Showing results by author "Daniel Todman" in All Categories

The most terrible emergency in Britain's history, the Second World War, required an unprecedented national effort. An exhausted country had to fight an unexpectedly long war and found itself much diminished amongst the victors. The outcome of the war was nonetheless a triumph, not least for a political system that proved well adapted to the demands of a total conflict and for a population who had to make many sacrifices but who were spared most of the horrors experienced in the rest of Europe.

A triumph of narrative, empathy and research, as gripping in its handling of individual witnesses to the war - those doomed to struggle with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and above all the absence of millions of family members - as of the gigantic military, social, technological and economic forces that swept the conflict along. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped our country.

Dr Daniel Todman is a senior lecturer in history at Queen Mary University in London. He has particular interest in the social, military and cultural history of Britain. He discusses the first in an ambitious 2-volume work on Britain's role in the Second World War in Britain's War: Volume 1, Into Battle, 1937-1941.