United Kingdom

On the same day, May 10, 1940, the German army struck in the west against the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. France held out for just 38 days. (Listen to an excerpt of Churchill’s first address to the House of Commons as prime minister, on May 13, 1940.) When on June 18 the French government resolved to ask for an armistice, Churchill announced on the radio that Britain would fight on alone; it would be the nation’s “finest hour.” So began the second phase of World War II for Britain. Through August and September 1940 Britain’s fate depended upon 800 fighter airplanes and upon Churchill’s resolution during the terrific bombardment that became the Battle of Britain. In the last six months of 1940, some 23,000 civilians were killed, and yet the country held on. (For contemporary descriptions of the devastation of London, see BTW: London Classics: London in World War II.)

Perhaps the important political lesson of World War II lay in the realization that a democratic country, with a centuries-old tradition of individual liberty, could with popular consent be mobilized for a gigantic national effort. The compulsory employment of labour became universal for both men and women. In 1943 Britain was devoting 54 percent of its gross national product to the war. Medical services were vastly extended. Civilian consumption was reduced to 80 percent of the prewar level. Yet by and large the political tensions that had accompanied an equally desperate war 25 years before did not appear. Politics, as opposed to the direction of the war, certainly for the voters, became almost irrelevant. There was some parliamentary criticism of Churchill’s leadership, but public approval, at least as measured by repeated opinion polls, hardly wavered. Nonetheless, the idea of a “united” country was overplayed then, and, in the eyes of some, has been overplayed since. The old divisions of class and gender were never far below the surface, and it is only with considerable qualification that World War II can be called the People’s War.

Political developments

German hostilities in the west ended at midnight on May 8, 1945. Six months earlier Churchill had promised in the House of Commons that he would ask the king to dissolve the sitting Parliament, elected in 1935, soon after the German surrender unless the Labour and Liberal parties seriously desired to continue the coalition government. Accordingly, he began conversations with Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labour Party, in the middle of May, proposing that Labour remain in the coalition until Japan surrendered, an event he estimated to be at least 18 months away. Churchill believed Attlee to have been initially sympathetic, but other members of the Labour Party pressed for departure. As a result, Churchill dissolved the government on May 23, appointed a new, single-party Conservative government, and set election day for July 5. Because it was necessary to count the military vote, the results could not be announced until July 26.

Attlee, ClementClement Attlee.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Considering that the leading figures in each party had been cabinet colleagues only a few weeks before, the electoral campaign was remarkably bitter. Largely on the advice of William Maxwell Aitken, Baron Beaverbrook, the Conservatives focused chiefly on Churchill himself as the man who had won the war. Churchill denounced Labour as the party of socialism and perhaps of totalitarianism while promising strong leadership and grand but unspecific measures of social reform. Labour, even though the war in the Pacific continued, concentrated on peacetime reconstruction and fair shares for all.

Quite clearly, Churchill’s rhetoric and his attacks on former comrades angered many voters. But the mood in the country that gave Labour its overwhelming victory was obviously determined by the recollection of the hardships of the 1920s and ’30s; Britons voted against Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. In the end Labour won 393 seats, almost double the Conservative total of 213 and far more than it had expected. On July 26, 1945, as soon as the results were clear, Churchill resigned and Attlee became prime minister.

Britain since 1945

Labour and the welfare state (1945–51)