former entailed the closure of the English Channel to deep-sea ships while the latter closed the Suez route to the east. The route to UK east coast ports was now via the north of Scotland, adding eleven days to merchant ships' average voyage length. Ships supplying the armed forces in the Middle East had now to go via the Cape of Good Hope and travel 21,000 km. (13,000 mi.) instead of 4,800 km. (3,000 mi.) as before; Bombay was now nearly 18,000 km. (11,000 mi.) distant instead of 9,600 km. (6,000 mi.). These and other re-routings, together with delays such as those involved in assembling convoys, led to an increase in average round voyage time from about 90 to 122 days and effectively reduced importing capacity by 25%.

Ships' patterns of trading were, of course, transformed. A handful of the smaller passenger ships continued their normal services to India and Australia but 50 of this type of ship, together with most of their officers and crew, were transferred to the Royal Navy to become armed merchant cruisers. The remainder of the deep-sea passenger ships were used for trooping. The larger and faster of these had originally been designed for the North Atlantic routes but now travelled world-wide. Cargo liners, also built for particular trades, were retained as far as possible for their normal routes and cargoes. Refrigerated ships designed for the Argentinian and Australasian meat trades, for example, continued to sail to those regions. Tramps, on the other hand, no longer scoured the globe in seasonal search of bulk cargoes and were overwhelmingly employed in the main North Atlantic supply line. Ships in the coastal trade mostly stayed in UK waters although a number were sent to the Mediterranean in 1942 to supply troops in that theatre. Some 24 North Sea and home trade passenger ships were allocated more heroic tasks. They sailed with the Atlantic and Arctic convoys as rescue ships.

UK, Table 8: Dry–cargo merchant shipping under British control, 1,600 gross tons and over, 3 September 1939 to 30 September 1945 (In thousand deadweight tons)

	Total	British flag Total	United Kingdom and Colonies	Dominions	Foreign vessles Bareboat charter	Requisitioned	Foreigna flag vessels time– chartered to United Kingdom
a for the earlier months of the war the information about foreign flag vessels on time–charter is incomplete
Source: Statistical Digest of the War, Table 153; Behrens, C. B. A., Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War (London, 1955).
1939
Sept 3	18,710	18,710	17,691	1,019	–	–	–
Dec 31	18,579	18,418	17,314	1,096	8	–	161
1940
Mar 31	18,764	18,403	17,258	1,102	43	–	361
June 30	21,096	18,911	17,264	1,276	68	303	2,185
Sept 30	23,459	19,831	17,718	1,343	45	725	3,628
Dec 31	21,963	18,453	16,362	1,330	46	715	3,510
1941
Mar 31	21,622	18,050	15,858	1,305	81	806	3,572
June 30	20,858	17,037	14,828	1,282	131	796	3,821
Sept 30	21,115	17,085	14,807	1,302	153	823	4,030
Dec 31	21,324	17,221	14,851	1,316	206	848	4,103
1942
Mar 31	20,994	16,809	14,452	1,272	245	840	4,185
June 30	20,505	16,336	13,921	1,250	346	819	4,169
Sept 30	19,722	15,826	13,333	1,219	488	786	3,896
Dec 31	18,758	15,135	12,411	1,225	826	673	3,623
1943
Mar 31	18,449	14,937	12,059	1,168	1,066	644	3,512
June 30	18,528	15,067	11,514	1,480	1,456	617	3,461
Sept 30	19,163	15,725	11,810	1,746	1,548	621	3,438
Dec 31	20,082	16,738	11,801	2,232	2,093	612	3,344
1944
Mar 31	20,765	17,426	11,892	2,364	2,546	624	3,339
June 30	21,967	18,245	11,996	2,650	2,997	602	3,722
Sept 30	21,962	18,282	11,841	2,901	2,971	569	3,680
Dec 31	22,225	18,597	12,000	3,104	2,945	548	3,628
1945
Mar 31	22,228	18,638	11,996	3,202	2,910	530	3,590
June 30	22,143	18,844	12,234	3,246	2,918	446	3,299
Sept 30	21,210	19,043	12,426	3,345	2,977	295	2,167

Some merchant ships were cast in unaccustomed roles. A number were adapted to launch aircraft to help protect the convoys in which they sailed (see CAM and MAC ships); and, beginning in 1943, five high-speed MGBs, crewed by merchant seamen, operated from Hull, on the English eastern coast, as blockade runners.

In 1938 there were 192,375 persons employed on British merchant ships, 50,700 of whom were Indian and Chinese. Constant official anxiety about the adequacy of shipping capacity, and heightened public awareness of dependence upon imports, focused an unusual degree of attention on merchant seamen. On the one hand they were uniformly portrayed in films, books, newspapers, magazines and radio programmes as archetypal stoical Britons who without fuss brought home food and the matériel of war. On the other hand, and quietly, Defence Regulations and the disciplinary provisions of the Merchant Shipping Acts were used by shipmasters, magistrates, and consuls to fine and gaol seafarers for shipboard offences in the UK and abroad on a scale without precedent. Another and wholly new disciplinary problem was provided by the Indian and Chinese seamen: hitherto considered docile, they engaged respectively in strikes and mass desertions as they successfully attempted to close the gap between their own and British seamen's wages. For their part, industrial action by British crews was rare. Although seafarers' average working week (before overtime) was ten hours longer than the all-industry average, and shipboard conditions were greatly inferior to those of Norwegians, monthly rates of pay had become relatively good and paid leave and continuity of employment were introduced for the first time. At no time during the war was there a scarcity of men to match the scarcity of ships. At those rare moments when seafarers were in short supply numbers were made up by recruitment in Aden and the West Indies as they had been in the First World War. When the war ended 29,180 merchant seamen had died and some 4,700 British-flagged ships had been sunk.

Tony Lane

10. Culture

The outpouring of cultural activities and achievements in the UK during the years of the Second World War, notable at the time, seems in retrospect a truly remarkable, even unparalleled phenomenon. The achievements at their most impressive, and, as it has turned out, at their most enduring, have transcended national boundaries and historical circumstances to become a permanent part of western culture in the 20th century. Even the most selective list would include Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, George Orwell's Animal Farm, T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, the poems of Dylan Thomas gathered in Deaths and Entrances, the wartime films by Humphrey Jennings, especially Fires Were Started, the ‘Shelter Drawings’ by Henry Moore, and Benjamin Britten's first true opera, Peter Grimes. These are the examples that immediately come to mind but they were not isolated achievements. Rather, they can be seen as the most outstanding in their respective genres, surrounded by an impressive array of work approaching them in quality.

Indeed, to have so distinguished a creative outpouring in a period of six years would be remarkable at any time. That it should have occurred in wartime, in a country engaged in a struggle that threatened its very existence, seems almost incredible.

There seems to have been, from the first, a determination on the part of such responsible and farseeing public figures as the economist John Maynard Keynes and the art critic Kenneth Clark, editors such as John Lehmann of Penguin New Writing and Cyril Connolly of Horizon, and senior authors such as E. M. Forster and Osbert Sitwell that ‘culture’ was not to be put aside ‘for the duration’; in the act of fighting to save the UK, the nation's culture must not be sacrificed. The commitment of the government to art in all its manifestations was established as a principle early on. The creation of the War Artists's Advisory Committee, under Clark, and of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, under Keynes, would play a significant role in bringing art to the people even as the Blitz brought the war itself into their lives. The ‘Home Front’, a cosy-sounding phrase, was anything but comfortable as the bombs fell night after night on London, Manchester, Coventry, and elsewhere. Life in the wartime years went on at something like battle pitch. The emotional level was high, and it was a level at which it was possible for artists, composers, and writers to create works of art—not as a way of escape, but to express the tension under which they lived. But their mood at the start of the war was subdued and was well captured by C. Day Lewis. In answer to the call for heroic war verse, he wrote: ‘It is the logic of our times, / No subject for immortal verse— / That we who lived by honest dreams / Defend the bad against the worse.’

Perhaps the most emblematic events of the role of culture in the UK during the Second World War were the concerts given at the National Gallery in London (cleared of its pictures in anticipation of the bombing raids). From 10 October 1939, when they started with Myra Hess playing Beethoven's ‘Appassionata’ sonata and her own arrangement of Bach's ‘Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring’, until 1945, there were 1,698 concerts by 700 performers attended by a total audience of 825,000.

Severe paper rationing was soon instituted and created a shortage of reading material, just at a time when long periods of boring wartime duty gave people more time to read. Penguin Books, eminent in the cheap paperback market since the mid-1930s with books priced at sixpence (under 3p) each, provided a mass of crime and adventure stories, suitable for reading in air-raid shelters, as well as more serious books, both literary and political. Largely through Penguin's influence, books began to form part of the English domestic furniture in a much wider range of houses than had been the case before the war—another foretaste of a new age.

John Lehmann had started to edit a book magazine, New Writing, before the war broke out, but it transformed itself quite rapidly into Penguin New Writing, a highly popular paperback that reprinted old material as well as new pieces, frequently by Europeans and by servicemen. Even more an exponent of high art was Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly, committed to the best of European culture, with a slightly disdainful attitude towards the war. Distractions at all levels were prized, and the long novels of Trollope enjoyed a revival that has lasted to the present day.

In literature it was not necessarily those who were directly involved in the war who wrote the most memorable works, among them T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and George Orwell, who published powerful essays dwelling on what was the essence of the good parts of English life, and on the necessity of keeping language honest against the claims of propaganda.

More directly depicting the effect of war on the Home Front were the novels and stories of Elizabeth Bowen, and the stories of the fire service by William Sansom. Otherwise, there seemed to be two main streams in the writings of the war. There was a high Bohemian and romantic strand found in what came to be known as Fitzrovia, centring on the personal style, and the poetry, of Dylan Thomas, the short stories of J. Maclaren-Ross, and James Tambimuttu and his Poetry (London). The emphasis was upon the personal, as in the developments to be found in one of the more public of the 1930s poets: Stephen Spender. Yet they wrote about the war, as in some of the best known of Thomas's poems, ‘Deaths and Entrances’ and ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’. There were also extremely fine soldier poets such as Alun Lewis (killed in Burma), Roy Fuller, Keith Douglas (killed in Normandy in 1944), and Henry Reed whose well-known poem ‘The Naming of Parts’ is characteristic of the rueful irony that was the dominant note in the poetry of the time. There are two voices in it—the sergeant's, explaining the different parts of the rifle; and the civilian soldier's which gives the military phrases a private meaning.

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.
At a more popular level, Patience Strong, the pen-name of Winifred Cushing, wrote a set of verses for every issue of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Pictorial for 40 years, including all those of the war. Through a mixture of sentiment, piety, and common sense she helped to sustain the morale of several million readers, and ran an unofficial forces' welfare bureau. The monthly magazine Lilliput also had its attractions, for in every number, supported by short stories, nature photographs, and snippets of news, was an artistic photograph of a naked girl; and in spite of the paper shortage, there was a steady demand for sporting and popular newspapers (see press).

Other than controlling paper, and hence restricting how many books could be printed, there was little official influence on what was published in the ordinary way. But in other aspects, the government was deeply involved, most notably in the world of art and the newest medium of all, the cinema. This was conducted through the new Ministry of Information, which in the course of the war helped produce 1,887 films as well as vetting 3,200 newsreels and 380 features. By 1942, these films, or others approved by the ministry, were being shown to 20–30 million filmgoers weekly. The ministry was not in charge of making commercial films but its approval (and also financing) was extremely important in terms of supplies and exemption from armed service of those involved. Perhaps the most famous made during the war were Henry V ( 1945), starring and produced by Laurence Olivier, and In Which We Serve ( 1942), starring and produced by Noël Coward. In vastly different ways, they both emphasized quiet heroism by all classes. The line between documentaries and commercial films was blurred, with documentaries, moving on from the tradition of John Grierson, likely to have somewhat more plot than they had had before, and commercial films having some sense of the actuality of war. Perhaps the most distinguished documentary, or rather docu-drama, of the war was Humphrey Jennings's Fires Were Started ( 1942). It told of 24 hours in the life of a fire service unit in London during the Blitz which had ended the previous year. The Germans were not mentioned by name, and the emphasis, with very little sentimentality, was on carrying on with the job, even at the cost of a life.

What were the contribution of those in the visual arts? Artists were to provide a record of the war; and in some instances, though it was very much a lesser consideration, they might even create something of greater artistic merit. That had certainly been true of such painters as Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, and Wyndham Lewis in the First World War, so there was little resistance to the idea that something similar should be encouraged during this war as well. In August 1939, Kenneth Clark proposed a War Artists' Advisory Committee to the Ministry of Information and it came into being the following January.

A few artists' organizations outside the government had been already formed by that time, such as Paul Nash's Oxford Art Bureau. Nash was concerned that artists might too hastily be called up as servicemen, and he established a panel of authorities—John Betjeman, Lord David Cecil, Lord Berners, and John Piper—to compile lists of possible war artists, and the lists were sent to ministries. But Nash's efforts were superseded by Clark's committee, which would appoint certain artists as official war artists and have the right of first refusal for all of their work.

Thanks to the war artists' scheme important work was done outside the UK by such painters as Anthony Gross, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Leonard Rosoman, and Edward Ardizzone. Yet it is striking that the greatest art work of the war was produced on the Home Front. Not only were there Moore and Sutherland in London, but Stanley Spencer paintings in the shipyards on the Clyde and Paul Nash with extraordinary paintings of fighter planes in the air war over Britain, culminating in the greatest single oil masterpiece of the war, Totes Meer (Dead Sea) of wrecked German planes. It was perhaps the most extensive patronage scheme for British artists that has ever existed, and it resulted in nearly 6,000 works of art, eventually most of them distributed to museums, with the Tate Gallery and the Imperial War Museum having the first pick. It also resulted in a higher evaluation placed by the public, and those who were seriously concerned with art, upon British art not only of the present but of the past.

Light music was for everyone and wartime Britain was deluged with it. It came primarily from the BBC and from innumerable private or public-house gramophones, playing fragile 78 r.p.m. records. ‘Music while you work’, an American slogan imported in the 1930s, helped to relieve monotony in war factories, where the machinery was not too noisy to drown out the music. Jack Payne and Henry Hall, dance band leaders, were better known than most generals.

So were Gracie Fields the comedienne and Vera Lynn the singer, who sang mixtures of old favourites and new, sentimental songs. Gracie Fields with her Lancashire accent and working-class airs was a symbol of the growing power of democracy, and Vera Lynn's good looks enchanted thousands of serving men at forces' concerts. Theatres and music-halls suffered severely from blackout and call-up—acting was not a reserved occupation; but, by arrangement with the service ministries, many actors and actresses were spared call-up if they consented to take part in travelling shows to entertain the armed forces.

Air attack damaged many theatres and put many more out of business. One that was proud to boast, after the war, that ‘We never closed’ was the Windmill Theatre off Piccadilly Circus, in central London.

The BBC competed, often with success, against theatres and cinemas as a vehicle of popular entertainment. One show in particular, Ted Kavanagh's ITMA (‘It's That Man Again’), starring Tommy Handley, was reckoned to have 16 million listeners every Thursday evening, among whom George VI was one of the most devoted. ITMA gently satirized wartime bureaucracy, in a dazzling interchange of epigrams and catch-phrases, many of which passed into the common currency of speech.

M. R. D. Foot/ and Peter Stansky

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Domestic Life, economy, and war effort Addison, P. , The Road to 1945: British Politics and The Second World War (London, 1975).
Barnett, C. , The Audit of War (London, 1986).
Calder, A. , The People's War: Britain 1939–1945 (London, 1969).
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Marwick, A. , The Home Front (London, 1976).
Smith, H. (ed.), War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War (Manchester, 1986).

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Government Addison, P. , op. cit.
Jefferys, K. , op. cit.
Lee, J. M. , The Churchill Coalition (London, 1980).
Schoenfeld, M. P. , The War Ministry of Winston Churchill (Iowa, 1972).

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Northern Ireland Blake, J. W. , Northern Ireland in the Second World War (Belfast, 1956).

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Armed forces and special forces Barnett, C. , Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War (London, 1991).
Fraser, D. , And We Shall Shock Them: The British Army in the Second World War (London, 1983).
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Richards, D. and and Saunders, H. , The Royal Air Force 1939–45, 3 vols. (London, 1974).
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Intelligence Hinsley, F. H. , et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War, 4 vols. (London, 1978–90).

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Merchant marine Behrens, C. B. A. , Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War (London, 1955).
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Culture Aldgate A. and and Richards, J. , Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War (Oxford, 1986).
Blythe, R. (ed.), Writing in a War: Stories, Poems and Essays of 1939–1945 (Harmondsworth, 1982).
Coultass, C. , Images for Battle: British Film and the Second World War, 1939–1945 (London, 1989).
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Foot, M. R. D. , Art and War (London, 1990).
Harries, M. and and S. , The War Artists (London, 1983).
Haskell, A.,, Powell, D.,, Myers, R.,, and Ironside, R. , Ballet, Films, Music, Painting Since 1939 (London, 1948).
Hewison, R. , Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939–45 (London, 1977).
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