Failing Britain

For my holiday reading in Australia I chose Max Hastings’s brilliant but exceedingly depressing Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Once you’ve read it, it’s impossible to take any pleasure from second world war history ever again.

Basically, runs Hastings’s persuasively argued thesis, we were rubbish at pretty much everything. Our generals were useless, our citizen soldiers lacked dash and folded at the first opportunity, our tanks were ill-protected and undergunned. Apart, maybe, from Bletchley, we contributed nothing major whatsoever to the Allied war effort: the Soviets doing all the killing and dying for us and the Yanks providing all the materiel.

So, really, it should have come as no surprise to learn from The Fall of Singapore: The Great Betrayal (BBC1, Monday) that we British were responsible also for the destruction of the US fleet at Pearl Harbor and our own abject humiliation at Singapore. That’s because — amazing but true — British spies provided the Japs with all the technical information and training they needed to build their devastating carrier fleets.