Britain's grand strategists indulged understandably in a form of ‘whistling in the dark’ during the period of their country's desperate struggle for survival in 1940–1. The three-pronged strategy which they elaborated to effect the destruction of Nazi Germany by way of bombs, blockade and ‘Bolshevism’, may have derived more from their own psychological necessity to conceive some path to victory than from any objective assessment of their real military, economic and political possibilities in the fight with the Axis. Certainly, British strategic thought had come to stress, well before the outbreak of war in 1939, the advantages of enervating aggressive German power by such indirect means, as against the frightful cost of direct military confrontation with the Wehrmacht. The lethargic Anglo-French search for oblique avenues of assault against Germany during the ‘Phoney War’ exemplifies this aversion to engaging in frontal combat. However, the resolution with which British strategists formulated, after the collapse of France, a grandiose plan for the reduction of German power by economic strangulation, aerial bombardment and popular subversion inside the Nazi-occupied countries, suggests that they were making a virtue of necessity.