Britain: the dreary years

Two years ago I signed on for this master's "programme" at King's College London, where half of my classmates were majors in the British army and the rest were civilians and military around the world. The discipline is War in the Modern World--i.e., 1945 to date. Since everyone else in the course was born after 1970, it didn't surprise me that none of the students remembered the harsh days that followed the Second World War, nor our tutors either. But the textbooks--surely they got it right?

Not at all! To my great astonishment, I found that most academics (John Gaddis at Yale being something of an exception) teach the Marshall Plan as a clever dodge by the US to head off its otherwise inevitable return to the Great Depression. As it happens, this was the very same explanation put out by the Cominform in 1948, as part of Stalin’s effort to head off NATO (and, indeed, European recovery). At the time, people dismissed it as Russian propaganda, but it has since become the conventional wisdom in academia, as I blogged in November 2006.

Similarly, on the Usenet forum about WWII, I find that Brits in particular have a collective amnesia about the state of their economy after Germany surrendered, 63 years ago this month. So I was delighted to discover David Kynaston's new book, Austerity Britain, 1945-1951, which deals entirely with those desperate years. By all accounts it's a marvel of historical reporting. I have it on order, and I'll report back when I've had a chance to digest it.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford (there were precious few blue-sky days in Britain in 1945, or indeed ten years later when I was a student there)