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Wall Street Journal
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
The Key to the Allies' Success
Marc Milner notes in 'Second Front' that the Anglo-American alliances in the two world wars functioned despite animosities ('The Allies on the Mend,' Bookshelf, May 19). What underlay that success was the prescient observation of Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of Germany, who is reported to have said that the greatest strategic fact of the 20th century was that the Americans spoke English. After World War I, Hitler identified the natural affinity of the Anglo-Americans as Germany's greatest threat. That common language came to serve the cause of freedom well. Yet both sides couldn't resist irritating each other. At the end of the first war, Americans said that the BEF—British Expeditionary Force—stood for the fact that the Americans arrived 'Before England Failed.' The Brits in return said that the American Expeditionary Force, AEF, arrived so late in the war that it meant 'Almost Evaded Fighting.' Eisenhower wouldn't tolerate that sniping in the next war. He demoted an outspoken American critic of the British and sent him home. In all of the joint staffs with a senior and deputy, one had to be American and the other British. It's doubtful any other man could have made the alliance work better.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
‘I rescued one of Dunkirk's Little Ships and spent £250,000 restoring it'
It was, the World War Two veteran and writer Arthur D Divine once recalled, 'the queerest, most nondescript flotilla that ever was'. In the final week of May in 1940, some 850 boats – from pleasure cruisers to fishing vessels, barges to private yachts – made up a patchwork civilian armada braided by one simple mission statement: bring them home. As they motored from Ramsgate across the Channel towards Dunkirk, 'we were in a sort of dark traffic lane, full of strange ghosts and weird, unaccountable waves from the wash of the larger vessels,' Divine wrote. 'When destroyers went by, full tilt, the wash was a serious matter to us little fellows. We could only spin the wheel to try to head into the waves, hang on, and hope for the best.' In the decades afterwards, the sentiment of those last four words came to attach itself to Operation Dynamo, the World War Two mission to rescue over 338,000 members of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from France. Primarily involving the Royal Navy, the Merchant Navy and civilian volunteers, 'the Miracle of Dunkirk' was indeed an astonishing feat, yet while the gods may have smiled on Normandy for those nine days, this remarkable act of deliverance was as much an achievement of planning and logistics as it was improvisation or pluck. And when it was mission accomplished, there was no time for congratulation, no moment to catch breath. 'Wars are not won by evacuations,' Winston Churchill said in the House of Commons on 4 June, and it's true: there was work to do. So while the Navy regrouped and military leaders plotted the next moves, almost all the troops recovered from Dunkirk went back into training, ready to be redeployed within months wherever they were needed. As for that hodgepodge fleet of vessels who carried them home, their fates were less predictable. Some returned from whence they came, many were lost, and a few remained with the Navy, which had requisitioned them in the first place. They came together to answer the call, then scattered as quickly as they arrived. The 'Little Ships of Dunkirk', as they'd be known, simply floated on with the tides. 'She's beautiful, isn't she?' Phil Christodolou says, beetling along a wooden pier at Penton Hook Marina in Chertsey, at the hem of south-west London and Surrey. There are around 500 boats berthed here, in the non-tidal reaches of the River Thames, but one, gently yawing under the midday sun, is a little more special than the rest. Quisisana, a 30ft pleasure cruiser built by Thornycroft at Hampton-on-Thames 98 years ago, was entirely unremarkable at the time she was launched. By 1940, though, she was on her way to Dunkirk, and returned as one of the most famous Little Ships of them all. 'Hold on, I'll get the photo,' Christodolou says, retrieving a book about Dunkirk that features Quisisana on the cover. There in the photograph (pictured at the top of the article) is Quisisana being towed into Dover in June 1940, decks laden with 18 troops from the Coldstream Guards, who were among the last to leave the beaches after securing Dunkirk from the advancing German forces. The image sums up the quiet heroism of these diminutive crafts. It seems as if it is heaving beneath the weight of the men, but they'd have been lost without it. 'That photograph's been used absolutely everywhere, on books, postcards, stamps, all sorts,' Christodolou says. 'It's part of living history.' The 59-year-old Londoner, who's worked for most of his life in live events, including in the music industry and Formula One, has lived on a handsome barge, Bella G, at this end of the Thames since 2021. Across the Staines Road, the rollercoasters of Thorpe Park loom. 'Sometimes, when the wind's down, you hear the screams,' Christodolou says, cheerfully. Soon after moving here, Christodolou met a classic boat enthusiast with close ties to the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships (ADLS). He became fascinated with the heroism of these everyday vessels, whose number is rapidly shrinking as they're lost or fall into disrepair. Moved to halt that decline, he set about trying to find one to buy and do up. 'I'd looked at a few and couldn't really find anything that was right, there were some real states out there,' he recalls. One day, Ian Gilbert, the honorary vice admiral of the ADLS, contacted him and told him about Quisisana. 'He said he'd been approached by the estate of one of the association's members, Martin Lowe, about Quisisana, which he'd owned for about a decade and hadn't been able to afford to look after. Ian said the estate wants it to go to someone who can look after her, but warned she's in Lowestoft, is a complete basket case, and needs a complete restoration.' Christodolou, who is nothing if not impulsive, enthusiastic and solvent, didn't need to hear any more. The aforementioned photograph means Quisisana – whose name is based on an Italian phrase qui si sana, meaning 'where you are healed' – is something of a celebrity among the Little Ships, and returning her to former glory became a passion project that instantly took over Christodolou's life. He purchased Quisisana for £5,000 in February 2022. Now, what is it they say about buying a boat…? He chuckles. 'Well, the clean version is that the two best days are the day you buy it and the day you sell it…' When he first picked Quisisana up, 'there were great big holes in her, planks were missing… She was, as I say, a basket case. We don't think she'd touched the water for at least 10 years.' Christodolou contacted Malcolm Jones of C&M Traditional Boat Repairs, who specialises in classic wooden boat restorations and had recently refurbished a sister ship to Quisisana called Nydia, and installed his new purchase in Jones's yard in Egham. She sat there for two years while Jones set to work. 'Phil had a blank canvas to do what he wanted,' Jones, 67, says today. 'It was a perfect starting point really, exactly what you want to see. The previous owner had started to strip things out, so we could just carry on. So often you do jobs where you agonise over whether to take this or that out before you start, but this was brilliant.' There are more veterans of Dunkirk around our waterways than you might think. The ADLS does its best to keep track of all the Little Ships still with us, and many can be seen in marinas, on rivers and pootling around our coasts, but as with lots of veterans, don't often make a great show of it. Jones has restored five or six for private owners, and owns one himself. Each bears a flag denoting its part in our national history. Others are hidden in plain sight. It was only in recent years that I realised I'd been walking past one – the pleasure cruiser Hurlingham, which can usually be seen around Millbank – every morning on my way into the office. Like its ill-fated sister ship Marchioness, which sank disastrously in the Thames in 1989, Hurlingham was requisitioned by the Royal Navy for Operation Dynamo in 1940, but never actually left British waters. 'There are a lot of little urban myths about the Little Ships, and one is that all the owners of these boats suddenly thought they needed to help so went across the Channel. They were actually collected by the Navy, then often towed over there just to make trips from the beach to bigger ships,' Christodolou says. 'The Thames was seen as a place where there would be a load of shallow draft boats that would be the right shape and size. There's all sorts of stories, a woman who lived on hers and came back to Teddington boatyard to find all her belongings, including her cat, being put on the side of the river while they refuelled and took it.' The basic issue at Dunkirk was that the advancing German army had funnelled the BEF into a narrow strip of land, where troops piled up on the beaches and couldn't be evacuated quickly enough. Large ships were unable to get close; the Navy was short on ways to ferry them. 'Again, it's another myth that the original skippers took the boats over. Most of the ships were skippered by members of the Navy or, as in Quisisana's case, Navy Veteran Reserve.' Specifically, at the helm of Quisisana was Sub-Lieutenant AJ Weaver. He and a naval rating took her to France and back. 'Originally they thought they'd be able to get 30-40,000 off the beach. In the end they managed over 300,000 with the Little Ships. And that's the part of the story that really got me. It's amazing, the difference they made,' Christodolou Nolan's Oscar-nominated 2017 film Dunkirk did a lot to revive interest in the tale. In the film, Mark Rylance plays the skipper of a Little Ship whose voyage is made even choppier by Cillian Murphy's soldier character being haunted by what he's seen at war. 'That film just moved it on to a new generation. The tourist board in Dunkirk have said there's been a massive resurgence in interest thanks to it, which is fantastic. Nolan used a lot of the real boats that went, and amalgamated various stories into it,' Christodolou says. The finished Quisisana, which Jones and his team completed last summer, is indeed a thing of great beauty. Both men cried when the job was done. Two berths over from Bella G, she glimmers with polished- wooden superiority among the white fibreglass hulls of other boats in the marina. At initial glance, it looks as if Jones and Christodolou, who spoke almost daily for two years as they volleyed ideas back and forth, have been entirely faithful to how Quisisana looked a century ago. And they have, to a point. 'My vision was that she's too big to be a museum piece, so you've got to make it usable. I wanted it to look traditional and then hide underneath the things that bring her up to date,' Christodolou says. Jones, a master shipwright, revelled in the details, finding larch wood harvested from the Sandringham Estate to finish the hull's carvel planking, for instance. He and his team bent each into place around the oak ribs and secured them with copper clench nails and roves – just as the original builders would have done in the 1920s That sort of fidelity to the original Quisisana was followed throughout the main structure and surface of the boat. Underneath, though, it's a little more up-to-date. Christodolou peels one mahogany panel back to reveal a fridge well-stocked with tins of Gordon's gin and tonic. Another unsheathes an air fryer, which he deemed an essential requirement for the modern, discerning pleasure cruiser. 'As I said to Malcolm at one point, 'You don't buy your granny Primark underwear for Christmas, do you?'' he says, by way of explanation. I turn to Jones. What was Christodolou's most outrageous request? 'Probably when he said he wanted a dolphin on the side of the boat in LED lighting.' Christodolou giggles. 'I went to a boat show and saw this company that does LED lights that follow the water line… I came back and went, 'I want that!'' He was swiftly disabused of the idea. 'Anything can be done, really, and hidden,' Jones says. 'Wi-fi, sinks, the black water tank for a modern toilet, it's all doable, it's just time and money.' With its rich, dark wood and plush leather furnishings, the galley looks like the cigar lounge in a gentleman's club, and leads to a private berth just big enough for two people who know one another very well indeed. Christodolou envisaged a quiet luxury about the finished product. He chose a colour called 'St James's red' for the leather and many of the furnishings, then added cushions made from red and gold silk to match the ribbon of the Dunkirk medal. In the loo are clippings and images relating to the boat's history Jones found on eBay. The chrome gauges and organ-stop switches, meanwhile, are entirely traditional, but tucked away behind a panel is a state-of-the-art Garmin chartplotter. Other mod-cons are hidden just as elegantly. To glance at the new Quisisana is to see a beautiful example of care and craftsmanship in restoration, but the tricks and toys underneath show, if anything, an even greater level of care: in incorporating the new alongside the old, Jones and Christodolou have ensured Quisisana will remain ship shape for a very long time. 'We just spent absolutely ages working out how I can spend as much of Phil's money as I could…' Jones jokes. 'But he was so interested in everything, so involved, selecting the hides, buying so much of it himself. We need to protect the Little Ships, and this boat is just lucky it found someone like Phil, who can put so much into it.' After buying it for £5,000, how much did he end up spending? He winces. 'About a quarter of a million… and that's a conservative estimate,' Christodolou says. But it's all worth it to him. And he'll never sell her on, he says. 'I can't part with her now.' The plan, then, is to take Quisisana to as many Little Ship reunion events as possible. Current members of the Coldstream Guards have already been on board for a cruise, and Christodolou has shown her off up and down the Thames over the last year, enjoying many admiring glances wherever he docks. But the goal was always to have Quisisana ready and dressed to the nines for the 85th anniversary of Operation Dynamo. To mark the occasion, Christodolou will motor up the Thames to Ramsgate, where he'll join up with a flotilla of dozens of other Dunkirk Little Ships for a very special return journey across the Channel. 'I think it'll be brilliant going over, but really quite emotional coming back in, in a flotilla of 60 or so. Being welcomed home into a Ramsgate harbour packed with cheering and waving people, especially if it's a nice sunny day, will be really quite something.' He pauses. 'Hopefully there'll be the same number of us as there were that went out…' Today, as we putter around the marina for a few minutes on placid waters, it's hard to imagine the shivering, terrified soldiers scrambling aboard all those years ago as the Luftwaffe droned overheard. 'Oh, it's two different worlds,' Christodolou says, shaking his head. 'But this is about preservation and keeping it going. These are now the last of the veterans. It's our job to keep their memory alive, isn't it?' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
BBC News
04-05-2025
- General
- BBC News
What happened in the Channel Islands during WW2?
The Channel Islands were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by the Germans during World War Two with islanders enduring five long, harsh years under Nazi 1940-1945 Germans set up the only concentration camps ever established on British soil and turned the islands into an "impregnable fortress" on the orders of Adolf of islanders were deported to German prisons, while those who remained nearly starved as the war approached its and Guernsey were liberated on 9 May 1945, and Sark the following day. Most of the inhabitants of Alderney, who had been forced to leave, could not safely return until 15 December - now marked as Homecoming Day. In 1940 the German army, the Wehrmacht, invaded Poland and the Low Countries before advancing through France. As the remains of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) were rescued from Dunkirk, Channel Island sailors reported seeing German troops occupying the peninsulas of Normandy and Brittany. The Channel Islands were left defenceless when Britain pulled its troops out and declared the islands demilitarised. Islanders faced the choice of remaining and risking invasion or leaving their homes for safety on the mainland. Hundreds queued for boats from St Peter Port and St Helier, while nearly the whole population of Alderney Jersey, there were reports of people driving to the harbour in expensive cars, then leaving the vehicles on the quayside with the keys in the ignition for anyone to drive away. On 28 June 1940, German bombers attacked the islands as farmers were lined up at the harbours of St Peter Port and St Helier weighing and preparing vegetables for export. The Luftwaffe pilots, perhaps mistaking the assembly of men and machines for military units, started to drop bombs. The red of burst tomatoes, mingled with the blood of dying and injured men, ran on to the roads and by the time the bombers left, 44 Channel Islanders were BBC broadcast an urgent message that the islands would not oppose any invasion and there were no more attacks, but two days later the first troops landed. How did life change? There was a cordial start to the occupation and stores did brisk business as soldiers bought souvenirs to send back to clocks were put forward an hour to coincide with German time and motorists were ordered to drive on the right, causing a flurry of accidents. There was a 23:00 6 June 1942, the Germans ordered islanders to surrender their radios so they could not follow BBC News. While many radios were handed in, hundreds of people managed to keep them or make crystal sets. Many islanders were caught and punished for spreading news. They included Harold Le Druillenec, a Jersey schoolmaster who was arrested in 1944 for anti-German was deported and held in German concentration camps including construction works were carried out on all the islands built by forced labourers and slave the first slaves arrived at the end of 1941 islanders were shocked as many of the prisoners were starving and dressed in rags. The slaves were put to work building fortifications, while many islanders resolved to help them, either by feeding or offering shelter to those who escaped. Hitler ruled any men not born in the islands should be deported to Germany with their September 1942 people were given a few hours notice to be at the harbour. As the first boat full of deportees sailed from St Helier, a mass of islanders watched singing We'll Meet 2,500 Channel Islanders were sent away and held in prisons or internment camps until the end of the war. Collaboration and resistance While there was no resistance to the initial landings, some islanders tried to undermine the daubed V for victory on buildings, or incorporated the symbol in stamps or stonework, including the V in the paving of Jersey's Royal including the Guernsey Underground News Service (GUNS), shared the news, but several members were Jersey a communist cell led by Norman Le Brocq worked to undermine the Germans. Its most spectacular coup came shortly before liberation when it helped a German deserter destroy the Palace Hotel, an important German headquarters. According to the Falla Archive, 21 people from Jersey and eight from Guernsey did not return from Nazi prisons, labour and concentration camps after the included Louisa Gould in Jersey who was sent to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, after she was caught trying to help the escaped Russian slave Feodor Polykarpivitch Burriy, known as Russian people tried to escape from the islands, mainly by boat. But they were in danger, not only from the Germans but also from the dangerous seas around the became slightly easier after the Allies liberated the French coast in 1944 and one of those who successfully got away was Sir Peter Crill, a future bailiff of Jersey. But there was little chance of organised resistance in the islands where the geography allowed nowhere to hide and where, at times, there was one German soldier for every three as in France and other occupied countries, there were also those who assisted the businesses took German money to help build the fortification while some women were referred to as "Jerrybags" after forming relationships with the took a more active role in denouncing their neighbours. Some suggested the occupiers look in the coal shed of a house to find a hidden radio, illegal food or an escaped slave. 'No fighting. Let 'em rot' Sir Winston Churchill recognised the Channel Islands, being so close to occupied France, would be hard to retake and almost impossible to was happy to let the Germans expend huge efforts and materials on fortifications that would never be is thought that about 10% of all the steel and concrete used in Hitler's Atlantic Wall was used to make the bunkers, guns and casemates in the Channel Islands. In the margins of an official report in September 1944 about the islands, Churchill wrote: "No fighting. Let 'em rot."Although it has never been clear whether he meant the German occupiers or the Channel Islanders, there was no attempt to retake the islands, even after France had been liberated. The garrison and the people had to wait until the end of the war in Europe. When the Germans arrived they demanded all Jews be registered. Fewer than half declared themselves, while some went into hiding. Island leaders refused to implement the German order that all Jews should wear the yellow star. The islands' governments were also complicit in helping Jewish shop owners who were forced to sell their businesses. Many were "sold" for a nominal fee and bought back by their owners at the end of the all Jews remained hidden and some were deported to Germany and imprisoned. Three women in Guernsey died in Auschwitz after confessing their faith in 1942. The occupation in Sark was less severe than in Guernsey and Jersey but some of the island's small population were was almost deserted when the Germans arrived and the invaders were able to build and fortify the set up four camps for slaves and forced workers who laboured long hours to build bunkers, gun emplacements and and Jewish prisoners were held at the SS concentration camps called Norderney and island was also used as a place to punish people from the other Channel Islands. It is believed nearly 8,000 people were imprisoned in Alderney and a recent study suggests between 641 and 1,027 died. Why was the last winter so severe? As the Allies advanced and liberated the French Channel ports they cut off the German food supply chain to the were reduced and gas and electricity cut leaving people with no light or lucky enough to have candles would struggle to find matches and people would go to bed at dusk, wearing all their starving slaves broke out of camps to steal what they could, risking death in the after negotiations between the British and Germans, the Red Cross was given permission to bring relief supplies into St Peter Port and St Helier. Between Christmas 1944 and the new year of 1945, the SS Vega brought thousands of Red Cross parcels to the islands, saving the lives of countless people. What finally brought liberation? As the Allies pushed closer to Germany, islanders felt forgotten and the German occupiers were May 1945, the European war reached its apocalyptic end in the ruins of Berlin. Hitler took his own life and a week later Germany victory speech, including the line: "Our dear Channel Islands are to be freed", was broadcast across Royal Square, 9 May, soldiers from HMS Bulldog landed in St Peter Port while HMS Beagle sailed into St Helier. In Guernsey the Union Flag was first raised over the States offices, then the Royal Hotel, before it was also raised at the Royal Court where the crowd of between 1,500 and 2,000 broke into a spontaneous rendition of God Save the Jersey the Union Flag was raised from the Harbour Master's Office and from the balcony of the Pomme d'Or Hotel, Jersey, in front of what is now Liberation Square. Celebrations were long and loud, children tasted their first sweets and women danced with Tommies. The National Anthem was sung along with Guernsey's Sarnia Cherie and Beautiful last island to be freed was Alderney, where the garrison did not surrender until 16 May. Thousands of minefields had to be cleared before the majority of inhabitants could return on 15 December, a day still marked in the island as Homecoming five long years of oppression, hunger, darkness and despair, the Channel Islands and their people were finally free. The military began bringing order to the islands as German leaders were taken away. Some soldiers were kept on to help clear the thousands of mines and miles of barbed escaped slaves who had been in hiding were sent back to Russia, where they were regarded with suspicion by the communist regime. The islands were left with hundreds of fortifications, many of which remain, some decaying and empty. Others, such as the Batterie Lothringen in Jersey and Fort Hommet in Guernsey, have been year on 9 May crowds gather to remember those five long years that forever changed island life and celebrate what happened on that day in 1945.
The Independent
09-04-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Tim Bouverie's Allies at War recounts the fall-outs and reconciliations of The Big Three with sensitivity and wit
A new star is born. The British firmament of modern political and military history is already a glittering one, but established names must now make way for a new companion, Timothy Pleydell-Bouverie. His first book, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War, was a deserved success. His second, Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler, proves that his debut was no flash in the pan. Bouverie's scope is wide, taking in the history of those relationships, which lay behind the creation and maintenance (just) of the greatest military alliance the world has ever seen: the British Empire, the United States, and the Soviet Union. We start with British policy based on the presumed rock of the French army; with Stalin supporting the German economy and war machine after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact; and with western outrage at Russia's invasion of Finland in 1939. In London sits the unpleasant figure of Joseph Kennedy Sr, the US ambassador, delighting in what he foresaw as the inevitable defeat of Britain. We end with the total victory of the Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, the last now our beloved Uncle Joe. And Poland, for whom we first went to war, betrayed. Churchill understood that winning would be, for the democracies, a matter of maintaining public support. He often drove the chiefs of staff mad with schemes that made no sense at all in military terms, but were designed to build pride in the honour of the cause for which free people were fighting. Churchill's ludicrous plot for a second British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to return to France after Dunkirk; his insistence on the doomed defence of Greece and his unswerving defence of France (in spite of all Charles de Gaulle's insults) – all these derived partly from his sense of chivalry but also partly from his understanding that people had to believe in what they were fighting for: survival, yes, but honour, too. In the period when the British Empire was fighting alone, it was vital to show the likes of doubting US ambassador Kennedy that we would fight, and would not be defeated. We were not the lost cause that the isolationists claimed. A good many desperate enterprises were undertaken to demonstrate that we were serious, including the partial destruction of the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir – allies who were friends only weeks before. In what is news to this reviewer at least, Bouverie shows that Churchill had cleared this with Roosevelt in advance. After Hitler's invasion of Russia, and then following Pearl Harbour, the great alliance – which in the end would defeat the Axis forces, was formed. In his book, Bouverie lays clear both its strengths and its weaknesses. Its strength was their common enemy; its weakness was their irreconcilable post-war aims. Roosevelt passionately believed in the construction of a new world order, safe for the world and also for the almighty dollar. He was wholly unsentimental about his British ally's future. Very hard bargains were driven in return for the supply of armaments – including forced sales to US interests of British overseas assets. Britain had rebuilt her net overseas assets after the First World War; all those and more were effectively sold cheap for dollars in the Second. Unlike the Soviet Union, who likewise received massive US (and very considerable British) aid, we went on paying for all this to the US until the first decade of the 21st century. All our military secrets, Bouverie shows, were given to America, up to and including the atom bomb research. Bouverie could have mentioned penicillin, too. Nothing came the other way. But it was necessary: we had nothing else to trade. The Red Army drove west in Michigan-made Chevrolet trucks, but Stalin obliterated any memory of the Western help without which Russian heroism might well not have been enough. The unity of the Big Three was often fractious and worse: Roosevelt could humiliate Churchill in front of Stalin every bit as much as Trump humiliated Zelensky in the White House. Bouverie charts the personal fallings-out and the reconciliations with great sensitivity and sometimes humour. Dreadful and dangerous beliefs in personal relationships often had terrible consequences. Poland was ultimately sacrificed at least partly because Roosevelt, and for a time Churchill too, genuinely trusted Stalin. Horrible things were agreed at Yalta and before involving the repatriation of people to their deaths in the Soviet Union – Uncle Joe was, after all, such a good chap. Reading this powerful and well-researched book left this reviewer with one very uncomfortable feeling. Read from the point of view of an isolationist, right-wing American political adviser of today, you could find precedent in what the sainted Roosevelt's did to the British for just about everything President Trump's administration is currently doing to Ukraine. 'Take their assets to pay for any help we give! Settle the boundaries of Europe in a way that satisfies Uncle Joe/my friend Putin! Russia's interests do not really diverge from America's! Good old Vlad just wants safe borders. Britain/Ukraine/Europe is on the way out anyway. And I have looked into Uncle Joe's/my friend Putin's eyes and I know I can trust him!' But Roosevelt had another, very different side to him that ensured his legacy. He was determined 'not to do a Woodrow Wilson' by letting the US scuttle home after the war to leave the world brewing up its next one. He believed profoundly in the values of liberal democracy and wanted his legacy to be a framework for peace, which would have the power and the prestige to prevent war. He left the embryonic UN and the Bretton Woods structures to try to ensure it. Roosevelt understood that the interests of the US and the almighty dollar depended on worldwide order. His safe place in history derives not least from his recognition that American power was the power of a law-based nation, and that spreading a law-based order was not only in the interest of his own people, but of the world as a whole. President Trump is said to admire FDR: he gets the ruthlessness, but does not seem to understand the greatness.
Telegraph
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Britain's naval power can stop Putin. It has always been our best safeguard
Britain's diplomatic strategy for more than 150 years – since 1940 perhaps its only coherent strategy – has been to ensure that the United States was never our enemy and if possible our ally. This was dressed up with sentimentality, especially on our side. As early as the 1890s, Brits were exalting the solidarity of the 'English-speaking peoples', and in 1917 we managed to drag the Americans into the First World War. But the US has often been predatory and isolationist. It has a long history of threatening Mexico and Canada. In the 1920s, it damaged Europe's hard-won peace prospects by rejecting the Versailles Treaty and demanding full repayment of inter-allied loans. Between 1940 and 1945, it extracted much of Britain's accumulated wealth and destroyed its trading system. Alliances are not friendships. Donald Trump is different only in his brazen cynicism. The great Lord Palmerston thought we should be friendly with the power that could do us most harm. That, for now at least, is the special relationship. Perhaps it always was. Trump has woken us up. Or more precisely, has made us stir in our long slumber. We now pay lip service to national defence. But the Prime Minister's plan is to try to galvanise the special relationship by offering to put British troops into Ukraine to tempt Trump into providing the 'back-up' he has repeatedly refused to give. We similarly put inadequate military forces into Iraq and Afghanistan, and before that into Bosnia, all to show that we were a useful ally of America or of the EU. We did something similar in 1914 (when the British Expeditionary Force was practically wiped out in three months) and in 1939 (which led to Dunkirk). Palmerston, and probably every statesman since, would have regarded sending a token force to Ukraine as insane. Either they will be hostages, like European troops in Bosnia (remember Srebrenica?), and as the BEF nearly was at Dunkirk, or they will end up giving shameful respectability to a 'peace' dictated by Putin and forced on Ukraine. Let us be honest. The only thing we can usefully do is provide money, training and arms to Ukraine as long as they resist, and encourage other countries to do the same. We have never been able to intervene in central and Eastern Europe: this was as true in 1849 (when we felt sorry for the Hungarians) and 1945 (when we felt sorry for the Poles) as it is today. If we are serious we must aim urgently to make ourselves as invulnerable as possible, so that we might be able to play an effective part in European or global affairs. A crucial aspect of Britain's historic strength has been such invulnerability, despite its small population, its long coastline and its tiny Army. Invulnerability was hard won, and only finally achieved after Trafalgar. Previously, invasion was a constant danger. But Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler all realised it was no longer feasible. So they tried to cut off our commerce, food and raw materials. As early as the 1840s, enemies were anticipating the day when Britain would starve. Fortunately, enemy surface raiders and submarines never came even close to winning. Instead, it was Britain that could starve its enemies: during the First World War perhaps 750,000 Germans died in consequence. During the Second World War, Britain could fight off a death blow from the air thanks to 1930s developments in radar and fast fighters, while eviscerating the German war economy and decimating its work force by mass bombing. And today? We are no longer invulnerable, and we are no longer able to retaliate against attack. Not only surface shipping, which carries 95 per cent of our trade (even the Houthis can attack British ships), but undersea cables, pipelines and offshore wind farms are frighteningly vulnerable. We also discover that we have, at best, inadequate defence against air attack. As for cyber, I hate to think. History rarely gives clear lessons, but this is surely one. To be safe, and to be influential, Britain must be a maritime power. We cannot (except briefly in extreme emergency) be strong on both land and sea. Hardly any state in history has managed this. We must not be distracted into building up land forces to send to the far side of Europe. Tanks cannot protect pipelines and wind farms. Nor will a regiment of Challengers in Ukraine frighten Putin. We cannot help allies when we are so vulnerable. At worst, brave soldiers sent to do the impossible lose life and limb to no purpose, and have to be rescued, as at Basra and Helmand. But naval power can support European security and deter aggressors. A navy is expensive, but in a dangerous world it is indispensable to Britain's prosperity and safety: the Russians are – and the Chinese soon will be – sailing round our coasts. Forty years of complacency mean that we have to start from the bottom up, first making a naval career attractive. Fortunately, Navy personnel make up in effectiveness for small numbers. In Queen Victoria's heyday, the Navy's headcount was about the same as today's, but they had the best (and most expensive) equipment. Now we need submarines, planes, drones and operational aircraft carriers and their escorts. We need a serious defensive and offensive cyber capacity – the modern equivalent of Palmerston's gunboats. This would require fundamental political changes, including redirecting public spending and indefinitely postponing net zero. Whether the Government does this will tell us whether it is just play-acting. There are alternatives. One is to continue as we have done since the 1990s and let our defences run down through underfunding; to hope that danger will go away, and that the Americans will save us if it doesn't; to disguise reality by talking up defence spending and making token gestures, such as putting 'boots on the ground' at the cost of a few hundred soldiers' lives. Another alternative would be to opt out, like Spain, for example. We are not on the front line. We could hope that others would sort out the world's problems. That has not worked badly for Spain, and it would at least be honest. For the first time in 700 years, we would become spectators in world history, hoping that aggressors would always leave us in peace. Deep down, we know they won't.
