The political history of the immediate pre-war period offers a reason for this change. The defeats of 1940 and 1941 were a tremendous shock to Britons. During the war there was no time for lengthy official post-mortems on the alarming inadequacy of British arms in France in 1940 or in the first reverses in the western desert of Libya a year later. But the polemics of the left managed to convince a great many people that the blame lay with the pre-war Conservative governments of Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin. When in 1945 the chance came to revenge themselves on the Tories, even though Winston Churchill, who had opposed both Chamberlain and Baldwin, was the Conservatives' leader, millions took the chance and voted Labor into office. The urge for change to meet changing conditions at home and new forces abroad was not universal. The people of the middle class had not yet fully understood what the war had done to Britain's economy and especially to that section of it which supported them. There was very strong opposition to the first post-war American loan in sections of this class, largely from people whose confidence had not been shaken by the cataclysm. The austerity imposed by Sir Stafford Cripps, the Socialist Chancellor of the Exchequer, was neither understood nor welcomed. The withdrawal from India was hotly opposed--and, it should be remembered, not purely on imperialist grounds. For two hundred years the middle class had provided the officers and civil servants who led and administered the Indian Army and the government of British India. As a class it knew a great deal more about India and the Indians than the union leaders and earnest young intellectuals of Mr. Attlee's government knew. The Socialist speakers and newspapers scoffed at "the toffy-nosed old ex-colonels" who predicted bloody and prolonged rioting between the Hindus and the Moslems once British power was withdrawn. The rioting began, and before it was over the bloodshed was greater than in all the British punitive actions from the Mutiny onward. None of this generally Conservative opposition could halt or even check a Labor government that had been voted into power in 1945 with 393 seats in the House of Commons as opposed to 216 for the Conservatives and 12 for the Liberals. The Tories were out, the new day had dawned, and the Labor Party, in full control of the government for the first time in its history, set out to remake Britain. No one in Britain could plead ignorance of what the Labor Party was about to do. Since 1918 it had been committed to extensive nationalization of industry and redistribution of income. Moreover, it came to power at a moment when the old patterns of industrial power and political alignments had been ruptured by war and when voters other than those who habitually voted Labor were acknowledging the need for change.