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Review

Brilliant and thought-provoking ... There are moments of edgy humour, too ... This remarkable book shows that whatever the reasons for the length of time it took to bring Hitler to heel, the quantity and quality of British war material was not among them -- Brendan Simms ― Sunday Telegraph

Edgerton's book is a remarkable achievement. He re-envisions Britain's role in World War II and with it Britain's place in modernity. In place of a plucky island standing alone, he gives us a global empire of machines, not a welfare state, but a technocratic warfare state. The period will never look the same again -- Adam Tooze, author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

Consistently lively, stimulating and authoritative ― Observer

Absolutely fascinating. This book will make you think differently about Britain's role in the Second World War -- Laurence Rees, author of Auschwitz: The Nazis and The 'Final Solution'

This book has certainly changed my views ... It is a necessary and timely corrective to a great deal of loosely thought-through conventional wisdom, and makes a real contribution to our understanding of the war -- Richard Holmes ― Literary Review

For too long we have had a distorted view of Britain's position and role in the Second World War. David Edgerton has produced a stunning book that rectifies this misconception, and which is told with authority, clarity and compelling energy -- James Holland, author of The Battle of Britain

An important corrective to the black-and-white portrait of the period that still prevails ― Financial Times

A stimulating exercise in muscular revisionism ... Offers a fresh and provocative view of our much-loved and much-misunderstood "finest hour" -- David Reynolds ― Guardian

Accessibly written and deserves a wide audience. Above all, Edgerton demonstrates that the war is a subject we haven't yet heard nearly enough about. Britain's War Machine is a considerable achievement -- Graham Farmelo ― Times Higher Education

Edgerton has excelled himself with this highly revisionist account of Britain's national performance during the Second World War ... an unusually provocative book ― Twentieth Century British History, 2011

Edgerton has written what could prove to be one of the most influential books on the history of the Second World War ... majestic ... [he] has successfully shown us that we still have a lot to learn about the conflict ... it will become the required reading for all students wishing to study the Second World War ― Reviews in History

An astounding work of myth-busting ... Inspiring and unsettling in equal measure -- Tom Holland ― Guardian

Majestic ... a wonderful read. It has probably popped more myths than any other book on the war in recent years -- Taylor Downing ― History Today

Brilliant and iconoclastic ... debunks the myth that Britain was militarily and economically weak and intellectually parochial during the 1930s and 1940s -- David Blackburn ― Spectator Book Blog

Truly eye-opening ... Edgerton's carefully researched book will fundamentally change the way you think about World War II ― Daily Beast

Riveting ... a wonderfully rich book ... thoroughly stimulating -- Richard Toye ― History

A major new assessment of Britain's war effort from 1939 to 1945. Never again will some of the lazy assessments of how Britain performed over these years ... be acceptable. That's why this is such an important book ― History Today

Innovative and most important ― Contemporary Review

Compelling and engaging ... an excellent read ― Soldier

Edgerton's well-researched volume bursts with data that reveal Britain's true strength even when supposed to be in critical condition -- Peter Moreira ― Military History

Britain's War Machine offers the boldest revisionist argument that seeks to overturn some of our most treasured assumptions about Britain's role in the war ... Edgerton [is] an economic historian with an army of marshalled facts and figures at his fingertips ... This is truly an eye-opening book that explodes the masochistic myth of poor little Britain, revealing the island as a proud power with the resources needed to fight and win a world war -- Nigel Jones ― Spectator

Masterful Britain's War Machine promotes the notion that the United Kingdom of the Forties was a superpower, with access to millions of men across the globe, and forming the heart of a global production network ― Mail on Sunday

About the Author

David Edgerton is Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History at King's College London. He is the author of a sequence of ground-breaking books in 20th century British history: Science, Technology and the British Industrial 'Decline', 1870-1970; Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970; as well as Britain's War Machine, and England and the Aeroplane, both published by Penguin. He is also the author of the iconoclastic and brilliant The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin; First Edition (29 Mar. 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0141026103
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0141026107
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.7 x 2.16 x 19.69 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 237,883 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.2 163 ratings

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David Edgerton

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David Edgerton is the Hans Rausing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Modern British History at King's College London. He is the author of a sequence of ground-breaking books on twentieth-century Britain: England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (1991), republished as England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines (Penguin 2013); Science, Technology and the British Industrial 'Decline', 1870-1970 (1996), Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 (2005), Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (2011) and The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a Twentieth-Century History (2018). He is also the author of the iconoclastic and brilliant The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (2006), which was re-issued in 2019.

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Duncurin

Stimulating and thought provoking

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 April 2011

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My father, who grew up in 1930's South Africa would never have described GB as a plucky underdog. He told me the story as a young man where someone had broken the cue ball or a cue in their local leisure centre. They waited weeks and weeks for a replacement to be shipped from the heart of the Empire which of course was London. When he came to this country he would automatically buy British goods as he knew these would be the best ! When war came it was automatic that he should fight - as of course did many thousands from overseas. Notwithstanding this the book does have a refreshing and thought provoking perspective on Britain's war time stance. I suspect that Churchill would only be too happy to talk to the USA as a junior partner as this gave him more leverage, the same way perhaps that MacMillan did in order to secure Polaris from Kennedy. To people like my dad our industrial might and excellence was never in question. This book is perhaps quite correct when it questions whether the direction was always the right one. I suspect for many alive at that time, War was very much a novel experience that they were not prepared for. The garrison that surrendered at Singapore for instance no doubt thought they would be treated humanely and obviously retrospective analysis is the most powerful but the most unforgiving of instruments. Some messages are harder for me to buy into that British tanks were superior to German tanks in anything other than numbers. The Germans did not christen Sherman tanks "Tommy Cookers" for nothing and you will have read of Michael Whitman destroying 15 in as many minutes and the 8th Army losing 25 tanks before they eventually got round the back of one Tiger tank. Prof. Edgerton also hints that Britain started the bombing blitz which I cannot agree with. In any event the German soldier had a much envied and justified reputation on the whole and whilst no-one is saying that we could have won the war as anything other than a team - there is much to admire in our performance in most areas and this book pays more than homage to this.

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MMG

Revolutionary and stimulating

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 May 2011

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David Edgerton's "Britain's War Machine" is a wonderful book which deserves a place on one's boookshelf beside the companion work The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze.

The first merit of Edgerton is to demolish the die-hard myth of Britain's unpreparedness in 1939. On the contrary he convincingly demonstrates that Britain was first of all opulent, "the richest state in Europe... certainly richer than Germany"; no wonder that "the British were the great meat-eaters of Europe" (even during the war "rationing did not imply drastically cut supplies, except in the case of sugar") and that "Britain was the most motorized nation in Europe" as well as "the world's largest importer of oil"; to be more precise "Britain started and ended the war as the world's largest importer". "So powerful was Britain in the world economy that it could in effect force many people around the world to supply it with goods for credit". Moreover "it had resources to spare, was wealthy enough to make mistakes, and could fight as it chose to rather than had to".

This enviable condition reflected itself both in the industry and in the armed forces. "The warfare state was one of plenty, of armed forces generously supplied with new equipment by new factories", "interwar Britain was a military superpower at sea and in the air, supporting the largest arms industry in the world" (incidentally, "it was the largest arms exporter of the world"). "Britain rearmed on a scale unprecedented in peacetime". The "liberal militarism" which pervaded Britain caused a veritable "orgy of techno-nationalist excess", the scientific pursuit of its industrial and military aims was spasmodic: not only "in some key sectors, efficiency of production was the same as in the USA", but "if one of the forces was organized with Teutonic efficiency and regimentation, it was the RAF, not the Luftwaffe". Moreover "Britain was the world's greatest tank producer in the years 1941 and 1942" and "although it was widely believed from 1941-42 that Britain tanks in North Africa were inferior to German in quantity and quality, this view was shown to be incorrect". "By nearly every standard the British army was much better equipped than the German army from the beginning to the end of the war". "Another measure of preparedness was that during the war forty-four overwhelmingly new ordnance factories were in operation".

Britain was so utterly self conscious of its industrial might and technical primacy that "when the British team... went to the US with new British developments in October 1940, there was again a clear sense that the British had more to offer the Americans than vice versa". On the battlefield "the British were also much more successful imperialists than the Germans, mobilizing a huge imperial force, a large part of it effectively mercenary".

The second merit of the book resides in the enormous amount of little known facts that it collects in support of its solid analysis (always suggesting orders of magnitude). The narrative is full of paragraphs which can be read as veritable monographs: the history of the ambitious and velleitarian atomic bomb program since 1941; the airframe and aircraft engine industry; the rifle crisis and the radios shortage in 1940; the import issue and the Liberty ships program; the story of Churchill, his cronies, the boffins and their often bizarre, costly but inconclusive war-winning gadgets; the uneasy relationship among science, technology, universities and operational research; the food and agriculture problems; the oil and fuel production (one of the very best parts of the book, perfectly supported by extremely enlightening maps of refineries, hydrogenation plants and pipelines locations; the perfect complement to Goralski and Freeburg's Oil and War: How the Deadly Struggle for Fuel in WWII Meant Victory or Defeat ); the peculiarities of the British Army (the first to have a complete cold-store chain as well as a blood transfusion system); "the Middle East Supply Centre [which] coordinated civil imports and promoted local supply", including the "growing of potatoes in Egypt and Syria, potatoes without which the British soldier does not consider himself properly fed", and the lavish "some 10 million fourteen-man packs... produced between 1942 and 1945, in seven varieties, which included pudding"; the bureaucracies (one finds out that "at one stage of the war the three key procurement officers [Ministry of Supply, Ministry of Aircraft Production and the Controller of the Navy] all knew each other from their days as naval officers" and "many crucial disputes between their ministries were solved in a genial manner in private": those three so called "boilermakers" launched every week at the Carlton Hotel!); "the Bengal famine of 1943, when millions perished".

Such a well documented (118 pages of notes and bibliography!) and convincing praise of the British Imperial spirit makes the continental reader sometimes cringe, as his ears resound with the words of Mussolini, when he declared war on the "plutocratic democracies", proclaiming that the Axis war was "the struggle of the poor and proletarian peoples against the exploiters which ferociously hold the monopoly of the world wealth".

Yet there are some aspects of the book which are at the same time stimulating and unconvincing.

A statement like "it went to war, allied with France, in pursuit of great interests, by choice", appears to hint that in September 1939 Britain was not just a purely formal aggressor (in fact declaring war on Germany in defence of Poland and of the status quo). No real evidence is offered for such an interpretation, which could be nonetheless correct, at least towards Italy, if it is true that (as Raynolds M. Salerno explains, Vital Crossroads: Mediterranean Origins of the Second World War, 1935-1940 (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs) ) as early as 1937 "Eden told the Cabinet that Britain should adopt a policy of intimidation by manifesting the progress of British rearmament with military reinforcement in the Mediterranean". One observes "Britain's arrogance in the Mediterranean" theater only (and intermittently), when a contemptuous Alexander Cadogan affirmed: "We shall have quite enough abuse of `Ice-creamers'" and wondered "what to do with the ice-cream vendors. Drown the brutes is what I should like to do" (quoted by Salerno).

Somehow enigmatic remains Edgerton's statement that "if we understand British strength not in continental military terms but in British terms, there is little doubt about relative British strength, bearing in mind that Britain never envisaged fighting a great power alone". The richest and supposedly most powerfully armed nation in Europe would be expected to demonstrate its strength on the battlefield, i.e. in the classical (not British nor continental) terms. Considering then that "external support was vital to high British mobilization. Indeed Lend-Lease was designed precisely to achieve this", one wonders if British strength was intrinsic or not. And if not, what was the price to pay and to whom. Edgerton stresses the "cheapness of the victory" affirming that "for the richest belligerents, the USA and Britain, victory came at very low cost" and that for Britain the war was "only a financial and not a commercial or industrial Dunkirk". Yet reflecting on the undeniable postwar British decline, Edgerton comes to the point with a phrase which is worth the whole book: "Britain's stupendous relative decline in wartime was caused not by its decision to fight, but by that of the USA". In fact Britain strove to keep direct military American help out of Europe for as long as possible, or at least for as long as the British could show off a purely indigenous triumph. As H.P. Willmott observes ( When Men Lost Faith in Reason: Reflections on War and Society in the Twentieth Century (Studies in Military History & International Affairs) ), "at a time when Britain stood on the edge of the eclipse as a great power, here was the victory that paid for all the defeats, won before dependence upon the United States undercut Britain's status and authority: Alamein was Britain's swan-song... Alamein, not the Somme, was Europe's last great love-battle. This was the last battle involving Europeans with virtually no reference to outsiders and somehow it seems both perverse and appropriate that with its fate to be decided by non- and extra-European powers greater than itself, Europe should have fought its final battle beyond its shores". Nevertheless not even Alamein prevented that feared direct American intervention which would compound British problems and engender Britain's decline. Thus it seems that the fall of the Empire originated from the Mediterranean stoppage since mid 1940, following which, Edgerton notes, "indeed Egypt was now closer to Australia than to Britain". Very meaningful was therefore the alternative proposed to the Britons: "Beef or Bardia"; but even though Bardia was taken (and in what a spectacular and "mechanical" way!), the defeated and humiliated Italians (Cadogan's "purulent dogs"!) managed nevertheless to make the Germans keep the Mediterranean closed for two fatal years more.

Taking into account the postwar convergence and the catching up with Britain of all European powers (particularly Italy, although it had mobilized for the war the tiniest fraction of its scant national income: see Mark Harrison, ed., The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Studies in Macroeconomic History) ), Edgerton does not convince as he writes that "US growth, not British failure, was the main cause of the spectacular British relative decline between 1941 and 1945". Moreover his observation that "industrially Britain had been strengthened by the war" looks not significant, since, as Harrison notes, "Each of our six countries... finished the war with a larger stock of machine tools than before".

Instead it seems rather natural that immediately after the war a resentful First Lord of the Sea wrote (Admiralty, FO 371/67751): "To the Italians, a reminder is required that they declared war on us and we beat them. But before their defeat, they did us irreparable harm, which they cannot and they should not forget. Because of this harm, we are now a poor nation, as poor as they, and cannot give charity gifts as the U.S. do. Apart from wealth, they never stabbed the U.S. in the back, and our motives and memories are conditioned differently to those of the Americans".

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Brinn Belyea

Essential WW2 Reading

Reviewed in the United States on 19 January 2024

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Britain's War Machine is in the same league as Richard Overy's War and Economy in the Third Reich or Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction. Absolutely essential reading. I devoured the book quickly due to how compelling it is.

Carlos Vazquez Quintana

Muy exagerado pero divertido

Reviewed in Spain on 30 December 2022

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POrque no debió ser divertida la 2ª guerra mundial para Gran Bretaña, pero el autor pretende que aun sin la ayuda de EEUU, esa isla hubiera ganado a Hitler.
Yo no me lo creo, pero es el caso que, aun siendo extraño, el relato de la fabricación de armamentos, provisiones y demás logística es algo que me atrae como muchos asuntos sobre ingeniería.
Paro vamos, es difícilmente tragable que los tanques británicos fueran jamás superiores a los alemanes, ni siquiera sus fusiles, pero es lo que en síntesis propone el autor. Un buen libro¿? para los que han cometido el tremendo error del Brexit.

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Cliente Amazon

Chauvinistic and Dreadful

Reviewed in Spain on 11 June 2019

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Propaganda rather than History. Shameful anglo-chauvinism and boring too

One person found this helpful

Ramon

Four Stars

Reviewed in Canada on 5 November 2015

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Good book, came in good time.

Bayard B.

Fascinating analysis of Britain's industrlal effort in World War II

Reviewed in the United States on 23 July 2013

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A little over the top in terms of presenting the idea that everything was wonderful about Britain's industrial effort regarding aircraft, tanks, ship building, and so forth. For a more balanced view on British tank design and manufacture (for example) see Death by Design by Peter Beale and Blood, Sweat, and Arrogance by Gordon Corrigan. For a thorough discussion of the relatively low level of the German military industry in the second world war, see The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. None the less, it does present a good alternative to the traditional historical view that Germany was the ultimate technical and industrial leader in the war.

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