Britain's War Machine

David Edgerton is an unusual historian. Operating at the interface between science and business, he has a prodigious appetite for materials that most of his peers run a mile from – company histories, industrialists' memoirs or government reports. He loves statistics and technical details and worships machines. The very names of aero engines – the Rolls-Royce Vulture, the Bristol Centaurus, the Napier Sabre – seem to give him a thrill. The great strength of his study of British science and industry in the second world war is that, by coming at the subject from a new angle, it offers an unfamiliar picture of the war, one dominated not by bluff airmen, bayonet-wielding infantrymen, sailors on Arctic convoys, blitzed housewives, Bletchley codebreakers or Penguin-reading intellectuals, but by backroom boys – grey men with slide rules, workers toiling through the night shift in Orwellian arms factories, chemists in laboratories and civil servants on committees.

The book opens with a magnificent survey of British trade and manufacture at the beginning of the war, designed to underpin an argument for which Edgerton makes bold claims of novelty. Far from being a plucky underdog in 1940, he says, Britain was a first-class power, with the world's largest navy, the greatest aircraft production of any country and a small but uniquely mechanised army – pre-war appeasement having gone hand in hand with rearmament. Her leaders were rightly confident in their ability to wage a devastating war of machines. The British army did not lose nearly all its equipment at Dunkirk; it had enough spare capacity left at home for Churchill to send tanks to Egypt in August 1940. Nor was Britain "alone" between June 1940 and June 1941: she had behind her a vast empire and global financial investments. These resources enabled the British to fight the war as they chose rather than as they had to, and to pay a much lighter price than most of the other belligerents.

The crisis of the Battle of the Atlantic, Edgerton argues, came not in 1943 but in late 1941. Nor was Britain ever really under siege or blockaded. Imports stayed at pre-war levels in value, most food was not rationed and was available in quantity. Meat and cheese imports actually increased. Oil products, fuel oil, petrol, aviation spirit and lubricating oils were all imported in unprecedented quantities. Contrary to popular belief, Churchill's wartime coalition was one of the most techno-literate in British history, with four scientifically trained ministers; most of the important work in wartime science was not done by prominent intellectuals such as JD Bernal but by obscure figures within the military bureaucracy; and Barnes Wallis and Frank Whittle did not have to struggle against Whitehall indifference – they were cosseted and indulged by the authorities. As for wartime solidarity: "The second world war brought the classes together, but neither side liked what it saw."

How convincing is all this? Edgerton himself makes two major qualifications to his thesis. British confidence in victory in 1940 turned out to rest on a colossal underestimation of the Germans' capacity to exploit labour and resources in the European nations they conquered. And, great as Britain's resources were, they proved quite unequal to the extra challenge posed by the Japanese victories in late 1941. Thereafter, the British relied on the wealth and manufacturing strength of the United States to carry them through. But even beyond that, many of Edgerton's other targets belong more to popular mythology than to historical orthodoxy. Churchillian rhetoric apart, no serious historian has ever suggested that Britain was "alone" in 1940. Accounts of the desert war bring out the major contribution made by Dominion troops; only a major industrial power could have sunk the Bismarck or devastated Hamburg.


_______________________
proxy
makeup artist