Photograph from Shropshire.

[Roger Payne]

Agreed, & of course, many Britons also felt bitter about British leadership failure at Singapore.

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[Surpmil]

Agreed, & of course, many Britons also felt bitter about British leadership failure at Singapore.

The chickens of Loos, the Somme, Passchendaele and the rest came home to roost in WWII. A nation's biological resources are a fixed quantity, and when they are squandered past a certain point the damage often is irreparable.

It has been said that nations last as long as their top soils; they also last as long as their birthrates. Kitchener typified the idiocy of the time when he blithely remarked that he could easily replace the 7000+ men and 700-odd(?) officers lost for nothing at first Loos.

Had he and his ilk the wits he might have remembered that each one of those men was a thread that stretched over countless generations, a thread that out of hundreds of others had survived unbroken to that day, and once cut off there is no knitting it back together. Shells and guns can be made to order, men cannot.

The Spartans IIRC did not allow a man into battle until he had at least two sons alive, albeit children. For all the classics read at public schools, this lesson was apparently forgotten.

F.M. Dill remarked in 1940 or 41 that most of the senior officers he had at his disposal were simply unfit for their positions, but he had no one else! Whether he included himself in that we are not told. Hence the Can-Loan officers and other such programs, though of course those were only junior officers.

The moral(e) decline in Britain post-WWI can be laid largely at the door of the simple demographic decline - as it can be in the Commonwealth at large. WWII was another nail in the coffin. Not for nothing did the then Japanese PM gloat in 1914: "This is the end of Europe". When a nation or a sports team or a company loses too many of its best people the result is inevitable, unless extraordinary measures are taken.

As for the Japanese, they chose their moment to pull the lion's tail while he was busy elsewhere. One has to look at these things through the lens of the times, not retrospectively. The Japanese invaded China in 1937 and never did conquer the entire country. It was well withing living memory when a puny expeditionary force had taken Peking during the "Boxer Rebelliion", but the Japanese could not??

The Soviets gave them a bloody nose at Nomonhan in 1939 and the world took note of that, and from a Red Army which was in the throes of being purged by Stalin's NKVD. The next year what seemed to be the same Red Army was humbled by the Finns. Naturally Japan's military reputation suffered severely as a result: lower than the Soviets who are lower than the Finns, who "are certainly no better than us British/French etc."

So the duffers tended to be sent to the Far East where climate, comfort and imperial power served to induce even more complacency. Percival seems to have had some sort of mental-medical problem as he served quite effectively in Ireland in 1920-21, but had become a complete "wet" by 1942. Why naval officers should be automatically court-martialled for the loss of their ships, but army officers let off scot-free for their failures, I've never understood!

What was needed as Churchill later said of the North African campaign, was "a field court martial and a firing squad". Had he sent Ironside out there things might have been very different.