Occupied Britain
By Interesting post and thread at Crooked Timber on the idea of a Nazi occupied Britain, based on an interesting article in the Guardian.
On the one hand, it’s important to note that French behavior wasn’t all that atypical of countries occupied by Nazi Germany in World War II. If the English Channel had not existed, Germany would undoubtedly have successfully conquered Great Britain and installed some sort of collaborationist regime. The French weren’t cheese-eating surrender monkeys so much as they were cursed by geography. On the other side of the continent, Russia prevailed over Germany only by giving up several France-sized chunks of territory. The French military defeat in 1940 was just that; a military defeat. All it revealed was that Germany had a more potent army and better intelligence than the French, and neither of these is, particularly, a moral or cultural failing.
However, I am inclined to think that Vichy was unusually poisonous for a collaborationist regime. Although fascist groups existed in Britain, I don’t believe that they ever had the strength that the right was able to claim in France. The Third Republic was a bit of a mess by 1940, riven by factions which had ceased to believe that they could work with the other side. The defeat of France by Germany was taken as a signal by the right wing factions that the left had finally led France to destruction. These groups saw Vichy as an opportunity to expunge the Third Republic, the Dreyfus Affair, and even the Revolution from French life. I don’t think that any British group had aims as far ranging, which suggests that the British collaborator government would have been somewhat less awful than the Vichy regime. Of course, I yield to any specialist on this question.
I also suspect that, because of the strength and relative independence of the British Empire, that a far more significant residue of UK fighting power would have continued the struggle. Neither Australia nor Canada would have surrendered to Germany, and both would have probably joined the US in its war against Japan. I would imagine that a significant portion of the Royal Navy would have passed to Canadian or American control, regardless of the neutrality of the United States.