The Phoney Victory by Peter Hitchens;

Author:Peter Hitchens;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History;Politics;World War II;Fascism and Nazism;Warfare and Defence;Colonialism and Imperialism;International Relations;Political leaders and leadership;Holocaust;Europe;UK;USA
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2018-11-02T16:05:40+00:00

It was almost as if Munro was enjoying the humiliation of the shallow, demoralised and lazy ruling class he spent so much time mocking. It is also casually anti-Jewish, in the way in which many British people were anti-Jewish until this became impossible after the death camps were opened in 1945. Many of the former elite are shown up by defeat. They turn out to be worthless collaborators suspiciously ready to shrug off the tedious burdens of greatness and enjoy their new and irresponsible status. He dwells on the prevalence of a sly and cynical tune and song, popular in these times, the ‘National Anthem of the fait accompli’. The reader is left to imagine it, perhaps as something like the ‘cracked, yellow’ tune which leaks from the telescreens in the Chestnut Tree Café in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. The book is hard to find in Britain, except in anthologies. In France, where perhaps readers have a special reason to enjoy the description of a German-occupied England, it can occasionally be found in print as a book in its own right, Quand Guillaume Vint.

I do not know of anything similar published during the years between 1918 and 1939. Perhaps, in the seemingly peaceful 1920s and early 1930s, a German invasion seemed less thinkable than it had in the pre-1914 era. By the time it appeared possible, in 1940, it was too real a fear to be fictionalised. Though by 1942, when the danger was much reduced, the first Hitler invasion fantasy had appeared. Perhaps it was also because bombs were viewed as more of a threat than foreign boots on British soil. Nevil Shute’s novel set in Southampton, What Happened to the Corbetts (1939), was a highly prophetic and unsettling description of what it would be like for prosperous civilians in a modern country to suffer bombing from the air.

H. V. Morton, chronicler of the ‘Atlantic Charter’ meeting, imagined a Nazi takeover of Britain in 1944 in his 1942 short story ‘I, James Blunt’. This appeared long after the idea had faded from the minds of most people, including the mind of Hitler, and was little-noted. But after the war, as the story of Britain’s lone, heroic peril grew in power and importance in British imaginations, there were a number of invasion and defeat fantasies about what might have been. These include Kevin Brownlow’s 1964 film It Happened Here, and in the same year an ITV drama called The Other Man. In this drama the Germans build a channel tunnel using concentration camp labour, as appalled travellers discover when they pull the blinds away from the window of their train. There was also a 1978 BBC drama series An Englishman’s Castle, in which the Nazi occupation has become an accepted fact, its underlying ruthlessness concealed by a front of civilisation. Most graphic (and first published in the same year) is a novel by Len Deighton, SS-GB, in which, with typical attention to detail, Deighton describes a German-occupied London, demoralised and full of nasty compromises, not long after invasion.

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