Is Britain the winner or the loser from WW2?

>until I was 12

You make that seem like some grand old age and completely shocking.

>Best UK Children's History Education

Nah, there is merit in the "standing alone" idea. It is a genuine source of British pride that the UK rejected a negotiated peace and grimly deciding to fight on with it's Commonwealth allies against Germany, Italy and Japan.

Nothing wrong with that. Legit national sacrifice for a greater good, fighting against non-great odds.

Tards just extrapolate that into "we won it", which is silly, but tards gonna tard and it's best to discard their worthless opinions.

I'm American and I also grew up on this.

>start war with empire
>start war to protect democracy in the east
>start war to maintain balance of power in Europe
>start war against potential ally over minor border dispute irrelevant to your geopolitical interests

>end war with no empire
>end war with only communist nations in east
>end war one dominant and hostile power on European continent
>Destroy potential ally in the process

WE WON THE WAR.

That's the definition of Pyrric Victory. I honestly can't believe the west still counts this as a victory for the west.

The problem with common WW2 histories is that they're prisoners to the time they were written.

You can read the most well-researched, thoughtful, and cumulative book about British involvement in the war, but unless it was published after the late 1980's, when the actions of the intelligence services started to be declassified, it's going to make short-sighted conclusions.

You can delve into the history of Lend-Lease and the rather magnificent cooperation that occurred between the commonwealth, but unless it was written after the mid-1990's, the facts and figures about Soviet production are going to be wrong, and they're still not all declassified.

Same in the US. The history of WWI is a couple pages long with equal part given to the holocaust.

You never learn why anything happened.

Hitler attacked Poland! Conquered France! Pearl Harbor Birtian fought on! The War turned at Stalingrad! Surrender at Berlin 1945 after D-Day!
next page: HOLOCAUST HOLOCAUST HOLOCAUST HOLOCAUST HOLOCAUST

There is no detail at all in our history books and most readers leave with the impression we fought the war to stop the holocaust which was not known about until well after thewar.

>There is no detail at all in our history books and most readers leave with the impression we fought the war to stop the holocaust which was not known about until well after thewar.

Maybe you just went to a shitty school.

Acknowledging that Japan and the USSR were even in the war (I also had "the war turned at Stalingrad" as the answer to a test question in HS) puts American education ahead of British education in this regard.

>the war turned at Stalingrad
kek

More like >the war turned at D-Day and nothing relevant happened in the East

I wonder, how do countries from outside the Big Three (not including other Commonwealth coubtries) learn about the war? Like Brazil.

>The UK was safe on it's island

Interesting article on tests conducted at Cambridge to study if the UK could feed itself without US imports of food; theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/sep/24/fighting-fit-britain-second-world-war

>The sheer quantity of potato needed to make up calories also took time to eat. All the fibre in the diet caused 250% bigger poos. They measured it.

>The other problem with eating all that starch was the amount of flatus – gas – that it produced. The consequences could be, in Widdowson and McCance's description, "remarkable".

You Brits and your fart jokes.

>theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/sep/24/fighting-fit-britain-second-world-war

That's an amazing article.

>Britbong here- the idea of Britain standing alone to face the evil Nazis is mawkish national myth-making on a colossal scale

but it actually happened, france fell and britain did stand - not quite alone we had the empire- and we pulled our weight in the fighting that followed, and yes we could have left the germans in europe and kept the empire, or we could honor our promise to the french and lose the empire.

from the fall of france to the start of barbarossa it really was essentially britain alone

>or we could honor our promise to the french and lose the empire.

yeah no. Churchill rejected an offer to return all French land and colonies except AlssaceLorraine and to guarantee the British empire with no loss ot territory.

You kept fighting for no reason at all other than Churchill would have lost power if the war ended.

>You kept fighting for no reason at all other than Churchill would have lost power if the war ended.

Yes, I'm sure Germany controlling all of Europe east of Alsace Lorraine wouldn't have threatened us at all.

>us
>we
>you

It's hard enough to try and shed yourself of national bias to take an objective view of history, personal pronouns to refer to countries and peoples don't help.

Sorry, let me fix that.

Yes, I'm sure Germany controlling all of Europe east of Alsace Lorraine wouldn't have threatened zir at all.

Loser. Fought more valiantly than anyone else but in the long run got completely fucked by it and lost most of its global influence.

For a good year and a half Britain did stand alone. Unless you include the vestiges and remnants of conquered European states the equivalent to the British fighting on fronts all over the world.

May 1940 to 1941 was a horror show, and it's where the "myth" stems from.

>Nazis were monster and killed 6 millions jews
>US won the war with some help from the allies
>Hitler was a nutjob and didn't know what he was doing
>Mussolini was another facist nutjob
My professor was specially left wing so he tried to associate nazism with right wing movements as best as he could. A part from that i don't remeber much
t. Hue

Horrible Histories.
Better then most of the High School history textbooks I had.

Britain was clearly one of the winners. However, the outcome only further solidified their global irrelevance, with the US taking over the leadership of the western world.

Arguably, siding with Germany would have opened up an opportunity to regain their old status, but that would have also been a much more uncertain, bloody and morally questionable option.

In a video game, if I were in charge of Britain, I would have sided with Germany in order to rise back to the top again. Luckily the real world is not a video game and Britain's leaders are more responsible than me.

>theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/sep/24/fighting-fit-britain-second-world-war

There is a fucking huge difference between

>Not having U.S. imports of food

and

>Totally cut off and reliant only on what the British Isles can grow.

I hope you realize that.

The main threat was u-boats cutting off American food stuffs. Even the seeds for the British War Relief Society's gardens were American. The irony, in the end, was British rationing being *more* stringent after the actual war due to the UK's responsibility to feed their occupation zones in Germany.

This isn't chest pounding though. The commonwealth fed all allies soldiers, American or otherwise, in the South Pacific for the majority of the war.

The belief in Britain that they won the war ended up ensuring Britain effectively ended up the losers.
They didn't want to give up their empire, work hard, change their ways, modernise, and this ended up stunting them economically and socially.
Only through their naturally perfidious nature have they managed to not yet fall to the ranks of a third rate nation.

Britain didn't side with Germany out of pride but ended up getting cucked harder in the long run

Reds were fighting in a war of survival. They never wanted a piece of it. The United States voluntarily sent troops and supplies to her allies while engaging in global war that wasn't even at her door step.

Body count =/= effort

>Reds were fighting in a war of survival. They never wanted a piece of it.
Stalin was hoping to conquer Europe after the Nazis had softened it up and exhausted themselves.

Britain lost ww1, ww2 was just the coffin being put to earth.