A page containing extracts and quotes from "A History of the English Speaking Peoples since 1900" by Andrew Roberts.

"This book is emphatically not intended to be a comprehensive history of the English-speaking peoples, which would be impossible to write in one volume and anyhow probably rather dull to read. Instead of a textbook, this is a series of snapshots taken rather arbitrarily, episodically and idiosyncratically, from the life of the English-speaking peoples since the dawn of the 20th century, through whose shared experiences I believe certain common themes emerge, almost unbidden. For my purposes, the English-speaking peoples hail from those places where the majority of people speak English as their first language: the United States, the United Kingdom and her dependancies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the British West Indies and Ireland... D-Day saw the supreme expression of the English-speaking peoples working together for the good of Civilisation..."
        - Andrew Roberts, writing in 2006

CONTENTS
~ Introduction
~ 1900-1904: Shouldering 'The White Man's Burden'
~ 1905-1914: America Arrives
~ 1914-1917: The First Assault - Prussian Militarism
~ 1918-1919: Peace Guilt
~ 1920-1929: American Energy
~ 1929-1931: Capitalism At Bay
~ 1931-1939: The Second Assault: Fascist Aggression
~ 1939-1941: Divided and Faltering
~ 1942-1944: United and Conquering
~ 1944-1945: Normandy to Nagasaki
~ 1945-1949: The Third Assault: Soviet Communism
~ 1950-1959: Cold War Perils
~ 1960-1969: Civis Americanus Sum
~ 1970-1979: The Long, Dismal, Drawling Tides
~ 1980-1989: Attritional Victory
~ 1990-2001: The Wasted Breathing Space
~ 2001-2005: The Fourth Assault: Islamicist Terrorism and its De Facto Allies
~ Conclusion
~ Beyond the Book: Reviews
~ Beyond the Book: Interviews
~ Beyond the Book: Similar Works

[Introduction: A Portrait of the English-speaking Peoples at the Dawn of the 20th Century]

"This will be the English speaking century."
        - Winston Churchill (1943)

"If one reflected on the most important events of the last millennium compared with the first, the ascent of the English-speaking peoples to predominance in the world surely ranked highest."
        - Professor Deepak Lal, "In Praise of Empires"

As the first rays of sunlight broke over the Chatham Islands, 360 miles east of New Zealand in the South Pacific, a little before 6:00am on Tuesday, 1 January 1901, the world entered a century that for all its warfare and perils would nonetheless mark the triumph of the English-speaking peoples. Few could have suspected it at the time, but the British Empire would wane to extinction during that period, while the American Republic would wax to such hegemony that it would become the sole global hyper-power. Assault after assault would be made upon the English-speaking peoples’ primacy, each of which would be beaten off successfully, albeit sometimes at huge and tragic cost. Even as the twenty-first century dawned, they would be doughtily defending themselves still.

Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no-one will bother to make a distinction between the British Crown-led and the American Republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognised that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common - and enough that separated them from everyone else – that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately. A Martian landing on our planet might find linguistic or geographical more useful than ethnic factors when it came to analyzing the differences between different groups of earthlings; the countries whose history this book covers are those where the majority of people speak English as their first language.

As the dominant world political culture since 1900, the English-speaking peoples would be constantly envied and often hated, which far from being anything perturbing has been the inescapable lot of all hegemonic powers since even before the days of Ancient Rome. Like the Romans, they would at times be ruthless, at times self-indulgent, and they too would sometimes find that the greatest danger to their continued imperium came not from their declared enemies without, but rather from vociferous critics within their own society.

Despite the harsh methods occasionally adopted to protect their status and safety from Wilhelmine Prussian militarism, then the Nazi-led Axis, then global Marxism-Leninism and presently by Islamic fundamentalism, the English-speaking peoples would remain the last, best hope for Mankind. The beliefs that they brought into the twentieth century largely actuate them yet; their values are still now the best available in a troubled world; the institutions that made them great continue to inspire them today. Indeed the beliefs, values and institutions of the English-speaking peoples are presently on the march.

In 1901 there was nothing inevitable about the domination that the English-speaking peoples’ political culture would retain throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Wilhelmine Germany’s burgeoning economic power was reflected in the massive High Seas Fleet that was being built specifically to challenge the Royal Navy. Third Republic France had a huge global empire and a thirst for revenge against Britain for slights real and imagined that it had received over the last century culminating on the Upper Nile three years earlier. Tsarist Russia, the largest country in the world with a vast standing army, looked enviously at British India across the narrowing gap between them in Central Asia. Each would have liked to have seen the United States humiliated over her continued protection of Latin America through the Monroe Doctrine. Within a decade the German High Command had drawn up plans to shell Manhattan and land a one hundred thousand-strong army in New England.

The world of 1901 was a multi-polar one of fiercely competing Great Powers. The idea that a century later, the English-speaking peoples would hold unquestioned sway in the world, challenged only — and even then not mortally — by some disaffected fanatics from the rump of the Ottoman Empire, would have astounded Kaiser, Tsar and French president alike. Two global conflagrations in the space of a generation, in which the English-speaking peoples escaped invasion — except those who lived in the Channel Islands — whereas no other Great Power did, explains much, but certainly not all.

When, just before his death in 1898, Otto von Bismarck was asked what was the decisive factor in modern history, he replied: "The fact that the North Americans speak English."

As the new century dawned, both the British Empire and the American Republic were involved in protracted colonial wars, in South Africa and the Philippines respectively. War has been the almost constant lot of Mankind since the days of Rome, yet the English-speaking peoples have presided over a longer period of peace between the Great Powers than at any time since the Dark Ages. In 1901, neither Britain nor the United States saw herself as part of a greater entity, the English-speaking peoples. They were rivals, though newly friendly ones... Yet their reverses — Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, Suez and Vietnam among them — have come when they were divided from another. By contrast, their many victories all came when they were united.

In South Africa, the war was proving far more expensive in terms both of blood and treasure in January 1901 than anyone had predicted when it had broken out 15 months earlier... Although the Boers' conventional forces were militarily defeated in the field, they nonetheless refused to surrender resorting instead to a protracted insurgency campaign. The United States already had to deal with a popular revolt in the Philippines that was fought against her with very similar guerrilla and terror tactics. The problem of how to deal with asymmetric warfare being made upon them would be one that would perplex the English-speaking peoples several times over the next 11 decades.

Criticism from churchmen, liberals, and public thinkers of the mission of the English-speaking peoples was to be a recurring theme throughout the coming century. The British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was to complain that, "England is, I believe, the only country in which, during a great war, eminent men write and speak as if they belonged to the enemy." In fact, the phenomenon was to recur through the English-speaking peoples over the coming decades, and in some engagements — such as Suez and Vietnam, opposition from vociferous domestic minority was to doom their enterprise far more than foreign opponents.

"Other nations might have built a modern unified world, but they would probably not have done it as quickly, efficiently, elegantly — or as humanely."
        - Arthur Herman, on the legacy of the British Empire

Ever since the mid-1830s, the English-speaking peoples had considered it their civilising mission to apply — with varying degrees of force — their values and institutions in those areas of the world they believed would benefit from them. Although Britain was under no threat from them herself, Lord Palmerston imposed regime change in Spain, Portugal and Belgium, using the power of the Royal Navy to force liberal constitutions on countries that baulked at first but later came to value them. "I hold that the real policy of England", he told the House of Commons in 1848, "is to be the champion of justice and right... not becoming the Quixote of the world, but giving the weight of her moral sanction and support wherever she thinks justice is, and wherever she thinks wrong has been done". The neoconservatives of President George W. Bush's Administration did not invent some brand new political philosophy in their desire to extend representative institutions to the Middle East... Whether the Middle East proves too theocratic, obscurantist and in some places feudal to benefit from democracy remains to be seen, but neo-conservatism is certainly no new historical departure in the self-proclaimed mission of the English-speaking peoples.

"It is very sad, but I'm afraid American is bound to forge ahead and nothing can restore the equality between us. If we had interfered in the Confederate War it was then possible for us to reduce the power of the United States to manageable proportions. But two such chances are not given to a nation in the course of its career."
        - Lord Salisbury

British post-imperial greatness has been preserved and fostered through its incorporation into the American world-historical project.

The foresight of Lord Salisbury's Unionist Government to observe a benevolent neutrality during the Spanish-American War — while the rest of Europe openly sympathized with Spain — ensured that the 20th century dawned on the best state of Anglo-American relations since the Revolution... The century was to see strains in the Special Relationship, particularly in 1927, 1944, 1956, 1965, and 1994-5, but never the break for which their rivals and opponents desperately hoped.

One of the common threads uniting the wars of the English-speaking peoples in the 20th century was that they have often suffered serious reverses in the first battle, or even the first campaign, before going onto to ultimate victory — seen in the Boer War, the Great War, the Second World War, the Falklands... This pattern of initial humiliation, or even catastrophe, is too well-established to admit to any doubt about the recurring phenomenon. Initial defeats, provocations or utter disasters early in the conflict, served to rally the English-speaking peoples for the necessary sacrifices ahead.

The separation of Church and State in the American constitution and the complete subjection of the armed forces to democratic control throughout the English-speaking peoples meant that they have been free of undue influences that have time and again stunted other nations' opportunities in the 20th century: theocracy and military dictatorshio. While some of the people who made their names whilst soldiering have become succesful politicians, they never had the threat of force at their back.

An inevitable concomitant of power has been the envy of others. In the 20th century, no less than in any other, the Great Powers excited the envy of lesser powers not necessarily because of how they behaved but simply because of what they were... Resentment of the leading world power by its rivals in 1901 was simply a factor of the human condition and not the result of anything in particular that the British Empire had done in South Africa or anywhere else.

"I never spend 5 minutes in inquiring if we are unpopular. The answer is written in red ink on the map of the globe... No, I would count everywhere on the individual hostility of all the great Powers, but would endeavour to arrange things that they were not united against me... I would be as strong in small things as in big. This might be a counsel of perfection, but I should like to see the experiment tried."
        - Lord Curzon, British Viceroy in India (1901)

The vital importance of maintaining the authority and prestige of the English-speaking peoples — a duty which passed from Britain to America in the 1940s — was upheled throughout the century in every decade except the second half of the 1970s... Overall, however, the prestige of the English-speaking peoples and pride in their reliability as allies and indefatigability as foes, has actuated their leaders, which is one explanation of their global success since 1900. Prestige is a tangible benefit in the calculus of international relations, its loss a concomitant danger.

In the debate over whether America was born great, achieved greatnes or had greatness thrust upon her, the only possible conclusion must be: all three.

Staying at the forefront of all the major developments in automobiles, aernautics, computers, finance, biotechnology, and the information revolution — and of all their various key military applications — has enabled the English-speaking peoples to win and retain their global hegemony. That would leadership will only be ceded to whichever world power — possibly China or India — is capable of producing better products cheaper than they, in a similarly secure political environment. It will happen, but hoepfully this time it will not happen violently.

As the 20th century dawned, New Zealand had every right to consider herself one of the most progressive and advanced nations on earth. In 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote... Her state system of education was free, secular and compulsory... On New Year's Day 1901, New Zealand also introducted a universal penny postage rate "to all important parts of the Empire." Premier Seddon saw no contradiction between being a progressive and a convinced imperialist. "The flag that floats over us and protects us was expected to protect our kindred and countrymen who are in the Transvaal," he said of the Boer War. "We should take action because we are a portion of the dominant family of the world — we are of the English-speaking race."

Throughout the period covered by this book the experience of Ireland, or at least the southern 26 of the island's 32 counties, seems to run contrary to that of the rest of the English-speaking peoples. It provided the exception to every rule, disrupted every generalisation and pursued so different a route from the rest of the English-speaking peoples so often that it must be considered quite apart from the rest. Yet that was not the case in 1900, when the Queen received loyal accolades from ordinary people quite as fervent as any that would have been heard in Manchester, Glasgow, Adelaide, Toronto or Auckland. That said, 1905 saw the founding of Sinn Fein, an anti-British revolutionary organisation that wad to cause mush misery over the coming century in its ultimately failed campaign to separate the whole island of Ireland from the United Kingdom.

Winston Churchill's fine four-volume book "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples" — their "origins, their quarrels, their misfortunes and their reconciliation" — ends in January 1901, just before by far the most important and interesting part of their tale began. He concluded his great work, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, with the words:
"The vast potentialities of America lay as a portent across the globe, as yet dimly recognised, save by the imagination. But in the contracting world of better communications to remain detached from the pre-occupations of others was rapidly becoming impossible. The status of world-Power is inseparable from its responsibilites... The English-speaking peoples... are now to become allies in terrible but victorious wars. Another phase looms before us, in which alliance will once more be tested and in which its formidable virtues may be to preserve Peace and Freedom. The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope."

Here is the next stage of their story.

[1900-1904: Shouldering 'The White Man's Burden']

Within a few months of taking office, President Theodore Roosevelt presented an awesome challenge to Congress and the nation. "The American people must either build and maintain an adequate Navy," he said, "or else make up their minds definitely to accept a secondary position in international affairs."

Roosevelt understood international naval power politics like no other previous president. His huge expansion of the US Navy presaged the American eruption onto the global stage that was to be the single most important feature of world politics in what was to be dubbed 'the American century'... he forced on the pace of naval armament, which was ultimately to make the United States a world power by the time he left office in 1909. As historian John Vincent has perceptively put it, "In terms of bloodshed and lives lost, America's rise to great power status could hardly have been more harmless."

Roosevelt filled the White House like no other peacetime president.

The process of splitting Panama from distant Colombia in order for the Panama Canal to be built has long been held against Roosevelt in Latin America; yet Panama had rebelled 50 times in 50 years — surely some kind of a record in international rebellion — and all he had to do in November 1903 was to let the 50th rebellion succeed... Senator Samuel Hayakawa of California once said of it, "We stole it, fair and square," but the United States in fact paid vast sums for it.

The Panama Canal was to bring the United States into West Indian and Latin American politics on a very regular basis, as a force for stability and the protection of property rights.

Most of Roosevelt's interventions in Central America were taken reluctantly and at the urgent request of the governments there, for, as he said about one crisis in the Dominican Republic, "I have about the same desire to annex [islands] as a gorged boa constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong end to." Nor was Roosevelt's expansionism doctrinaire; he handed Cuba her independence in May 1902... In vigorously enforcing the Monroe Doctrine throughout the 20th century, the United States deserves commendation for not allowing that continent to develop into a battleground between the Great Powers.

The statesmanship — and there can be no greater test of statesmanship than sticking to unpopular bur correct policies in the face of a general election — of McKinley, Roosevelt and Hay laid the basis of the friendly co-operation of the English-speaking peoples in the coming century.

"Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation."
        - George Washington, 1796 Farewell Address

Those words — wise for 1796 when it took seven weeks' sailing to reach America from Europe — made far less sense in the world that George Washington could never have forseen, that of the railway, the telegraph, the steamship, the aeroplane, the submarine, the aircraft carrier, the jet, the internet, let alone the inter-contintental ballistic missile. Under Washington, the fastest a man could travel was on a galloping horse... As the globe shrank so America's world role grew, and by the early 20th century it had certainly outgrown its late 19th century mantras.

The 20th century record of imperialism of the English-speaking peoples, be they American, British or Antipodean, was far superior to that of any of their rivals.

In the four years that the Philippines were part of Japan's so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity, no fewer than 5% of the entire Filipino population died.

The way that Pretoria treated the Britons who lived and worked in the Transvall... was humiliating for the British Government, which saw itself as their champion.

The real fear of the effect of loss of prestige was to recur again and again in the story of the English-speaking peoples. Empires run by tiny elites are to a great extent ruled as much through kudos as by deployable military power.

The clash between the Boers and the British in South Africa was long in coming, but once it materialised it was a straightforward struggle for primacy of prestige.

A characteristic of the English-speaking peoples displayed both in South Africa and in the Philippines at the dawn of the 20th century, and then fairly regularly ever since, was their tendency towards ruthlessmess in warfare. For all that they are slow to anger, they have historically been very hard-nosed once the fighting was actually taking place, although this has often been tempered by a tendency to treat defeated enemies generously. Plenty of what in the luxury of peacetime have been called 'war crimes' have been laid at their door since 1901... No one in history has done more for the concept of human beings having certain inalienable rights than the English-speaking peoples, and it is often solely becase of their belief in the rule of law that abuses ever come to light and are punished. Every war has thrown up its dirty secret.... to expect anything different is to misundertand the way humans behave in wartime, from whichever colour, creed or class they hail. What is needed is a legal device to correct abuses, and that is something that the English-speaking world has generally had in place, but which the Germans in 1900s Angola, the Japanese in 1930s China, the French in 1950s Algeria and the Russians in 1980s Afghanistan had not. The difference is not that the English-speaking peoples never commit crimes in wartime, but rather that their open societies and free press tend to ensure that they are punished, while many other societies' crimes rarely are, or are even acknowledged as such.

If America's Administrations — as opposed to her people — were stalwart during the Boer War, the rest of the English-speaking peoples were magnificient.

The nationalism — indeed jingoism — engendered by the Boer War encouraged a profound desire amonst Canadians to differentiate themselves from Americans, whose population was as pro-Boer as her leaders were pro-British... In 1901, Imperial unity served as a counterpoise to bad US-Canadian relations and affored Canadians a means of preserving national identity, but also of standing up for what they believed to be their right vis-a-vis their militarily, demographically and economically giant neighbour to the south. Complaining that their situation was like that of living next door to an elephant, Anglo-Canadians wholeheartedly embraced the alternative vision for which the British Empire stood. The 20th century was to see ultra-loyal Canada brusquely rejected by Britain, yet not drawn into America's orbit as a result.

Why was this land of opportunity and growth so keen to become involved in a war 7000 miles away, on behalf of an elderly Mother Country, in which Canada had no direct concern? In the 1960s it was fashionable to explain this remarkable phenomenon in terms of conspiracy theories and 'propaganda manipulations'... yet this was because of English Canada's deep-seated commitment to the concept of Imperial unity and genuine Canadian identification with the Empire's cause.

At this distance of time it seems unimaginable that there might have been a US-Canadian war, not least because English-speaking democracies do not fight one another, but in 1894 forty-two out of America's forty-five state governors promised to enrol troops for one, and a senior American general, Nelson Miles, was quoted saying, "Canada would fall into our hands as a matter of course." Be that as it may, the pounding that the eastern seaboard of the United States would have suffered from a Royal Navy that was hugely larger than the pre-Rooseveltian US Naby might not have made invasion worthwhile.

The way that capitalism, when allied to the right to own secure property and the rule of law, has unleashed the energy and ingenuity of Mankind has been remarkable and forms the basis of the English-speaking peoples' present global hegemony. So long as they retain the technological edge in the military field, the only way they can be replaced as the world-hegemon is through another Great Power adopting an even more effective form of capitalism... The French, Swedish, social democratic, Japanese corporatist and various other models of capitalism have all failed dismally compared to the Anglo-Saxon version.

It had been under the Royal Navy in the 19th century that Britain had originally established what the distinguished Indian political scientist Professor Deepak lal calls a 'Liberal International Economic Order', whose major attributes were free trade, mobility of capital, sound money due to the gold standard, property rights guaranteed by law, piracy-free transportation, political stability, low domestic taxation and spending, and 'gentlemanly' capitalism run from the City of London. "Despite Marxist and nationalist cant," he writes, "the British Empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least to those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe." The United States was to inherit the duty of protecting, promoting and expanding this Liberal Internation Economic Order in the coming century.

Even more important than ruling the waves in the 20th century has been the English-speaking peoples' dominion over the skies... by stauing at the forefront of almost every advance in civil and military aeronautics throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the English-speaking peoples were able to bring decisive power to bear on their many and varied opponents. Air power was to become a central part of the reason why the English-speaking peoples have survived and prospered so successfully since 1900... Indeed, the day that the English-speaking peoples fall behind in the contest to build the world's best fighter and bomber aircraft will be the one when their primacy is doomed.

Religious toleration has been a mainstay of the English-speaking peoples since 1900; powerful emotions that have been channelled elsewhere in the world into suppressing minorities because of the way the choose to worship particular deities have been generally absent from the secular societies of the English-speaking world, with corresponding advantages both for social unity and the ability of these minorities to contribute to the greater good... In the 20th century, the best gauge of a society's attitude towards religious toleration has been its treatment of the Jews, and although they have undoubtedly been socially discriminated against, they have never been persecuted in the English-speaking world except in 1904 in Ireland, a country whose special historical development makes its experience very different from the rest of the English-speaking peoples since 1900.

The 1904 Entente Cordiale proved to be one of the world's longest-lasting alliances and is still in (at least nominal) existence. It would henceforth be the unspoken assumption that in any war central to their continued existence, Britain and France would fight on the same side. Of course the Entente has worked in France's interests more than in Britain's, for the inescapable geographical fact that any country capable of threatening Britain's independence was likely to have attacked France beforehand... In pure realpolitik terms, Britain did herself few favours by concluding the Entente, thereby shackling herself to the fortunes of a nation that was in even faster imperial decline than she, and which stayed so ever since... yet short of making an alliance with aggressive and unpredictavlble Wilhelmine Germany, there was little alternative.
Thenceforth, from 1904 to 1940 Britain's fate was intimately linked to that of France, even though the subsequent story was one of having to fight two world wars, primarily because France was incapable of defending herself alone. Of course, the gargantuan ambition of both Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler has to be halted, but the Entente failed to prevent either of their attacks on France in 1914 or 1940. Britain instead sacrified her freedom to maneuver by being connected to France and gained little from it thereby. Militarily she was forced to send two expeditionary forces to continental Europe... Nonetheless, there was little alternative in 1904, and the Entente was responsible for preventing the whole of Europe coming under the domination of a violently aggressive Imperial Germany ten years later.

[1905-1914: America Arrives]

"The same causes which havr raised Great Britain to her present exalted position will (probably in the course of the next century) raise the United States of America to a degree of industry, wealth and power which will superpass the position in which England stands as at present England excels little Holland."
        - Friedrich List, German political economist (1844)

"Germany had been preparing every resource, perfecting every skill, developing every invention, which would enable her to master the European world; and, after mastering the European world, to dominate the rest of the world. Everybody had been looking on. Everybody had known... Yet we were all living in a fool's paradise."
        - Woodrow Wilson, speaking in 1919

The way that the English-speaking peoples led the world in embracing female suffrage is a sign of its political maturity and liberalism, but also of its enlightened self-interest... Only after the English-speaking peoples experimented successfully with female franchise, progressively dropping property and age restrictions and extending it to married women, did the rest of the world begin to adopt it.

"The international conflict in the summer of 1914 consisted of two wars, not one. Both were started deliberately. They were started by rival empires that were bound together by mutual need... The wars were about power."
        - Professor David Fromkin, "Europe's Last Summer: Why the World Went to War in 1914"

In both the cases of the Habsburg and Hohenzollern Empires, the decision to go to war "was made by a few individuals at the top, whose peoples were unaware that such decisions were being considered, let alone made." The lack of proper democracy in either country therefore clearly exacerbated the situation.
It was Austria-Hungary's little local war against Sebia — relatively unimportant in itself given the history of Balkan conflicts since 1875 — that, in Fromkin's estimation, "provided the German generals with the conditions they needed in order to start a war of their own: a European conflict, which grew into a global conflict". Far from being the pointless, unnecessary war that poets, playwrights and screenplay-writers have continually depicted since the mid-Twenties, in fact "It was about the most important issue in politics: who should rule the world."

Why should a Maori New Zealander have died in Turkey and been buried in Greece because an Austrian had been shot by a Serb in Bosnia? The relations of the peoples of the British Empire were so close in 1914 that an assault on the independence of one was automatically considered an assault on the independence of all, and Germany's march through Belgium was certainly such an assault. Belgium was a British creation intended to ensure the Channel ports stayed out of the hands of a hegemonic power, and the threat to incorporate Belgium into Germany was a direct threat to Britain. In a sense it was even more more of a direct threat than that posed by Napoleon at Boulogne in 1804... a following wind was no longer necessary for the powerful German High Seas Fleet in the era of oil-powered engines.

New Zealand, Australia and Canada all equipped, trained and paid for their own forces throughout the conflict, which had not been the case in the Boer War. Even South Africa, which had been an enemy in 1902, declared for Britain in 1914.

For over three centuries, entirely out of realpolitik reasons of self-preservation, britain had pursued a policy of supporting a balance of power in Europe, attempting to ensure that no single nation dominated the continent. be it Philip II's Spain or Louis XIV and Napoleon's France, total hegemony could not be allowed to go to any single Great Power. "England has ever watched the Channel ports with especial jealousy," Lord Robert Cecil wrote of William Pitt's foreign policy during the Napoleonic Wars. "It has always been one of the cardinal maxims of our foreign policy that they should not fall into the hands of any power whom she had need to fear."

Should the German High Command put into operation their notorious Schlieffen Plan, by which France was attacked through Belgium, British participation in the war would be automatically triggered by the British guarantee of Belgian neutrality, formally given when that country was created in 1839. Because this is precisely what happened, it is clear that Imperial Germany bears full responsibility for the outbreak of that terrible war. Far from being a futile, unncessary conflict, Britain went to war in 1914 for the noblest possible ideal and best possible reason: her honour and self-defence. To have attempted to renege upon, or legalistically wriggled out of, the 1839 would not only have been unacceptable to British public opinion at that time, but, as Edward Grey later put it, "We should have been isolated; we should have had no friend in the world." It was not the British way.

The Treaty of 1839 was "a Treaty with a history", said Foreign Secretary Grey, who mentioned Bismarck's promise in 1870 to respect Belgian neutrality when he attacked France during the Franco-Prussian War.

Furthermore, without British intervention there can be little doubt that France would have been overwhelmed, probably in only a matter of weeks, as in 1870 and 1940. But unlike 1870, the Germans had no intention of merely annexing a province, exacting relatively light reparations and then withdrawing after three years. The Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II had ambitions far closer to the Third Reich's than to his grandfather's limited desire for Alsace-Lorraine. Wilhelm II wanted nothing sort of a German-dominated continent, what he later tellingly described as "a United States of Europe under German leadership". German control of such an entity from Brest to the Polish border would ultimately have posed a mortal danger to Britain's continued existence as an independent power... To have allowed such a man as Wilhelm II to rule Europe would have been a crime against Western Civilization to an almost equal degree as to have failed to challenge Hitler's bid for the control of Europe 20 years later.

No one would ever seek to doubt or deny the horrors of the Great War, with its gas, mud, machine-guns and mass slaughter, but questioning the merits of the manner in which a war was fought is quite different from questioning its motive. Its tactics might be doubted, its necessity cannot. For Britain and her Empire to have stood aside in 1914, looking only to her defences and colonies while Europe was ravaged, would only have postponed the day of reckoning whilst divesting her of her Russian, French, Belgian, Italian, Japanese and ultimately American allies... In the First World War no less than in the Second, Britons did not die for a vain cause.

*To get a snapshot picture of just how weighty Britain's imperial obligations were in 1914, and what she had on her mind over the two days in which Europe slipped into war, here is a sample of the written and oral parliamentary answers that ministers were giving on 3 and 4 August 1914, none of them to do with the Balkan crisis. They were busy answering questions from MPs on tribal customs in Assam; the governorship of Tasmania; the Bengal Military Orphan Society; an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Tipperary; the South African Native Land Act; Coptic newspapers in Egypt; press freedom in Lahore; the University of Calcutta; the abdication of the Raja of Cochin; Indian police pensions; "suicide by burning among girl wives in Bengal"; cocaine possessions in India; Masai cattle in British East Africa; taxation in the Straits Settlements and Malay States; sanitation in the Punjab; and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company Bill. Such was the width of British responsibilities.

[1914-1917: The First Assault - Prussian Militarism]

"Her military men published booksand told us what they were going to do, but we dismissed them. We said 'The thing is a nightmare. The man is a crank. It could not be that he speaks for a great Government. The thing is inconceivable and can not happen'. Very well, could it not hapen? Did it not happen? ...The great nations of the world have been asleep."
        - Woodrow Wilson, on Wilhelm's Germany (1919)

Although it is true that large crowds congregated in London on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of August 1914, the British did not celebrate the outbreak of war in the jingoistic manner often alleged. People will throng the streets on what are clearly going to be historic occacions for all sorts of non-political reasons. The presence of large numbers of spectators should imply popular support for whatever the Government was deciding at the time. Added to that, central London was traditionally where large crowds gathered on Bank Holiday Monday... The true mood of the country was one of sombre, concerned realism. Our forefathers were thus not the naive, bloodthirsty chauvinists of the popular imagination; they needed persuading to go to war against such Great Powers as Germany and Austria-Hungary, and what persuaded them was the cold blooded execution of the Schlieffen Plan. After Belgium's ill treatment by German forces, a tsunami of moral outrage was unleashed from one end of the English-speaking peoples to the other.

It was not the outbreak of war itself that encouraged vast numbers of Britons to flock to the colours — only 100,000 had enlisted by 22 August — so much as the publication of the Mons Despatch of Tuesday, 25 August 1914. The defeat in the battle of Mons was presented in stark though heroic terms... On the same page of 'The Times' as the Despatch lay an editorial entitled "England's Call", which was a masterpiece of recruitment literature and bears repetition because in the week between 30 August and 5 September no fewer than 174,901 Britons applied to join the colours.

"We are committed to a life-and-death struggle for all that we hold dearest with the mightiest military Monarchy in the world... Now is the time for all men of British blood to bethink them what they may do to safeguard their national inheritance... When our troops are under fie and our Allies have met with reverses, there is no place amongst us for the idler or the loafer, England needs all her sons."
        - The Times

As a recent historian of the analysis of the patterns of recruitment in the early part of the Great War has said, "Far from signing up in a burst of enthusiasm at the outbreak of war, the largest single component of volunteers enlisted at exactly that moment when the war turned serious. Men did not join the British Army expecting a picnic stroll to Berlin but in the expectation of a desperate fight for national defense."

In his intriguingly entitled 1975 book, 'The Social History of the Machine Gun', John Ellis explored the profound militarym political, social and even moral effects that the machine-gun was to have upon modern society, for never in the field of human conflict could so many be killed so quickly by so few.
In the Sudan campaign in 1898, machine-guns played a major part. After Omdurman, where General Kitchener lost 48 killed and the Dervishes over 11,000, it was remarked that, "In most of our wars it has been the dash, the skill and the bravery of our officers and men that have won the day, but in this case the battle was won by a quiet scientific gentleman living in Kent."

While the English-speaking peoples have kept the technological edge on the invention and development of weaponry, they have managed to retain the hegemony of the world. The machine-gun, the tank, the Spitfire, the Lancaster, B-29 and B-52 bombers, the H-bomb and A-bomb, Agent Orange, the F-16 fighter, stealth aircraft, the 'daisy-cutter' bomb — each were ground breaking weapons and all were first deployed by the English-speaking peoples, and to devastating effect. The primary reason that peace reigned between the Great Powers for over sixty years after 1945 — an unprecedented length of time in modern history — was that the English-speaking peoples possessed weaponry of such power and sophistication that no rival power could defeat them in a general tactical war.
The understandable entusiasm to abolish certain types of weapons — such as the antipersonnel mine — needs to be set against the fact that some have been needed by the English-speaking peoples. The British used minefields to cover their retreat across the Western Desert in the Second World War and to narrow Rommel's field of attack.. A blanket ban of the kind advocated by Diana, Princess of Wales, in the 1990s would, had it been in places in the 1930s, have spelt disaster at the fulcrum moment of the war in North Africa.

On Easter Monday, April 16, as the battle of Verdun was reaching its between, between 1000 and 1500 volunteers from Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Brotherhood staged a rebellion against British Rule in Dublin. The Rising was put down by the Royal Irish Constabulary with some support from regular forces. It had not spraked a general Irish uprising against Britain, as was hoped by the nationalists, and by 1 May it had been suppressed after some fairly heavy fighting.
The execution after summary trials of 12 of the rebels, including their leader Patrick Pearse and the wheelchair-bound James Connolly, however legally correct and well-deserving considering the wartime circumstances, was a disastrous political error on behalf of the Government solely because it led to their 'martyrdom' by the republican movement.

"Initially seen as a lunatic gesture by an unrepresentative minority, the Rising came to be canonised as the founding event of the independent Irish state."
        - Roy Foster

"Irish 'patriotism' is something of a sham. As of old, the Irish have a warrior class now known as the IRA... The warrior class do not mind destroying Ireland if by such means they can spite England. Throughout their history they have invited would-be rulers from France, Spain and Germany. Far from being proudly independent patriots, they are willing to be ruled by any foreigner as long as he's an enemy of England. The pre-provisional IRA toyed with the idea of an alliance with Soviet Russia... We English are the unwitting enemy of the warrior Irish no matter what we do, whether we like Ireland or now."
        - Roy Kerridge

The idea that the Kaiser, if successful in a war against Britain and thus master of the European continent for decades to come, would have allowed souther Ireland to be free and independent is a geopolitical absurdity.

Overall, Irishmen gave their lives for the British Empire in the Great War at a high rate, even compared to Australians and New Zealanders: 50,000 Irishmen died out of a population of 4.38 million, or 1.14%, which was only slightly lower than Australia's 1.25%, and New Zealand's 1.66%, but higher than Canada's 0.76%. It is a sign of how loyal most Irishmen were to Crown, even while a tiny minority of them raised the flag of rebellion over Dublin at Easter 1916.

The losses sustained by the British Army on the first day of the Somme offensive, 1 July 1916, not only completely dwarfed all earlier battles in British history, but exceeded many other entire wars. The casualties, including 19000 dead, of that single day bear equivalence to the 16,000 British soldiers killed in the Boer War and the 20,000 of the Crimean War... As an extreme example, the Charge of the Light Brigade cost 110 dead in 7 minutes, whereas the first day of the Somme killed 175 times that number.

"To call it a crime against Mankind is to miss at least half its significance, it is also the punishment of a crime."
        - Frederic Manning, "Her Privates We", on the Great War

The Great War myth insists that the British generals in that conflict were mainly "aristocratic cavalry officers who lived in chateux well behind the front lines and send millions of young men, either duped working-class heroes or sensitive middle-class poets, to their deaths."
In fact... the Great War generals tended to be infantrymen in their late 40s, who had seen plenty of active service. No fewer than 97 were killed in the war and a further 146 were wounded or taken prisoner. As many major-generals were killed in action at the battle of Loos as in the whole of the Second World War. The military historian Richard Holnes considers them to have been "honest, brave and hard-working" soldiers, who were "all too aware of the consequences of their mistakes."

Since the armies of the English-speaking peoples were the only ones still capable of mounting any kind of offensive in 1918, with morale still high, and considering that they demonstrably won the war with a series of impressive victories that summer and autumn, Field-Marshal Douglas Haig could not have been the blunderer depicted in plays and films... Haig learnt fastest and best of the Allied generals how to defeat our most formidable and efficient foreign enemy since the Napoleonic Wars... If there had been a way of fighting the war differently once trenches stretched 400 miles from the Channel to the Swiss border, the Germans of the French might have discovered one, but neither did. Modern critics of the High Command need to explain how they would fought the Great War differently.

Discipline was not simply kept up through fear. Only 346 out of the 3080 death sentences for desertion and cowardice were actually carried out — from an army of over 5 million men — and usually to reinforce discipline in a particular unit or at a particular time... The reason most Britons fought — apart from the sense of comradeship and regimental pride fostered in all armies — was that they rightly believed that Britain's safety depended upon victory. Some 704,208 Britons died in the war — 1.53% of the population — but they did not consider that they were dying in vain.

"They never weep; their voices do not falter. Not a tear have I seen yet. They take it as part of the price of greatness and of empire. You guess at their grief only by their reticence. They use as few words as possible and then courteously take themselves away. It isn't accident that these people own a fifth of the world. Utterly unwarlike, they outlast anybody else when war comes."
        - Walter Hines Pages, US Ambassador to Britain, on civilian reaction to casualties

Public displays of emotion were thought, rightly, to be bad for civilian morale, there was genuine, heartfelt lamentation for loved-ones, of course, but it was patriotically kept private.

Although co-ordinating a peace approach with the other Allies such as France, Russia and Italy would have been hard, it would not have been impossible in November 1916. Similarly, ensuring that the Germans fully withdrew from France and Belgium and all captured territories would have required tough negotiation. Yet an armistice in late 1916 when Lord Lansdowne first advocated it would probably have saved the 20th century from the horrors of the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions and their aftermaths.

Without fixed-term premierships, the British have long been ruthless in sacking wartime prime ministers who are not perceived as up to the task: Aberdeen was replaced by Palmerston during the Crimean War, Asquith by Lloyd George in the Great War and Chamberlain by Churchill in the Second World War.

If Australia and New Zealand defined themselves as independent nations partly through their sacrifice of Gallipoli, Canada's apotheosis moment came on Easter Monday 1917 with her victory at Vimy Ridge... Only 4.7% of men eligible from Quebec volunteered by 1917, compared with 15.5% of those from western Canada and 14.4% from Ontario — this despite the fact that the war was being fought largely to protect metropolitan France.

[1918-1919: Peace Guilt]

"The age of nationalities will be of short duration, or of a very tyrannical character."
        - Benjamin Disraeli (1860)

"This is not peace; it is an armistice for twenty years."
       - Marshal Foch (1919)

"There was never a quick path to victory on the Western Front, because the 1914-18 technology of destruction vastly outstripped that of communication and mobility. Defenders could always reinforce a threatened sector more quickly than the attackers could advance across it, until the German army had been worn down by four years of loss and Allied blockade. Haig's commitment to the doctrine of attrition seems repugnant, because its human cost was unspeakable. Yet he was correct that victory was unattainable without it."
        - Sir Max Hastings

Overall the Great War is estimated to have mobilised over 63 million soldiers (42 million Allied, 23 million Central Powers) and cost the lives of over 8 million soldiers (5 million Allied, 3 million CP) and 6.6 million civilians (3.15 Allied, 3.45 million CP). The total number of wounded numbered no fewer than 21,228,813 people. Such was the appalling human cost of the Central Powers' grasp for global hegemony in August 1914; the most incredible phenomenon of the century was that only one generation later they were ready for a sequel performance.

A 'Dolchstosslegende' (stab-in-the-back myth) was promoted by the Nazis and other extreme nationalities that insisted that Germany had been 'Im Felde umbesiegt' (undefeated in the field) but only betrayed by the "criminals of November" such as socialists, capitalists, Jews and pacifists. In fact, however, the Germany Army had sustained a series of overwhelming straightforward defeats during the summer and autumn of 1918 at the hands of the Allies. Yet such had been the earlier successes in 1914 that the Germans had surrendered before the fighting reached their borders, so their own territories were not ravaged by marching armies. The myth was allowed to germinate precisely because when they had surrendered in November 1918, Germany's armies were all on foreign soil. Despite the terrible ravages of the Allied blockade, the country had not duffered the kind of domestic physical destruction that 'Bomber' Harris was to visit upon it in 1940-5. As the historian Margaret Macmillan put it in her book Peacemakers, "Of course thngs might have been very different if Germany had been more thoroughly defeated."

It was at Versailles that the British Empire reached its vertex. So vast was the British Empire as a result of the treaty that by 1922 a coal-burning round-the-world steamship could, with a the single exception of the three-day string across the South Atlantic from Ascension Island to Trinidad, be sure that every nightfall it could "berth safely under the lee shore of a British dependency."

The way in which the Dominions signed the Versailles Treaty independently and joined the League of Nations separately under their own names marked an important stage in their national stories. During the Great War, the British Empire raised armies totalling nearly 9 million men, of whom 3 million came from outside the United Kingdom. The contributions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, who between them raised over 1 million troops despite their small populations, needed to be recognised and rewarded. By 1919, it was now impossible for them to feel that foreign policy and its military consequences could be left to the UK. Back in 1902, during the negotiations over the Anglo-Japanese alliance, for example, Britain had spoken for all of them. After the Great War the implicit autonomy of the Dominions in these remaining spheres of policy had to be made explicit.

Ever since Macauley's Education Minute of 1835, it had been envisaged that the Britishwould quit their Empire as soon as they had educated their successors. It was thus the first empire in human history to be manufactured with a sell-by date attached. Now, hoever, it attained the greatest spain in its history, if one includes the various Protectorates awarded it under the terms of Versailles. Yet just as its extent reached the widest, so the cracks in its edifice were beginning to become very apparent. The most obvious was the loss of nearly a million of its brightest, bravest and best young men over the previous four years of war.

The first draft of the proposed Covenant of the League of Nations sparked intense debate across the world, but especially in the United States where opinion was deeply divided about the extent to which a burgeoning world power like theirs should have its hands tied by a powerful supranational body. One of its most considered responses came from former Secretary of War Senator Elih Root. He was unhappy about several key areas of the League's constitution... saying that the scheme had great value but correspondingly "very serious faults", which needed to be addressed... including that arbitration before conflict was not made obligatory on all signatories; and in undertaking to preserve the territorial integrity of all League members, the world' borders would effectively be set in aspic for evermore... Root was all too aware of the danger of aranchy sweeping through Russia, Germany and Eastern Europe. He wanted a League of Nations, just not one that proved counterproductive to peace in the long run... Active American involvement in the general world settlement of 1919 was a crucial prerequisite for its success... yet it was not to be.

As a result of the Versailles Treaty, 70 million Germans would be surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of small and medium-sized states, which, as one historian has pointed out, "were domestically unstable, economically increasingly dependant on Germany and which had tro rely for their independence on the goodwill and assistance of faraway Great Powers."
The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires have been likened to old, beautifil vases that no-one appreciates until they have been smashed into hundreds of pieces, impossible to restore. The tragedy was that the vases weren't broken by accident, but flung to the ground by the hubristic vandals of Versailles.

"Vienna and the monarchy made up one enormous family of Hungarians, Germans, Moravians, Czecds, Serbs, Croats, and Italians, all of whom understood that the only person who could keep order among this fantastical welter of longings, impulses and emotions was the Emperor, in his capacity as sergeant-major and imperial majesty, government clerk in shirtsleeve protectors and grand seigneur, unmannerly clod and absolute ruler.
        - Sandor Marai, "Embers"

By breaking up that family and forcing its emperor into exile, Woodrow Wilson created a maelstrom of inherently unstable, competing nationalities, increasingly prone, as the years went by, to the lure of fascism... Borders had to be drawn somewhere for the hypenated new countries like Czecho-slovakia and Yugo-slavia. In order to protect these new artificial borders, long-term commitments from all the victors needed to be entered into in good faith. It was the world's tragedy that this did not happen.

The central accusation made against the Versailles Treaty is that its supposed harshness on Germany made revanchism, and thus future conflict, more rather than less likely. Yet to blame Versailles for Hitler's war is, as Margaret Macmillian put it, "to ignore the actions of everyone — political leaders, diplomats, soldiers, ordinary voters — for twenty years between 1919 and 1939. Had the Treaty actually been harsher on Germany — specifically if it had divided the country in two or more (as was the case before 1871) separate entities — then there might have been no via dolorosa of Rhineland-Anschluss-Sudetenland-Danzig for Europe to walk between 1936 and 1939... The problem with the peacemakers of Versailles was that they were willing to wound but afraid to strike, though admittedly it did not look that way at the time. It was not the Treaty itself, so much as the US and other's refusal to stand by its measures to curb German rearmament, come what may, that exposed the weakness of the security it was designed to instill.

Although there was a clause relating to Germany's "War Guilt" in the Treaty, it was not ling before the Western powers were suffering from something almost as bad: "Peace Guilt".

The refusal of the US Senate to ratify the Versailles Treaty was perhaps America's most fateful and worst decision in the history of the 20th century.

"The monster that had resorted to arms must be put in chains that could not be broken."
        - Woodrow Wilson

"I have the profoundest faith that we shall win and by winning I mean putting Germany in such a position that she never again can repeat the horrors which she has precipitated upon the world."
        - Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, as American soldiers enter combat (1918)

Fearful of "any arrangement which would sabotage our independence and sovereignty", Senator Lodge persuaded 39 senators to sign a resolution hoping that Versailles "may revise this draft in such a way as to make it acceptable to the Senate."
[Among his objections] Lodge wanted to safeguard the right of Congress to prevent the US going to war... and felt that Article Ten setting up the League of Nations should not be attached to the peace treaty but debated separately, since it was too important to be hurried through under pressure. All these were reasonable demands, yet the vain, over-confident and surprisingly impulsive President Wilson failed to address any of them, refusing the amendments and reseverations of senators who had read the small print of what was proposed and baulked at a situation in which US could  in theory, be required to furnish an army of 200,000 men to take over Anatolia and Armenia. Because Wilson insisted on keeping Article Ten tacked onto to the Versailles Treaty, the US Senate rejected it by 55 votes to 39 in November 1919... Wilson had warned "If America goes back upon mankind, mankind has no other place to turn." Yet it was largely Wilson's own fault that it happened, and an historic opportunity was missed.

[1920-1929: American Energy]

"Interest is not necessarily amoral; moral consequences can spring from interested acts. Britain did not contribute any less to international order for having a clear-cut concept of its interest which required it to prevent the domination of the European Continent by a single power (no matter in what way it was threatened) and the control of the seas by anybody (even if the immediate intentions were not hostile."
        - Henry Kissinger, "Central Issues of American Foreign Policy"

With a staff of 143,000 by 1921, the Cheka (Soviet Secret Police) employed terror and torture to destroy what it called 'anti-Soviet subversion', but which was often just innocent life.

This was the way that the Bolsheviks built their workers' utopia:-
"In Kharkov they burned the victim's hands in boiling water until the blistered skin could be peeled off. The Tsaristyn Cheka sawed its victims bones in half... In Kiev they affixed a cage with rats to the victim's torso and heated it so the enraged rats ate their way through the victim's guts in an effort to escape... In Odessa a favourite winter torture was to pour water on the naked victims until they became living ice statues."
        - Orlando Figes, "A People's Tragedy"

A very small but heroic band of anti-communist writers sought to expose the true nature of Soviet tyranny to the English-speaking peoples from the 1920s onwards... All too often their message was met with disbelief, quibbling over facts, accusations of partiality or worse, and occasionally outright ridicule. When finally the Berlin Wall fell and the archives became available to Western scholars, it was discovered that many of these writers had if anything underestimated the true scale of the horrors being perpetrated by the Bolshevik regime against their own peoples.

"We cannot act alone as the policeman of the world," Andrew Bonar Law wrote to 'The Times' on 6 October 1922. It was as well he announced that in the pages of the newspaper of record, because it came as news to an empire that was well used to acting in precisely that way, particularly in areas of the world adjacent to the ocean. Yet in a sense Bonar Law was right; without the United States being closely involved and without the League of Nations having teeth, there could be no world policeman, at least not a British Empire that was exhausted by the Great War, doubtful of its future and no longer the pugnacious force it once was.

The British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote that, "To succeed pre-eminently in British public life it was necessary to conform either to the popular image of a bookie or of a clergyman." After the Conservative Party voted in 1922 to withdraw from the Lloyd George coalition and govern by itself, the Cabinet saw a wholesale swapping of bookies for clergymen.

One of the problems the English-speaking peoples have long encountered in their diplomacy has been their insistence on precise language and verifiable outcomes.

[1929-1931: Capitalism At Bay]

"No society on Earth has ever had such a privileged existence as the capitalist West. Even the lives of the poorest sections of society are immeasurably better in almost all ways than under any other form of economic system."
        - Anthony Browne, "The Retreat of Reason"

The St Valentine's Day massacre came to symbolise America's scourge of gangsterism, racketeering and gun-crime... It also came to be seen in time as a standing indictment of freebooting American capitalism, however absurd that might be... In fact, since it arose largely through the gross restraint of trade involved in Prohibition, one might more profitably blame the rise of gangsterism on the nanny state.

Refined European art critics all too often develop a form of Tourette's Syndrome when they are faced with American culture, yet it rarely prevents them from pocketing the Yankee dollar they affect to despise.
The most virulent criticisms of America and Americans comes from Americans themselves. Self-hatred, often through guilt over their supposed materialism and obsession with money, is an abiding defeat in the English-speaking peoples, and for some reason especially strong in Americans.

A superior, cultured contempt for aspiration — for people working hard to better themselves and their families — also led the modern British writer Zadie Smith to describe Britain as "just a disgusting place", adding, "vulgarity, stupid TV shows, aspirational arseholes, money everywhere." English-speaking peoples' worst critics have long come from within their own society. The politics of the pre-emptive cringe is evident throughout the culture of the English-speaking peoples, who in reality ought to be proud of the way their citizenry can aspire to better themselves.

Capitalism works best within the political, social and legal framework perfected by the English-speaking peoples, partly because of the strength of Protestantism in those societies. The connection between Protestant individualism and personal responsibility creates a favourable environment for free enterprise.

"It affirmed the spiritual without the need for ritual. It relished argument, lived in language, and celebrated a faith that had its beginning in the Word. Its spirit was democratic, with the Bible and the church office open to all. Its polar opposite is not atheism, but the New Age 'faiths' that celebrate feeling over thought and privilege a caste of gurus over a questioning congregation."
        - Michael Gove, Conservative MP on the legacy of Protestantism

Just as isolationism had seemed attractive to many Americans in the 1920s, so too did many non-Americans feel that it was possible to isolate themselves... but those days were now over, as the Wall Street Crash proved from Sweden to Egypt and from Lancashire to Poland. What people said and did in New York mattered, as it had never mattereed before but was increasingly to in the future. By 1929, the US was contributing 34.4% of the world's gross production by value, as against Britain's 10.4%, Germany's 10.3%, the USSR's 9.9%, France's 5%, Japan's 4%, Italy's 2.5% and Canada's 2.2%. It was therefore inescapable that a collapse in US share prices would affect the rest of the planet.

In 1926 and 1927, the Kansas Republican Congressman, James A Strong, had tried to amend the 1913 Federal Reserve Act in order to make price stability an explicit goal of 'the Fed'. He was opposed in this by Benjamin Strong, the Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a powerful figure in the organisation, who feared that it would be interpreted as meaning that the Reserve would end up trying to maintain price stability in agricultural products. The bill was defeated. Today, Alan Greenspan, amongst many others, agrees with Allan Metzler's contention that if Strong's bill had passed, the Federal Reserve "could not have permitted the Great Depression of 1929-33 or the Great Inflation of 1965-80".

New York erected itself over the traces of its own past... It is true that, as the architectural writer Martin Filler has put it, "No great world city retains so little of its visible past as New York, not even post-apocalypse Berlin"... Of course in any city it is impossible to build anything without first razing something else. A whole district of Federal-era brick buildings were levelled to make room for the World Trade Center in 1969-71... Yet that was a far cry from the gross vandalism represented by the destruction of the neo-classical Pennsylvania Station, which was so solidly built that it took two years to demolish between 1963-65. Built in 1906-10, this noble portal to New York was replaced by a "mediocre office tower, sports arena and a hopelessly seedy underground terminal", which prompted the architectural historian Vincent Scully to remark that travellers used to enter New York like gods but now must scurry in like rats.

[1931-1939: The Second Assault: Fascist Aggression]

"It is the English-speaking nations who, almost alone, keep alight the torch of Freedom."
        - Winston Churchill, May 1938

"An Englishman's mind works best when it is almost too late."
        - Lord D'Abernon in "Geoffrey Madan's Notebooks"

The essayist Norman Douglas wrote, "There is no cause so vile that some human being will not be found to defend it." The Russian gulag was attended by scenes of dysentry, dementia, monasteries being converted into torture chambers, starved slaves hacking at permafrost, massacres and mindless, sadistic savagery. One way the Left in the West has attempted to undermine its legacy is to try to argue that there was a 'moral equivalance' between Soviet communism and English-speaking capitalism. Thus in 2004 the University of California Press published a book by Mark Dow entitled "American Gulag: Inside US Immigration Prisons"... It is perfectly true that the US has 2 million people in prison, which the Left regularly describes as 'a gulag'. Yet however vicious, unpleasant and forbidding those prisons might be — or Camp Xray in Guantanamo Bay — to equate them to the Soviet gulas, which housed many millions of complete innocents and killed 5 million in the last 5 years of Stalin's life, is to indulge in an outrageous misnomer. Everyone imprisoned in the US is there because a judge and jury convicted them after a trial, and only 1000 people out of a population of 297 million have been executed in the last 30 years. To draw a moral equivalence between that situation and the Soviet gulag of the Thirties and Forties is fraudulent history, yet it is done regurly by the Left.

"Intellectuals by and large disgraced the 20th century... With rare exceptions, they whored after false gods, of which the most odious and overwhelming was power. Writers, artists, philosophers, historians, even musicians and architects, enthusiastically committed their talents to the service of one cause or another. This treason of the clerks spread like an epidemic, diminishing the world's hard-won stock of wisdom and morality, and Civilization is still reeling from it."
        - David Pryce Jones

With Western intellectuals having so dreadful a record in the 20th century, it is small wonder that the conservative American journalist William F. Buckley Jnr has said that he would sooner be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University.

There has been virtually no murderous communist dictator who has not had apologists on the Left, be it Stalin (worshipped by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw), Charmain Mao (adored across Sixties' campuses), or Fidel Castro.

Stalin committed seven major acts of racial genocide, against the Ukranians in 1930-2, the Poles, Balts, Moldavians and Bessarabians in 1939-41 and 1944-5, the Volga Germans in 1941, the Crimean Tatars 1942, the Chechens and the Inguches in 1944. Indeed, as Professor Alan Bullock so comprehensively proved in his 1991 book "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives", the Nazis actually learnt most of their repression techniques from the Bolsheviks.

A hundred times more people were murdered by the Soviet Communist Party than willingly sacrificed their lives for it.

Probably any time between 1924 and 1941 Mussolini would have won a free and fair election in Italy if he had been unfascist-minded enough to have held one... It was his defeat of Italian communism that originally raised Mussolini high in the opinion of the West, but thereafter the combination of nationalism and fascism in his domestic politics and the vainglory of his foreign policy should have signalled his true nature to many people.

With no army, navy or air force, the League of Nations was impotent. "And covenants, without the sword, are but words," wrote Thomas Hobbes in chapter 17 of 'Leviathan', "and of no strength to secure a man at all." It was as true in the Devil's Decade as when Hobbes had written them in the mid-17th century.

If the 20th century was, as Henry Luce dubbed it, 'the American Century', it was largely due to the Roosevelt cousins. Theodore created a framework to ensure that capitalism did not devolve inot unregulated monopolistic cartels while simultaneously thrusting the United States onto the world scene and attaining Great Power status for her, but it was under Franklin D. Roosevelt that she became a superpower. First his defence of democracy domestically and then his promotion of it globally set the political weather for the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st... It was the ability of the English-speaking peoples to throw up leaders of the stamp of FDR, who could turn fury and resentment into non-revolutionary avenues, that saved America from being led down avenues of extremism.

Yet for all her ability to build the Empire State building and the Hoover Dam in the Thirties, America was a minor player in world affairs in that decade. In the first eight years of his presidency, FDR travelled outside the US only once, and by 1935 the US army was still only the world's 19th largest.

By coming out of the Great Depression, the United States had shown that capitalism has an inherent power of resurgence and renewal that should never be underestimated by its opponents.

"This is the midnight, let no star delude us, dawn is very far... Stand by! The lull 'twixt blast and blast signals the storm is near, not past."
        - Rudyard Kipling, "The Storm Come" (1932)

"An insular country, subject to fogs and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen."
        - Benjamin Disraeli

Unfortunately, Britain had a surfeit of grave statesmen in the 1930s.

The vast majority of people had chosen not to listen to Winston Churchill's jeremiads against Nazism and his Cassandra-like warnings of the dangers of Hitler, but trusted to the 'Respectable Tendency' of British politics to see them through future crises. A glance at Churchill's pre-1939 career explains why the English-speaking peoples seemed justified in supposing that his warnings about Germany sounded suspiciously like the boy who cried 'Wolf'... For this was the man who devised the Gallipoli landings, promoted the ill-fated intervention in the Russian Civil War, who rejoined the gold standard at the wrong time and rate, opposed Indian self-government and supported the King over the Abdication crisis.

At the time of Churchill's campaign against Indian self-government, Mrs Ogden Reid of the New York Herald Tribune, who was placed next to Churchill at a White House dinner asked him: "What do you intend to do about the poor Indians?" According to a story told years later by Lord Mountbatten (admittedly not an altogether trustworthy source in his anecdotage) Churchill replied: "Mada, to which Indians to you refer? Do you refer to the brown Indians of the Asian subcontinent, who under benign and benevolent British influence have multiplied alarmingly? Or do you refer to the red Indian of this continent, who under the current Administration are almost extinct?

In May 1937 Neville Chamberlain took over the premiership from Stanley Baldwin. Chamerlain was a man of culture and honour... a forceful politician and had been a highly effective Mayor of Birmingham, Minister of Health and Chancellor of the Exchequer. However, as the historian Robert Blake caustically put it, "When national security is at stake, one does not judge a statesman by his successes in slum clearance."
Yet the fact remains that to those who had lost family members in the Great War — which comprised a vast cross-section of the English-speaking peoples — the prospect of a European conflict breaking out all over again was simply an unthinkable obscenity, and Chamberlain expressed that better than any other politician of the day... After Hitler's bold, bloodless coup in the Rhineland, the West had to face three full years of bluster, bullying and brilliant brinksmanship before Chamberlain laid down the tripwire of Britain's guarantee to Poland in April 1939.

Chamberlain was not the naif that some of his detractors have painted him. In a public letter in 1938 he made it clear that "the preservation of the peace of the world must be largely dependent on the strength of our own country. If we are to avert the perils of war the defence programme on which the national Government embarked three years ago must be accelerated even though it may involve sacrifices. But let us always remember that the sacrifices of peace are far less terrible than the sacrifices of war."

Appeasement was not simply a political phenomenon. The Church of England supported it on spiritual grounds, ex-servicemen's organisations supported it to avoid war, and the management of corporate Britain embraced it as the best way to avoid damaging Britain's economic strength... Britain's major companies believed that they could play a key role in humanising Hitler's regime through closer trade contracts... Certainly, the London Stock Market reacted very positively to the Munich agreement, with the industrial sector leaping 13%.

"Neville anoys me by mouthing the arguments of complete pacifism while piling up armaments."
        - Clement Attlee, Labour Party leader

The title of Tory MP Quintin Hogg's 1945 book about the Labour Party's foreign policy in the Thirties, "The Left Was Never Right", can hardly be bettered as an accurate analysis of the effects of its opposition to rearmament, conscription and all the other measure that might have made the fascists take note.

Simply to enumerate the Jewish emigres who left Germany, Austria and Poland in the 1930s, and who settled in the English-speaking world, is to read "a more of less endless list of eminence" — including Einstein, Freud, Popper, Kissinger, Pressburger, Schonberg... Had Hitler not persecuted the Jews, forcing German-Jewish nuclear scientists to flee Germany, the Nazis might have produced an atomic bomb. But then, he would not have been Hitler.

In a sense, although the governments of the English-speaking peoples produced the finance and facilities for building the atomic bombd, it was the vombined genius of the Jewish Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, along with the New Zealander Sir Ernest Rutherford, that brought into being the technology that finally ended the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers in the Pacific theatre in 1945 owed their lives to the Jewish scientists who had fled Nazism in the Thirties.

English-speaking society was chronically infected with the bacillus of anti-Semitism on both sides of the Atlantic, albeit not of the exterminationist kind found in Germany, on the extreme Right in France and in much of the rest of continental Europe... For all the influx of individual geniuses into the US, the 1930s were overall a hard time for American Jewry.

Between 1951 and 2000, 32% of Nobel Prizes for Medicine went to Jews... For Central Europe to have lost so many people from that race, and the English-speaking peoples to have gained them, was to due to the superiority of democracy over dictatorship, and of religious toleration over persecution.

While communism made some very limited headway in Britain — there were 5 communist MPs selected to the House of Commons between 1924 and 1945 — fascism made none... And membership of the British Union of Fascists declined dramatically after the Olympia riots. The fighting that broke out at the Olympia stadium in June 1934, where hundreds of communists disrupted a Mosley rally of 2000 Blackshirts among a 12000 strong audience, profoundly shocked the British public.

It is perhaps a necessary attribute in anyone who wishes to be prime minister to believe unquestioningly in one's own brillance...

Time ran out for Chamberlain and Britain in the early hours of 24 August 1939. The non-aggression pact signed by Molotov and Ribbentrop in Moscow was a masterpiece of cynicism, opening the way for Hitler to unleash Blitzkrieg on Poland and subsequently on the West... The differences between the fascist and communist ideologies diseappared before the perceived requirements of both countries' realpolitik. A diplomat in the British Foreign Office put the situation succintly when he said of the pact, "All of a sudden, all our isms became wasms."
Much has been made, rightly, of the tremendous sacrifices of the Russian people in defeating Hitler at the cost of over 20 million dead in 1941-45. Yet against that must be placed the fact that Stalin had allowed Hitler to secure his eastern flank in 1939. Fear of a war on two fronts, such as wrecked Germany in the Great War, had been the only thing holding Hitler back in 1939. Ths Pact removed that fear and thus made was as inevitable as anything in human affairs. The Soviets reaped in June 1941 only what they had sown in August 1939.

Fortunately for Britain the year between Munich and the outbreak of war solidified Commonwealth feeling behind Britain and allowed for major advances in the crucial areas of air rearmament and radar.

[1939-1941: Divided and Faltering]

"We can never forget how in the hour of trial in 1939 the call to save Civilisation met with an instant response from the Dominions... Hitler, like the Kaiser before him, learnt that there are bonds of the spirit much stronger and more enduring than any material ties, and that freedom unites more surely than domination."
        - Clement Attlee (1945)

"War is a beastly thing now, all the glamour has gone out of it."
        - Winston Churchill

"I never met anybody who wasn't quite confident that we would win the war."
        - Hugh Trevor Roper

The overwhelming response to the outbreak of war in September in 1939 was of sad resignation that Hitler should have behaved in the way he had. The English-speaking peoples entered their second great test of the century without any sense of euphoria, but firm in the knowledge that, as in 1914, the conflict was not of their making... The coming struggle was to see the united English-speaking peoples (except Ireland) fighting Nazism all over the world, facing every kind of adversity.

During the Second World War, no fewer than 5 million Commonwealth went to fight for the Allies; 170,000 of them perished. The 2.5 million who joined the Indian Army comprised the largest all-volunteer military force in human history. The Commonwealth contribution in theatres as diverse as the Western Desert and Burma, Normandy and the Pacific, the skies of Britain and the Murmansk convoys was crucial in wearing down and eventually destroying the Axis. Indeed, had the BEF been captured at Dunkirk and Britain invaded, there were only two divisions protecting London, both of which were Canadian.
Patriotism was a primary motive for those millions who willingly joined the colours in 1939 — two years before Japan entered the war — even though Nazi Germany alone could not possibly have posed a direct threat... For millions too, the war provided the best and most regular pay they had ever enjoyed, whilst giving them the chance of taking part in a noble global endeavour.

By contrast, Eire declared her neutrality in September 1939 and stuck to the policyright to the end of the war... When Eamon de Valera criticised the invasion of Belgium and Holland, he not even specify who had been responsible. "Today, these small nations are fighting for their lives, and I think it would be unworthy of this small nation if, on an occasion like this, I did not utter a protest against the cruel wrong that has been done to them," he said. Quite who had done this cruel wrong was left to the listener to deduce, but from de Valera's language it might almost have been an Act of God.

"Paris is a beautiful woman and London is an ugly man, still, the masculine quality counts for something."
        - Benjamin Disraeli (1857)

The 'masculine quality' of London certainly counted for much during the Blitz. The architecture of London — with its winding streets, small alleyways, courtyards and street names going back six centuries — represents the legacy of liberty. By contrast, the wide boulevards of Paris were designed by Baron Haussmann so that government artillery could destroy barricades and command great sweeps of the centre of the city... It was this ancient, largely unplanned London that took such a pounding during the Blitz, many are the churches and public buildings with commemorative plaques that record only two eras of destruction — the 1666 Great Fire and the London Blitz.

In May 1940, Sean Russell, the IRA's chief of staff, visited Ribbentrop in Berlin and concluded that, "Our ideas have much in common". He was quite right; the IRA was essentially a fascist revolutionary organisation in aim, method and organisation, and remained so... Russell's visit to Germany in the summer of 1940 represented the high-water mark of IRA-Nazi relations... For all that Russell "only wanted what was good for Ireland", in fact, there is nothing to suggest that after a successful invasion of the British Isles, the Wehrmacht would have dutifully stopped at the border of neutral Eire. Like so many Irish nationalists before and after him, Russell put his pathological hatred of Britain before his patriotic love of Ireland.
Although the Germans sent ten agents to Ireland, none supplied them with any useful information... German espionage in southern Ireland during the Second World War was generally characterised by hilarious incompetence.
At a time between 1941 and 1943 when the entire English-speaking peoples were fighting for their existence, the Irish government was keeping its options resolutely open, while putting the issue of partition above the question of the survival of Civilisation itself. The idea that a Nazi victory in the West would lead to an extension of Irish liberty, sovereignty and independence might be laughable today, but a (fortunately small) section of the Irish governing class was so blinded by Anglophobia that they were willing to take the risk.

The only part of the English-speaking peoples' sovereign territory to be subjected to German occupation during the war were the Channel Islands; but does its experience of collaboration with the Nazi authorities give us any indication about how other parts of the English-speaking world might have responded to a successful invasion? Does their experience of German occupation between 1940 and 1945 — in which they undoubtedly collaborated and established a modus vivendi with the enemy — really mean that the English-speaking peoples are exactly the same as everyone else when it comes to withstanding tyranny? The subliminal question is why, if the English-speaking institutions would have been no better that the rest of Europe's in withstanding Hitlerism, should we be so protective of them today?
Fortunately, their experience tells us precisely nothing about the way the rest of Britain would have behaved towards a Nazi invasion... The island had been specifically ordered by the War Office not to resist, as their strategic importance was minimal... One-third of the population, including all their able-bodied men of militar age had already been evacuated. The 60,000 who were left were guarded by no fewer than 37,000 Germans — a ratio which, if translated to mainland Britain, would have required them to station 30 million troops there.

"You can always take one with you."
        - Message to be broadcast by Winston Churchill in event of German invasion

If the same strict standards regarding financial disclosures had pertained in the 1930s as do in the British Parliament today, it is uncertain that Winston Churchill would ever hade made it to Downing Street. Sleaze allegations would have continually dogged him if he had been forced to admit the truth about his financial affairs in any Register of Members' Interests form.

In his speech of 18 June 1940, in which Churchill coined the phrase 'Their finest hour', the Prime Minister had to try to advance some arguments to persuade the British people that, as he put it, "there are good and reasonable hopes of final victory", despite the French armistice... It was in fact to be another year and three days before Hitler's invasion of the USSR gave any logical grounds for optimism.

In September 1940 they (fifty American destroyers swapped to Britain) were priceless as a propaganda tool, and it was brave of Roosevelt to take such a bellicose step less than two months before an election in which he was forced to promise — in Boston on 30 October 1940 — "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." The best that can be said is that he believed it at the time.

On the night of Tuesday, 17 September 1940, the 'City of Benares', a ship taking Britons to Canada, including 90 child evacuees, was torpedoes with the loss of 255 passengers, among them 83 children. "I am full of horror and indignation that any German submarine captain could be found to torpedo a ship over 600 miles from land in a tempestuous sea," said Geoffrey Shakespeare, Under-Secretary at the Dominions Office. "This deed will shock the world." He was right, at least as far as the English-speaking peoples were concerned: the American Secretary of State Cordell Hull described it as "a most dastardly act".

It was fortunate for the fate of the English-speaking peoples that FDR was re-elected in 1940. An opponent of isolationism, whose secret policy was to try to get the US into the war against Hitler, Roosevelt's feline touch for politics allowed him to push each incident as far as possible towards interventionism, but never too far to provoke an isolationish backlash. His Republican opponent, Wendell Wilkie, though a fine man and a true American patriot, would probably not have been able to massage, embroide and subtly tug the USA towards war in the war that the arch-politician FDR did.

One indication of the power and confidence of American capitalism was the explosion in commercial aviation in the US before her entry into the Second World War. The free markets had been able to create in America that which even state-subsidised corporations were unable to elsewhere: a viable, profitable non-military aircraft industry.

The English-speaking nations are each proud of their independence and act according to their own national self-interest; it just to happens that tehse interests have historically tended to coincide very much more than they have diverged.

"Let us remember that the American War of Independence was fought by British Americans against a German king and a reactionary prime minister for British ideals."
        - Lady Astor, fostering warm Anglo-American relations

On the night of 10 May 1941, no fewer than 1,486 Londoners were killed, 1800 were injured and 11,000 houses were destroyed. It was a 400-bomber raid, taking advantage of bright moonlight... Ths historian of that terrible night has nonetheless concluded that London emerged "the symbol of the free world, bruised and battered, but unbeaten and as bloody-minded as ever."

There was a curious dichotomy between the way the Nazis tried to keep visiting allies and clients away from bomb-damaged areas, thinking it bad for morale, whereas the British positively encouraged visitors to go to such places.

Adolf Hitler predicted that when he unleashed his Blitzkrieg invasion of Russia, "The world will hold its breath." It certainly was breathtaking in its scale — involving 3.6 million German troops attacking across a 1,000 mile front — but in a sense the British were able to exhale, since they and their allies were, after a year of standing alone, no longer the sole components of the anti-Hitler struggle.

There is no more ironclad commandment in human affairs than the Law of Unintended Consequences, and Stalin had not expected the non-aggression pact of 1939 to result in Hitler having a free hand to attack the Soviet Union by June 1941.

"Any coalition of Powers that turns against Germany can from the outset depend on France," Hitler stated in his unpublished sequel to 'Mein Kampf', and thus the destruction of France had to be the first duty of any future Chancellor of Germany.

[1942-1944: United and Conquering]

"We Nazis never said we were nice democrats. The problem is that the British seem like sheep or bishops, but when the moment comes they are shown to be hypocrites, and they become a terribly tough people."
        - Reinhard Spitzy, private sectreary to Joachim von Ribbentrop

The decision of Roosevelt and the US Chiefs of Staff to concentrate on defeating Germany before directing the full might of the US against Japan represents one of the greatest acts of American statesmanship of the 20th century. Much militated against it; Japan had attacjed Pearl Harbor, after all, whereas Germany had so far deliberately not attacked US interests. Japan was much closer to the US, had captured US possessions and was in the process of attacking the Philippines. American newspapers and public opinion were clamouring for an immediate punishment of Japan's "infamy". Yet Roosevelt and General George Marshall held ferm and decided to fight a war of containment in the Pacific until Germany had been defeated... They correctly identified Germany as being the stronger and thus the more dangerous threat, and so decided to deal with her first. So, however illogical it might seem at first glance, it was in North Africa that the US struck the totalitarian Axis powers first, in response to an attack thousands of miles away in the Pacific Ocean.

General George Marshall inherited an army of 174,000 men and 1,064 aircraft in September 1939, but by 1945 this had grown under his stewardship to one of 8.3 million men and 64,000 planes, the fastest and greatest mobilisation of any society in human history.

Considering how much more the US was contributing to the war effort than Britain in terms of men, money and materiel by the autumn of 1942, it is impressive how often Churchill managed to get his way in the great strategic issues that faced the Western allies. Crucially, in the summer and autumn of 1942, he persuaded the Americans not to undertake a risky cross-Channel invasion in 1943. Although he was very conscious of being the junior partner from 1943 onwards — and was regularly infuriated by it — Churchill defended his corner with tenacity, and except at Yalta, where there was virtually no room for maneuver between Stalin and Roosevelt, he generally got his way.

In all during the war, the US spent a total of $350 billion, more than Germany's $300 billion, Russia's $200 billion, the UK's $150 billion or Japan's $100 billion. She turned over her huge industrial capability to war production and harnessed the limitless energies of her people to creating the tools with which the Allies finished the Axis.

Although there were undoubtedly some severe social (and sexual) problems that were thrown up by the presence of large numbers of American servicemen stationed in Britain during the war, there was a good deal of true love too. No fewer than 60,000 British girls became 'GI brides', marrying American soldiers and going to live in the US after the war.

The genesis of the Dieppe raid was political: the Western Allies wanted to prove to Stalin that they were active at a time when the Red Army was bring so grievously hard-pressed deep inside the USSR. As with so many operations with a primarily political rather than a strictly military objective — such as the Dardanelles adventure or the attempt to protect Greece in 1941 — it was a disaster.
The cracking of the German naval code by Bletchley Park allowed Lord Mountbatten to know that there was an escorted enemy convoy in the Channel, which could not fail to compromise the operation by warning the German forces in Dieppe of the raid hours before it started. Yet despite this complete loss of tactical surprise the raid still went ahead... The forces were massacred... Mountbatten later tried to blame several other people for the debacle, but it was he who was personally responsible for every stage.

"Twice in my lifetime the long arm of destiny has reached across the oceans and involved the entire life and manhood of the United States in a deadly struggle. There was no use in saying "We don't want it; we won’t have it; our forebears left Europe to avoid these quarrels; we have founded a new world which has no contact with the old. "There was no use in that. The long arm reaches out remorselessly, and every one's existence, environment, and outlook undergo a swift and irresistible change... The price of greatness is responsibility. If the people of the United States had continued in a mediocre station, struggling with the wilderness, absorbed in their own affairs, and a factor of no consequence in the movement of the world, they might have remained forgotten and undisturbed beyond their protecting oceans: but one cannot rise to be in many ways the leading community in the civilised world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes.
If this has been proved in the past, as it has been, it will become indisputable in the future. The people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility. Although we live in a period so tumultuous that little can be predicted, we may be quite sure that this process will be intensified with every forward step the United States make in wealth and in power. Not only are the responsibilities of this great Republic growing, but the world over which they range is itself contracting in relation to our powers of locomotion at a positively alarming rate."
        - Winston Churchill, address to Harvard (1943)

[1944-1945: Normandy to Nagasaki]

"To us is given the honour of striking a blow for freedom which will live in history; and in the better days that lie ahead men will speak with pride of our doings. We have a great and righteous cause."
        - General Montgomery's message before Operation Overlord

"Our generation has succeeded in stealing the fire of the Gods, and is doomed to live with the horror of its achievement."
        - Henry Kissinger

"How do you expect us, the British, to adopt a position separate from that of the United States? We are going to liberate Europe, but it is because the Americans are with us to do so.When I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, you should know that I will always choose Roosevelt. And when I have to choose between Europe and the wide open seas... I will always choose the wide open seas."
        - Winston Churchill to Charles de Gaulle

It is sometimes easy, especially when considering great historical events of six decades past, to forget the personal side of sacrifice, the immense scale of the human tragedy engendered by the Nazi ambition to conquer and subdue. A short walk through any of the war cemeteries of Normandy quickly reminds one of the fact that every man lying buried was someone's son.

In his recent book, 'Armageddon', about the battle for France and Germany in 1944-5, the distinguished military historian Sir Max Hastings summed up the moral difference between the Atlantic allies and the totalitarian powers thus:
"To an impressive degree, the American and British armies preserved in battle the values and decencies, the civilised inhibitions of their societies... The Germans and the Russians... showed themselves better warriors, but worse human beings. This is not a cultural conceit, but a moral truth of the utmost importance to understanding what took place on the battlefield."

Of course, as Hastings is the first to admit, there is no telling whether Atlantic civilised values might have survived if Britain and America had ever to fight the kind of war-to-the-knife that the Soviets did to defend their Motherland and expel the invader.

Although the truth was evident far earlier, in 1944 the United States was confirmed as the leading power of the Western alliance. The baton had passed from hand to hand, reluctantly and not without bluster, but neither was it wrenched from Britain's grasp. Churchill was to be the last British leader of the Free World.

The literary critic Desmond MacCarthy once described the primary national characteristics of the French as 'stinginess, and blind vindictive self-assertion', and both were certainly apparent when Charles de Gaulle spoke from the Hotel de Ville in Paris on 25 August 1944. In his speech he proclaimed that Paris had been "liberated by her own people, with the help of the armies of France, with the help and support of the whole of France, that is to say of fighting France, that is to say of the true France, the eternal France." No mention was made of any Allied contribution; the myth-making had begun.

Yalta was the best deal that Roosevelt and Churchill could have negotiated in the circumstances. Although the Russian promises of democracy were clearly worthless, at least it was delinated where the Red Army would halt in its march eastwards across Europe. Furthermore Greece and eventually Austria were saved from falling into the Soviet sphere... No statesman could have altered the sheer fact of Russian having million of troops on the ground, all across most of the territories under dispute... The sad but unavoidable truth is that the United Staes and Great Britain simply had no choice but to accede to Stalin's fait accompli. Never since 1900 were Western statesmen's decisions more important, more long-lasting, more bitter to swallow and yet more impossible to escape.

It is wrong to argue that the victory over Germany made no difference, that it merely opened the door for five more decades of totalitarian rule over countries such as Poland. To have ridden the world of a monster as baleful and dangerous as Adolf Hitler was undoubtedly worth the enormous sacrifices it took to achieve. A successful Lebenstraum policy and a completed Final Solution, let alone the possibility of a victorious Hitler getting hold of nuclear weapons in the late 1940s, are such nightmare concepts that they outweigh even the tragedy of post-war Poland.

The literary historian Paul Fussell, who had been posied to take part in the projected invasion of Japan, recalled what it was like when he heard the news of the surrender:
"We learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared and shelled, and for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live."

Any peace feelers that Japanese diplomats were trying to put out via the Soviet Union ran up against the granitic fact that the Japanese military, not civilians, had ultimate control, and they had no intention of surrendering. Nor would it have been possible for Truman to simply have dropped the Allied demand for Japan's unconditional surrender, originally made by his predecessor Roosevelt. "Practically all Germand deny the fact that they surrendered during the last war," Roosevelt had said, "but this time they are going to know it. And so are the Japs."
Those who argue that Japan was desperately looking for a way to end the war must explain the astonishing fact that she refused to surrender even after Hiroshima was destroyed.

Emperor Hirohito's Imperial Rescript of 14 August 1945 made it perfectly plain that the dropping of the atomic bombs was absolutely epicentral to Japan's decision to surrender. He told his people:
"The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilisation. Such being the case, how are We to save the lives of millions of Our subjects? This is why we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers."

As the writer Allan Massie has put it, excerpts from the diaries that some of the POWs held by the Japanese managed to keep "make you realise that the Japanese camps, like the Nazi deathc camps, were all that we have imagined of Hell translated to the surface of the earth and made reality."

With the official figure for expected American casualties for the attack on Kyushu, one writer has stated that "only an intellectual could assert that 193,500 anticipated casualties were too insignificant to have caused Truman to use atomic bombs."
Fortunately, the English-speaking peoples’ wars are fought by professional soldiers under the direction of elected politicians, with intellectuals having very little to do with them until they are safely won, after which they can criticize with hindsight and moral superiority.

It is also forgotten how the nuclear bombs did not just save Allied lives, but hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives too... It took a brave former president of the Japanese Medical Association to enunciate it, but it is true that, "When one considers the possibility that the Japanese military would have sacrificed the entire nation if it were not for the atomic bomb attack, then this bomb might be described as having saved Japan." The fact that Japan has been a peaceful, indeed almost pacifist, decent, democratic and law-abiding power ever since Hiroshima, with no revanchist tendencies, is largely down to the events of 6 and 9 August 1945.
Futthermore, the undeniable destructive power unleashed on those two days has meant that no-one in the Cold War and since has been under any illusions about the reality of nuclear warfare. In that sense, far from being the English-speaking peoples' greatest war crime, the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were its most signal service in bringing about the relatively peaceful world of the past six decades.

"My chief purpose was to end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of the men in the armies which I had helped to raise. In the light of the alternatives which, on a fair estimate, were open to us I believe that no man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hand a weapon of such po