World War II Counterfactuals, Again: Axis Victory as Heroic Failure

At this stage of things I rarely run across anything about World War II counterfactuals that I have not encountered before (and that usually many times), but Finian O'Toole at the least managed to detect what was for me an unfamiliar element in some very familiar images in his piece on Brexit in the Guardian.

O'Toole, discussing the then-recent miniseries version of Len Deighton's SS-GB approaches the British fascination with such scenarios through the lens of the cult of British "heroic failure." While he does not mention Stephanie Barczewski by name she wrote a book about the phenomenon just a little before O'Toole published his piece, which offered rather an interesting argument.

Barczewski holds that the ascent of the British Empire was a material triumph--of technology and wealth and organization (a view with which my own study of the matter has had me concurring). However, Victorian idealists were vehement about the idea of superior British character, to say that Britain's victories as conqueror and empire-builder were not about having the money and the ships and the guns and the system to apply them but rather those qualities of courage, poise, steadfastness of which certain of the upper classes of the country stereotypically made so much, and in which they insisted they were superior to all the rest of the world--an elite of James Bonds, basically. Occasions in which British soldiers and the like were not crushing hapless colonials in one-sided wars but fighting from the position of disadvantage, and forced to bear bitter defeat, were chances to demonstrate that. (One can add, too, that making much of the courage, "professionalism," etc., displayed by soldiers in some situation has long been a convenient way of diverting the audience from the whole matter of the reasons why the soldiers were there in the first place when these are inconvenient.)

Of course, World War II was no one-sided colonial campaign. Certainly after the fall of France Britain faced what was the stronger enemy, so much so that had it been truly unsupported Britain would likely have ended the conflict by seeking terms. (Simply put, the Germans never had much chance of knocking Britain out of the war with an air campaign or an invasion across the Channel, but siege-by-bombing-and-blockade drove Britain to bankruptcy by March 1941, and only colossal American aid kept the country in the fight.) That Britain was dependent on the material support of others only underlined that the war was, if not like some Victorian campaign in Africa or Asia, the most mass-technological-material war of them all, while when one looks past the legend to the reality one sees that British forces were at their most successful not when they went in for heroics, but when they embraced that mass-technological-material aspect of the conflict and carried on the fight scientifically (as Stephen Bungay, for example, shows to have been the case in the Battle of Britain in The Most Dangerous Enemy).

All this would seem to have fed into a tendency to imagine the war being fought by Britons without the material factors on their side, whether by imagining it differently than how it was, as with the reduction of the Battle of Britain to public school boys in Spitfires facing down an overwhelming German "juggernaut" (Bungay's debunking of which is one of his book's most interesting and useful aspects), or the fascination with commando operations critics like John Newsinger and Simon Winder have often remarked. It would also seem to have fed into fantasies of Britons fighting in a still more dire situation, of an underground resistance movement, or even disorganized individuals on an island occupied by the triumphant enemy--and done so more stolidly and successfully--than others who actually did suffer occupation, like those "continentals" on whom Britons are so prone to look down, and whom they are so prone to regard as less attached to humane liberal values than themselves (all as, vice-versa, they hold authoritarian, fascist politics to be an alien weed that could never take root in English soil, figures like Oswald Mosley never having had a chance, etc., etc.).

At best it seems awfully light-minded--and one does not need to go anywhere near "at worst" to see it as an evasion of a great many less than palatable truths about human beings, war and Britain's own history, both abroad in the wider world and at home.