HISTORY

SIMONHEFFER DECLINE AND FALL

THELASTTHOUSANDDAYS OFTHE BRITISHEMPIRE

★By Peter Clarke (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 559pp £25)

THEENDLESS FASCINATIONwith the military events that brought about the end of the Second World War has perhaps disguised the importance of the diplomatic and political ones that ran concurrent with them. Peter Clarke’s book, as its title suggests, deals with one particular legacy of the denouement: how Britain’s empire became not just politically untenable (there had been plenty of signs of that in India for the preceding quartercentury) but economically unviable. In a way the title is misleading: there is much less emphasis on the dismantling of empire in the text than one might expect. What is dealt with in much greater detail are the international political processes that drove the final nails into Britain’s coffin as a leading world power, notably the relations between the ‘Big Three’ of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. After Clarke has told that particular story, the decline of Britain as an imperial power comes as no surprise at all. By the autumn of 1944, when the narrative starts (a thousand days before the Union flag was run down over India for the last time in August 1947), Britain is proud, but broke. John Maynard Keynes is in America negotiating, through perilous illness, a postwar international financial settlement that will not implode. Stalin has recently shown his true colours by waiting for the Warsaw uprising to be suppressed by the Nazis, with a savagery breathtaking even by their standards, before allowing the Red Army to proceed and engage the Wehrmacht. Churchill, according to the diaries of those who have to humour him, is steering a drink-fuelled and orotund passage towards eventual victory. Roosevelt, in the last months of life, is trying to let the British down gently about the future of their empire (which America, as part of its goal finally to supplant Britain as a superpower, wishes to see wiped from the face of the earth), and is on a course that even his own countrymen regard as the appeasement of Stalin. On the battlefield in Western Europe there are enormous tensions between Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander, and

Truman: the new MD

Montgomery, the narcissistic, egomaniacal genius who is the unchallenged hero of the British press. For Churchill, his dealings with America are constantly dogged by what he regards as the offensive suggestion that the Empire might have to be downgraded as part of an acceptance of the postwar realities, especially when the war in the Far East is over. There is also, as Clarke illustrates with much reference to the papers of the men concerned, growing hostility in America in general towards the British. Darting in and out of the narrative is the theme of how much, in the end, it actually benefited America that, first, Britain should have stood alone against the Nazis, and then, that America should have expended much blood and treasure on the salvation of Europe. Isolationism was not, after all, a viable option for America even before Pearl Harbor: had it lost export markets in a Nazi-dominated Europe for perhaps decades, and had its own war with Japan to deal with, what we call the postwar period would have been very different. Certainly, as Clarke points out, President Truman was happy for victory to signal the liquidation of Britain’s financial debt to America, on the basis that we had all been in it together: Congress was less so. Even without the American debt, though, Britain was still stuffed. The popular idea that the Empire was in some way enriching Britain, and that the mother country was living off the gains of exploitation in its colonies, is shown by Clarke to be false. Australia and New Zealand actually made money out of the war from services rendered to the Old Country. Churchill’s own commitment to India was shaken in 1945 when he realised that we owed that country £1,200 million in sterling balances for the help its soldiery had given us in preventing them from being overrun by the Japanese. There was, of course, a strong political impulse to grant independence to India, but that was a separate argument. Churchill decided not to grant India dominion status on VE Day, which merely postponed the inevitable by just two years. When, after Attlee’s assumption of the post of Prime Minister, the new government moved speedily to grant independence, the act became a useful cover for the fact that a country almost bankrupted by war, and living on handouts, could hardly pretend to afford the jewel in the crown. And, as power slipped away on the subcontinent, so Clarke illustrates the parallel advance of British impotence in the much smaller, but no less intractable, theatre of postwar Palestine. With loss of money, and loss of material power, came loss of will. These weaknesses, so slowly apparent to the British people

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007