Britain at Bay
The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A sweeping, groundbreaking epic that combines military with social history, to illuminate the ways in which Great Britain and its people were permanently transformed by the Second World War.
Here is the many-faceted, world-historically significant story of Britain at war. In looking closely at the military and political dimensions of the conflict's first crucial years, Alan Allport tackles questions such as: Could the war have been avoided? Could it have been lost? Were the strategic decisions the rights ones? How well did the British organize and fight? How well did the British live up to their own values? What difference did the war make in the end to the fate of the nation?
In answering these and other essential questions he focuses on the human contingencies of the war, weighing directly at the roles of individuals and the outcomes determined by luck or chance. Moreover, he looks intimately at the changes in wartime British society and culture. Britain at Bay draws on a large cast of characters--from the leading statesmen and military commanders who made the decisions, to the ordinary men, women, and children who carried them out and lived through their consequences--in a comprehensible and compelling single history of forty-six million people. For better or worse, much of Britain today is ultimately the product of the experiences of 1938-1941.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Allport (Browned Off and Bloody-Minded), a history professor at Syracuse University, delivers a sweeping first installment in a planned two-volume chronicle of Great Britain during WWII. He expertly sketches the cultural and social landscape of middle-class England in the 1930s; details political unrest at home (IRA bombings in Ulster) and abroad (the Arab revolt in British-occupied Palestine); and assesses Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as a "dreadful judge of character." After the 1938 Munich accords failed to contain Hitler, Winston Churchill came to power, the British troops were forced to evacuate Dunkirk, and France fell. Allport offers cogent and insightful accounts of the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the first tank campaigns in Egypt and Libya, and bombing raids over Germany, and he sketches incisive portraits of key yet often overlooked political and military leaders, including conservative M.P. Leo Amery and Gen. Sir Archibald Wavell. Setting the stage for the next volume, Allport argues that three far-flung occurrences in the first week of September 1941 were key to England's fate: a German submarine fired a torpedo at a U.S. Navy destroyer, a committee of British scientists was given the go-ahead to develop an "effective uranium bomb," and Japanese strategists met to study the inevitability of war with the U.S. and Britain. Expertly researched and marvelously written, this sterling history casts an oft-studied subject in a new light.
