Alan Allport - Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941

The wreckage in Broadgate, Coventry, 25 August 1939, after an Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb. Photo: Central Press/Stringer/Getty

A British Army armoured car patrols the streets of Belfast in July 1935. Photo: R. Lock/Stringer/Getty

A factory worker at the Singer Motors works in Coventry. Photo: Fox Photos/Stringer/Getty

British troops blow up houses in the village of Miar, near Haifa, during the Arab Revolt in British Mandate Palestine. Photo: Fox Photos/Stringer/Getty

Neville Chamberlain, British chancellor of the exchequer 193137 and prime minister 193740. Photo: Fox Photos/Stringer/Getty

British foreign secretary Austen Chamberlain. Photo: AFP/Stringer/Getty

Chamberlain shakes hands with Adolf Hitler at the conclusion of the Munich Conference in September 1938. Photo: Historical/Contributor/Corbis

Neville Chamberlain with Winston Churchill in 1939. Photo: Hulton Deutsch / Getty

The battleship HMS Prince of Wales is launched, 3 May 1939. Photo: Central Press/Stringer/Getty

A French battleship in the harbour of Mers-el-Kbir, in north-western Algeria, burns on 3 July 1940 after being attacked by British warships. Photo: Central Press/Stringer/Getty

Evacuee children from London arrive in the coastal town of Eastbourne September 1939. Photo: Bentley Archive/Popperfoto/Getty

From the left: Chief of the British Imperial General Staff Sir Edmund Ironside; General Alphonse Georges, commander of the French northeastern front; Winston Churchill; General Maurice Gamelin, commander-in-chief of the French armed forces; and Lord Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France. Photo: Keystone/Getty

British troops wait uncertainly outside a Norwegian coastal town in May 1940. Photo: Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty

One of the more than 100 RAF Fairey Battle light bombers shot down during the first three weeks of the German invasion of France and the Low Countries in May 1940. Photo: ullstein bild Dtl./Getty

British troops on the Dunkirk beaches, awaiting evacuation in the final week of May 1940. Photo: Grierson/Stringer/Getty

The foreign secretary Lord Halifax (left) leaves 10 Downing Street alongside the secretary of state for war Anthony Eden on 28 May 1940. Photo: Fox Photos/Stringer/Getty

British troops watch for enemy invaders on a barbed-wire-laden beach on the south coast of England in early September 1940. Photo: Fox Photos/Stringer/Getty

Interned enemy aliens arrive in a holding camp somewhere in Britain in 1940. Photo: Fox Photos/Stringer/Getty

Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, commander-in-chief of RAF Fighter Command from 1936 to 1940. Photo: Hulton Archive/Stringer/Getty

Aircrew of the RAFs 264 (Madras Presidency) Squadron near one of their turret-armed Boulton Paul Defiant fighters, 31 May 1940. Photo: IWM/Getty Images/Contributor

Hawker Hurricane fighters fly in formation during the Battle of Britain, summer 1940. Photo: UniversalImagesGroup/Contributor/Getty

Liverpool city centre after seven continuous nights of heavy bombing by the German air force, May 1941. Photo: Mirrorpix/Contributor/Getty

Air Raid Precautions (ARP) rescue workers extract dazed survivors from the rubble of a bombed house during the Blitz. Photo: Popperfoto/Contributor/Getty

Supporters of the anti-war Mothers Crusade protest near the US Capitol in Washington DC in February. Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty

Survivors of a merchant vessel torpedoed by a German U-boat in the North Atlantic await rescue by the Royal Navy in May 1940. Photo: Mirrorpix/Contributor/Getty

General Sir John Dill (left), and General Sir Archibald Wavell (centre), with Lady Wavell, Cairo, 1941. Photo: Daily Herald Archive/Contributor/Getty

British Matilda II infantry tanks in action near Tobruk, Libya, in 1941. Photo: British Official Photo/Contributor/Getty

Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador to Britain, is presented with the first fighting vehicle built during Tanks for Russia Week, September 1941. Photo: Hulton Archive/Stringer/Getty

A view of night-time Berlin from the bomb-bay of an RAF bomber, September 1941. Photo: IWM/Getty Images/Contributor

This book, the first of two parts, is an attempt to understand how Britain fought the Second World War: how it became involved in it in the first place, how it fought it, why it was ultimately on the winning side and what the war did to its institutions, its culture and its society. It is a version of the story that omits the well-loved but misleading clichs that have traditionally infused it. In doing this, it becomes a story that is more interesting, more valuable, more important than ever. Britains war can be understood, broadly, as a tale of two parts.

The first part, which this volume is concerned with, is a story mostly about defeat diplomatic defeat followed by military defeat after military defeat. What it tries to explain is how a country that got so many things catastrophically wrong in the early years of the conflict managed not just to hold out against Hitler but, by the second anniversary of the wars outbreak in September 1941, to have apparently halted the rout, and even, perhaps, to be constructing a plausible theory of victory. It ends on a note of cautious hope. The second part will show how such hopes eventually became realities, and how the British people rallied themselves as part of a powerful global alliance to defeat Nazism, fascism and Japanese militarism and what the cost of that victory would turn out in the end to be.