Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947

ISBN-13: 9780190658489 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 976 str.

Daniel Todman

Opis

The second of Daniel Todman's two sweeping volumes on Great Britain and World War Two, Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947, begins with the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 to the Japanese-the event Winston Churchill called the "worst disaster" in British military history. Japan took 80,000 British, Australian, and Indian troops as prisoners of war, throwing Britain's position in the war into further uncertainty and catapulting the empire its nadir of the war.

As in Into Battle, Todman highlights the inter-connectedness of the British experience in this moment and others, focusing keenly on its inhabitants, its defenders, and Churchill's Cabinet. Todman explores the plight of families doomed to spend the war struggling with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and, above all, the absence of their loved ones and the uncertainty of their return.

Stretching from 1942 to India's partitioning and independence in 1947, Britain's War: A New World is a triumph of narrative, empathy, and research. Daniel Todman explains complex issues of strategy and economics clearly while never losing sight of the human consequences-at home and abroad-of the way that Britain fought its war. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped Great Britain.

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Praise for Britain's War: Into Battle, 1937 - 1941

"Todman's book seems deserving of high respect for the amount he has read, the fluency of his narrative, mastery of complex information and generally clear and shrewd judgments. The author brings to a new audience a mass of ideas and data familiar only to my own ageing generation. This is an energetic, ambitious, provocative work by a young historian of notable gifts, which deserves a wide readership." - Max Hastings

"Into Battle, the first volume of Dan Todman's new history of Britain and the Second World War, is a tour de force. Taking the story up to the end of 1941, Todman provides us with a judicious guide to the road to war and its catastrophic first phase, offering in addition a shrewd portrait of Churchill which is worth the price of the book alone. Total history at its best." - Jay Winter, Yale University

"In the opening pages of this book, the first volume in a monumental new history of Britain's experience of the 'long' Second World War, Daniel Todman presents his own personal links to the world of the war through which his grandparents lived. This could have been a rather sentimental journey, but Todman tells their story with a light touch. As Todman demonstrates, one of the most remarkable aspects of Britain's war effort was the strong sense that the country would not be defeated and would, in the end, emerge victorious. There were no real grounds for thinking that, but the conviction clearly helped to prevent public confidence from succumbing to the grim effects of bombing and military defeats. Although the Blitz spirit has been fair game for critical historians for decades now, the democratic nature of the new war, sparing no one on the home front, did cement within the population a level of war-willingness sufficient for them to accept sacrifice and loss without buckling. The voices in Todman's book provide endearing evidence of such certitude and endeavour." - Richard Overy