As a Dutch person, my relationship with the Second World War begins with absence.
Growing up, the scars of war were present in the relatives I never met, in the absences around the family, and in the scars my parents carried. Rotterdam, the city I grew up in, had its centre bombed flat. Almost all of it, except for the two buildings that contained birth records, which were left standing so the Germans could identify and hunt Jews.
For me, the Second World War begins there: records left standing so the machinery of persecution could do its work.
So British war culture lands strangely with me: the Blitz spirit, the Keep Calm merchandise, the pubs themed around the home front, the constant political invocations of “the spirit that got us through”. My reaction is not bemusement. Closer to revulsion, visceral and alien to my nature. Not because the British experience was not real, but because the mythology built on top of it has become something unrecognisable from the war my family lived and died through. More than that, I suspect the mythology is still doing damage today.
Two wars, one conflict
Britain’s war experience was genuinely different from continental Europe’s, and that difference matters. Britain wasn’t occupied. There were no roundups in British streets. No collaboration government. No neighbours disappearing in the night. The Blitz was devastating, but it was endured collectively and survived, which made possible a narrative of resistance and resilience that could be told cleanly, heroically, without the moral complications that haunted the continent.
In the Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland, none of us got a clean story. The Dutch resistance narrative, while real, is inflated. The Netherlands had a higher rate of Jewish deportation than France or Belgium. Collaboration was more widespread than the post-war story acknowledged for decades. Coming to terms with that, with the reality that survival often meant silence, complicity, or impossible moral choices, was painful, incomplete, and necessary.
Britain never had to do that work. “We stood alone and endured” was broadly true. It was also radically incomplete.
What the mythology leaves out
Inside the “stood alone” story, an extraordinary amount disappears. The Empire contributed massively to the war effort; Indian soldiers, African soldiers, Australian and Canadian forces fought and died in enormous numbers. American lend-lease funded the war significantly and left Britain bankrupt and indebted for decades. The Soviet Union lost twenty-seven million people. Britain’s contribution was real, but it was part of something much larger, not the solo stand the mythology implies.
Anything that does not fit the heroic frame is pushed aside: the Bengal famine of 1943, where wartime policy contributed to the deaths of millions; the strategic bombing of German civilians at Dresden and Hamburg; the turning away of Jewish refugees before the war. None of this features in the popular British narrative. It cannot, because the narrative’s power depends on moral clarity, good versus evil, with Britain unambiguously on the side of good.
Mythology as political infrastructure
Every country mythologises its war. De Gaulle built part of the French resistance story to paper over Vichy. The American “Greatest Generation” narrative smooths over segregated military units and Japanese internment. The Dutch resistance story, as I’ve said, overstates the case. National myth-making is universal.
Existence is not the unusual part. Political usefulness is. This myth is still actively doing political work eighty years later.
Brexit was argued in Blitz language. “We stood alone before, we can do it again.” COVID lockdowns were framed as wartime endurance. Every national challenge gets filtered through the same template. The tabloid press treats critical examination of the war period as near-treasonous. A political class that overwhelmingly attended the same small cluster of schools keeps the narrative alive because it serves the broader story of British exceptionalism: not needing Europe, not needing to change, not needing to reckon honestly with what Britain is today versus what it was in 1940.
From a continental European perspective, this is baffling and alarming. My part of Europe came out of the 1940s believing that nations need more integration, more mutual commitment, more collective structures to prevent catastrophe. The EU, for all its flaws, is fundamentally a peace project born from the understanding that European nations left to their own nationalist impulses will eventually destroy each other. Britain looked at the same history and drew the opposite conclusion: that it proved Britain didn’t need anyone else.
Identity outran reality
Britain can be the world’s sixth-largest economy with genuine strengths: world-class universities, cultural soft power, the English language itself, a globally significant financial centre. It can also be a country where a third of children live in poverty, where junior doctors use food banks, where food bank usage has tripled in a decade, where housing conditions for those on lower incomes are genuinely atrocious, black mould killing children in social housing in one of the world’s wealthiest nations.
Those realities coexist with a national identity still anchored in wartime greatness. Honest assessment gets coded as defeatism. To say “Britain is a medium-sized economy that needs immigration to sustain its aging population, that benefits enormously from European integration, and that has a serious and worsening poverty problem” is to say something that is simply true. It clashes so fundamentally with the national self-image that no mainstream politician will say it plainly.
Germany has Vergangenheitsbewältigung, an entire cultural framework for confronting the uncomfortable past. The Netherlands has had its own slow, painful reckoning with wartime collaboration and failure. Britain has no equivalent process, because the dominant mythology says there is nothing uncomfortable to confront. We were the good guys. Full stop.
Myth keeps moving
I don’t write this to diminish what British people endured during the war. The Blitz was real. The sacrifices were real. The courage was real.
The problem is what the story keeps doing after the wreaths have been put away. It helped justify Brexit. It frames immigration as invasion rather than economic necessity. It treats European partnership as subordination rather than mutual benefit.
From where I sit, from a country that was occupied, that lost people I would have known, that had its city centre destroyed not as collateral damage but as a tool of genocide, the comfort of the British story is hard to share. It looks less like memory than shelter from present facts.
My family’s war taught us that nations are fragile, civilisation is thin, and survival depends on collective structures stronger than any single country’s pride. Britain’s war taught it that it could stand alone.
Eighty years later, it is still trying.