Advance Britannia: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945
In the annals of finest-hour mythmaking, there are two abiding articles of faith: first, that the United Kingdom bravely fought on 'alone' after the fall of France, and second, that the New World ultimately came to the rescue of the Old ... Alan Allport skillfully subverts both these myths in Advance Britannia, the second volume of his elegant and unsparing history of London’s role in World War II ... Allport, a historian at Syracuse University, does a good job of including the perspectives of the victims of British colonialism as well as its perpetrators ... Allport is a fluid writer, a conjurer with the rare ability to sustain a gripping narrative without resorting to Vaseline-lensed sentimentality. He overturns one piece of conventional wisdom after another — quarrelsome, occasionally, to a fault ... In a book about a global conflict, there are drawbacks to Allport’s narrow focus on Britain’s role alone ... 'Our Oriental Empire has been liquidated, our resources have been squandered,' Churchill later remarked. 'Our influence among the nations is now less than it has ever been in any period since I remember.' Allport’s unblinking history shows us why that happened.
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There is no silly sensationalism in this book, merely sound storytelling and measured judgments ... He corrects some popular myths, for instance that the August 1944 American invasion of southern France was wasted motion, as Churchill believed ... Allport’s account of the September 1944 struggle for Arnhem is a bit wobbly. John Frost’s 2 Para was not 'the only battalion to achieve its objective'. It failed — unsurprisingly — to secure the Rhine bridge, and merely clung courageously to a meaningless toehold on its further bank. But this is a trifle. What matters is that Allport seems right about most things, which is more than many of us manage.
Allport is especially good at tracing themes in wartime that foreshadow later events ... A bracing history that sheds light both backward and forward.
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