Advance Britannia - by Alan Allport (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The author of Britain at Bay--which The Wall Street Journal said may be "the single best examination of British politics, society, and strategy [from 1938 to 1941] that has ever been written"--picks up his sweeping social history in 1942, when what was once a regional war has become an intricate, globe-spanning conflict, with profound consequences for the British Empire and for a British people already exhausted after more than two years of fighting.

"The Japanese, gone berserk, have struck in the Pacific, joined up with the Axis, declared war on us," one British soldier wrote in his diary. "So the Yanks are now our comrades in arms, and the whole world's ablaze."

By 1942, Churchill found himself facing a vastly different war than the one he'd inherited from Neville Chamberlain back in 1940. In the East, the Soviets were now a co-belligerent (if not exactly a firm ally). And the aid he'd so longed for from across the Atlantic had finally arrived, when Pearl Harbor pushed America to end its "dithering and buggering about." But with Parliament and the public losing faith in him, Churchill had to manage a war that now stretched into the Pacific and Indian Oceans, threatening Britain's colonies, all the while negotiating a new relationship with Roosevelt and Stalin--two jostling, unpredictable comrades-in-arms fully prepared to carve up the world to their own satisfaction.

In this sequel to his prizewinning Britain at Bay, Alan Allport completes his superlative history of Britain's role in World War II, once again weaving together the political, military, social, and cultural to tell a multifaceted story of a country forced to endure the profound stresses of total war. Now, Britain is no longer at bay. But any victory remains far off, and its costs will be great. Can the British win the war without sacrificing so much along the way that they then lose the peace?

Review Quotes

"Alan Allport has followed up Britain at Bay with another tour de force. Advance Britannia ranges widely from the battlefield to the home front, from the cabinet war rooms to factory floors. It is as complete and compelling a picture of Britain in the Second World War as one could hope to read." --Phillips Payson O'Brien, author of The Strategists

"Allport succeeds in making stories that many of us thought we were familiar with feel fresh, urgent and timely. He has the true storyteller's gift. This is a must read for anyone who is interested in what really happened in World War II." --Anne Sebba, author of The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz

"There isn't a better history of the Second World War than this remarkably fresh account. It is a history liberated from the pious sentimentalities of both left and right, a story not of a nation but an empire at war, partly with itself. In prose which zings along it authoritatively dispatches one myth after another, comes to thoughtful and clear judgements on people and events, and surprises the reader on every page. It is an extraordinary achievement, a book which deserves to be read by all who pretend to know British history." --David Edgerton, author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation

"Allport's great achievement is to capture this extraordinary global upheaval without losing sight of the poignant human dramas that were intertwined with it." --Richard Vinen, author of The Long '68

"Allport has done it again--a highly readable, analytically provocative and original interpretation of Britain's experience of war. For many years to come, Advance Britannia will be an authoritative account and explanation of these pivotal years of the war." --Julie V. Gottlieb, author of Guilty Women

About the Author

ALAN ALLPORT, a British-born historian, is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society who specializes in the British role in World War II. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently the Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is the author of Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941, which won the Historical Writers' Association Non-Fiction Crown Award; Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War (2010), winner of the Longman-History Today Book Prize; and Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War 1939-1945 (2015). He lives in Syracuse, New York.