Britain after the war

Britain played a major role in the Allied victory, though it was less important than either that of Russia, with her huge armed forces, or the United States, with her industrial resources. However, given that Britain is a much smaller country, the cost to Britain in terms of losses and expense was tremendous. Britain was bankrupted by the war and the first thing the new Labour government had to do was borrow £1 billion from the United States (though the British asked for £1.5 billion). Fortunately for Britain, the other states of Europe - Germany, France and Italy - were even more severely affected by the war and so Britain's weak economic state was not immediately obvious. Indeed, she managed to increase exports by 75 per cent from the 1939 figure. She developed her own atomic bomb in 1952, three years after the Russians, and until 1960 only the United States, Russia and Britain had this weapon.

Britain loses power

All this helped to conceal from the British people and the world that Britain was really no longer a great world power. From 1945 until the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 two countries were dominant: the United States and the Soviet Union (Russia). Britain, despite being on the winning side, had really lost a great deal as a result of the war. Within twenty years of the end of the war, the British Empire had been broken up and today Britain ranks as only the world's fifth richest nation - behind the United States, Japan, Germany and France.

Neil Demarco: The era of the Second World War; Oxford University Press, 1993/2000, page 77 f.