“Pat rewrites history again. Britain didn’t lose her empire because of the world war.”
Well, actually, she did. Britain went bankrupt during WW II... they spent the entire treasury on the war effort, including lend-lease. You simply can’t hold an empire together when you can’t even protect your capital from getting bombed.
But.... the war simply hastened an inevitable process, I think. Even if WW II had never happened, Britain’s territories were already moving for independence. Before Hitler became a threat, Churchill was most famous for ranting about the threat of India breaking away from the Empire in Parliament.
WW 1 made the end of the Empire inevitable, because that’s the war that spawned all the major national independence movements. Even without WW II, the British Empire, at best, would have slowly died away. WW II just accelerated the process.
Woodrow Wilson put two words out and the Nationalists believed him. Those two words are dogging us to this day: self determination.