The German invasion threat helped to reshape the British national character. It cast Britons as the saviours of Western democracy, a role that put them at the centre of world history and boosted their national pride. For more than a year after the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, only Britain stood against Hitler. Its refusal to capitulate despite the enemy’s menacing preparations embedded itself deep in the nation’s self-image. During 1940 and ’41, the government carefully monitored civilian morale, and emphasised that the decision to fight on alone resulted from general principles, not mere expediency. Britain was not only refusing foreign domination but refusing Nazi control. To emphasise that point, the government celebrated the national traits that made Britons the opposite of Nazis. [...]
By the 1960s, the British were producing a body of literature on the spectre of a possible Nazi-occupied Great Britain. Sometimes, the occupation resulted from an invasion, and other times from a dishonourable peace. The literature of Nazi-occupied Britain offers a different kind of counterfactualism from that found in military histories. It draws out sequences of imagined events to create a picture of a society that might have existed. The books show a preoccupation with how Britain’s national character would have fared under Nazi occupation. Would Britons’ behaviour have differed from that of other Europeans? If so, how and why? The answers varied but the imagining of a Nazi Britain compelled intense British self-scrutiny. [...]
If Britain Had Fallen stresses that these British Nazis would not have been representative of the occupied British nation. Longmate portrays the struggles of British judges, lawyers, district nurses and doctors, postmen, teachers, tax collectors, mayors and city clerks pressed between the subjugated people and the Nazi overlords. If Britain Had Fallen gives us a very different Nazi Britain from Clarke’s England Under Hitler. Clarke’s model of British behaviour had been Major Colin Gubbins, the head of the Auxiliary Units, assassinating Nazi perpetrators after a village massacre. Twelve years later, in Longmate’s If Britain Had Fallen, the exemplary Briton is the anonymous civil servant, ‘a good mayor or, perhaps even more, a good town clerk’, bearing the day-to-day burden of carrying out German orders and consequently ‘likely before long to be unpopular all round’. [...]
In her book The Model Occupation (1995), Bunting reasoned that the Channel Islands’ occupation might serve as an accurate model of ‘What … could have happened in the rest of Britain’, which would debunk ‘the myth of the distinctiveness of the British character from that of Continental Europeans’. In an occupied Britain, she asserted, Britons would have behaved as they did in the actually occupied islands; they would have ‘compromised, collaborated and fraternised just as people did throughout occupied Europe’. Bunting urges Britons to discover what they truly are from the Channel Islands’ experience: typically European. Acknowledging their Europeanness would help them to accept their proper place, which is in Europe.
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