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BRITAIN AT BAY
The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941
By Alan Allport
Neville Chamberlain after signing the Munich agreement, 1938. Alamy
“In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. … History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes.” Those were Winston Churchill’s words in one of the greatest, though least remembered, speeches of his life, his elegy for Neville Chamberlain days after Chamberlain had died in November 1940. They remain singularly apt for the years before and after Churchill spoke. That story, of how the British found themselves at war and then how they survived it, is the subject of Alan Allport’s “Britain at Bay.”
The author of several books, including a valuable study of British servicemen in 1939-45, Allport begins with a chapter called “Shire Folk.” This allusion to Tolkien becomes a riff on which he then plays throughout the book, and an unfortunate one for this reviewer, who has since boyhood suffered from acute Hobbitophobia. But the point Allport wants to make is a good one: The British saw themselves as a kindly, gentle, puzzled people, like those cute little critters in the Shire, which was not how others always saw them.
In a sharp turn, when this unusually informative and stimulating book really gets going, Allport takes two snapshots of violence…
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