39. Churchill’s defeat in 1945 meant the Empire was doomed.
When Clement Attlee and the Labour Party prevailed in the British elections in 1945, the greatest defender of the British Empire, Winston Churchill, fell from power. The Labour government believed that Great Britain could no longer afford the Empire nor defend it from insurrection within or aggression from without. Pressures in India reached the point that all out civil war was threatened, and the last British Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, set the date for Indian independence as August 15, 1947. The partitioning of the subcontinent created the independent states of Pakistan and India, displaced millions along religious lines, and led to decades of strife, poverty, and famine.