Britain's War. Into Battle 1937-1941

by Daniel Todman

Allen Lane, £30

Review by Jonathan Wright

Daniel Todman makes a bold claim in his introduction. He announces that his account of Britain during the Second World War will interweave different historical strands – political, social, economic and cultural – "in a way that no other book has done." Hubristic as that may sound, it turns out to be true. I have never read a more daringly panoramic survey of the period. With so many overlapping narratives and topics it can all become rather chaotic but this only reflects the confusion of the times. Todman eschews a thematic approach, which would have been much neater, in order to "tell the story as it went along." After all, "no-one in 1939 knew that the war would end in 1945." You will emerge from this book exhausted but enriched. You will also notice that, after 800 pages, we have only reached 1941. Wheelbarrows may be required to cope with the planned second volume, which will take the story to 1947, but no-one could question Todman's ambition or scholarly pluck.

Perhaps the finest section of the book looks at the period between 1937 and 1939. While the outbreak of World War I had taken most people by surprise, the "terrible and vague" threat of another global conflict haunted the 1930s. In Britain, it was hard to miss the efforts and expenditure being ploughed into rearmament. For all that, late 1930s Britain was not, on Todman's account, a place beset by panic. Unemployment was a devastating and seemingly insoluble problem but the middle classes were doing very nicely, the worst of the slump was over, and the birth of a "modern mass media society" kept us entertained. There was no "powder keg of class conflict" and while radical, anti-democratic groups had emerged, their memberships had never risen above the low tens of thousands. The empire, Todman avers, was still "much the same racist, exploitative, brutal institution that it had always been" but tensions had mostly been limited to a simmer by concessions to nationalist groups and exercises in limited local autonomy.

Peace was, therefore, well worth preserving which is probably why the logic of appeasement, even if it only put off the inevitable, held broad appeal. As late as 1939 a poll showed that 28% of those questioned saw appeasement as the route to a permanent peace and 46% accepted it because it would give Britain ample time to reach its rearmament targets. Only 24% thought it made war more likely "by whetting the appetites of the dictators." Such figures soon ceased to matter, of course. Todman tells of a twenty-five-year-old Cambridge secretary hearing about the bombing of Warsaw in September 1939. She knew what was coming and rushed off to the registry office with her fiance. All their plans, she wrote, were now in tatters and they spent their honeymoon evening "helping to darken the windows with old curtains."

When war began it was, Todman writes, "the greatest anti-climax in modern British history." The anticipated Luftwaffe bombing did not begin immediately and there was no sign of a German invasion. From the off, however, there was inconvenience and dislocation. 241,000 children were evacuated from London, 71,393 from Glasgow, and 79,930 from Merseyside. In urban areas the blackout caused a "sudden plunge into Stygian darkness." As the conflict escalated, with theatres opening up across the Empire, Britons behaved both decently and badly. The self-serving politicking at Westminster was hardly a shining example of solidarity and Todman reveals a surprising lack of charitable feeling when France fell to the Nazis. One Belgian visitor remarked that the English "have the greatest contempt for the continent in general and the French in particular... You sometimes almost want them to lose [the war] to show them how things are." On the other hand, pride could be taken in the resilient reaction to the Blitz and J. B. Priestley loudly praised "the strangest army the world has ever seen, an army in drab civilian clothes, doing quite ordinary things, an army of all shapes and sizes and ages of folk."

By the end of the book the German armies have headed off to the Soviet Union, the Americans have belatedly joined the fight, and a "truly global war" is in the offing. Those first two years really were quite astonishing, however: a time when "British strength determined, for the last time, the future of the world." Military history buffs are well served by Todman's detailed accounts – and some top notch maps – but it's the tales of ordinary people trapped between boredom, fear and confusion that will live in the reader's memory. Todman has taken on a mammoth task but, at half-time, he shows every sign of completing it triumphantly.