Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, two days after the invasion of Poland, and fought for the entire duration — longer than any other major Allied power. The war is the single most important event in modern British self-understanding.
Standing alone
After the fall of France in June 1940, Britain and its empire faced Germany without a major ally for a full year, until the invasion of the Soviet Union and then Pearl Harbor. That period — roughly June 1940 to June 1941 — is the heart of the national story.
Dunkirk
In May and June 1940, over 338,000 Allied troops were evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk, assisted by hundreds of civilian “little ships”. It was a catastrophic defeat presented, largely successfully, as a deliverance. “Dunkirk spirit” entered the language.
The Battle of Britain
Through the summer of 1940 the RAF fought off the Luftwaffe’s attempt to win air supremacy ahead of an invasion. Churchill’s line — “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few” — was about the fighter pilots, a substantial number of whom were Polish, Czech and Commonwealth.
The Blitz
From September 1940 to May 1941, German bombers attacked British cities. London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights. Coventry was devastated in a single raid; Liverpool, Hull, Plymouth, Belfast, Glasgow and others were hit hard. Around 43,000 civilians were killed.
Londoners sheltered in Tube stations, and the images of ordinary life continuing amid rubble became the definitive expression of British endurance.
The home front
- Rationing from January 1940, covering food, clothing, petrol and soap.
- Evacuation — around 3.5 million people, mostly children, moved from cities to the countryside.
- Conscription of women into war work from 1941, the first country to do so.
- The blackout, the Home Guard, “Dig for Victory” and “Make Do and Mend”.
- Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and thousands of others broke German ciphers — work that stayed secret for thirty years.
The cost
Around 450,000 British deaths, including 67,000 civilians. Cities were wrecked, and Britain finished the war effectively bankrupt, having liquidated overseas assets and taken on enormous American debt. The final Lend-Lease repayment was made in 2006.
Austerity deepened rather than eased. Bread was rationed from 1946, which had not happened during the war itself, and rationing did not end completely until 1954.
What came out of it
The 1945 election returned a Labour government by a landslide, and the country that had won the war built the NHS, the welfare state and mass council housing. The empire began to unwind within two years, starting with Indian independence in 1947.
The war remains the reference point for British national identity in a way that has no equivalent in most of Europe — invoked in politics, sport and advertising, and endlessly re-examined in film and television.