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*How the !$^&* did these people ever survive the Blitz?
Oh, that was their grandparents. The last British generation with brains, guts, and faith. *

That generation really had no choice—remember, we had to send them guns because they literally were disarmed. One could posit that they only survived WW2 because of Hitler’s foolish choices. If he had sent the tanks onto Dunkirk instead of relying on Goering, the story might have ended differently.

The last truly brave generation the British seemed to have was slaughtered en masse in Flanders. After that, it looks to have all gone downhill.

Many of the same British generation that survived WWI were in their 40s and 50s when the German bombs began falling on London and environs. They endured hardships that few of their modern counterparts could imagine, beginning with the economic dislocations of the 1930s, the shortages and rationing that came with war (again), the need to send their children to the countryside to escape the Luftwaffe and the rockets, none knowing when or if they'd ever see each other again.

Having grown up in America, I had only a tenuous idea of what it meant to be British (or Dutch, Belgian or French) during the war. My education was significantly advanced when I spent time abroad in the 70s and had occasion to speak with people who lived through it, and visited some of those cemeteries whose marble stones seem to stretch into infinity. And standing in the middle of Coventry Cathedral, alone on a Sunday morning, looking up at the sky... a very eerie and quiet moment.

My father always said that what was once meant by "Europe" truly died during World War I. The Brits of that generation were decimated, of course, but the French: they were truly finished off. After the Napoleonic Wars and the Franco-Prussian War, a whole surviving generation of young men rushed headlong into German machine guns and artillery fire shouting "Elan!" to the last man.