Germany. Allied superiority was only potential in
the sense that it depended on Britain and Russia
not being defeated. The US would make its mil-
itary weight felt in Europe only in 1943 and
1944.
For Britain the danger of invasion finally
passed in 1941. With Germany fully engaged in
the east, there remained no possibility of mount-
ing an invasion of the British Isles as well. But
this did not mean that there was no longer any
danger that Britain might be forced to submit. It
remained beleaguered, dependent for longer-
term survival on supplies reaching it from over-
seas, above all from the US. Britain’s own
resources, great though they were when fully
mobilised, were not sufficient both to sustain the
war effort and to feed all the people. For Britain’s
success in mobilising its material and human
resources much credit must go to Ernest Bevin,
a leading trade unionist who had entered
Churchill’s national government as minister of
labour in 1940. The British people accepted an
unprecedented degree of direction of labour and
of rationing. Even so, supplies from overseas
became increasingly essential. Lend-Lease made
possible the purchase of war supplies in the US
without payment of cash. But they still had to
reach Britain.
The conflict at sea, the battle of the Atlantic,
was therefore as vital to Britain as the land battles
had been to France in 1940. The sinkings by
German U-boats in 1941 and 1942 could only be
made good by the output from US yards. Before
Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Hitler had
given orders that American vessels supplying
Britain and their escorting US warships were not to
be attacked. His hands had been tied. After Pearl
Harbor he welcomed the outbreak of war between
Japan and the US, and declared war on the
Americans himself, removing the restrictions on
the U-boat war in the Atlantic. Now, he thought,
Britain would be forced to its knees. In November
1942 U-boats sank 729,000 tons, and for the year
as a whole almost 8 million tons or 1,664 ships.
These losses were inflicted by about 200 sub-
marines and could no longer be made good. The
tide was turned in the spring of 1943. By the end
of May airpower, improved radar and ‘Ultra’ prac-
tically drove the U-boats from the Atlantic. The
submarine had been the greatest threat. Germany’s
surface fleet was not sufficiently strong to challenge
Britain’s supremacy. Hitler’s battleships were elim-
inated after some spectacular engagements. The
Graf Speesank in 1939, the Bismarckin 1941 and
the crippled Tirpitzby air attack in 1944. Supplies
were carried across the Atlantic by convoys. By far
the most hazardous route for these merchant ves-
sels was from Scotland and Iceland to Murmansk
to aid Russia. But by the end of 1943 not only had
the Germans lost the battle of the seas, they had
also sustained defeats on land from which there
would be no recovery. The darkest years of the war
were over for Britain. Churchill’s contribution to
maintaining British morale would be difficult to
overestimate.Britain’s warfare with Italy and Germany on land
in 1941 and 1942, judged by the numbers of men
engaged, was secondary when compared with the
millions of German and Russian troops locked in
battle in the Soviet Union. Yet strategically the
region of the eastern Mediterranean, known
loosely as the Middle East and lying between
neutral Turkey and the Italian colony of Libya,
was a vital one. During the inter-war years it was
dominated by Britain and France not as outright
colonial powers but as the powers holding League
Mandates. Both Britain and France had problems
with their Mandates. From 1936 onwards, Arab
militancy forced Britain to station 30,000 troops
in Palestine. But after the British government’s
decision in 1939 to restrict the immigration of
the Jews there was relative calm until 1944.
Hitler’s Arab policy was ambiguous. While
welcoming Arab hostility to Britain, the Nazis
were not prepared to give unequivocal promises
of future independence to the Arab states. But
Arab attitudes were determined by Arab hostility
to Britain and France as the occupying powers.
Thus Egypt, nominally independent, and though
being ‘defended’ by Britain, was pro-German
during the war and was actually occupied by
Britain. Iraq, Britain’s Mandate, achieved inde-
pendence in 1930 under British sponsorship but
was closely linked to Britain economically and
militarily. What was important to Britain was that