Britain in 1939 and 1940 really thought they were going to lose the war. It looked like they were going to lose. There was bombing every day, and people were literally starving.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy.
We... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children.
If you were born in Britain after World War II, you see a continuous atmosphere of decline, moral and economic and political.
The key lesson of the 1930s is that appeasement leads directly to war.
The world probably wishes that Great Britain had rebuilt its defenses and stopped Germany from reoccupying the Rhineland in 1936.
It all went back to problems we had talked about before, you know, such as the British not believing in formation bombing and not believing in daytime bombing.
World War II... did not happen to everyone, but it happened to most. There were people from Germany who were throwing bombs at us.
Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.
Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.
World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.