Putting Off Our Finest Hour

Historiographic indignation levels are set to rise as the Heathen Chinee attempt to rewrite the history of the Battle of Britain by relocating the war's beginning to when the fighting started. A British historian, whose book The Second World War begins with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, said that the Heathen Chinee were trying to "reverse the recent tide of historiography" by claiming that the Second World War began with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. A Beijing historian commented that the revision was justified in terms of mere accuracy, but that the Communist Party is likely to be trying for a propaganda effect. This is, of course, all quite alien to the far more objective and sensible British method of history, where stout chaps do sterling deeds, where the odd famine or genocide is barely worth mentioning and is in any case compensated by some dashed fine railways, and where the role of the Heathen Chinee in the Second World War is even more minor and obscure than that of the USSR.