Reviewed by Chris Smith<\/p>\n
This book, the second volume of Daniel Todman\u2019s mammoth history of Britain\u2019s Second World War, picks up where the previous volume left off in 1941. Unlike the majority of histories of Britain\u2019s conflict, which tend to focus on only one aspect of the war, Todman\u2019s work aims to be completist \u2013 or rather as completist as any single history (even in two volumes) of Britain and the Second World War can hope to be.<\/p>\n
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The book traces Britain\u2019s military, economic, political and social history, from the end of 1941 to the immediate post-war years, concluding in 1947. Naturally, the books begins with a Britain beset with both hope (in the form of new a new military partner, the United States of America, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941) but also calamity, as British South Asian possessions, not least Singapore, were humiliatingly seized by the rampant Imperial Japanese Army. The book concludes, as the title suggests, following not merely the formal surrender of Japan on 2 September 1945, but with the establishment of a new Labour government and its efforts to reshape post-war Britain. These efforts, Todman informs readers, \u2018determined the creation of a new Britain\u2019, one which \u2018was different from the country of the 1930s\u2019 (p. 777).<\/p>\n
Todman\u2019s book is interestingly structured. The chapters, some 29 of them in all, are broadly chronological, some focussed on specific periods while others are more thematic. These chapters are divided into shorter sub-chapters, each in turn dealing with one specific aspect of Britain\u2019s war effort. The logic of this decision is clear: it is to ensure the reader is drawn through the war, in significant detail, but never overwhelmed \u2013 a tricky business even when writing shorter books. In this structuring strategy, Todman has been remarkably successful. For example, readers are briskly walked through the drama of Operation Torch (the Allied invasion of French North Africa) and the strategic decision regarding what to do next, before then enjoying a retelling of the high political drama of post-war planning and the 1942 Beveridge Report. This success is aided by a lucid and elegant writing style, which carries the reader along even through potentially difficult chapters loaded with statistical and technical detail.<\/p>\n
That said, the sheer scale of the exercise inevitably yields some unwieldy sections. For instance, the opening chapter flits between discussion of the BBC\u2019s coverage of Christmas, Christian broadcasting, to its reporting of Stalin and the Soviet Union, then to\u00a0Music While You Work<\/em> (a programme of light music, designed to be played in factories to improve workers efficiency), and then to political criticism of the BBC. Here Todman\u2019s usually lucid flow has a certain staccato effect, which this reviewer found slightly jarring. Meanwhile, the very final chapter of the book, examining post-war Britain, covers both 1946 and 1947 in mere 54 pages. By contrast, the period from 1937 to the outbreak of Britain\u2019s war on 3 September 1939 occupies ten whole chapters in the previous volume. That all said, these kinds of criticisms are to quibble.<\/p>\n It is important to note that the experiences, hardships and successes of ordinary people are not lost in Todman\u2019s story. The sub-chapters, and indeed some full chapters, which deal with the domestic war \u2013 the Home Front \u2013 draw heavily on Mass-Observation (a social survey project which ran from 1937 to the 1950s), to illustrate and detail the impact of the war on the British public. For instance, discussions of rationing, a potentially dry subject, are leavened with fascinating accounts from ordinary people. For instance, we learn that entrepreneurially-spirited spivs bought and sold coupons while others, with access to rare luxuries, illicitly traded sometimes ill-gotten wares. So far so familiar, but fascinating little touches from the Mass-Observation archive add colour to this story, not least the speculation that a dock worker smuggled Demerara sugar home from work in his boots (p. 402).<\/p>\n The brief for this review was to examine whether Daniel Todman has produced the \u2018new Calder\u2019 \u2013 a reference to Angus Calder\u2019s seminal and myth-busting 1969\u00a0The People\u2019s War 1939\u20131945<\/em>. In some ways this is a slightly unfair comparison, the two books have very different objectives and were written in very different times. Calder\u2019s book sought to dismantle myths of the Home Front, whether the British public really came together, class differences melting away in the face of the furnace of shared hardship. Todman\u2019s two volumes, though dealing with some of the same questions and myths, are much more ambitious. The coverage here is much more extensive, both thematically and chronologically, and represents a vital contribution to the historiography of the Second World War. It is little exaggeration to suggest that these two volumes, along with Alan Allport\u2019s recent\u00a0Britain at Bay<\/em><\/a>, the first of a similarly expansive two-volume history of Britain\u2019s wartime experience, will be the go-to, standard texts for many years to come.<\/p>\n Britain\u2019s War: A New World, 1942\u20131947<\/em><\/a>\u00a0by Daniel Todman (London: Penguin, 2020; 953 pp.; \u00a335.00).<\/p>\n Chris Smith<\/a> is Lecturer in History at Coventry University and author of <\/em>The Hidden History of Bletchley Park<\/a> (2015) and <\/em>The Last Cambridge Spy<\/a> (2019).<\/p>\n Image Credit: In Convoy from Bombay to Singapore, February 1942<\/a>. \u00a9IWM A 9692, Licence: IWM Non-Commercial Licence<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n