THE 80th anniversary of VE Day marks a triumph forged not by generals or politicians alone, but by the sweat and sacrifice of Britain’s working class. This was a total war — a conflict won through the collective muscle of munitions workers, the ingenuity of engineers, and the unbreakable spirit of communities under bombardment.

Women stepped into factories and fields, trade unions became the backbone of production, and for the first time ever, the state worked for the people rather than against them. Yet today’s sterile commemorations tell a different story — governments now mark the peace by bombing Damascus or Yemen while the public is reduced to a passive sideshow. With eastern Europe again a battleground, defending the true history of this struggle has never been more vital.

The Foundations of Resistance

The war effort didn’t begin in 1939 — it was built on the ashes of the 1930s. Memories of hunger marches and Means Testing of households for eligibility for unemployment relief fuelled a determination that this war would not be like the last.

The fight against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts had already steeled working-class neighbourhoods against fascism’s appeal. When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and Hitler bombed Guernica, Britain’s unemployed dockers and factory workers understood a fight to save the peace, and if necessary make war — long before Churchill did.

Chamberlain’s betrayal at Munich wasn’t just a diplomatic failure; it was proof that the old elite would rather bargain with fascists than arm the Spanish Republic.

The Communist Party, despite early debates over the war’s character, became a relentless anti-fascist force. Its members — many fresh from the International Brigades — brought battlefield discipline to the Home Guard and shop floors.

Meanwhile, the ruling class’s hypocrisy was laid bare. Lord Halifax, soon to be foreign secretary, wrote privately of admiring Hitler’s “achievement” in crushing communism — even as the Gestapo’s terror became impossible to ignore. When war came, it was the left, not the fascists, the state initially feared, but this would change. The Daily Worker was banned, yet it was Mosley who was locked up — a telling shift as the threat moved from domestic subversion to outright invasion.

The War Machine’s Unsung Engineers

The Blitz didn’t just level cities — it levelled class barriers. Middle-class car owners queued for buses alongside cleaners; aristocrats grumbled as Bevin’s ministry fixed rents and profits.

In Coventry, union leader Jack Jones — a veteran of the Spanish Civil War — became Churchill’s eyes and ears, relaying front-line production reports via a network of bicycle-riding shop stewards. The Home Guard, often mocked as “Dad’s Army,” was in reality a people’s militia, its best units trained by communists who’d faced Franco’s tanks.

This was a glimpse of socialism in everything but name. The Excess Profits Tax clawed back wartime profiteering at 100 per cent. Factories became democracies, with joint production committees giving workers control over hiring and safety.

Scientists like JD Bernal, who designed the D-Day “mulbbery” harbours, and JBS Haldane, pioneer of air-raid shelters, became folk heroes by treating workers as collaborators, not cogs. For the first time, miners had onsite nurses, and factory women got paid holidays.

The 1944 Education Act and Beveridge Report weren’t gifts from above — they were wrested from a state that feared the backlash if it didn’t deliver. Bevin’s first act as Minister for Labour and National Service was to abolish the Means Test.

The state and shopfloor citizens
Ministries began to use planning in the deployment of labour, use of factory space, supply of raw materials, fuel and foodstuffs.

These were overseen by unions in joint production committees. Around two out of every seven houses in Britain suffered war damage. In Bermondsey, only four out of every hundred emerged untouched. By June 1941, two and a half million people were homeless and on the move. All citizens aged 18-60 performed some sort of national service.

A third of this 23 million were women. It gave an irreversible shift to working-class family and civic life and impacted on union membership and priorities. Unions lobbied for equal pay. Working-class life was changing.

The first period of war was, following the “phoney war,” one of deep defence and retreat. Later, after victory at Stalingrad and in the desert war at El Alamein (November 1942), the people united, brought their socialistic instinct to the struggle and began the most profound transformation of state power thus far.

It is in this transformation that the idea of a welfare state was forged. The state was perceived as more modern, effective and efficient over the profiteering and dog-eat-dog approach of the capitalist class.

It also asserted a moral superiority of collectivism over individualism. Neighbours shared tools and even suits in which to get married. Popular campaigns emerged, “A saucepan for Spitfires,” “Make do and mend” became collective expressions, but also illustrative of the genius of ordinary people, once their latent power was unleashed. What emerged was what one writer has defined as “shop floor citizens.”

Unions and the impact of mass planning
With officials away at war, unions were lay-led. They now included membership and organisation in entire new industries such as chemicals, rubber and plastics. The union-policed training agency used Essential Works Orders to drive up the conditions of 8.5 million workers in 67,000 ordinance establishments. White collar workers, especially those in the growing science industry, and also agricultural workers gained new force as the national spirit of sacrifice, reduced the blue and white collar and rural/urban divides.

Scientists played an important role in combatting disease. Despite the damage to sewers resulting from bombing, typhoid was avoided. National immunisation programmes against diphtheria were rolled out. Milk was given to infants, fortified with vitamins.

The Communist Party moved from a policy of a united front, to a popular front, then a national front, in just a decade filling Trafalgar Square and the biggest auditoria in the land with calls for a Second Front.

Churchill tried to wriggle out of his commitment to opening a western front in support of the Soviet Army, but popular campaigning made this impossible. The class struggle was far from over and trade unionists fought unsuccessfully to have the Trade Disputes and Trades Union Act 1927 abolished. This Act was especially despised in the mining areas.

Taking in all these factors in an objective way it is not difficult to see how Labour won the general election on Thursday July 5 1945.

No-one under 31 had ever voted in an election before and the experience, expectation and the labour movement clout of this generation was about to radically change Britain. Both Labour and the Communist Party became dominated by a new generation of young engineers and miners and returning NCOs.

1945: The Promise and the Betrayal

Labour’s landslide was no accident. Returning soldiers, who’d crossed deserts and liberated camps, weren’t going back to slums. The NHS, nationalised mines, and the Catering Wages Act — which ended near-slave labour in stately homes — were victories.

But the ruling class hadn’t vanished. They fought for every inch of social territory: watering down nationalisation and blocking worker control. Initiatives such as the establishment of a National Housing Scheme were stymied. Some were still-born as with the National Hire Purchase Scheme.

The school leaving age was raised to 15 and the pension age lowered. Workers were able to make and achieve important demands such as an end to Compulsory Wage Arbitration.

Victory in Europe came in May 1945 and further afield by August. The TUC of that year put out a call to unite the world’s trade unionists into a world federation. This was achieved in October. In the same month the United Nations was formed. In November the Nuremberg Trials began. In 1946 the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act was passed. And despite the onset of the Cold War, the NHS was formed in 1948. Malnutrition was ended.

More Britons may have died in World War I, but the economic damage was far greater in World War II. Two great British armies took the field in different ways during WWII.

The first fought abroad, its regiments, its arctic convoys covered in glory for their role in the refusal to succumb to invasion and the later defeat of Hitler.

But alongside them was the great army of organised labour, transformed and fighting for war production and a new society.

Phil Katz is author of author of Freedom From Tyranny — the war against fascism and historical revisionism.