Sixty years ago, as the German army continued its relentless advance across Europe, Britain - a country ill-prepared for war - faced its darkest hour.
Published to tie in with the BBCTV series, Finest Hour recreates the terror, the tragedy and the triumph of the Battle of Britain, through the testimony of those who experienced it. Finest Hour is a powerful and incisive account of the events of 1940, told through the voices, diaries, letters and memoirs of the men and women who survived it - and those who lost their lives. These witnesses of war, with their individual stories of grief and joy, of love and of loss, provide revealing and often controversial new insights into the conflicts and the politics of the period.
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Clayton and Craig are particularly good at guiding us through the early days of Churchill's premiership. Read most populist accounts and you would imagine that the moment Churchill took office the bulldog spirit took over and we plucky Brits stood resolute. Not so. The case for appeasement was still being made within the Cabinet up until the evacuation of Dunkirk, as Lord Halifax had a great deal of support for his conciliatory views. Bizarrely, the thing that ultimately counted against him was his title as it was felt the Upper House should not hold sway over the Commons. Where this book excels, though, is in the quality of its eyewitness testimonies. Many books have previously used this technique of threading narrative with the first person but few have found such eloquent speakers. Most eyewitnesses fudge the difficult bits with remarks like, "It was hell". Clayton and Craig's witnesses don't pull their punches. We hear of one Brit who shot a German officer in cold blood and had nightmares for ages afterwards. We hear of the sailor who saw his gunner decapitated. We experience the stench of burnt flesh following the shelling of an ambulance. In short, we are spared nothing. It may not be comfortable reading but you can't ignore it. 60 years after the men and women in these pages fought and died, there's a tendency for the rest of us to take the freedom they gave us for granted. They deserve a better memorial than a slow fading into nothingness. This book ensures they get it. --John Crace
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