Lesson 15: World War II — Britain Alone

In the summer of 1940 Britain stood alone against a Germany that had conquered Western Europe in six weeks. What followed — evacuation from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz — became the nation’s founding modern myth, and the war that Britain did eventually win, as junior partner in a Grand Alliance, destroyed its finances and accelerated its reinvention. The exam skill here is discrimination: separating the myth of 1940 from the mechanics of survival, and both from propaganda. This lesson covers Britain’s war from the Phoney War to VE Day, practising source work on Churchill’s most famous speech.

Timeline and key terms

Phoney War — the quiet months of 1939–40 before Germany struck west. Radar (Chain Home) — the coastal radar network feeding Dowding’s command system. The Few — Churchill’s name for Fighter Command’s aircrew: about 3,000 men.

1940: defeat in France, survival at home

The Phoney War ended on 10 May 1940. As German armour broke through the Ardennes, Chamberlain fell and Churchill — the anti-appeaser of the wilderness years — became prime minister of a national coalition. Within three weeks the BEF was trapped at Dunkirk. The evacuation of 338,000 British and French troops by 26 May–4 June, by destroyers and the famous “little ships”, saved the army’s trained core but abandoned all its heavy equipment; Churchill warned Parliament that “wars are not won by evacuations”. France surrendered on 22 June. Invasion seemed certain, and Britain’s survival turned on the air battle of July to October.

The Battle of Britain was won by a system, not only by pilots. Chain Home radar and the Observer Corps fed a centralised control network — Dowding’s great innovation — that scrambled squadrons only when needed, keeping fighters in reserve; Ultra decrypts from Bletchley Park helped at the margins; British factories outbuilt Germany’s (nearly 2,000 aircraft produced in July–September against roughly 800 German fighters lost and replaced more slowly); and fighting over home soil meant downed RAF pilots returned to duty while Luftwaffe crews became prisoners. The Luftwaffe’s switch from airfields to London on 7 September — the start of the Blitz — relieved the pressure on Fighter Command at the decisive moment. By 31 October the invasion was postponed indefinitely. “Never in the field of human conflict”, Churchill said, “was so much owed by so many to so few” — the few being some 3,000 aircrew, a fifth of them from the Commonwealth, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

The Blitz and the home front

From September 1940 to May 1941 German bombers attacked London for 57 consecutive nights, then the ports and industrial cities: Coventry’s medieval centre was destroyed on 14 November 1940 (the raid gave German the verb “coventrieren”), with Liverpool, Glasgow, Plymouth, Birmingham and Hull all heavily hit. Some 43,000 civilians died in the Blitz overall. Morale bent — Coventry and the East End saw shock, looting and complaints about shelter inequality — but it did not break, and the “Blitz spirit” was then deliberately cultivated by government, the BBC and the King and Queen, who stayed in London and had Buckingham Palace bombed (“I can look the East End in the face”). The home front was a mobilisation without precedent: evacuation of 1.5 million children and mothers in 1939 (many drifted back), rationing from January 1940 that lasted, in part, until 1954, the Home Guard, the blackout, women conscripted into industry and the services from 1941, and American Lend-Lease from March 1941 feeding and arming a bankrupt ally.

Away from the home front, the war widened: the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats reached its crisis in 1942–43; Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein (October–November 1942) was the first great land defeat of Germany; Bomber Command’s offensive killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians at contested military value; and Bletchley Park’s codebreakers — Turing’s Bombe, then Colossus — shortened the war in ways kept secret until the 1970s. D-Day, 6 June 1944, put 156,000 Allied troops ashore in Normandy; British and Canadian forces took Gold, Juno and Sword beaches. Germany surrendered on 8 May 1945. Britain had won — at a cost of about 450,000 dead, a debt of 250 per cent of GDP, and its position as a first-rank independent power.

Myth and reality: the “People’s War”

The historian Angus Calder named the standard story the “Myth of the Blitz”: a unified people, cheerful under bombs, levelling class in the shelters, led by the indispensable Churchill. The myth did real work — it legitimised the post-war welfare settlement (“if we can beat Hitler together, we can beat Beveridge’s five giants together”) and remains central to British identity. But revision matters: crime rose, class friction persisted, some morale reports were bleak, and Churchill was voted out in July 1945 by the very electorate that had cheered him. Handling 1940 well at GCSE means holding both truths: the survival was real and extraordinary, and its memory was constructed, deliberately, by the people who lived it.

Working with sources — Source A

Source A is the conclusion of Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons on 18 June 1940 — the day after France asked Germany for an armistice — later broadcast and known by its final phrase:

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our
duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the
British Empire and its Commonwealth last for
a thousand years, men will still say,
“This was their finest hour.”

Model answer — “How useful is Source A for an enquiry into the British government’s aims in June 1940?” [8 marks]

Source A is very useful because it reveals the government’s central strategic aim at the moment of maximum danger: to fight on. Eight days after the French collapse began, Churchill was not describing policy options; he was closing them down — the speech’s whole architecture (“brace ourselves”, “their finest hour”) exists to make negotiation unthinkable and surrender shameful. Its provenance helps us trust that reading: this is the prime minister, on the record, in Parliament, with America listening; the commitment was a public act of strategy, since only a Britain visibly determined to resist could hope for American aid. Its limits follow from the same analysis: a speech declares aims, it cannot prove they were shared — the War Cabinet had genuinely debated exploring terms through Mussolini in late May — nor that they would succeed. For the aim itself, Source A is as direct as evidence gets; for the debate behind it and the means of survival (radar, production, sea power), the historian needs cabinet minutes and the operational record.

Why this reaches the top level: it treats the speech as an act of policy, not a description; places it against the secret debate it was designed to end; and distinguishes aims from capabilities.

Common mistakes

• Taking “finest hour” as a verdict, not an argument. Churchill was manufacturing the morale he described; analyse the manufacture.
• Dunkirk as a victory. It was a deliverance inside a defeat — Churchill said so. Examiners reward the distinction.
• Narrative without mechanism. Battle of Britain answers must name the system — radar, control rooms, production — not just brave pilots and weather.

Exam Experience

Question — “Write an account of the Battle of Britain.” [8 marks]

Model answer:

The Battle of Britain was fought for air superiority: without it, Operation Sea Lion — Germany’s invasion — could not sail. It fell into phases. From July 1940 the Luftwaffe probed Channel convoys and coastal radar stations; in August (Adlertag, 13 August) it struck Fighter Command’s airfields and radar in earnest, and by early September the attrition was working: No. 11 Group’s airfields were cratered, experienced pilots were being lost faster than replacements could be trained, and Dowding’s system was near breaking point. The turning point was a German error and a British reprisal: after a stray bombing of London and an RAF raid on Berlin, the Luftwaffe switched its main effort on 7 September to bombing London — militarily less dangerous, and the start of the Blitz. Fighter Command recovered; on 15 September, the battle’s climax, the RAF inflicted losses the Luftwaffe could not sustain, and on 17 September Hitler postponed Sea Lion indefinitely. The causes of victory were structural as much as heroic: radar and centralised control multiplied every fighter; British production replaced aircraft faster than Germany’s; and geography returned British pilots to their squadrons while German crews went into captivity. The consequence was immense: Britain survived as the unsinkable base from which the Atlantic war, the bomber offensive and eventually D-Day were launched.

Marking notes:

• Level 1 (1–2 marks): simple narrative — planes fought, Britain won — with little structure.
• Level 2 (3–5 marks): accurate detail in sequence — phases, 15 September — with some explanation of turning points.
• Level 3 (6–8 marks): an analytical account that structures the battle by purpose, phases and turning point, and explains victory through systems and geography, as the model does.

Going further — the lifeline and the cost

Britain’s survival had a logistics department. The Battle of the Atlantic was the war’s longest campaign: U-boats sank merchantmen faster than shipyards could replace them through 1942, Britain’s imports halved, and rationing tightened to the edge of calculation. The turn came in spring 1943 — “Black May”, when 41 U-boats were lost — through the same system-thinking that won in the air: very-long-range aircraft closing the mid-Atlantic gap, escort carriers, centimetric radar, and Bletchley decrypts routing convoys around wolf packs. Churchill wrote that the U-boat peril was the only thing that ever really frightened him; the statistics justify him, and they correct any account of 1940 that ends with the Few: the island fortress lived by sea, and nearly starved by sea.

The financial sequel deserves a place in every judgement of the war. Britain liquidated overseas investments, ran up sterling debts to its own empire, and depended on Lend-Lease, which the United States ended abruptly in August 1945. Keynes, sent to Washington to negotiate the loan that followed, privately called the country’s position a “financial Dunkirk”. Victory had been bought with the reserves of a century — the economic context without which neither the Attlee settlement’s austerity nor the empire’s rapid dissolution makes sense.