Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947

The second of Daniel Todman's two sweeping volumes on Great Britain and World War Two, Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947, begins with the Fall of Singapore in February 1942 to the Japanese-the event Winston Churchill called the "worst disaster" in British military history. Japan took 80,000 British, Australian, and Indian troops as prisoners of war, throwing Britain's position in the war into further uncertainty and catapulting the empire its nadir of the war.

As in Britain's War: Into Battle,1937-1941, Todman highlights the inter-connectedness of the British experience in this moment and others, focusing keenly on its inhabitants, its defenders, and Churchill's Cabinet. Todman explores the plight of families doomed to spend the war struggling with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and, above all, the absence of their loved ones and the uncertainty of their return.

Stretching from 1942 to India's partitioning and independence in 1947, Britain's War: A New World, 1942-1947 is a triumph of narrative, empathy, and research. Daniel Todman explains complex issues of strategy and economics clearly while never losing sight of the human consequences-at home and abroad-of the way that Britain fought its war. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped Great Britain.

Daniel Todman is Senior Lecturer in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London. He is also the author of Britain's War: Into Battle, 1937-1941, The Great War: Myth and Memory, and is co-editor of Field Marshall Lord Alanbrooke's War Diaries, 1939-1945.