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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...