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A broad arc of khaki ochre and dirty chalk sweeps the upper half above scrubbed blue-black and oxblood that flake its lower edge.

Britain's usable war

February 202610 min read

I once wrote that I find the identity Britain has built around the Second World War “a little bit repulsive, to be honest”, and I have been trying to work out ever since how much of that I should take back.

A friend had told me over dinner that England still hasn’t adjusted to who it is today and lives in the past. The remark was about the economy, which is a separate argument, but it kept working on me, and when I tried to write down what it had stirred up I found I was writing about the war. My own sentence was not a comfortable one to read back. I have lived here for years and I love living here. My corner of London, around Elephant & Castle, was devastated on the last great night of the Blitz in May 1941, and I seem to have a gift for settling in places the Luftwaffe has already visited. The people who sat through those nights were brave, and I do not doubt that for a moment. My reaction was to what has been built on top of them: the Blitz spirit, standing alone, the Keep Calm mugs, and the politicians who can still summon the spirit that got us through whenever endurance would be more convenient than an honest account of the problem.

Part of the explanation is simply that I come from a different war. It killed aunts and grandmothers in my family. Rotterdam, where I grew up, lost its centre in a single afternoon in May 1940, nearly four months before the first night of the London Blitz, and the Netherlands surrendered a few hours later. That is where the war begins for me, and what comes after it is not really a story about holding out. It is five years of occupation, in which the question that mattered was what you were prepared to go on doing.

So the mugs land oddly. The history of that poster is better than most people realise. The Ministry of Information had millions of copies printed in 1939 and held them in reserve for the catastrophe it was expecting, while two companion posters went up first. People found those patronising, and the ministry decided the third wasn’t worth putting out, so that according to the Imperial War Museums it was never actually shown. It reached the British public around the turn of this century, after a couple who ran a bookshop in Northumberland bought a box of books at auction, found a copy at the bottom and framed it. The museums’ own page explaining all this will sell you a print for six pounds. I find I like the British of 1939 rather more than I like the mug.

I cannot laugh at the instruction itself, though, because in the occupied Netherlands keeping calm and carrying on is a fair description of what went wrong. Early in 1941 the Dutch authorities, on German orders, told all Jews to register with their municipality. A tab was added to each card in the population register, with a J or a B on it, to make the cards easier to retrieve, and by August the count stood at more than 160,000 registrations. The identity card that made it so hard to disappear from that system was the work of a Dutch civil servant, Jacob Lentz, whose perfectionism, as the Anne Frank House puts it, cost many of his compatriots their lives. Dutch administrators and policemen cooperated, and Dutch Railways ran the special trains to the transit camp at Westerbork and was paid for them. About three quarters of the Jews in the Netherlands were murdered, by far the highest proportion in western Europe. When Mark Rutte became the first Dutch prime minister to apologise for this, in January 2020, his account of the officials was that some had resisted and too many had simply done as they were told.

There is an unattractive satisfaction in being the one at the table who knows what carrying on really meant. Everything I found seemed to confirm my biases, so I went looking for the strongest opposing case, and it has to start with one of my own stories. Many Rotterdammers will tell you, and I have told it myself, that when the bombers flattened the centre they deliberately left standing the buildings with the birth records, so that the occupier would know from the first day who everybody was. It has a terrible logic to it: records left standing so the machinery of persecution could do its work.

Rotterdam’s city archive has a page on this, about the city hall and the personal records inside it, and it calls the explanation verleidelijk, maar toch een stadsmythe, tempting, but an urban myth all the same. The Heinkels that bombed the city were not capable of that kind of precision, and the city hall was hit along with everything around it. It survived the firestorm that followed because behind its classical front stood a twenty-year-old building of fire-resistant reinforced concrete, clear of its neighbours.

I could file that under things I had wrong, but the story does something specific. It gives the catastrophe an intention and puts the cunning in a German cockpit. The records never needed sparing from the air, since a Dutch civil service was going to keep them immaculately and produce them when asked, and that is a much less comfortable thing for a Dutchman to write than a story about clever bombers. My version tidied the war up and moved the complicity out of the building, which is what I had been accusing Britain of doing.

Not everybody kept filing, and the people who refused knew exactly what those cards were. In March 1943 a resistance group led by a sculptor and a painter set fire to the Amsterdam registry, and almost all of them were betrayed, arrested and sentenced to death. The national collection of identity records sat in a requisitioned art gallery in The Hague, a white villa near the Peace Palace, and what happened to it is the British war story I admire most, although it is hardly a British story. A Dutch agent proposed that the RAF should destroy the building, a committee that included the prime minister in exile gave the green light, and on a sunny afternoon in April 1944 six Mosquitos came in at about sixty feet and put their bombs through the front of it. One of the pilots was Robert Cohen, a student from Delft who had reached England by crossing the North Sea in a canoe; his bomb release jammed, and he was killed over France that August.

They came on a working day on purpose, because the cabinets would be open and the cards out on the desks. Sixty-two people died, among them clerks who had been quietly filing cards to match the resistance’s forged papers. Less than half the records were destroyed, and by then most of the Jews of the Netherlands were already gone. The Dutch war institute still judges the raid to have been of great value to the resistance, and I believe it, but I cannot imagine how you would get it onto a mug.

None of this disposes of the strongest case against my reaction, which is that Britain’s war really was different. Great Britain was not occupied and had no collaborationist national government, and after the fall of France it went on fighting when nobody else in western Europe could. A heroic account can be told here with far fewer of the complications that an occupied society meets once it starts examining its own compromises, and nobody owes me an apology for having been spared them. The step I can’t follow is the one from circumstance to character, and on that there is something close to a controlled experiment. The Channel Islands were the one piece of British soil the Germans occupied, and there too the administration stayed at its desks. Guernsey’s States approved nine orders against the island’s handful of Jewish residents, including a register and the yellow star, with little more than one brief protest on the record. Three women, two Austrian and one Polish, were deported in April 1942 and died at Auschwitz that summer. A former Bailiff has called that government effectively powerless, and a historian of the occupation points out that it could not have known where the women would end up. Those are fair things to say, and I would want them said, as far as they are true, for the clerks at home. What separated Guernsey from Kent was a stretch of water, a navy and an air force, rather than anything in the national temperament.

The clean version also takes more editing than it lets on, and like the poster, much of it came later. David Edgerton argues that neither “stood alone” nor “the people’s war” was at all common during the war itself: “alone” became a commonplace of the history books only from the 1960s, and it was historians who nationalised an imperial and internationalist war into a domestic story about the Home Front. In 1940 the British Empire held a quarter of the world’s population, nearly all of it at war with Germany, and the Imperial War Museums themselves call standing alone a bit of a myth. The Indian Army reached 2.5 million men, around 89,000 of India’s servicemen died, and American finance and matériel were indispensable. The domestic story has least room of all for the Bengal famine of 1943. Historians dispute the relative weight of crop failure, inflation, local administration, imperial priorities and decisions in London, but not that wartime government policy contributed to a catastrophe that killed millions, and that disagreement deserves more care than a morality tale in either direction permits.

All of this would be a matter for historians if the story were not still at work. You can hear the wartime frame whenever endurance or independence needs a heroic precedent. I would not pretend that a war memory caused the Brexit referendum, but the promise to “take back control” drew emotional force from an older confidence that Britain is most itself when disentangled from Europe. During COVID the analogy became explicit, when Boris Johnson said on 17 March 2020 that the government must act “like any wartime government”. That version of the war makes independence feel like proof of national character, and this is the conclusion I find baffling, because where I come from the same war is the best argument anyone ever made for tying the countries of Europe together so tightly that they can’t do it again.

I have no quarrel with remembrance, which is not the same thing as chauvinism. I take issue with what the story is asked to justify after the wreaths have been put away, not with honouring the people who endured the war. Nor do I have much of a height to speak from. Germany has Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a word long enough to suggest how much work it is, while the Dutch spent decades inflating their resistance and sorting the occupation into goed and fout, right and wrong, before historians started writing about a grey past. Rotterdam’s own memorial is Zadkine’s The Destroyed City, six metres of bronze with its arms thrown up and a hole through its torso, which the city calls Jan Gat, Jan with the hole. I knew it as part of the city long before I knew anything about it, and it still seems to me a more honest object than anything in a museum shop. Yet Rotterdam’s public sculpture programme will tell you that Zadkine began with a more universal memorial in mind, that Le Havre probably gave him the first impulse, and that the city annexed the design for itself.

So Rotterdam put its war to use as well, and I would take back the part of my sentence that assumed my side had done any better. I don’t think a country can remember a war without using it, and I no longer expect one to. I would still object to doing it without noticing, and that leaves the question I actually wanted to ask. Do British people have any awareness of how completely this one framed period has forged their idea of themselves, in ceremonies, in souvenir shops and in the political choices that feel imaginable? I would genuinely like to know.

Chris Chabot, February 2026

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