Britian at Bay
1938-1941

By Alan Allport, Alfred A Knopf, 2020, 467 pages, additional 123 pages of notes and index
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, April 27, 2023

What a lifeless title. Alan Allport devoted all of his remarkable research and mesmerizing storytelling to page-after-page of debunking early-World-War-II’s many myths, so when it was time to come up with a grabber of a title, he was spent.

Drunk on debunking, “BAB” comes up with such shockers such as: Universally reviled appeaser Neville Chamberlain actually was a “warlord.” The quickly dispatched French weren’t surprised by the Nazis’ speed. Churchill’s inspirational “so much owed by so many to so few” speech included a heavy dose of hypocrisy. The British and Americans weren’t natural allies. Hell, at some point, I expected Allport to reveal that Hitler wasn’t really the bull-goosestepping Nazi and instead languished in homeless squalor from 1939 to 1945 on Berlin streets, selling his putrid paintings for mere pfennigs.

Allport is engaging because he is disgusted as well as sarcastic, regularly hurling such lines as, “History has not been kind to …  not overawed … is a myth … is quite wrong … saccharine-coated nonsense … easily the most misunderstood … was later mythologized.”

And even when he’s not debunking, he’s creating phrases that I wish I’d thought of. Who can resist “sclerotic obsolescence?”

(Memo to Alan Allport: Now, there’s a title.)

Allport even finds a way to uncover the meagerest portion of credit for history’s worst villain: Hitler, according to a British intelligence report, privately referred to (Chamberlain) as an “Arschloch” [“arsehole”]. It is hard not to think that the Führer, for once, may have had a point.

Worth reading.