People & Histories
1914–1918, 1939–1945

The two world wars

Britain fights both world wars from start to finish; the slaughter of the trenches and the defiance of 1940 become the two great shared memories of modern England.

  • The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century — David Reynolds, Simon & Schuster (2013)
  • The Myth of the Blitz — Angus Calder, Jonathan Cape (1991)
  • The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History — David Edgerton, Allen Lane (2018)
  • Their Finest Hour (speech of 18 June 1940) — Winston Churchill, International Churchill Society
  • Churchill: Walking with Destiny — Andrew Roberts, Allen Lane (2018)

Well established warmemoryidentityempire

Britain entered the First World War in August 1914 and the Second in September 1939, and fought both until victory. The First World War killed around three-quarters of a million men from the United Kingdom; the Second killed fewer soldiers but brought the war to English cities, as German bombing in the Blitz of 1940–41 killed over 40,000 civilians.

  • The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century — David Reynolds, Simon & Schuster (2013)
  • The Myth of the Blitz — Angus Calder, Jonathan Cape (1991)

The Great War

A volunteer army of “Pals battalions”, men from the same streets and workplaces, joined up in 1914–15. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, the British army suffered some 57,000 casualties, about 19,000 of them killed, the bloodiest day in its history. Almost every English town and village has a war memorial listing its dead. The war poets, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon among them, shaped a lasting memory of the war as futile slaughter, of “lions led by donkeys”, though historians still debate how fair that is. The wars also helped win the vote: most women over thirty in 1918, and all women over twenty-one in 1928.

  • The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century — David Reynolds, Simon & Schuster (2013)
  • The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)

1940

The Second World War produced England’s most powerful modern story. In May–June 1940, after the German conquest of the Low Countries and France, more than 330,000 British and French troops were evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk, helped by a flotilla of small civilian boats. On 18 June Churchill told the Commons that if the empire lasted a thousand years, people would say “This was their finest hour.” The RAF’s victory in the Battle of Britain that summer prevented invasion, and Londoners and the people of Coventry, Liverpool, Birmingham, Plymouth and other cities endured months of bombing.

  • Their Finest Hour (speech of 18 June 1940) — Winston Churchill, International Churchill Society
  • Churchill: Walking with Destiny — Andrew Roberts, Allen Lane (2018)
  • The Myth of the Blitz — Angus Calder, Jonathan Cape (1991)

Remembering it

The wars are remembered as a time when the nation pulled together, across classes, and many older people are deeply moved by that memory. But historians have long questioned the myth. Angus Calder’s The Myth of the Blitz showed the looting, panic and class tensions that official accounts left out. David Edgerton argues Britain was a rich, well-armed imperial power rather than a lonely underdog. Millions of soldiers from India, Africa, the Caribbean and the dominions fought for Britain, yet were long missing from popular memory; the Bengal famine of 1943 remains a bitter subject in South Asia.

  • The Myth of the Blitz — Angus Calder, Jonathan Cape (1991)
  • The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History — David Edgerton, Allen Lane (2018)
  • Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II — Madhusree Mukerjee, Basic Books (2010)

The wars’ consequences shaped the rest of the century: the welfare state that the Second World War made possible, the end of empire that it accelerated, and a lasting English unease about Europe, which many remember as the place Britain had to rescue rather than join.

  • The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History — David Edgerton, Allen Lane (2018)
  • The English and Their History — Robert Tombs, Allen Lane (2014)

How it's seen
"Finest hour" memory

In 1940 Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany when the rest of Europe had fallen, and ordinary people, through the Blitz and Dunkirk, showed the steady courage that saved freedom.

Historians' critique

Historians such as Angus Calder and David Edgerton argue that Britain was never really "alone": it was backed by a vast empire, by American supplies and, from 1941, by the Soviet Union, and the myth of plucky isolation feeds a nostalgic, exceptionalist nationalism.

  • The Myth of the Blitz — Angus Calder, Jonathan Cape (1991)
  • The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History — David Edgerton, Allen Lane (2018)

Colonial perspective

For many in India and the colonies, the war is remembered for the 2.5 million Indian volunteers who fought for Britain and for the Bengal famine of 1943, in which around three million died while wartime policy put other priorities first.

  • Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II — Madhusree Mukerjee, Basic Books (2010)

Why it matters today

England

Few things shape English national feeling like the wars. Poppies every November, the two-minute silence, the "Blitz spirit", Dunkirk and Churchill are touchstones of who many English people think they are, invoked in crises from the pandemic to Brexit. Younger and more diverse generations, and many historians, ask that the memory include the empire's soldiers and the wars' darker sides.