I’m Dutch, and my relationship with the Second World War begins with absence. Aunts and grandmothers died, and my parents carried the scars. Rotterdam, the city I grew up in, had its centre bombed flat in 1940. Almost all of it was destroyed. The two buildings that held the birth records were left standing so the Germans could identify and hunt Jews. That is the history I bring to Britain’s account of the war.
Over dinner in February, a friend said England still hasn’t adjusted to who it is today and lives in the past. He meant the economy. I kept thinking about the sentence that evening and eventually reached the war. I wrote: “I find my reaction to this British identity to be a little bit repulsive, to be honest. How do Brits see this?” Reading it back, I thought repulsive was a big word. I wanted to know why I had used it.
The war culture here lands strangely on me. I mean the Blitz spirit, the Keep Calm mugs in souvenir shops, pubs themed around the home front, and politicians reaching for “the spirit that got us through.” The experience was real. The version now used in shops and speeches is harder for me to recognise from the war my family lived and died through. I also think it still affects political decisions.
That evening I started checking the story. Britain’s war really was different from the continent’s. There was no occupation here and no neighbours disappearing in the night. The Blitz was devastating, but Britain endured it and survived. That allowed for a clean, heroic national account that occupied countries could not honestly tell.
Before going further I held my own country to the same standard. The Dutch resistance was real, but the story I grew up with was inflated. The roundups in Dutch streets were so effective that the Netherlands had a higher rate of Jewish deportation than France or Belgium. Collaboration was also more widespread than the postwar account admitted for decades. Survival often involved silence, complicity, or impossible moral choices. Learning that hurt, and it still does. Every country mythologises its war, mine included. De Gaulle built up the French resistance story to cover Vichy, while the American “Greatest Generation” account leaves little room for segregated units and Japanese internment. Britain has not had an equivalent national reckoning.
“We stood alone and endured” was broadly true, but it leaves out many of the people who made survival possible. Indian, African, Australian, and Canadian soldiers fought and died in enormous numbers. American Lend-Lease helped fund the war and left Britain indebted for decades. The Soviet Union lost twenty-seven million people.
The heroic account also makes little room for the Bengal famine of 1943, where wartime policy contributed to millions of deaths, or the Jewish refugees turned away before the war. These facts disturb the moral clarity on which the familiar account depends.
Brexit was argued in Blitz language: we stood alone before, we can do it again. COVID lockdowns were framed as wartime endurance. The tabloid press treats critical examination of the period as something close to treason. The political class keeps using the frame because it supports British exceptionalism. It suggests the country can do without Europe and avoids the distance between Britain now and Britain in 1940.
My part of Europe walked out of the 1940s convinced that nations left to their own nationalist impulses will eventually destroy each other, and built the EU, flawed as it is, as a peace project on exactly that fear. Britain read the same history and concluded it proved Britain didn’t need anyone else. I live here, I love living here, and I still find that conclusion baffling.
The economic costs of that self-image became an essay of their own. They include immigration the country needs and resents, and a balance sheet no mainstream politician will describe plainly. The war story helps turn that description into betrayal. Say it out loud here and you get called a declinist.
Germany has Vergangenheitsbewältigung, an entire cultural framework for confronting the uncomfortable past. The Netherlands has had its own slow, painful reckoning with collaboration and failure. Britain has no equivalent process, because the mythology says there’s nothing uncomfortable to confront. We were the good guys.
At some point that evening everything I found seemed to confirm my biases, so I looked for the strongest opposing case. The obvious objection is that a Dutchman lecturing Britain about inflated war stories comes from a country that spent decades telling itself one. British people also endured the Blitz with real courage. My argument concerns the later political uses of that history. It helped sell Brexit and still helps frame immigration as invasion in a country that needs immigrants.
My family was made smaller by the war, and my city rebuilt its centre from almost nothing. Eighty years later, I find little comfort in the British version. The sentence I wrote that evening ended in a question, and I still don’t have the answer. How aware are British people that this period still shapes the country’s idea of itself? I’d genuinely like to know.