My grandfather was a ww2 vet; he told me that after we got crushed by Hitler he stumbled upon a photograph of british ladies clearing their destroyed homes and doing the “v for victory” as the King was visiting some bombed out London neighbourhood. Grandpa told me that this very photograph made him understand that the Brits would NEVER surrender; it helped him keep his morale up a lot, despite not being an anglophile at all.
The answer is very clear: Britain was NEVER close from losing ww2: they got material help from the US, they were an island country, they got the RN, the RAF, the Commonwealth and an unshakable faith in victory.
We may be rivals but the Brits will forever be our heroes for the part they played in both world wars.
God bless Britain, a beacon of hope in the darkest times.
EDIT: wow! I didn’t expect so much commentaries for such a simple answer. I don’t know if I will manage to answer everyone but I will definitely read everything.
As you can tell,I love English as a language; feel free to correct me, my automatic corrector is set to French and thus it can generate errors when I write in English. On top of that many comments are very interesting and I try to answer quickly…making mistakes in the process.
Very close, and probably not in the way you might think.
The UK was not and normally would not have been conquered in a military way. If it would have lost the war it would have been thanks to defeatist, naive or treacherous (or any combination of these) politicians. The only thing that avoided this catastrophy was the fact that Winston Churchill was elected Prime Minister in stead of Edward Wood, Viscount Halifax (later 1st Earl of Halifax), referred to in general as Halifax.
On Chamberlain’s resignation early in May 1940, Halifax effectively ‘declined’ (he knew he wouldn’t win the leadership vote amongst the MP’s) the position of prime minister as he felt that Winston Churchill would be a more suitable war leader (Halifax’s membership in the House of Lords was given as the official reason). A few weeks later, with the Allies facing apparently catastrophic defeat and British forces falling back to Dunkirk, Halifax favoured approaching Italy to see if acceptable peace terms could be negotiated. He was overruled by Churchill after a series of stormy meetings of the War cabinet.
How anybody could have been so naive as to think that Hitler would have honoured any agreement, especially after the Munich debacle of Chamberlain, is beyond me. Churchill was luckily chosen and Halifax, together with a number of other weaklings, was removed from the cabinet in 1941.
Britain got close to losing the war – and there were perhaps three pivotal factors:
1 – The Atlantic War
Churchill, The British Prime Minister during WW2 said:
“… the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril’.
Britain came closest to losing the war during the Atlantic War – because of German attacks on shipping. Britain was an Island, and needed to import food and materiel to sustain itself. Agriculture was it’s weak point – it had plenty of sources of food outside the UK, but the issue was getting it to the there. In terms of materiel, they had lost a lot of equipment and vehicles in the evacuation of Dunkirk.
The British Navy was the best in the world, but the German U boats were the best submarine force in the world – they were wiping out thousands of tons of shipping, and if they had been more successful, the UK would have been forced to sue for peace.
2 – The US joining the war and supporting Britain.
Despite the modern view, the US was not necessarily going to be involved in a European war, and support the UK. The US dithered at the beginning and could have chosen not to support the UK. In the end, the UK impressed the US with their actions in North Africa and the mediterranean and the US realised the UK could win if supported. The US would have joined the war after it was attacked by Japan, but by that stage, but by that stage, it may have been too late for the UK.
3 – It’s not generally discussed, but the Ultra Project, the breaking of the Enigma code machines was pivotal. Many historians say that without the Ultra project, the war would have gone on for years, or at worst, the UK may have had to surrender and the Germans may have won. Ultra provided critical information that helped the Brits defeat the Germans in North Africa, destroyed the Italian fleet, destroyed German and Italian merchant shipping and even assisted the Russians at Moscow.
However, most importantly, Ultra code breaking meant they could read German Navy communications so they knew where U boats were in the Atlantic and the convoys could avoid them.
Ultra was really based around two people, Marian Rejewski for initially cracking the enigma machine codes and inventing the Bombe de-encryption device, and Alan Turing for his further work. If the Poles had not got out of Poland to the UK with their research, Ultra wouldn’t have happened and the Brits would have probably lost the battle of the Atlantic, as they could read the German Navy’s communications with it and knew where and when the U boats were attacking.
So thank you Marian Rejewski – too many people don’t know your name!
