BRITAIN AT BAY

Sub-titled 'The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941', this sweeping ground-breaking epic combines military with social history, the 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 right ones? How well did the British organise 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? He also looks intimately at the changes in wartime society and culture and 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, to present a comprehensible and compelling single history of 46 million people. What he tries to explain is how a country that got so many things catastrophically wrong in the early years of the conflict managed not just to hold out against Hitler, but in the second anniversary of the war's outbreak in September 1941, to have apparently halted the rout and even perhaps to be constructing a plausible theory of victory. It ends on a note of cautious hope. With maps including the battlefield of May to June 1940, the Battle of Britain, major Luftwaffe night attacks, the North Atlantic, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Imperial Crisis spring 1941 and Bomber Command targets September 1939 to December 1941. The British-born historian's book has been published in the USA, 590 roughcut pages which are highly desirable in the US. 2021 Alfred A. Knopf New York.