Underestimating the British Empire
It is easy to consider, as many histories do, that Great Britain stood alone against Germany after the fall of France. This is a false image. Germany faced, not Great Britain alone, but the British Empire, the world’s global superpower. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, flowed to the Mother Country from the expanses of the Empire; from Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India, Rhodesia, and everywhere the Union Jack flew. So did materials, supplies, food, clothing, raw materials, iron ore and coal, bullion, bauxite, tin, rubber, and all of the needs for war. Churchill’s wartime rhetoric was deliberately calculated for both English and American ears, the former to encourage morale and the latter to appeal for support.
The size of the British Empire, on which it was said the sun never set, dictated the size of the Royal Navy, and the bulk of British defense expenditures and strategy. Churchill’s rhetoric aimed at the Americans was carefully crafted to indicate that Great Britain was fighting a war against Nazi tyranny, not a war to maintain the British Empire, two very different things in the minds of many Americans of the day. The British Empire was not without many examples of tyranny of its own. Churchill also knew that Great Britain could never mount the industrial campaign undertaken by the Americans, safe from German bombing, and that the Americans would have to fight the bulk of the war against Japan.