Yesterday, eighty five years ago, faced with the military expansionism in Europe of Adolf Hitler’s Germany and having exhausted every chance to avoid conflict, the British government declared war on Germany. Although the declaration of war was long before my time, but listening to the recordings of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast to the public about the new war with Germany still gives me the chills when I hear it.

It gives me the chills because I know what’s coming. I know the ‘phoney war’ period in late 1939 where the population of the UK hadn’t yet been touched by the war and I know that what comes after that is devastation, loss, destruction and the birth of a new Britain that although victorious is both diminished and impoverished. Britain entered the war a superpower, a nation that had given the world the Industrial Revolution and which ran, sometimes well sometimes not so well, a huge Empire. Britain at the start of the war had much to be proud of. It had brought development to areas that were backward, was a hub for trade and had been one of the first major political powers to vanquish the practise of slavery even though this abolition came at the cost of thousands of British sailors lives. British culture, science and technology and language became things that benefited not just Britain but the entire world.

In 1939, despite setbacks and problems both economically and socially, Britain had a great deal going for it. But we spent the lot on fighting the Nazis and Japanese militarism. Britain expended 450,000 lives both military and civilians who were killed by enemy action and spent the Empire on beating these monsters from Central Europe and the Far East. Compared to how Britain entered the War, Britain left it tired, broke and in the hands of Socialists who were elected because the people were tired and broke and wanted some justifiable reward for their previous wartime sufferings.

Many people now who look at WWII from today’s viewpoint don’t realise how close complete destruction came for Britain. They also don’t realise how much chance as well as British valour played in victory. If the enemy had made this or that decision differently it could have turned out not in Britain’s favour. If the Germans had opted for total destruction of British troops at Dunkirk instead of letting a large contingent of British escape then Britain would have been much harder pressed to defend itself let alone take the battle to the enemy. What if Operation Sealion had been a success, which it might have been if German intelligence overestimates of British defences had been dismissed by the German military? Or what if the German leadership had not dismissed nuclear physics as ‘Jewish science’ and by doing so thinned down the number of experts in this field? In that case then we might today be reading of ‘The German Uranium Project’ rather than ‘The Manhattan Project’ as well as contemplating, from a safe distance of course, the glowing remains of London or Liverpool. Chance and bad decisions by the enemy meant that Britain could prevail rather than fall and keep going until America and the Soviet Union joined the war against The Axis in 1941.

Britain bought into its own decline by having to fight Hitler and Hirohito. The war was so costly in manpower, treasure and effort that it bled Britain dry. It left Britain less than capable of withstanding the challenges of the post war and Cold War periods and less influential during this period. The impoverishment created by WWII also made us less capable of making the sorts of investments that other nations were able to make in things like research and development. Repairing our shattered cities and infrastructure post war had, in the minds of Government, to take priority over the high tech development that America excelled at after WWII.

Those who were alive to hear Chamberlain speak to the nation on September 3^rd 1939 had no idea whatsoever what they were about to experience or how the country would change because of the war. They also would have had no idea about how much the war would drain from Britain and how much the war, although won, would contribute to Britain’s decline and loss of self confidence.