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Great Britain France That may well have been true It is much harder to defend Churchill’s interest in continuing extremely hard offensive operations in Italy well after June 1944, including opposition to additional landings in southern France that August and resistance to reinforcing battered and weakened British and Canadian divisions in France with units bogged down in northern Italy As the campaign in Italy slowed to a bloody crawl, American leaders—most notably, General George C Marshall— refused to ever again defer to London’s strategic preferences The Western Allies won the Battle of the Atlantic by mid-1943, though it did not end until the last U-boats surrendered in 1945 The victory permitted Britain to serve as a giant air base supporting great air forces that pounded Germany to the end of the war, as well as a huge staging area for assembling great armies that conducted two invasions of France and Europe in 1944: OVERLORD and DRAGOON Germany was not toothless yet, however Britain was therefore subjected to a second Blitz from January to May, 1944 Then it suffered attacks by Hitler’s V-weapons from June, after the British took two of the five beaches on D-Day (June 6, 1944), and while they were making a major contribution to the Normandy campaign and liberation of France The RAF defended well against the last few Luftwaffe bombers over England, while the bunkers and bases of the vengeance weapons were soon overrun or bombed into silence There followed the special disaster for the British Army and Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery of the failure of Operation MARKET GARDEN British troops saw limited combat in the Ardennes offensive at the end of 1944, but saw heavier action during the conquest of Germany in 1945 Meanwhile, the Royal Navy continued its vital work securing the seal lanes across several oceans, while Bomber Command conducted the last and most devastating raids of the Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany Most able British men and women were mobilized in some form during the war—in the armed forces or women’s auxiliaries, in the Home Guard, or in farm and factory work By war’s end Britain suffered nearly 800,000 casualties, including 383,000 killed in military operations and tens of thousands of civilians killed by bombing and other war-related causes Food was rationed, consumer goods were scarce, and social life was constrained and dreary The psychological burden of remaining in a state of war lasting 6.5 years was great It would have been worse had people known that decisions were taken by the War Cabinet to commit large-scale British and Commonwealth forces to the invasion of Japan, with heavy fighting and losses expected into 1946 Fortunately, Britain had earned many foreign friends with its dedicated early war effort and sustained military commitment, especially in the United States and Commonwealth nations Much needed aid poured in from abroad during the second half of the war: for the first time in several centuries Britain was itself a recipient of wartime aid, not the mainstay in a grand coalition By early 1945, with casualties mounting in final battles to cross the Rhine and invade northern Germany, Britain was deeply war weary The British were tired of blackouts, of bombing and rationing Several decades later, a school of revisionist historians portrayed Britain as deeply divided during the war by class, criminality, and streaks of pacifism They argued that many Britons were left unaided in misery and material privation by an indifferent government At most, that 468
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