Peter Clarke - The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

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Hope and Glory: Britain, 19002000

PETER CLARKE

ALLEN LANE

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

ALLEN LANE

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First published 2007
1

Copyright Peter Clarke, 2007

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

EISBN: 9780141906386

For my sister Jane 1947 And All That

PART 1:
Broad, Sunlit Uplands

Prologue
19414

PART 2:
False Summits

1 The Spirit of Quebec
September 1944

2 Setbacks
OctoberNovember 1944

3 Bad to Worse
NovemberDecember 1944

4 Battles of the Bulge
December 1944January 1945

5 Awaiting the Big Three
JanuaryFebruary 1945

6 YALTA
February 1945

PART 3:
Hollow Victories

7 Faltering and Altering
FebruaryMarch 1945

8 Shadows of Death
MarchApril 1945

9 Justice?
May 1945

10 Peace, Politics and Potsdam
JuneJuly 1945

PART 4:
The Liquidation of the British Empire

11 Hopes Betrayed
AugustOctober 1945

12 The Costs of Victory
October 1945April 1946

13 Sabotage?
AprilNovember 1946

14 Scuttle?
December 1946August 1947

Photographic acknowledgements are given in parentheses. Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.

Winston Churchill (Yousuf Karsh, Camera Press, London)

Churchill meeting Roosevelt and his son Elliott at the Atlantic Charter meeting, August 1941 (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)

Churchill, Hopkins and Cadogan aboard HMS Prince of Wales, August 1941 (Churchill Archives Centre, Sir Alexander Cadogan Papers, ACAD 2/5)

Generals Patton, Eisenhower and Montgomery (by permission of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London)

Roosevelt, Churchill and Mackenzie King at the Quebec conference, September 1944 (Getty Images)

Churchill with Field Marshall Alexander in the Italian battlezone (by permission of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London)

Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke (Yousuf Karsh, Camera Press, London)

Cripps and Nehru, 1942

The Big Three at Yalta (Corbis/Bettmann)

President Truman (Yousuf Karsh, Camera Press, London)

December 1944 (by permission of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London)

Churchill, Brooke and Montgomery on the Rhine, March 1945 (by permission of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London)

German surrender, Lneberg, May 1945 (by permission of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London)

Jane on VE Day, Daily Mirror, 8 May 1945 (Mirrorpix)

Clement Attlett (Yousuf Karsh, Camera Press, London)

J. M. Keynes and Lord Halifax, Washington, September 1945 (UPI/Corbis/Bettmann)

Churchills Fulton speech, March 1946 (Churchill Memorial, Fulton Library, Missouri)

Gandhi with Cripps

Queuing for rationed food, London 1946 (Getty Images)

Explosion at the King David Hotel, Jerusalem, July 1946 (Topfoto)

Jinnah with Liaquat Ali Khan at the London conference, December 1946 (Getty Images)

Bevin and Marshall (Getty Images)

Lord Mountbatten with Edwina and Jawaharlal Nehru (Broadlands Archive, Hartley Library, University of Southampton)

India: communal identity in 1945 and the partition borders of 1947
(largely the Radcliffe Line)

Chester Wilmots view of the strategic controversy

The United Nations Partition Plan, November 1947

By 1945, victory, which had seemed such an elusive dream to the British in 1940, had been achieved against all odds. After such hardships and such risks, surely their fortitude and sacrifices in the common cause would be duly rewarded?

The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire shows how the British came to be disabused of this idea. It shows how they were surprised to find themselves as much victims as victors after 1945, and how they tried to make sense of this. It tells the story of how the British Empire survived the war only to expire in a post-war world that did not owe the British people a living. Weary and impoverished, they were puzzled to find wartime rationing and austerity succeeded by peacetime rationing and austerity. It was not what they had expected, and one natural reaction was to ask who was responsible. Some blamed the Soviet Union for starting a cold war, some blamed the United States for taking unfair advantage of its loyal ally, some blamed the Labour Government at home. Historians have subsequently argued each of these cases. Few, then or later, blamed Churchill himself for getting the country into this mess in the first place. The abrupt decline of British power nonetheless decisively gathered pace under his wartime premiership. It made what he called the liquidation of the British Empire inevitable; and it happened on his watch.

The six magnificent volumes of Churchills The Second World War, published over half a century ago, still stand proud on many bookshelves. They have provided insights into these events for many people even those who did not get much further than reading the noble motto at the front:

IN WAR: RESOLUTION

IN DEFEAT: DEFIANCE