The Virus War Versus WW2

War On The Virus Versus WW2

It’s been said that we are at war with the virus so I‘ve been playing around wirth the idea of an anology between that and WW2, to see how far the similarities go. Probably too much time on my hands but…...…………….

The lead up to and early days of WW2 were characterised by delay, indecision, unpreparedness and no little incompetence. Forewarning? There were plenty of warning voices in the UK from 1936 onwards and a report recently released shows that the current government knew in 2017, through Exercise Cygnus; it would be unprepared for a future virus. SARS a dozen years ago demonstrated the threat yet the government continued to make cuts to the NHS. An emergency load on medical services occurs in both cases so the analogy holds in all these aspects.

Leadership? Johnson versus Chamberlain? There’s little correspondence other than the indecision and lack of preparedness. Johnson would doubtless like to cast himself in the rôle of Churchill but there’s little correspondence there either. In WW2 we had a coalition cabinet to bring the country together. Now? Dream on. There’s no conscription now but why should there be? There’s no obvious reason but the government has the power to order it if manpower is short and critically needed for whatever. However there has been a successful call for volunteers and the army has been called in in both cases, obviously in the former.

Bomb shelters? Those are now people’s houses. Food shortages in both cases, caused by German U-boats formerly and self-imposed by greedy shoppers now. Air raid wardens? Those are now the police or drones.

Truth in the media as the first casualty of war/ Truth in the mdeia was already a casualty before the current crisis started but is certainly a casualty in both cases.

Isolation? Britain was not alone in 1939, as some like to suggest, unless you discount Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and an empire that covered a quarter of the globe. It need not be alone now but appears to want to be, refusing to join in cooperative initiatives in Europe. Lock-down/up? In the current case it is jock-down; in the former quite a lot, mostly toffs, were locked up.

There is one aspect in which the analogy does not hold up at all. It would be important, when WW2 ended, to evaluate the state of the economy and repair it; but nobody paid any attention to that during the war, the all-important goal was to win it. In this virus war, the goal of winning seems somewhat tempered by considerations of the economy in government pronouncements. After WW2 the UK had the most radical socialist government it has ever had, one which spawned the NHS. Does that come into the analogy?

Key moments? It’s probably too early for those in the current case but an El Alamein moment could be round the corner. A new general and far superior resources? If only…………….

Commentary

I passed this analogy analogy through my son and he made two comments I thought interesting. One was with respect to unpreparedness and forewarnings and the other with respect to how similar communities were then and now.

Thz first comment was words to the effect of “how much of what followed could have been known without hindsight?”. It’s a good question with a simple but simplistic answer: nothing. Nobody can be certain they know anything about future events. Indeed, a good way to inhibit any discussion of the future is to counter any assertion with “but you can’t be certain”. Another oft-discussed imponderable, motivation, can be treated in the same way. And yet intelligent people continue to discuss both. There are many situations, particularly in a war, when it makes sense, indeed can even be imperative, to put together all the known information and assess the probability of future events. Much the same goes for motivation. The important point here is to look at all the information, not just at isolated events. There is considerable documentary evidence that many people in Germany in the 1930s were uneasy at what Hitler was doing but found convenient reasons to excuse individual events. Nobody wants to forecast doom and few wanted to try to create a picture on a canvas of all the events. That was so then and seems so today. I think it very likely that this natural reaction contributed to Britain’s unpreparedness in 1939 but have no idea if, ot to what extent; it has shaped unpreparedness for the virus war. Nobody could know for certain that a new vrus would appear but the possibility was assessed and it was apparently decided neither to take action nor to hedge bets. Should bets have been hedged? That will be a matter of opinion.

My son’s second comment, on similarities or otherwise between communities now and then is also obviously relevant. Differences in life-style abound but but can probably mostly be set aside for the purposes of this exercise. Two pertinent key differences stand out to me: political divisions and closeness within neighbourhoods.

In the 1930s Britain was quite divided politically. The decade had started with a coalition government which was replaced by a Conservative government and the Communist party and the Fascist parties were stronger than at any time before or after. The primary causes of these divisions were the economic depression and attitudes towards Hitler. In the lead up to the virus war Britain had around 4 million worhers earning below the living wage and was split in two over attitudes to Europe. Soon after the outbreak of WW2 a coalition government was formed which helped to unite the country and ensure all were pulling in the same direction. In the virus war, there has been no similar rapprochement.

The difference in communities that strikes me is again essentially one of rapprochement and also of local support. Extended families tended to live very much closer then and neighbourhoods tended to be much closer knit, partly perhaps because far fewer women had salaried work. An important result of this was that there was effectively a strong social support network in most neighbourhoods. There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence for the strength of community spirit then. By the advent of the 21^st century most of the basis for this had disappeared as extended families scattered around the globe and more people travelled further to work. In the virus war, panic buying in UK supermarkets is evidence of the absence of community spirit. Mmany philanthropic people are trying to put together local support groups to fill this gap but a significant difference in the strength of local support seems likely to remain. Certainly there seems little very evidence of any general communal spirit of togetherness.

A final point, a question that children will ask in the future. What did you do in the virus war, mummy/daddy?