We Britons can rightly be proud of helping to win the Second World War 80 years ago.
Soviet and American power mainly proved decisive in defeating the evils of Nazi Germany and fascist Japan. But British and Commonwealth men and women played key roles and made huge sacrifices in many European and Asian theatres of war.
Some 384,000 British soldiers died, along with over 70,000 civilians, mainly in the Blitz. Nearly 200,000 soldiers from Commonwealth countries were also killed.
For British officials imperialist interests were certainly at play during WW2, especially in protecting the Empire, which covered around a quarter of the world’s population in 1939.
But ordinary Britons weren’t fighting to defend the Empire. They were risking their lives to protect the country from invasion, which meant stopping Hitler dominating Europe. In practice, this signified defeating fascism and liberating subjugated and occupied people from tyranny.
But how have British political leaders upheld such grand principles our forebears rose up to promote decades ago?
Standing up for invasions
Britain entered WW2 in September 1939 after Hitler invaded Poland, and the Nazis subsequently invaded over a dozen more countries.
Once the Nazis were defeated, the postwar world established a key principle. At the Nuremberg trials in 1945/46, the German leaders who were executed were convicted primarily of waging aggressive war. As the International Military Tribunal noted, aggression “is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime.”
Since 1945, British leaders have dispensed with the notion that invasions constitute such a crime.
The UK has itself deployed its military forces for combat over 80 times in 47 countries since the end of WW2. These episodes include outright invasions – notably Egypt (1956), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) – and interventions to remove governments that were tantamount to invasions – such as British Guiana and Iran (both in 1953), Indonesia (1957), Libya and Syria (2011).
Whitehall has also invariably lent its support to US invasions or interventions, especially in Vietnam (1965-75), Nicaragua (1980s), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), and Sudan (1998).
The Nuremberg principles have been all but forgotten. Britain’s standing up against aggression has been unusual since 1945, and has tended to be solely reserved for official enemies, such as the USSR during the Cold War, and Russia in Ukraine now.
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Challenging fascism
German fascism produced one of history’s most brutal regimes which promoted probably the worst crime in history, the holocaust of the Jewish people.
But the British establishment’s relationship to fascism was always ambivalent. Prime minister Winston Churchill, who overrode the ‘appeasers’ to take Britain into war with Hitler, was a fervent admirer of Italian Benito Mussolini and the fascist movement which he founded in 1919.
And members of the royal family and British aristocracy were close and sympathetic to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
After Germany’s defeat, and indeed for decades after 1945, the UK became a haven for some of those who had willingly worked with the Nazis. As David Cesarani has documented, Britain allowed around 10,000 former Waffen-SS soldiers, especially from Ukraine and the Baltic states, to be brought to the country.
Some were put to use by intelligence agency MI6 in the new Cold War with the Soviet Union. “British intelligence protected alleged East European war criminals and ‘shared’ their services with the Americans”, Cesarani writes.
By the late 1940s, MI6 was covertly working with former Ukrainian Nazi collaborators to stir up unrest inside the Soviet Union.
In Asia, after the US and Britain defeated Japanese fascism in August 1945, the British military immediately began to support forces which had collaborated with the Japanese occupiers to challenge anti-colonial movements in southeast Asia.
In Vietnam the British army rearmed French Vichy troops and even Japanese soldiers who had surrendered, in order to fight Vietnamese nationalists.
In Indonesia (then the Netherlands East Indies) the British army killed thousands in 1945-46 to prevent a popular Indonesian administration taking control of the country following Japan’s defeat.
Quasi-fascism
Fascism mirroring the Nazis and imperial Japan has thankfully not taken root in Europe or Asia since 1945. But several totalitarian, militaristic and extremely brutal regimes have arisen that can be considered extreme right-wing or quasi-fascist, and some have been supported by the UK.
Britain backed General Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, and subsequently helped the regime’s brutal military intelligence services as it murdered its political opponents.
Three years later, when a right-wing military junta seized power in Argentina, which also went on to kill thousands, Margaret Thatcher’s government sought to enhance commercial, political and military relations with the regime.
Britain also played a covert role in the landmark US-backed coup in Brazil in 1964 that ushered in a brutal 21-year military dictatorship.
One of Asia’s worst postwar crimes was General Suharto’s killings of over 500,000 people in Indonesia in 1965-66, ostensibly aimed at eradicating the country’s communist party and intended to move towards a “new order”. The British declassified files show diplomatic and practical UK support for Suharto’s campaign.
Perhaps apartheid South Africa might be included in a list of quasi-fascist regimes that have taken hold in the postwar world. For decades, Britain acquiesced in or outright supported the South African regime, to maintain military links and mineral interests.
As soon as Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990 after 27 years, and with apartheid still in place, UK officials were lobbying him for their business interests in South Africa, declassified files show.
Many repressive regimes are backed by London. Indeed, my colleague Phil Miller found that the UK supports most of the world’s regimes rated as “unfree”.
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Protecting Britain from invasion
The UK obviously hasn’t been invaded since 1945 and elites like to claim their military strategies, and NATO, deterred a ‘Soviet threat’ during the Cold War.
Yet while the Soviets brutally intervened in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, the threat to western Europe and the developing world was exaggerated, but was useful for maintaining high military budgets and intervening in other states.
Britain’s military spending has long been more configured to offence than defence. While the UK deploys forces in dozens of countries around the world, the country appears to lack sufficient air defences.
Does Britain’s possession of nuclear arms keep us safe, or make us a target of attack? Does hosting US bases and military strike forces in Britain, sometimes including nuclear-armed aircraft, increase or decrease our security?
We’re now in the midst of a campaign – by both state and national media – to convince us to increase military spending. The strategy is overtly intended to benefit UK arms firms, and is a key plank of Labour’s overall economic growth plan.
Though every government in history has said it seeks peace, Whitehall has strong institutional interests in wars – as well as aiding government-connected arms corporations, wars can help exert UK influence and satisfy the quasi-imperial interventionist mindset that still pervades the corridors of power.
The next war?
Eighty years after Europe’s most devastating war in history, British military leaders are now raising the prospect of war with Russia.
Defending Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression could be seen as defending one of those grand principles from WW2. It is, however, a principle noticeably lacking in the case of Gaza, where the UK prefers to side with Israel conducting mass attacks against Palestinians.
The government even claims that UK security “begins in Ukraine”. In reality, in aiding Kyiv, Whitehall is promoting the elite’s geopolitical interests above all else.
Russia is Britain’s main rival for influence in Europe and Ukraine is a new key market for British firms (during and after the war), not to mention the country’s critical minerals deposits.
Putin is not Hitler, and appeasing Hitler in the 1930s will not be compensated for now by stoking further conflict in Europe.
At age 98 in 2015, my great uncle, Robert Rigler, was presented with the legion d’honneur medal from the French government for bravery at Arnhem in 1944. He twice crossed a river under heavy German fire taking part in the rescue of two boat loads of soldiers.
Uncle Bob died aged 101 and I wonder what he would make of the prospect of a new European war and those touting for it.
