‘The Fight at Odds’: Revelation, Memorialisation, 1945–1965

Abstract

Britain’s international and imperial standing during the early post-war years underwent dramatic change, American and Soviet dominance of a devastated Europe reinforced through both military and economic realities (see Appendix 8). Struggling with the enormous burden of war reparations, rationing, the need to replace both housing and infrastructure and also make good on wartime socialist promises — ‘what we are fighting for’ — of better education, health and welfare provision, it was inevitable that despite being on the winning side, the peace would appear gloomily pessimistic to many.¹ Churchill had reinforced this on 5 March 1946 with his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech about the evolving Soviet threat, a hardly-welcome development after six years of war when the costs of maintaining a vast, jet-equipped RAF, standing army and navy to counter this new menace were clearly unsustainable into the medium term.²