ABSTRACT
It is a truism to say that Britain was not prepared for the Second World War. Little effort had been put into preparing the Army for its role in 1940. The extent to which the British Expeditionary Force was to suffer for that is a measure of the degree to which Britain had become obsessed with the threat of air attack since 1918. However, it is easy to underestimate just how much had been achieved. ‘Preparation’, after all, is a relative term, and it can be shown that German preparation also had many crucial weaknesses; in no sense did Germany outgun the West in 1940 in the Battle of France. The fact is that continental commitment had not been the top priority for Britain between the wars. By 1939, Britain was actually spending more than she had ever spent on armaments in peacetime. She had introduced conscription without any of the hand wringing that had accompanied the introduction of the first such measure just twenty-three years previously. She had begun to organize her aircraft industry in a way that was to contribute substantially to survival in the Battle of Britain. Spitfires and Hurricanes were not conjured out of a hat by the Churchill government in the summer of 1940; they were the product of long-term planning. Britain had also organized a large-scale programme of civil defence, designed to cope with a wholly new method of attack which threatened the massive destruction of industrial and dormitory areas of Britain – with gas, incendiary and high explosive. This was necessary as the next war, it was confidently predicted, would be very different from the last, because this time the people themselves would be the targets. The myth of the ‘next war’ dominated interwar assumptions, and framed preparations for a conflict which, if it could not be avoided, was deemed virtually certain to be even more apocalyptic than the last.
