Barnett The Audit of War

The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30949-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 372 Seiten

Reihe: Pride and Fall sequence

Correlli Barnett described his Audit or War as an 'operational study' to 'uncover the causes of Britain's protracted decline as an industrial country since the Second World War.' First published in 1986, the book swiftly became one of the most controversial and influential historical works of its time. '[The Audit of War] argued that British industry during the Second World War was scandalously inefficient, a situation Barnett blamed on an establishment more concerned with welfare than with industry, technology or the capacity of the nation to fight a war... Alan Clark records approvingly that Mrs Thatcher herself read it...' David Edgerton, London Review of Books 'A stimulating polemic.' Times Literary Supplement 'A formidable book, essential reading.' Asa Briggs, Financial Times

Correlli Barnett is a world-renowned historian with particular prowess in military, naval, economic and social subjects. Faber Finds are reissuing his four volume The Pride and Fall sequence: The Collapse of British Power, The Audit of War, The Lost Victory, The Verdict of Peace, as well as The Swordbearers, Britain and her Army, 1509-1970 (winner of the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Award) and Engage the Enemy More Closely (winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barnett, Correlli

Leseproben

Prologue
In the last days of April and the first days of May the light of peace began to glow strangely on the familiar Britain of sirens and tin-hats, battledress and sandbags, stirrup-pumps and air-raid shelters. It transmuted at a touch all such apparatus of recent survival into historical relics, at one with the medieval battlements of England’s castles and the pikes and halberds in the Tower Armoury. Henceforward the British people would need tools of a different kind in order to hold their place among the nations; skills and spirit of a different kind too. Meanwhile they could listen to the final news reports of the fading war on ‘the Nine O’clock’ with pride as well as thankfulness. On 2 May 1945 the German forces south of the Alps, nearly a million strong, surrendered to a British field marshal, Sir Harold Alexander, the Supreme Allied Commander Mediterranean. Three days later, all the German armed forces by land, sea and air in north-west Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark surrendered to another British field marshal, Sir Bernard Montgomery, commanding the allied 21st Army Group. It was the greatest single German capitulation in the field during the Second World War, signed in classic military form in a tent pitched on a heath under a Union Flag whipping in the breeze. It presaged the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich to the allies which followed on 8 May 1945. Neither Marlborough after Blenheim, nor Wellington after Waterloo, nor Haig after his victorious offensives in 1918 had enjoyed more signal moments of triumph over the sovereign’s enemies than these. Far off, in that other war to defend the British Empire against Japan, the fall of Rangoon on 2 May consummated Lieutenant-General Sir William Slim’s epic reconquest of the British colony of Burma. For the British people the ‘official’ VE-Day (‘Victory in Europe Day’) on 9 May therefore marked the occasion of proud remembrance of their long struggle from early defeat through to this ultimate victory – the only allied nation to fight Nazi Germany from first to last. Once again in their history they had won, as they had always assumed they would. The very ritual of the victory thanksgivings proclaimed the continuity of British life and British institutions while foreign tyrants came, briefly puffed themselves up into a menace, and went. On 8 May Germany’s unconditional surrender was formally announced by the Prime Minister to a House of Commons which had continued in free debate throughout the war. The Commons then walked in procession from the St Stephen’s Porch of the Palace of Westminster to their service of thanksgiving at St Margaret’s Church – Winston Churchill following the Speaker and the Serjeant-at-Arms with the Mace as the bells pealed out above, while their Noble Lordships of the Other House were led by Black Rod and the Clerk of the Parliaments to their own service in Westminster Abbey. Away in the City, beneath the unscathed dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, the Lord Mayor of London and the Lady Mayoress were also thanking God for the victory. Outside Buckingham Palace citizens came together in a great swarm under a pale May sun to cheer their sovereign, and to shout, ‘We want the King!’ When George VI, in the uniform of an admiral of the fleet, appeared on the balcony with the Queen and the two princesses, his subjects responded by roaring out ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. Then, at about 5.30 p.m., Winston Churchill joined the Royal Family in a fresh appearance on the balcony. The crowds roared again; and the film cameras recorded it all for the nation at large to see on the newsreels – the first minister of the Crown, who had brought the realm safely through the greatest peril in its history, standing in comradeship with a Royal Family bonded even more closely to the British people by reason of their courage, humour and simplicity through the shared dangers and discomforts of war; and all of them together personifying a constitutional monarchy that had survived unshaken, had indeed never been more firmly rooted. On Sunday 14 May the King and Queen rode out in an open horse-drawn landau to St Paul’s for the national service of thanksgiving, just as Queen Anne had ridden out to St Paul’s to give thanks for Marlborough’s great victories two and a half centuries earlier. At Temple Bar, gateway to the City, they were greeted in traditional ceremony by the Lord Mayor of London in a black and gold robe over court dress, and flanked by the Aldermen in gowns of scarlet silk. When the royal carriage stopped at the foot of the steps that sweep up to the cathedral entrance, trumpeters of the Household Cavalry in gold lace and scarlet sounded a fanfare; a scene evocative of so many royal and national celebrations in the past. In the cathedral, where Wellington and Nelson lay in the crypt, the Archbishop of Canterbury preached the sermon; the anthem reverberated up into Sir Christopher Wren’s majestic vaults; the King and Queen and the dignitaries and the crowds went home; and it was really all over at last after five and a half years. It was no wonder that at such a time and in such a mood the British took it for granted that Great Britain was, and would always remain, a first-class world power. She alone of pre-war European great nations had never been reduced to impotence during the war by defeat and occupation. Her formidable armed forces ranked her with Soviet Russia and the United States in the ‘Big Three’ that had waged and won the war against Nazi Germany: a navy that kept every sea and ocean from home waters to the Pacific; armies numbering nearly 3 million soldiers standing in Germany, Italy, the Middle East and Burma at the end of arduous marches to victory; an air force that had inflicted Germany’s first and decisive defeat in the Battle of Britain, had pounded German cities into rubble, and acted as a vital partner in all the army’s and navy’s successes. Moreover Britain, in the shape of Winston Churchill’s bulldog personality, had sat in all the wartime summit conferences as an equal partner with America and Soviet Russia, most recently at Yalta in February 1945. She was currently engaged, again as an equal partner, in discussions at the world security conference in San Francisco on the structure of the new international order. Her Prime Minister would attend a forthcoming tripartite summit, probably in Germany, to decide the future of Europe – the role played by Wellington and Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 and by Lloyd George at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Yet, as the British saw it, Britain’s world role did not rest on the strength of the United Kingdom alone; it rested also on that of the British Empire and Commonwealth. The war had witnessed a heart-warming revival of imperial loyalties, as the British press reminded its readers in the hour of victory. In the words of the Conservative and middle-class Daily Telegraph on 8 May, ‘the whole Empire has played a valorous and ungrudging part…. It is the Empire’s “finest hour”, too.’ Next day the mass-circulation left-wing Daily Mirror struck a no less imperial note in a leading article entitled ‘We Remember’, which recalled: the grand Canadians who, when our peril was greatest, came to nourish and sustain our resistance … the Australians and New Zealanders who bore the brunt of the battle in Egypt and Greece … the South Africans who tore from Mussolini’s grasp the first fruits of his treachery … the loyal Indians and sons of Colonies who won new battle honours in Egypt and Italy.1 For all its loyalty, however, the empire had produced only one-tenth of the munitions of war supplied to Britain and the empire together, whereas the United Kingdom itself had produced seven-tenths.2 The British people were well aware that Britain’s place in the ranks of world powers in war and in peace was sustained first and foremost by her own industrial machine – on the enterprise, energy and skill of her managers and workforces; on the inventiveness of her scientists and technologists. And this too provided a major theme in the celebrations of Britain’s victory. The War Premier himself in the course of his victory broadcast over the wireless praised the ‘marvellous devices’ which British ingenuity had conceived and constructed in order to make the Normandy landings possible. He reminded his listeners: ‘and, mark you, our scientists are not surpassed by any nation in the world, especially when their effort is applied to naval matters….’3 During the next three weeks, fresh disclosures of wartime secrets bore out his words. There was the ‘Pluto’ pipeline unrolled across the bed of the English Channel like an enormous garden hose to supply the invasion armies with petroleum; the ‘Fido’ device for clearing fog from operational airfields by means of powerful petrol flares along both sides of the runway. The Times asserted on 24 May in regard to ‘Pluto’ that ‘success in this novel and daring project could not have been achieved if there had not been available in the country’s need British engineers, modern Elizabethans, who had gained unique experience in pioneering enterprises in all parts of the world’. Next day the same newspaper concluded a leading article entitled ‘Science at War’ (which also referred to ‘Pluto’) by saying that ‘The lessons for peacetime progress of this combination of scientific imagination, technical skill, and efficient workmanship are manifest.’ The Daily Telegraph, for its part, reckoned that ‘Pluto’ had been ‘as brilliant...