History UsefulNotes / TheHomeFront

In short they wanted the findings of ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beveridge_Report The Beveridge Report'']] implemented so that everyone would be fed, everyone would be educated, everyone would have a place to call home, everyone would have a job, and everyone would be looked after when they were sick or unemployed or old. Winston Churchill infamously opposed the implementation of the report, at least until he realised that it was so popular that his party would lose for sure if they continued to do so. Ultimately his refusal to explicitly endorse implementing the report cost him victory in the General Election on the 5th of July 1945... ushering in the Labour Party and the Deputy Prime Minister of the coalition War Ministry, UsefulNotes/ClementAttlee...

[[folder: '''Whale Meat Again- Rationing''']]

[[folder: '''The Battle of Britain''']]

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[[folder: '''The Blitz''']]

->"You said the war was 'practically over already'. So why are we down here?"
-->-- [[UsefulNotes/JosephStalin Vyacheslav Molotov]], to Joachim von Ribbentrop, while taking shelter from British air-raid.

->"Phoenix Resurectum"

[[folder: '''Where are we again? Signs, or the lack thereof''']]

[[folder: '''A very temporary truce - Class''']]

[[folder: '''"The White Cliffs of Dover"- Entertainment''']]

->"The movie-going public, which in this country, the Dominions and the U.S. numbers nearly 200 million, after three years of war can smell pure propaganda a mile off. [...] Therefore the film ["The Way Ahead"] must be of first-class entertainment value, with the benefit to army prestige coming as a natural result of the story.

[[folder: '''The {{Home Guard}}''']]

[[folder: '''[=WAAFs=], Wrens, Factory Girls, and Boffins''']]

[[folder: '''Overpaid, Overfed, Oversexed and Over Here ''']]

[[folder: '''Vengeance Weapons''']]

[[folder: '''The Enigma Variations- Intelligence Operations''']]

* Beer was not rationed (bad for morale), but was frequently watered down, otherwise limited, or just plain unavailable. With France occupied by and Italy allied with ThoseWackyNazis and every part of the supply line from California filled up with high-priority war material, wine was {{Unobtainium}}.

* Beer was not rationed (bad for morale), but was frequently watered down, otherwise limited, or just plain unavailable. With France occupied by and Italy allied with ThoseWackyNazis and every part of the supply line from California filled up with high-priority war material, wine was {{Unobtainium}} .

* Only Slough could get Mars Bars.

The V-2 was the first ballistic missile and first man-made object launched into space, the progenitor of all modern rockets. Over 3,000 V-2s were launched by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets in World War II. Unlike the V-1, they were completely impossible to stop[[labelnote:Although...]]A system ''was'' proposed, by General Frederick Alfred Pile of Anti-Aircraft Command, to destroy V-2s in flight by saturating their descent paths with massed AA fire. This idea was first brought up as early as August 1944 (_before_ the first V-2 was fired in anger), but the vast numbers of AA shells required (over 300,000 per V-2) meant that more damage would have been caused by unexploded shells falling back onto London than the V-2 itself would have inflicted, and the idea was shelved. It was brought up again in January 1945, this time using only a few hundred to a few thousand shells per missile (which would be carefully aimed to explode along the V-2's flightpath, as opposed to the original proposal to basically put as much AA fire as possible into the air and hope for the best), equipped with new fuzes which would greatly reduce the number of shells that failed to explode, but was put on hold until incoming V-2s could be tracked well enough to allow accurate gun laying; vast improvements in the ability to predict the V-2s' trajectories allowed the Pile system to finally be approved for use in late March 1945, but Allied military advances in the Low Countries and northern France pushed the V-2's available launch sites out of range of London before it could become operational.[[/labelnote]]; luckily, their accuracy left much to be desired, which Britain's Doublecross system worked hard to make worse with disinformation of the missiles' impact locations.

The V-2 was the first ballistic missile and first man-made object launched into space, the progenitor of all modern rockets. Over 3,000 V-2s were launched by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets in World War II. Unlike the V-1, they were completely impossible to stop[[labelnote:Although...]]A system ''was'' proposed, by General Frederick Alfred Pile of Anti-Aircraft Command, to destroy V-2s in flight by saturating their descent paths with massed AA fire. This idea was first brought up as early as August 1944 (_before_ the first V-2 was fired in anger), but the vast numbers of AA shells required (over 300,000 per V-2) meant that more damage would have been caused by unexploded shells falling back onto London than the V-2 itself would have inflicted, and the idea was shelved. It was brought up again in January 1945, this time using only a few hundred to a few thousand shells per missile (and accepting the correspondingly-reduced probability of a successful interception), equipped with new fuzes which would greatly reduce the number of shells that failed to explode, but was put on hold until incoming V-2s could be tracked well enough to allow accurate gun laying; vast improvements in the ability to predict the V-2s' trajectories allowed the Pile system to finally be approved for use in late March 1945, but Allied military advances in the Low Countries and northern France pushed the V-2's available launch sites out of range of London before it could become operational.[[/labelnote]]; luckily, their accuracy left much to be desired, which Britain's Doublecross system worked hard to make worse with disinformation of the missiles' impact locations.

The V-2 was the first ballistic missile and first man-made object launched into space, the progenitor of all modern rockets. Over 3,000 V-2s were launched by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets in World War II. Unlike the V-1, they were completely impossible to stop; luckily, their accuracy left much to be desired, which Britain's Doublecross system worked hard to make worse with disinformation of the missiles' impact locations.

More people died making it (French and particularly Soviet POW were used as slave-labourers) than were killed by it.

* The Cabinet War Rooms, built in London under the instruction of UsefulNotes/NevilleChamberlain (but most famously used by UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill), were a state of the art bunker (although it was 1943 before it was bombproof and Churchill had a habit of going up on the roof during the Blitz to watch the planes in any case) and intelligence hub that had the UK's first florescent lighting for its war maps and a transatlantic phone link to the White House. The scrambling equipment for the phone was so big that the actual line ended in Westminster and an extension was set up and concealed by the simple expedient of putting a toilet door lock on it, everyone assumed that Churchill had a private loo. Apparently Churchill infuriated the White House staff by ringing whenever he had a question or idea, regardless of whether it was 3 AM or not.

-->-- Prime Minister UsefulNotes/WinstonChurchill to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, 18 June 1940[[note]]Parliamentary debates weren't broadcast at that time, so Churchill made his speeches in the Commons then redid them on radio. The recording you may have heard of this speech was made quite late in the day, and rumour has it that Churchill was, as PrivateEye would say, ''tired and emotional'' by the time they put it to tape.[[/note]]

Britain during the UsefulNotes/SecondWorldWar. [=WW2=] had such a massive impact on British history, it's usually referred to simply as "the war".

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The design itself was rather flawed; while a small-scale mockup was successfully fired to prove the theory, the larger gun was plagued by several problems, including timing, maintenance, and a rather nasty habit of the initial propellant detonation racing ahead of the projectile and setting off the acceleration charges prematurely, accidentally slowing the projectile down rather than speeding it up or just causing the entire cannon to [[StuffBlowingUp explode.]] It was never actually fired against London, but Stubborn old Winston had it destroyed regardless, there was no way he was going to chance having THAT aimed at the UK, whether it actually worked or not.

Our CrowningMomentOfAwesome.

Britain did quite a lot of intelligence work during the war, much of it warranting the title of CrowningMomentOfAwesome.

* The [[UsefulNotes/{{SOE}} Special Operations Executive]] a.k.a. 'the Baker Street Irregulars' a.k.a. the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, created by Churchill and part set up by Chamberlain while he was in the war cabinet, with the mandate to "Set Europe Ablaze" with every last act of sabotage and dirty trickery that the trainers could think of. Trained and dropped spies over Europe to help the resistance groups, ordinary men and women risking life and limb sending secrets back the British Government. They were also responsible for Operation ANTHROPOID, training and inserting the two Czechoslovakian nationals who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SS and major architect of the Holocaust. Former Agents include Creator/IanFleming, [[Series/DoctorWho Jon Pertwee a.k.a the 3rd Doctor (who notably favoured a more secret agent style and gadget based approach]], and ''Creator/Christopher Lee'', with Fleming apparently basing ''Franchise/JamesBond'' on both of the latter. We won't know the full story of what they did and where until after all of their agents are dead as the files are sealed until then.

* The [[UsefulNotes/{{SOE}} Special Operations Executive]] a.k.a. 'the Baker Street Irregulars' a.k.a. the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, created by Churchill and part set up by Chamberlain while he was in the war cabinet, with the mandate to "Set Europe Ablaze" with every last act of sabotage and dirty trickery that the trainers could think of. Trained and dropped spies over Europe to help the resistance groups, ordinary men and women risking life and limb sending secrets back the British Government. They were also responsible for Operation ANTHROPOID, training and inserting the two Czechoslovakian nationals who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SS and major architect of the Holocaust. Former Agents include Creator/IanFleming, [[Series/DoctorWho Jon Pertwee a.k.a the 3rd Doctor (who notably favoured a more secret agent style and gadget based approach]], and Creator/Christopher Lee, with Fleming apparently basing ''Franchise/JamesBond'' on both of the latter. We won't know the full story of what they did and where until after all of their agents are dead as the files are sealed until then.

''V1''

''V-2''

''V-3''

''However'', the war didn't end with the defeat of Germany... and when the British public realised that, morale and public support for the war sunk to a new low. As May and June dragged on it became crystal-clear that [[UsefulNotes/WarInAsiaAndThePacific Japan wouldn't surrender just because Germany had]] and that the British public didn't give two hoots whether Britain got to Burma, Malaya, Hong Kong etc back: they were sick of high taxation, they were sick of rationing, they were sick of people dying (especially the specific bits they were dying for), and they wanted political and social reform to build the country anew. And they were ''very'' specific on that last part: they had ''not'' died in the tens of thousands just to get the old Britain back, they wanted a new one - better than before.

''However'', the war didn't end with the defeat of Germany... and when the British public realised that, morale and public support for the war sunk to a new low. As May and June dragged on it became crystal-clear that Japan wouldn't surrender just because Germany had and that the British public didn't give two hoots whether Britain got to Burma, Malaya, Hong Kong etc back: they were sick of high taxation, they were sick of rationing, they were sick of people dying (especially the specific bits they were dying for), and they wanted political and social reform to build the country anew. And they were ''very'' specific on that last part: they had ''not'' died in the tens of thousands just to get the old Britain back, they wanted a new one - better than before.

Fortunately for Britain (though unfortunately for Japan) the Americans had...[[NukeEm other]] ideas on how to deal with Japan, but [[UsefulNotes/AtomicBombingsOfHiroshimaAndNagasaki that's another story...]]

''However'', the war didn't end with the defeat of Germany... and when the British public realised that, morale and public support for the war sunk to a new low. As May and June dragged on it became crystal-clear that [[UsefulNotes/AtomicBombingsOfHiroshimaAndNagasaki Japan wouldn't surrender just because Germany had]] and that the British public didn't give two hoots whether Britain got to Burma, Malaya, Hong Kong etc back: they were sick of high taxation, they were sick of rationing, they were sick of people dying (especially the specific bits they were dying for), and they wanted political and social reform to build the country anew. And they were ''very'' specific on that last part: they had ''not'' died in the tens of thousands just to get the old Britain back, they wanted a new one - better than before.

So, to in conclusion:
The V-1 was capable of being intercepted and was inaccurate.

The V-2 was too scarce, too small and[=/=]or too inaccurate.

The V-3 was plagued by mechanical problems never used in service.

The V-3 cannon was not as well-known as its two siblings, but it was nonetheless another attempt by Hitler to terrorize the British mainland. It actually was not a single cannon but an underground complex of 25 guns, each one consisting of a single breech-loading barrel to which additional breeches were attached up its length at set intervals, its appearance earning it the codename "Tausendfüßler" (Millipede). The idea was that as the canon fired, charges placed in the additional breeches would detonate as the projectile passed them at precisely timed intervals, accelerating it to an extremely high velocity so to successfully fly over the channel and hit London from its site at Mimoyecques, France. The "London gun" consisted of five shafts each containing five 500-foot-long barrels, side by side.

The V-3 cannon was not a single cannon but an underground complex of 25 guns, designed to lob shells at London from its site at Mimoyecques, France. The "London gun" consisted of five shafts each containing five 500-foot-long barrels, side by side.

Stubborn old Winston had it destroyed before it ever entered service, there was no way he was having THAT aimed at the UK.

The V-3 was never used.

They did however suck resources and money away from the army. [[NiceJobFixingItVillain Well done, Vergeltungswaffe]].

Throughout Europe rationing of grain and all other foods continued long after the war's end due to the wartime devastation of European agriculture. In Britain, bread was first rationed in 1946 because of delayed after-effects of the massive 1940-45 downswing in European agricultural production (specifically French, Benelux, German, and Soviet production) caused in large part by the Germans' wholesale acquisition of untold millions of farm-horses and tens of thousands of trucks and tractors. It was not until 1954 that the last item (bananas) stopped being rationed.

* Petrol (gas) was needed for the military and farming. The farming petrol was dyed red to stop people selling it on the black market. This didn't work since the dye came out if you ran it through a gas mask respirator (note that "red diesel" still exists today, denoting it as tax-exempt, with a much better dye).
* Fish was not rationed, but could be very hard to get hold of due to wartime limitations on the fishing fleets and the general lack of transportation, with varieties of fish previously considered unpalatable.making up ever-larger proportions of the catch.

* Sausages were not rationed but were very very hard to get. They often had a lot of bread and suet in them, so much so The Times got a reasonably famous letter to the effect of "we don't know whether to put mustard or marmalade on them."

After the victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Nov. 1942, Churchill ordered the bells to be rung for the first time in years to celebrate.

Problem 1: The only land unit in Great Britain which has artillery, mortars, or trucks is Canadian and it has just 14,000 people. The invasion force will have at least a fifty thousand well-armed troops.

At the war's end the USSR took the research-sites and some of the factories (which were in what then became Poland), but the USA managed to get the lion's share of the scientists courtesy of their ''Operation Paperclip'' (to extract, pardon, and employ all useful German technical experts). The innovations thus yielded advanced the missile programs of pretty much all the allied powers, and the US and USSR in particular (an orbital launch vehicle is just a ballistic missile with a satellite or capsule instead of a warhead).

* Another operation (Called [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat Operation Mincemeat]]) involving disguising a dead tramp as a British soldier; the corpse was set to wash up on a Spanish beach with papers that suggested the Allies were not going to attack Sicily (the obvious target) but were actually only going to use Sicily as a distraction for a two-pronged assault, Sardinia on one side, the Grecian islands and the Balkans on the other. The deception was so successful that Sicily was taken with minimal Allied casualties. This incident was later immortalized in book and film as ''Film/TheManWhoNeverWas''.

In short they wanted the findings of ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beveridge_Report The Beveridge Report'']] implemented so that everyone would be fed, everyone would be educated, everyone would have a place to call home, everyone would have a job, and everyone would be looked after when they were sick or unemployed or old. Winston Churchill infamously opposed the implementation of the report, at least until he realised that it was so popular that his party would lose for sure if they continued to do so. Ultimately his refusal to explicitly endorse implementing the report cost him victory in the General Election on the 5th of July 1945... ushering in the Labour Party and the Deputy Prime Minister of the coalition War Ministry, UsefulNotes/ClementAttlee...

''However'', the war didn't end with the defeat of Germany... and when the British public realised that, morale and public support for the war sunk to a new low. As May and June dragged on it became crystal-clear that [[UsefulNotes/AtomicBombingsOfHiroshimaAndNagasaki Japan wouldn't surrender just because Germany had]] and that the British public didn't give two hoots whether Britain got to Burma, Malaya, Hong Kong etc back: they were sick of high taxation, they were sick of rationing, they were sick of people dying (especially the specific bits they were dying for), and they wanted political and social reform to build the country anew. And they were ''very'' specific on that last part: they had ''not'' died in the tens of thousands just to get the old Britain back, they wanted a new one - better than before. In short they wanted the findings of ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beveridge_Report The Beveridge Report'']] implemented so that everyone would be fed, everyone would be educated, everyone would have a place to call home, everyone would have a job, and everyone would be looked after when they were sick or unemployed or old. Winston Churchill infamously opposed the implementation of the report, at least until he realised that it was so popular that his party would lose for sure if they continued to do so. Ultimately his refusal to explicitly endorse implementing the report cost him victory in the General Election on the 5th of July 1945... ushering in the Labour Party and the Deputy Prime Minister of the coalition War Ministry, UsefulNotes/ClementAttlee...

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The idea was to flatten the cities, wreck the infrastructure and demoralise the people. Despite [[BlitzEvacuees creating plot fodder for a generation of childrens' books,]] it didn't really work. While the Blitz was the lowest point of British public support for the war before 1944-45, which was when the war first became unwanted by a majority of citizens, it was also a high point of anti-German hatred. Every night the people of major cities on the South coast (and elsewhere) were bombed, and in the immediate aftermath of losing family members and homes the universal reaction was despair and skepticism of ultimate victory. That said, the people who had not actually lost anything themselves generally got over the initial shock very quickly. Moreover in the months and weeks, or even days, following personal loss many people were filled with extraordinary bloodlust and hatred for Germans. "We are all in this together" was the official line that smoothed over these very different and changing attitudes: if your shop-front was blown in you swept up the glass and hung a "[[GallowsHumor more open than usual]]" sign on the door frame. If half your factory was flattened, you put up tarpaulins and carried on working in the other half. It is no coincidence that this era was the origin of the famous slogan, 'Keep Calm and Carry On.'
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Postboxes were painted so they would change colour if gas was present.
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They were never needed. The German Army was even more dependent on horse-transport than the British were, and Germany itself was far less well-prepared for gas attacks than the British Isles were. Moreover [[PragmaticVillainy British retaliation-in-kind upon German civilians would have made The Party very unpopular]].
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British wartime propaganda only partially succeeded in channelling the hatred and strife of Britain's Class Warfare outward. There were a number of early cock-ups, with the Evacuation in particular resulting in a distinct flare-up as working class children (and the mothers of the very youngest) were sent to live with middle- and upper-class families. Many of these families found that the demands of feeding their new tenants meant that they were unable to eat the kind and quality of food they were used to. Others simply disliked sharing their homes with such 'rude' and 'common' people. The experience as a whole seems to have reinforced rather than break down class prejudice, and later Evacuations strove to match children with families of similar socio-economic status wherever possible to minimise inter-class interaction.
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For many Britons, in particular the young ones, it was their first exposure to another culture. Some things, like American music and American egalitarianism were to have significant influence on postwar life. (But not, as the legends would have it, baseball, which was actually more popular in interwar Britain than it is today.) It was also their first exposure to some less welcome things, like overt racial segregation and sexually transmitted diseases. For the Americans it was a pleasant respite or interlude between or before the unpleasant realities of combat, and a useful introduction to the people they'd been sent to help. Nor was the exchange entirely one-way, as tens of thousands of Royal Navy, Royal Air Force, and Fleet Air Arm personnel were sent "stateside" for training, taking advantage of America's weather and wide-open (and enemy free) skies and harbours.
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Once France fell the eyes of the Nazi War Mare-with-panje-cart[[note]] 'War Machine' is the popular term, but the horse was just as if not more important to the German military than was the steam-locomotive. Germany invaded the Soviet Union with 120,000 automobiles and more than ''600,000'' horses. Even the British had a more motorised (proportionally) military force than Germany did throughout the war despite their poverty and second-fiddle-to-the-USA status [[/note]] turned to Italy's new enemy of Greece, the ally-turned enemy of Yugoslavia (which had suffered a British-backed coup), and Britain itself. After Dunkirk the British army was in tatters, although if it had failed to evacuate as many troops from France things would have been even worse. During the first year of the battle of Britain the only adequately-armed (wih machine guns, mortars, artillery, trucks, and radios) division in Britain was Canadian, the British forces having abandoned eight divisions' (120,000 combat troops) worth of heavy-weapons and machinery in the retreat. A galling and at the time much-noted consequence was that the lorries and motor vehicles, as well as some tanks abandoned in France, were refurbished and used to equip German 'third-rate' and anti-partisan units. Many saw action as far as Belgrade and Minsk under their new drivers (because they used such unorthodox parts and were worse than useless against contemporary Soviet armoured vehicles, they were used to massacre civilians and kill partisans). When the cream of the Wehrmacht's armoured forces were destroyed in the western Ukraine in 1943-44, some of these British tanks were actually put back into front-line usage... to little effect.

If Germany had taken the British Isles then an Allied invasion of Europe would have had to come through the Mediterranean, which would have made things rather bloody what with the poor infrastructure and all the hills and mountains. However, the prospects of Germany successfully invading and conquering Britain were non-existent - not that this was known by the people of Britain at the time. Indeed, ''Mass Observation''-magazine reports of the time show that the 'middle classes' (rich people, basically) thought that invasion and defeat was more likely than poorer people; 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing', as they say, and this is reflected in their generally lower morale throughout the war.

Germany decided that in order to invade it needed Total Air Superiority, to prevent the RAF and the Royal Navy from sending their invasion fleet down to the bottom of the English Channel. And so the campaign against the RAF began.

(This would have been very difficult. Britain could replace planes and pilots faster than Germany could, with the added bonus that an RAF pilot who bailed out could be returned to the fray, whereas a Luftwaffe one was permanently lost to the Germans. Even if the Luftwaffe had gained aerial superiority, it would have been likely to be a fleeting victory and its capacity for attacking the Royal Navy was totally abysmal. However, the disabling of runways (by making large holes in them with bombs, for example) could easily have led to a downward spiral: fewer runways means fewer planes in the air, meaning more bombers get through to destroy runways, until you run out of runways and the remaining planes start getting destroyed on the ground.)

Britain had a few tricks up its sleeve. One of these their large and relatively advanced CHAIN HOME network of long frequency RDF ("Radio Distance Finding") stations - a technology better known today by the American acronym RADAR ([=RAdio=] Detection And Ranging).[[note]] The RDF designation was specifically chosen prewar to disguise their intentions as was already in common use for "radio direction finding. [[/note]] While most of the world's military powers, such as France and the USSR, had just a few sets Britain had invested in creating several dozen. These gave them near-total coverage of the eastern approaches to their entire (admittedly small) country. Though primitive, these early long-wave stations had more than twice the detection range as sound detecting devices and could also determine range and altitude with a fair degree of accuracy, something no sound-based device could do.[[note]] The
CHAIN HOME stations were backed by an extensive network of ground observers equipped with optical tracking equipment and later reinforced by a high-frequency radar network called CHAIN HOME LOW that covered the low altitudes that CHAIN HOME couldn't see.[[/note]] But even more important than the radar network was the extremely sophisticated intelligence system that forwarded information from the radar stations (and an even larger network of ground observers) to "Sector Stations" where it was collate and analyzed before being forwarded it to the central station at Bentley Priory where all available information was plotted on large maps. This allowed the RAF manage their resources [[IncrediblyLamePun "on the fly"]] and pick-and-choose which forces to engage, ensuring lower losses and good odds in every engagement. The Germans never even conceived of anything anywhere near as sophisticated and it was only matched by the US Navy's "Big Blue Blanket" Combat Information Centers in the final months of the war.

The pride of the Royal Air Force was the [[CoolPlane Supermarine Spitfire]], indisputably the best British fighter of the war, and more than a match for the German Messerschmitt 109. While media both at the time and since focused on the Spitfire, the more numerous fighter was the Hawker Hurricane - not as fast and agile as the Spitfire, but rugged, dependable and just as loved by its pilots. In a case of BoringYetPractical, the Hurricane's stability in flight, which made it less suited for dogfighting, made it far more capable when it came to the business of taking on German bombers; the Spitfires drew the glory, ideally keeping the German fighter escorts occupied, but the Hurricanes almost certainly saved more lives on the ground.

The idea was to flatten the cities, wreck the infrastructure and demoralise the people. Despite [[BlitzEvacuees creating plot fodder for a generation of childrens' books,]] it didn't really work. While the Blitz was the lowest point of British public support for the war before 1944-45, which was when the war first became unwanted by a majority of citizens, it was also a high point of anti-German hatred. Every night the people of major cities on the South coast (and elsewhere) were bombed, and in the immediate aftermath of losing family members and homes the universal reaction was despair and skepticism of ultimate victory. That said, the people who had not actually lost anything themselves generally got over the initial shock very quickly. Moreover in the months and weeks, or even days, following personal loss many people were filled with extraordinary bloodlust and hatred for Germans. "We are all in this together" was the official line that smoothed over these very different and changing attitudes: if your shop-front was blown in you swept up the glass and hung a "[[GallowsHumor more open than usual]]" sign on the door frame, if half your factory was flattened you put up tarpaulins and carried on working in the other half.

Despite all the destruction deaths and wounds were not as high as expected, mostly because pre-war projections for this kind of attack bordered on the insanely fatalistic. Most families with a garden had an Anderson shelter, a mostly underground bomb shelter. In London, despite instructions to the contrary, people used UsefulNotes/TheLondonUnderground as a shelter, and seeing as you could buy a platform ticket and stay as long as you liked anyway, no one could do anything about it. People without bomb shelters were told to crouch under the table.

Plymouth was bombed so thoroughly that it was said that if Sir Francis Drake (the guy who fought the Spanish Armada) had sailed into harbour and was told that the city was destroyed he would look over the remnants and say "look like it is all here to me." The above quote means "From the ashes, we will rise." And they did.

One of the most famous raids was on the industrial city Coventry on 14 November 1940, which killed at least 568 people and devastated much of the city, including destroying the ancient cathedral. The common theory is that ULTRA decrypts identified Coventry as a target, but the city could not be warned without alerting the Germans that the British were reading their messages, so the bombing was allowed to occur. RV Jones, a wartime scientist, however, says that the relevant message was not decrypted in time. He also pointed out that the Germans were using radio navigation beacons to find their targets, and on 14 November the British jammers were set to the wrong frequency and did precisely nothing.

A quick note on the ''Series/DoctorWho'' example referenced -- the gas masks in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS27E9TheEmptyChild "The Empty Child"]]/[[Recap/DoctorWhoS27E10TheDoctorDances "The Doctor Dances"]] are historically inaccurate, as civilian masks had only a single visor in the adult version. These were made for the show -- masks for the period have asbestos in.

However, the semi-official "soldiers' shows" which evolved on an ad-hoc basis as local entertainment for the troops, in which talented servicemen performed to entertain their mates and keep morale up, spawned an entire generation of talent who after demob became the mainstays of British entertainment until superceded in the 1960's and 1970's by the ''Creator/MontyPython'' generation. Artistes who honed their craft on their mates included Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers, Tommy Cooper, Norman Vaughan, and many others. ''Radio/TheGoonShow'', cited as a seminal influence on later British comedy, had its origins in UsefulNotes/WW2 as a satirical reaction to the petty indignities and Colonel-Blimp-like leadership imposed by the armed forces

Music wise, the era is remembered for the GlamorousWartimeSinger Music/VeraLynn, aka "The Forces' Sweetheart", who is still alive today, although long retired from singing. "We'll Meet Again" or "The White Cliffs of Dover" is a StandardSnippet for a British war movie. The period was also enriched by the more proletarian Gracie Fields, a [[OOpNorth northern]] chanteuse who could be described as the Hurricane to Dame Vera's Spitfire. Buck-toothed comedian and ukelele-accompanied singer George Formby is also remembered with great affection.

Accidents and blunders were a common occurrence. They ranged from the daft to the downright tragic. One man ended up killing his wife while cleaning his rifle in the kitchen. Another, very young soldier accidentally killed a boy his own age on while supervising a factory. He rode up on his bicycle and the soldier told him to stop, believing he was a spy. It turned he was just there because he liked to watch them work inside the factory, and that he didn't stop because he was deaf and that he didn't hear the private's orders. The [[FromBadToWorse worst]] part of it was that he had aimed for the bicycle wheel because he had no intention of killing him, but the bullet riccocheted up from the ground and hit the boy in the back.

Recognizing their distinct population disadvantage against the Axis Powers, the UK moved as quickly as possible to full military and industrial mobilization, something the FascistButInefficient Germans failed to achieve until 1943, the Japanese until 1944 and the Italians never did (and even then women were distinctly underrepresented in the German armed forces, handicapped as they were by a fundamentally reactionary political philosphy.) By contrast, women had been serving inl the Royal Air Force since the 1920s and the Army and Royal Navy since 1938 and the British made full use of as many women as possible in administrative and support positions. Initially it was done primarily in the name of freeing men to fight, but it soon became apparent that these women had undeveloped talents and important skills to contribute, and an entire generation of young women (including the future Queen Elizabeth II) learned to drive as part of the war effort.

In addition to driving trucks and ambulances, women served vitally important roles in the data collection and analysis efforts which made the British war effort so effective. Britain's highly sophisticated antiaircraft defense network and the Royal Navy's western ocean frontier equivalent were staffed primarily by members of the Women's Auxiliary Air Service and Women's Royal Naval Service. England's success in both the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic depended largely on the efforts of hundreds of women who processed, analyzed, and plotted incoming reports and then transmitted the resulting orders back down to the sea and air defenses. The famous codebreakers at Bletchly Park were largely women as well. A less bellicose but no less important organization was the Women's Land Army, which recruited young women to provide agricultural labor in place of the young men called to the colours.

Britain's full mobilization also extended to the arts and sciences. Unlike FascistButInefficient Germany, where the research efforts were often uncoordinated and scattered amongst various competing interests, England mobilized Academia for the duration. Their first task, a comprehensive review of old lab notebooks to see if anything useful had been overlooked, produced penicilin -- the original experiment being written off in the 1920s as a failure. Anything promising was promptly re-investigated; Promising research they lacked the time or resources to follow up on was sent to the United States -- national survival trumping national interest for the duration. The brilliant codebreakers at Bletchley Park are justly famous: less well known but no less important werel the brilliant scientists of the Meteorological Office, whose weather forecasting gave the Western Allies a huge advantage throughout the entire war. Their crowning achievement came when they identified the narrow lull between two storm fronts that allowed the D-Day landings to proceed. Radar was rapidly developed from meter to centimeter and ultimately millimeter bands, allowing allied aircraft to go from spotting submarines to periscopes, ASDIC (soon re-christened with the more descriptive acronym [=SONAR=]) installations were made better, smaller, and more reliable. A huge range of weapons, from effective to wacky, were designed and tested. One of the best examples came shortly after D-Day, when it was found that the dust from dirt airfields in France was damaging the powerful Napier Sabre engines on Hawker Typhoon fighter bombers, a collection of aerodymamicists and engineers, designed, tested, and fielded an effective cyclonic air filter in just 24 hours. But perhaps their greatest achievement was the "Wizard War", where British radio and radar specialists engaged their German counterparts in an ever-escalating battle of spoofing, jamming, counter-jamming and other electronic countermeasures and soundly defeated them at virtually every turn.

For many Britons, in particular the young ones, it was their first exposure to another culture. Some things, like American music and American egalitarianism were to have significant influence on postwar life. (But not, as the legends would have it, baseball, which was actually more popular in interwar Britain than it is today.) It was also their first exposure to some less welcome things, like overt racial segregation and sexually transmitted diseases. For the Americans it was a pleasant respite or interlude between or before the unpleasant realities of combat, and a useful introduction to the people they'd been sent to help. Nor was the exchange entirely one-way, as tens of thousands of Royal Navy, Royal Air Force, and Fleet Air Arm personnel were sent "stateside" for training, taking advantage of America's weather and wide-open (and enemy free) skies and harbors.

For the most part people were got along well despite the inevitable misunderstandings, though you would think it was all sunshine and rainbows from the British and American propaganda of the times. Much as you'd expect, there were extra-marital affairs and children born out of wedlock as women succumbed to the attentions of the men they had available while their own served overseas. The Americans also offered serious competition for unattached women, because they were sharply dressed, comparatively well paid, had hundreds of pilots (and even some fighter pilots!) among them, and had access to otherwise unobtainable goods like chocolate and nylon stockings through the vast American supply system. Not all these relationships were temporary, with a fair few lifelong friendships and enough marriages that the term "war bride" became prominent in the postwar American and Canadian Lexicon. In the end, none of the fuss caused by the Americans was insurmountable and not everyone--particularly the children--was glad to see them go.

Vergeltungswaffe in German. After the battle of Britain was won as a resounding victory for the British and the war had turned against Germany, Hitler decided he needed a miracle weapon to win. In that at least, he was right. There are three things that were called Vergeltungswaffe.

They could be shot down by radar-guided anti-aircraft fire using proximity fuses or intercepted by fighters, with one Spitfire pilot reportedly flipping one over with his wing, though reports of this becoming a standard tactic were greatly exaggerated.[[labelnote:*]] This is referenced in ''Series/TheUnit'', when Bob tries it on a plane carrying a chemical weapon. It doesn't work.[[/labelnote]] Eventually London was protected by a nearly impenetrable three-ring defense, with an outer ring of the fastest long-range fighters (Tempests and Mustangs) an middle ring of short ranged Spitfires and and inner ring of AA guns that collectively accounted for nearly 80% of the V1s launched towards the end of the campaign.

The V-2 was too scarce, too small and / or too inaccurate.

** It was discovered after the war that Double Cross had been so good at its job that ''every single German agent in Britain'' had been turned. On the other hand, they also discovered - rather later on - that a British Soviet agent, Anthony Blunt of the Cambridge spy ring, had actually worked as the personal assistant to Guy Liddell, one of the key players in the Double Cross System; everything the British were doing to feed the Germans innacurate information was being reported to Moscow, and could potentially have fallen into German hands as a result. Tar Robertson, another key player in the Committee, disliked Blunt intensely - but due to a touch of homophobia on Robertson's part, and not because he suspected Blunt was a spy.

* The [[UsefulNotes/{{SOE}} Special Operations Executive]], created by Churchill and part set up by Chamberlain while he was in the war cabinet, with the mandate to "Set Europe Ablaze" with every last act of sabotage and dirty trickery that the trainers could think of. Trained and dropped spies over Europe to help the resistance groups, ordinary men and women risking life and limb sending secrets back the British Government. They were also responsible for Operation ANTHROPOID, training and inserting the two Czechoslovakian nationals who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SS and major architect of the Holocaust. We won't know the full story of what they did and where until after all of their agents are dead as the files are sealed until then.

The Blitz effectively ended around 16 May 1941, when Hitler transferred most of his bombers in France to the Eastern Front in preparation for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR. The General Staff had told him - some of them lying through their teeth but, worse still, most really believing it - the Soviet Union would be defeated in two weeks. In the third week the German Army's reserves could be demobilised, halving the size of the army overnight, and the Soviet Union's vast material wealth would be available for use against Britain. Of course, history took a different course, almost entirely because invading Russia successfully is only slightly more difficult than walking to Pluto -- or, as the world found out, achieving total air superiority over Great Britain [[WhatAnIdiot without having a real plan how to do that or sticking to it]]. Germans or no, the whole war went down about as well as a plan dreamt up and carried out by a bunch of infighting genocidal racist conspiracy-theorists would have been expected to.