Advance Britannia: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945
By Alan Allport.
Knopf, 2026.
Hardcover, 656 pages, $40.
Reviewed by John P. Rossi.
Advance Britannia is the second volume of Alan Allport’s history of Britain’s role in World War II. The first volume carried the story from the outbreak of war to the eve of Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war. Allport notes that before America’s entry, Britain had survived the German threat but had no realistic strategy for confronting an all-powerful Germany, even with the Soviet Union as an ally. On the news of December 7th, Churchill remarked, “so we have won the war after all.” That proved true, but as Allport notes, the war cost Britain dearly in manpower and physical destruction while also marking its slow decline as a world power.
A major theme that runs through Allport’s study is the shifting equilibrium of power relations between the United States and Britain. The war demonstrated that, as British power and resources dwindled, Britain became dependent on material and financial supplies from the United States. Also, British military failures embarrassed Churchill throughout the war. The poor performance of British arms in Egypt, the Mediterranean, and the Far East initially demonstrated that Britain could not act independently of American support.
British and American military philosophes clashed throughout the war. The British preferred a peripheral approach, campaigns in North Africa, Italy, the Balkans, etc., to a direct attack on the German position in Europe, hoping that the Russians would wear down German strength before the British and Americans would have to launch a landing somewhere in Europe. The American strategic approach of confronting and defeating the enemy at his strong point troubled the British, who remembered their losses in World War I, when they initially used that strategy at the Somme and Passchendaele with enormous losses.
The early months of 1942 witnessed a low point in the war for the British. The fall of Singapore was a grievous blow to Churchill. The so-called “Gibraltar of the East” collapsed in a matter of weeks as just 50,000 Japanese forces easily defeated an Empire army of over 130,000. The Japanese also drove the British out of Burma and threatened their position in India. Churchill was particularly humiliated by the so-called ‘Channel Dash’ of February 1942, when two major German ships rushed through the English Channel without a loss; the first time the English had suffered a defeat in home waters since the Dutch wars of the seventeenth century.
British and American shipping losses in the second half of 1942 reached alarming levels and threatened to starve Britain out of the war. In one of the most interesting parts of the book, Allport rejects the view that Britain was ever in danger of losing the war to the U-Boat threat. Admiral Doenitz, he argues, underestimated the productive capacity of the United States, which built 13.6 million tons of shipping in 1943 alone, despite increasingly desperate submarine attacks. In the build-up to D-Day, the American Army did not lose a single troop ship to German submarine attacks.
Allport is dismissive of the role of the British bombing offensive, which began in 1942, played in winning the war. He is disgusted at the savagery of Air Marshal Arthur Harris’s campaign of targeting enemy population centers as a way to break Germany’s will. The bombings of Dresden and Hamburg came in his view after the war had been effectively won—after Stalingrad, El Alamein, and D-Day. American targeting of specific industrial centers, especially oil production sites, Allport believes, was more effective in crippling the German war effort. Churchill’s initial enthusiasm for Harris’s bombing campaign wore off. There is very little about the campaign in Churchill’s history of the war, which Allport believes is a reflection of his concern at the ugliness of the bombing campaign.
Allport’s perspective on some of the leading British political and military figures in the war is always interesting. Among Churchill’s political colleagues, he has a low opinion of Anthony Eden, whom he regards as lightweight, something he proved when he finally became Prime Minister after Churchill’s retirement. On the other hand, the role of Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin in the War Cabinet enhanced the credentials of the Labor Party and helped it win the General Election of 1945. Among the military figures, he has a high regard for Field Marshal Alan Brooke’s role in directing the British military effort. He and Churchill worked well together despite Brooke’s legendary irascibility and his frustration with Churchill’s wilder military ideas. Brooke thought the American leaders Generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower were lightweight military thinkers and often raged at finding himself forced to bend to their military plans. Brooke and Churchill rejected the American idea of a landing in France in the fall of 1942 as a way of relieving pressure on Russia in favor of a landing in French North Africa, which Allport believes was the correct move. It was also one of the last times the British imposed their strategy on the Americans.
The North African campaign, especially General Bernard Montgomery’s defeat of General Rommel’s forces at El Alamein and subsequent Allied landings in Sicily and Italy in the summer of 1943, marked the high point of British military power in the war. The Italian campaign Allport regards as of minor strategic significance, although it witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, especially around Monte Cassino. It remained, in Allport’s view, a British sideshow and contributed little to the defeat of Germany.
Allport’s portrait of General Bernard Montgomery is one of the most fascinating in the book. Montgomery became the other face of the British war effort after Churchill. In Allport’s view, he proved a good set-piece general at El Alamein and guided Allied forces effectively after D-Day, despite the terrible bloodletting to secure Caen. Allport is sharply critical of Operation Market Garden, Montgomery’s plan to blitz his way into Germany using paratroop and armored units along a very narrow front. The plan was a disaster and cost the Allies 12,000 casualties for no appreciable gain. I believe a better criticism of Montgomery at this point was his failure to secure the Scheldt estuary, thereby opening the port of Antwerp and securing the supplies the Allied forces needed to continue the war in late 1944.
Two interesting parts of Allport’s book for American readers are his treatment of the 1945 British General Election and General William Slim’s reconquest of Burma. Most Americans haven’t heard of Slim, but Allport argues he was the most brilliant British military commander of the war. Americans also find it surprising that the British public rejected Churchill after his role in guiding Britain to victory. But as Allport notes, the British public wasn’t rejecting Churchill as much as they were remembering the grim Conservative party record during the years of “the Slump,” what they call the Depression. Every poll taken in the last two years of the war showed the Labor Party winning a handy victory.
Allport’s study of Britain’s role in World War II takes its place alongside such classic portraits of modern British history as Charles Loch Mowat’s Britain Between the Wars and A.J.P. Taylor’s English History 1914-1945. It belongs in the library of anyone interested in the key moments of Britain’s past.
John P. Rossi is Professor Emeritus of History at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
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