Britain At War In Colour

I've been watching a remarkable DVD of colour documentary footage from the Second World War, called Britain At War In Colour. The most extraordinary sequences are not those of the actual fighting, but of British cities, towns and country places in wartime. One can actually gain a sense of what it felt like to live in Britain during those years: the shots of street scenes (such as I remember from my own childhood only five or six years later) and countryside fairs, with "Holiday At Home" signs, and the children, many pale and undernourished, yet cared for. The films, many recorded by amateurs, show a society deeply unsettled and anxious, plagued by food shortages and fears of bombing and invasion, yet cohering around a sense of national identity that was really nothing more nor less than a sense of being human. These sequences go a long way to counter the commonly accepted cliches about Britain - the "stiff upper lip" and so on - for one can see just from the expressions on faces in the street that there was no certainty the war would be won, and the material hardship and ever-present threat and reality of cataclysmic violence made it hard to go on.

Watching these films, which among other things show U.S. service personnel in London, and British fighter pilots being trained at airbases in the United States, I became more and more aware of the acute differences between Britain and the United States: though America made a great contribution to the defeat of Nazism, America did not suffer internally as a country in the way that Britain did. In spite of all the sacrifices made by U.S. forces during the war and after, the American people still don't really know what it means to encounter and fight evil as a nation.