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Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War
GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR
The familiar image of the British in the Second World War is that of the plucky underdog taking on German might. David Edgerton's bold, compelling new history shows the conflict in a new light, with Britain as a very wealthy country, formidable in arms, ruthless in pursuit of its interests and sitting at the heart of a global production system.
The British, indeed Churchillian, vision of war and modernity was challenged by repeated defeat by less well equipped enemies. Yet the end result was a vindication of this vision. Like the United States, a powerful Britain won a cheap victory, while others paid a great price. Britain's War Machine, by putting resources, machines and experts at the heart of a global rather than merely imperial story, demolishes some of the most cherished myths about wartime Britain and gives us a very different and often unsettling picture of a great power in action
The familiar image of the British in the Second World War is that of the plucky underdog taking on German might. David Edgerton's bold, compelling new history shows the conflict in a new light, with Britain as a very wealthy country, formidable in arms, ruthless in pursuit of its interests and sitting at the heart of a global production system.
The British, indeed Churchillian, vision of war and modernity was challenged by repeated defeat by less well equipped enemies. Yet the end result was a vindication of this vision. Like the United States, a powerful Britain won a cheap victory, while others paid a great price. Britain's War Machine, by putting resources, machines and experts at the heart of a global rather than merely imperial story, demolishes some of the most cherished myths about wartime Britain and gives us a very different and often unsettling picture of a great power in action
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First published March 31, 2011
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About the author
David Edgerton
17 books36 followersDavid Edgerton FBA was educated at St John's College, Oxford, and Imperial College London. After teaching the economics of science and technology and the history of science and technology at the University of Manchester, he became the founding director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at Imperial College, London, and Hans Rausing Professor. He has held a Major Research Fellowship (2006–2009) from the Leverhulme Trust. In 2013, he led the move of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine to the Department of History of King's College London.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
March 22, 2014
David Edgerton's book turns popular myths about Britain in the Second World War upside down and inside out. But a word of warning first.
He is making a point about history and not giving us a narrative so it would help if you already had some understanding of the course of the second world war and its past historiography.
There are times when the author revels in his piling up of data to prove his points - which are very many - so that some chapters require a fair amount of concentration of effort to understand fully.
But I do not want to put you off the book because it is informative, sometimes downright exciting as it shifts mental models and well illustrated with tables, maps and extensive notes.
Where to begin? I was persuaded by the sheer logic of the book that much of what I thought was true was not true ... it has even changed my view of contemporary political priorities.
He is persuasive that the British Empire was never not going to win the Second World War (with perhaps my own caveat that a lucky invasion and a bunch of quislings might have made it a very different Empire).
The scale of the trading and financial muscle of the Empire with its Dominions (four of the five 'Big Eyes' of global surveillance today) meant that what became the United Nations would conquer in the end.
By the end of the book, one might even feel sorry for Germany if it were not for the vile nature of its regime, blockaded, led by a blockhead, self-murderously running itself into the ground.
There is, of course, the story here of how the US displaced the Empire as hegemonic Western power but Edgerton is persuasive that this was not Britain declining but the US making use of spare capacity.
The difference between the two powers in 1939 was that the UK was an efficient global trading operation (which it still is) and the US had still not found a way to mop up the mass unemployed of 1929.
War permitted that massive surplus capacity to be employed. There is a fascinating transfer of capability from the UK to the US where it becomes clear that the US is simply more effective at utilising assets.
This is one of the points that come out of the book - Britain was so prosperous that it was monstrously wasteful. War is wasteful, of course, but the level of waste here was something else.
What was happening was that Churchill and his cronies exemplified a peculiar form of Liberal Militarism (still operative today) that created what amounted to a warfare state.
But the liberal part of that apparent oxymoron included an evident reluctance or perhaps political inability to expend human life with the gay abandon of the Central and East Europeans.
Edgerton has written elsewhere on this idea of a Liberal Militarist warfare state beyond categories of Right and Left (perhaps more to the Right) that saw total victory arising out of machines.
What this meant was that the right application of technology to wielding death on your opponents would permit the minimum death to your own side and the minimum disruption of the good life at home.
He makes clear that it was rather a 'good war' for Britons compared to what was experienced on the Continent. Not for some individuals or families perhaps but undoubtedly for many young workers.
In general, people were well nourished and the bombing campaigns were isolated to a relatively short period and area. When they came, they were horrific but most people most of the time were secure.
But it was no welfare state - the poor, the young, the old and the vulnerable were shunted aside to ensure that war workers and the military had the best of what was going.
Similarly, the death rates for troops were far less than the bloody milling going on from the suburbs of Moscow to Berlin. Bomber crews and merchant navy men were the worst affected with significant losses.
And that in itself tells you something - one set of men were expended to wreak greater death largely on civilians and the other lost their lives ensuring their fellows were well nourished and armed.
The US was to bring to a higher level this Anglo-Saxon belief in technology - the atom bomb and B-52 - as assurance against sending voters' kids too lightly to their deaths.
This attitude is very much part of what it is to be a modern liberal in the age of democracy and it empowered the State to allocate vast sums to armament and social control for decades to come.
Not that any liberal has ever hesitated to send another father's son to their death if it was 'the right thing to do' but only that it was deemed better to have your enemy and his mother killed remotely.
If the British Empire was never going to be defeated (and the German regime is now reliably seen as economically flawed at its very core), this was because it was never alone.
The Empire was not just a formal empire but an informal network of global relationships. Much of the world was dependent on patterns of trade and finance set by London and London dictated its terms.
The UK was quite capable of shifting its supply around from a blockaded Europe to the rest of the world in a way impossible to Hitler as much as Napoleon and to do so very quickly.
European dictators have to grab territory - drive desperately for oil fields or wheat lands - whereas the great Anglo-Saxon empires have simply sent a ship, theirs or one purchased with their geld.
Europeans within the blockade and third world suppliers of single crops that were no longer a priority suffered terribly. The Bengal Famine of 1942 was the fruit of a callous shift of shipping priorities.
The Empire treated much of the world as private property required to maintain the homeland and war then became a means of creating a strong national state that could disregard the interests of its partners.
Edgerton is persuasive that the war represents a transition not only from British to American global dominance but also from an imperial mind-set to a nationalist mind-set.
But Britain was 'never alone' - the rhetoric was nonsense and should be seen to be nonsense. The British were just the self-regarding beneficiaries of their own past piracies.
In the end, the myths were necessary to create a certain spirit or morale, helped by the fact that the Nazis really were rather vile. Perhaps we did not do bad things simply because we did not need to.
But we did. This brings us to the peculiarly Anglo-Saxon contribution to the long litany of man's inhumanity to man - the strategic bombing campaign where the British made a fetish out of area bombing.
The brutality of this is fascinating. Though we are brought up on Guernica, in fact the Nazis retaliated rather than initiated bombing and bombing of civilians was absolutely central to British strategy.
Indeed, it is interesting that it was the Americans that insisted on trying to be precise and break down transport and oil supply while the horrible Bomber Harris insisted on area bombing.
It was all part of this idea that war could be won by technology so minimising harms to the homeland. Edgerton is particularly good on this, showing not merely a warfare state but an aviation state.
The interwar ideology of world peace being enforced by a British imperial air force links us directly with the mentality behind atomic warfare and the repulsive bombing campaigns of Vietnam.
The same mentality is behind 'shock and awe', drones and surveillance as means of both crushing alternative military structures and controlling errant asymmetrical tribes people - increasingly ourselves.
The Liberal Militarism (precursor to neo-conservatism and Blairismo) of empire is matched by its wastefulness and its intense interest in technology as weapon of state expansion and social control.
I think you are beginning to see the importance of this book because, alongside the work of Peter Hennessy on the Cold War State and many others, we have a picture of the democratic state that disturbs.
Huge resources are made available to the State, justified by war or emergency, that can be applied not merely to winning the war but to controlling how we see that war. This is totalitarianism-lite.
Edgerton does not spend a lot of time on culture - his metier is science and technology - but his few examples show how the arts contributed to our own contemporary false consciousness about our past.
We need to start thinking about this. His and other historians' remorseless engagement with the facts tell us a very different picture about the Second World War than we had been led to believe.
We leave the book with a profound sense of confusion because he has dismantled a structure of belief (like Nietzsche killing God) but has not given us alternative structure.
He takes no ideological position so perhaps we have to - we might go back to the myth and say simply that this was what we were led to believe and now we have become what we believe.
This would be no different from any member of any religion who has inherited norms which scholarship will dismantle easily enough but which the believer chooses not to listen to.
What we have done is inherited a national religion - as perhaps all nations have done - and the new facts require either forgetting or a reform of our belief.
Certainly, the book has led me to 'fix' some revisions of belief that were already in my mind but has produced some new ones.
Thanks to Hennessy and others, I already knew that the United Kingdom had become a warfare state in stages throughout the last century and that welfare was a poor relation made necessary by political pressures.
I was never sold on the country having a well functioning democracy so the account of Churchill's cronyism - as oligarchical as anything to be found in Putin's Russia - did not surprise me.
Perhaps the historical depth of liberal internationalism as Liberal Militarism was new to me but not wholly a surprise.
After all, I had, when young, sat in on private meetings at which noble lords and industrialists had plotted with surety the defeat of the Left precisely in order to save the nuclear deterrent.
And, finally, no one but a fool does not understand imperialism and capitalism as essentially exploitative, although without necessarily believing that the exploitation cannot be progressive and modernising.
No, what was new was the realisation of just how much the 'ordinary folk' of Britain, the British working class, had been bamboozled about their own condition and in so many different ways.
The worst culprit is ironically the Party in which I spent much of my life - the Labour Party.
Although it did triumph in 1945 and it did shift into a welfare agenda, it never shifted out of the warfare agenda (excepting perhaps under Harold Wilson and then in its time of troubles in the 1970s).
It was brought into Government by Churchill as a political manouevre to counter the free trade and peace elements on the Right and was largely cover for his own Liberal Militarism and imperialism.
From that point on, although it captured the State through elections, in fact the State captured it, culminating in the final indignity of a full-blown Liberal Militarist running it like a dictatorship in Blair.
1926 may have proven decisively that the revolutionary path was not possible for the Left but Ramsey Macdonald and then Attlee both hammered nails of different sorts into the coffin of left democracy.
Macdonald toadied to the prevailing vision of economics when he had no need to and Attlee (far more forgivably) sacrificed democracy for the power to make material changes in the lives of the people.
Similarly, the book helps to lay to rest another set of malign myths that come from the closed elite that seems to decide how we are to think as well as live - about Europe.
The logic of the European Union for Europeans is profound in the context of world war. Any power that conquers Europe by force destroys Europe by triggering blockades on one side and Russia on the other.
From this perspective, unifying Europe and turning it into a single market by consent halts competition for internal imperial control and ensures that scarcities can be ameliorated by internal trade.
But for the United Kingdom and for Russia, the same logic does not apply. Let Russia speak for Russia but the United Kingdom only survives as an island through global and not just European trade.
Inside Europe, the United Kingdom is just a Province, outside Europe it is a wealthy Informal Empire. The welfare state depends on it being more than a Province. It requires the City and exports.
Just as the Labour Party needs to be removed or become the voice of the people, so the United Kingdom needs to recognise that what is in the interest of the people is independence of Europe.
The elite that blundered into war in 1914 and in 1939 is still with us. It still has a Liberal Militarist ideology and it still buys off any attempt to question its rule in just the way it has always done.
It is committed to its own survival by selling out a rather limited democracy and our independent cultural tradition to a bureaucracy that reproduces its own desire for waste, warfare and a trough.
Neither world war was necessary to the British people unless you are a card-carrying liberal internationalist but that is what these people are. The same people took us to edge on the Ukraine only this month.
The same bureaucrats and intellectuals from the same network of schools and universities, with the same editors, run rough-shod over both the wealth producers in business and the 'workers'.
One of the tricks is to divide us aggressively into right and left as if the worker and the financier do not actually have more in common as wealth creators than either do with those who live high on the tax hog.
Workers who won't work but want a regular wage and capitalists who are pig-greedy are minorities we can deal with but a free nation is one with absolute equality of opportunity and reward for effort.
But back to the book, where none of this politics exists, just straight talking on the facts that stands in a long tradition of independent historical thought that goes back to Angus Calder.
Each generation of historian - I admire Richard Overy in this respect too - is stripping way the mythology of power and allowing us to make choices about the narrative that works for us.
Increasingly, one sees accepted history as a form of belief, a religion of identity, and the best historians of our time as critics of culture whose impact is like that of philosophers on religion.
Identities have become fluid in the internet age. So they should be, matters of choice and not imposition, but identities have not gone away.
Just as someone might choose to be transgender, another might reaffirm their traditional masculinity. Someone might choose to be a Wiccan and another affirm an existential belief in the Lord Jesus Christ.
So it is with national identity - it is a thing that we inherit and then we have to choose what to do with the inheritance, adopt what we have been given, reject or adapt it to new conditions.
I hope the new fact-based and humane historiography of war, empire and nationality enables us to begin to analyse our position without falling into the trap of ideology.
What are our own core values - what is the good - and how do these values related to what I have been told it is to be (as I choose to be) English, British or even European.
Edgerton's book, alongside others, reaffirms that what it is to be British is my choice on the facts and I choose to be enraged at the incompetence and waste of our ruling elite and at the warfare state.
However, I also choose to be deeply impressed by the way the people of a very small island created a global trading system that, on balance, if callously, brought a positive modernity to the world.
I also choose to think that the suppressed and repressed radical democratic tradition of the English remains fundamental to reviving Britain as a peaceful, prosperous and humane nation.
An English Left, shorn of ideology, critical of power, engaged with global wealth creation and abandoning liberal internationalism and techno-warfare as false and cruel, may be far away but it can be.
If we come to see an equivalent Right that is individualistic and democratic and competes for space with neo-socialism in a free independent Britain, this will also be down to good historiography.
January 4, 2020
A good companion to works such as Tooze's Wages of Destruction and Collingham's The Taste of War, this work investigates British attitudes towards a war that was thought to be determined by modern technology. The British Empire was notable for its reliance on its powerful industrial basis.
Perhaps Edgerton's book is not as thorough as the two studies mentioned above. The book has a stronger political slant, as Edgerton argues that later historical interpretation of the war was strongly colored by the rise of British nationalism and post-war political thinking, which displaced the strongly internationalist outlook of the war years. This gave rise to the myth of Britain "standing alone" against the might of Nazi-occupied Europe, which in turn fed many small myths. This work makes a strong effort to replace myth with facts and figures, and describe the reality of the war years. The result is laden with information both on industry and on the important personalities of the period.
At times one does get the feeling that the author is overreaching a bit. But this is a very interesting work, which may change one's perspective on a period about which all already appeared to be known.
Perhaps Edgerton's book is not as thorough as the two studies mentioned above. The book has a stronger political slant, as Edgerton argues that later historical interpretation of the war was strongly colored by the rise of British nationalism and post-war political thinking, which displaced the strongly internationalist outlook of the war years. This gave rise to the myth of Britain "standing alone" against the might of Nazi-occupied Europe, which in turn fed many small myths. This work makes a strong effort to replace myth with facts and figures, and describe the reality of the war years. The result is laden with information both on industry and on the important personalities of the period.
At times one does get the feeling that the author is overreaching a bit. But this is a very interesting work, which may change one's perspective on a period about which all already appeared to be known.
February 19, 2014
Very data rich and does some heavy myth-busting of common misconceptions about Great Britain and the Second World War. It HAD way too many examples and failed to keep the narrative moving steadily and coherently from chapter to chapter. Don't bother with it unless you have a pretty serious interest in the technological innovations and minutiae of production in the UK leading up to and during WWII.
April 10, 2012
This is a strange book. Starts off fantastically and convincingly, goes through a 100 page section which just bombards you with statistics, then gets it together again at the end.
Unbelievably level of research. 300 pages long, plus 150 pages of footnotes.
Unbelievably level of research. 300 pages long, plus 150 pages of footnotes.
June 14, 2021
A truly outstanding book on Britain and the Second World War that destroys many of the popular myths surrounding the conflict.
September 30, 2013
BY PERMISSION FROM www.paper-trails.ca
Original Post: http://paper-trails.ca/2012/11/11/boo...
A shallow review I suppose – mostly summary- but such a great book I've been reading while knocking around NZ one last time in my surf van and today – Lest We Forget – I can't resist throwing it up here.
With a blizzard of fact and annecdote, Edgerton here demolishes the traditional narrative the British have told themselves: that after the fall of France amid the Battle of Britain, under threat of Hitler's unrealized OP SEALION invasion plans in 1941, they stood “alone” as a plucky underdog holding out against ruthlessly efficient mechanized Nazi blitzkrieg. In reality, Britain was far from alone, as Canadian know well: believing this story requires writing Canada out of the war, along with India, British Africa, and the rest of the roughly one quarter of the manpower of the human race. It rests on a very twentieth-century and very English assumption that only white peoples in Europe countries count strategically.
If legeandary Kiwi-born catoonist David Low is a good example, it also rested on the very colonial England-worship of the rest of us 'Britons' elsewhere in defferential, perennially small-minded quarters of the empire. If the Anglo-American Atlanticists have written us out of our central role in world history, we've only been too keen to help.
Most bizarrely, it rests on a peculiarly un-English underrating of the strategic weight of sea power: the Royal Navy was never seriously challenged by Germany and as long as it controlled Europe's coastline, it was the Europe under economic siege, not the British Isles. The U-boat threat, famously (at least among RCN sailors…) claimed by Churchill as “the only thing which really worried” him can be disposed of with some solid data for the reliability of food imports; the U-Boats were always more threat than blow, the marine equivalent of V1 and V2 rocketry. Their destruction was spectacular, but not strategically decisive in a war attrition Allied shipyards were always certain to win. Meanwhile, the RN home fleet's blockade of Nazi Europe put far more serious constraint on Axis access to resources, as the economic data here bear out, and was so complete it was never even contested even by the great Bismark. Perhaps modern media are part of the problem: battlefleets that rarely fight suffer from an availability problem to radio listeners; we don't hear about them much, so they don't seem to matter. In fact, strategic outcomes are not incremmental sum of operations: war is not tennis, and the winner of the most battles does not necessarily win overall, at all. It's unwise to make strategy by publicity – but that is generally the scheme of democracies' historiography, at very least.
In reality, George VI's realm has to be graded the favourite to prevail throughout the conflict and was much stronger than generally realised both in its materiel on hand, the industrial mass of war production, and technological sophistication. On this too Low's typical chagrin (another 1940 cartoon juxtoposing planes and tanks with a threadbear infantryman lists the score as “Machines 1: Heroes 0 !”) was merely compounding the conventional wisdom already shared by the Whitehall elite – and as Edgerton documents, reflected in British resources allocation for years already. The reason the Home Guard was so notoriously short of rifles was not unreadiness, but the higher priority of heavy mechanisation in lieu of small arms. Our idea of a bankrupt late-empire Britain as technologically superior to the vigourous, 'youthfull' America obscures the reality that so much technology-transfer actually flowed the other way. In radar and sonar, in intelligence cryptography, and of course on the atomic bomb, the main result of U.S. entry into the war was to enable the Americans to take tutelage, catch up, and modernize. Yet even at the time, the image of Britain as a faltering dinosaur dominated public perception on both sides. For Edgerton, paradoxical paranoia about falling behind in weapons science is what may well have drove investment in secret weapons and war machines – an investment at least on par with Hitler's better known secret-weapon mania, and arguably an overinvestment.
By extension to the Social Democratic era that followed, Edgerton shows how crucial wartime mobilisation and militarism really was in the drift leftward: not a welfare state, so much as a warfare state. This crucial idea - the social progressivity of the military-industrial complex – is not one the contemporary pseudo-pacifist left is keen to entertain. Beveridge et. al. were building “not a Welfare State but a Warfare State,” in his words, emphatically in context relative to totalitarianism; i.e. not a social safety net so much as a harness to mobilize total employment to the task at hand. Self-sufficiency in lieu of trade only really makes sense as a lingering U.K. value in strategic terms.
Here, the idea that the British Empire could have won World War II in Europe unilaterally without any American intervention at all is more credibly presented than I've ever seen. The Amazon hoards may accuse him of nationalism, but I think they're missing the point: he's rescuing the visibility of the country which actually fought the war – The Empire – and revealing what a novelty the U.K. nation-state and its islander national identity really is; a Britishness explicitly exclusive of Anglo-Canadians, Australians, and the rest was a novelty indeed. Whereas at the time, as one of Edgerton's wiser 1940 Punch cartoons has it, “We stand alone… only the billion-and-a-half of us!”
So why not some revisionism on 1940? So much of the conventional narrative comes from Churchill himself – by which he emerges as the preiminent hero – that it's hard to say what else we would expect him to tell us. Judged by their full participation in the pre-war arms race Churchill's predecessors of the thirties were not, according to Edgerton, the luddites and anti-mechanisation dinosaurs pre-supposed as such by the very title of Churchill's 1938 polemic While England Slept. As he declared in the Commons, “History shall judge you harshly, for I shall write that history!” As an American-Briton determined to definitively tie Britain to American power, his rhetoric rationlised a strategic neediness in the English people that still drives the special relationship today.
The lesson here is that industrial strategy matters: as I've argued about the CF-35s, procurement is not simply buying a product off-the-shelf in the market place. A native defence industrial base is invaluable in its own right, whether measured against enemies or – as we see here so vividly in the London-Washington dynamic – with allies alike. The implications of transactions for vendors are strategic variables in their own right; they have to be planned. A economics of defence must be a planned economy; this is not a popular approach today to say the least. But we're paying the costs in Canada. For example, what of Ottawa's Silicon Valley North? It seems hard to deny defence IT spending was a key spark; now that it's unravelled, how ready for the era of cyberwar can Ottawa really be? Well, I know China is certainly ready, and given their neighbourhood and 20th century history with surviving it, who could blame them? Certainly in aerospace, and above all in civil nuclear energy, post-war Canada's high-tech prosperity were directly the spoils of an agressively R&D led Imperial industrial strategy we've left too forgotten to credit.
Canada too is better understood as a consequence of the story Edgerton tells: in our poverty of strategic culture, and our semi-colonial eager-beaver assumption that the grownups in London and Washington will know what to do – or that even if they don't we can safely sit out from it all. I've written elsewhere of my conviction that the reason Canadian foreign policy – or at least public opnion about it – so strongly resembles post-war German and Japanese pseudo-pacifist multilateralism is that like them, anglo-Canadians too 'lost the war'. It was our Empire too, and when the war was over we'd lost it – despite our most entheusiastic popular imperialism having raised arguably the largest all-voluntary army in world history… twice. Legal definition of a separate Canadian citizenship would arguably not have been politically salable in Ontario or the Maritimes for Mackenzie-King's Liberals prior to the War, but was self-evident in 1948. If the U.K. nationality was a post-war novelty then so, by way of geopolitical orphanhood, was ours. The Aussies have never been confused about that, of course… but in this regard, their War is as forgotten to Anglo-American Atlanticist historiography as our own.
Reality is that while Gibraltar never fell, but the vaunted 'Gibraltar of the East' at Singapore certainly did. Our deliciously revisionist author locates the true nadir of British fortunes in the war: catastrophic naval defeat by Japan by early 1942. In the Churchillian memory, the Indian Ocean theatre is a sideshow: we scarcely really think of Britain as a player in the Pacific, the 'Americans' War'… but that's only because their setbacks at Singapore, Hong Kong, even at Trincomalee were all so spectacularly decisive, with the sinking at sea of flagship HMS Prince of Wales, her cutting-edge radar malfunctioning and anti-air gunners proving unready. To the Japanese it was European colonialism in Asia which formed the Main Adversary. Churchill loudly dismissed Ghandi as a terrorist, for example, and had the Japanese a clear opening they might well have sought to adopt the Congress Party as a proxy – as Stallin in the event made sure to do. Churchill's memoirs may well rather dwell on the Battle of Britain, but to Edgerton these naval defeats cast a far longer shadow, ending the RN's two-century hegemony over a whole hemesphere, leaving the post-war end of Empire a forgone conclusion – and having nothing at all to do with any unpreparedness of appeasement. Midway was no more predictable as a victory… and American tribulations around the Asian littoral ever since are largely a matter of its grasping (often absent-mindedly) to pick up the pieces amid a vacuum left by unforseeable and basically spontaneous British combustion.
In sum: our Empire had a hip tech-led strategy after all… but still lost WW2… in weak leadership at sea… to the United States.
So the Clauswitzian lesson here is simply that battles matter; so refreshing to read after decades of Marxist or Neo-liberal materialism and economic determinism about global power. Battles don't matter cumulatively, necessarily, but quite often as decisive fulcrums where so very much is prone to random chance. This debate echoes Roman historiography, where the causative weight of far-from-inevitable battlefield disasters – especially at Adrianople (378) – have long been cast as mere symptoms of inexorable social or economic decline at least since Edward Gibbon invented modern academic history in his 1776 classic. I've raised this dilemma with my History students this semester: just because there are systemic implications trending human societies towards some configuration (technolgical implications, sociological, implications) does exclude a decisive role for random chance.
The same point applies to business strategy, or social policy, any other strategic context: it is a profound fallacy to assume cause and effect are proportionate. Obscurities can have comprehensive consequences. New technology is not destiny – and not necessarily even a strategy.
It's why history is inherently of the humanities: history is a literature, and certainly not a social science. Theories of history are not falsifiable because history does not repeat itself (when it does, unexpectedly) Even if we could press a 'rewind' button and rerun the same events, we would almost certainly not see causititve variables yield the same results.
Sometimes… stuff happens.
Original Post: http://paper-trails.ca/2012/11/11/boo...
A shallow review I suppose – mostly summary- but such a great book I've been reading while knocking around NZ one last time in my surf van and today – Lest We Forget – I can't resist throwing it up here.
With a blizzard of fact and annecdote, Edgerton here demolishes the traditional narrative the British have told themselves: that after the fall of France amid the Battle of Britain, under threat of Hitler's unrealized OP SEALION invasion plans in 1941, they stood “alone” as a plucky underdog holding out against ruthlessly efficient mechanized Nazi blitzkrieg. In reality, Britain was far from alone, as Canadian know well: believing this story requires writing Canada out of the war, along with India, British Africa, and the rest of the roughly one quarter of the manpower of the human race. It rests on a very twentieth-century and very English assumption that only white peoples in Europe countries count strategically.
If legeandary Kiwi-born catoonist David Low is a good example, it also rested on the very colonial England-worship of the rest of us 'Britons' elsewhere in defferential, perennially small-minded quarters of the empire. If the Anglo-American Atlanticists have written us out of our central role in world history, we've only been too keen to help.
Most bizarrely, it rests on a peculiarly un-English underrating of the strategic weight of sea power: the Royal Navy was never seriously challenged by Germany and as long as it controlled Europe's coastline, it was the Europe under economic siege, not the British Isles. The U-boat threat, famously (at least among RCN sailors…) claimed by Churchill as “the only thing which really worried” him can be disposed of with some solid data for the reliability of food imports; the U-Boats were always more threat than blow, the marine equivalent of V1 and V2 rocketry. Their destruction was spectacular, but not strategically decisive in a war attrition Allied shipyards were always certain to win. Meanwhile, the RN home fleet's blockade of Nazi Europe put far more serious constraint on Axis access to resources, as the economic data here bear out, and was so complete it was never even contested even by the great Bismark. Perhaps modern media are part of the problem: battlefleets that rarely fight suffer from an availability problem to radio listeners; we don't hear about them much, so they don't seem to matter. In fact, strategic outcomes are not incremmental sum of operations: war is not tennis, and the winner of the most battles does not necessarily win overall, at all. It's unwise to make strategy by publicity – but that is generally the scheme of democracies' historiography, at very least.
In reality, George VI's realm has to be graded the favourite to prevail throughout the conflict and was much stronger than generally realised both in its materiel on hand, the industrial mass of war production, and technological sophistication. On this too Low's typical chagrin (another 1940 cartoon juxtoposing planes and tanks with a threadbear infantryman lists the score as “Machines 1: Heroes 0 !”) was merely compounding the conventional wisdom already shared by the Whitehall elite – and as Edgerton documents, reflected in British resources allocation for years already. The reason the Home Guard was so notoriously short of rifles was not unreadiness, but the higher priority of heavy mechanisation in lieu of small arms. Our idea of a bankrupt late-empire Britain as technologically superior to the vigourous, 'youthfull' America obscures the reality that so much technology-transfer actually flowed the other way. In radar and sonar, in intelligence cryptography, and of course on the atomic bomb, the main result of U.S. entry into the war was to enable the Americans to take tutelage, catch up, and modernize. Yet even at the time, the image of Britain as a faltering dinosaur dominated public perception on both sides. For Edgerton, paradoxical paranoia about falling behind in weapons science is what may well have drove investment in secret weapons and war machines – an investment at least on par with Hitler's better known secret-weapon mania, and arguably an overinvestment.
By extension to the Social Democratic era that followed, Edgerton shows how crucial wartime mobilisation and militarism really was in the drift leftward: not a welfare state, so much as a warfare state. This crucial idea - the social progressivity of the military-industrial complex – is not one the contemporary pseudo-pacifist left is keen to entertain. Beveridge et. al. were building “not a Welfare State but a Warfare State,” in his words, emphatically in context relative to totalitarianism; i.e. not a social safety net so much as a harness to mobilize total employment to the task at hand. Self-sufficiency in lieu of trade only really makes sense as a lingering U.K. value in strategic terms.
Here, the idea that the British Empire could have won World War II in Europe unilaterally without any American intervention at all is more credibly presented than I've ever seen. The Amazon hoards may accuse him of nationalism, but I think they're missing the point: he's rescuing the visibility of the country which actually fought the war – The Empire – and revealing what a novelty the U.K. nation-state and its islander national identity really is; a Britishness explicitly exclusive of Anglo-Canadians, Australians, and the rest was a novelty indeed. Whereas at the time, as one of Edgerton's wiser 1940 Punch cartoons has it, “We stand alone… only the billion-and-a-half of us!”
So why not some revisionism on 1940? So much of the conventional narrative comes from Churchill himself – by which he emerges as the preiminent hero – that it's hard to say what else we would expect him to tell us. Judged by their full participation in the pre-war arms race Churchill's predecessors of the thirties were not, according to Edgerton, the luddites and anti-mechanisation dinosaurs pre-supposed as such by the very title of Churchill's 1938 polemic While England Slept. As he declared in the Commons, “History shall judge you harshly, for I shall write that history!” As an American-Briton determined to definitively tie Britain to American power, his rhetoric rationlised a strategic neediness in the English people that still drives the special relationship today.
The lesson here is that industrial strategy matters: as I've argued about the CF-35s, procurement is not simply buying a product off-the-shelf in the market place. A native defence industrial base is invaluable in its own right, whether measured against enemies or – as we see here so vividly in the London-Washington dynamic – with allies alike. The implications of transactions for vendors are strategic variables in their own right; they have to be planned. A economics of defence must be a planned economy; this is not a popular approach today to say the least. But we're paying the costs in Canada. For example, what of Ottawa's Silicon Valley North? It seems hard to deny defence IT spending was a key spark; now that it's unravelled, how ready for the era of cyberwar can Ottawa really be? Well, I know China is certainly ready, and given their neighbourhood and 20th century history with surviving it, who could blame them? Certainly in aerospace, and above all in civil nuclear energy, post-war Canada's high-tech prosperity were directly the spoils of an agressively R&D led Imperial industrial strategy we've left too forgotten to credit.
Canada too is better understood as a consequence of the story Edgerton tells: in our poverty of strategic culture, and our semi-colonial eager-beaver assumption that the grownups in London and Washington will know what to do – or that even if they don't we can safely sit out from it all. I've written elsewhere of my conviction that the reason Canadian foreign policy – or at least public opnion about it – so strongly resembles post-war German and Japanese pseudo-pacifist multilateralism is that like them, anglo-Canadians too 'lost the war'. It was our Empire too, and when the war was over we'd lost it – despite our most entheusiastic popular imperialism having raised arguably the largest all-voluntary army in world history… twice. Legal definition of a separate Canadian citizenship would arguably not have been politically salable in Ontario or the Maritimes for Mackenzie-King's Liberals prior to the War, but was self-evident in 1948. If the U.K. nationality was a post-war novelty then so, by way of geopolitical orphanhood, was ours. The Aussies have never been confused about that, of course… but in this regard, their War is as forgotten to Anglo-American Atlanticist historiography as our own.
Reality is that while Gibraltar never fell, but the vaunted 'Gibraltar of the East' at Singapore certainly did. Our deliciously revisionist author locates the true nadir of British fortunes in the war: catastrophic naval defeat by Japan by early 1942. In the Churchillian memory, the Indian Ocean theatre is a sideshow: we scarcely really think of Britain as a player in the Pacific, the 'Americans' War'… but that's only because their setbacks at Singapore, Hong Kong, even at Trincomalee were all so spectacularly decisive, with the sinking at sea of flagship HMS Prince of Wales, her cutting-edge radar malfunctioning and anti-air gunners proving unready. To the Japanese it was European colonialism in Asia which formed the Main Adversary. Churchill loudly dismissed Ghandi as a terrorist, for example, and had the Japanese a clear opening they might well have sought to adopt the Congress Party as a proxy – as Stallin in the event made sure to do. Churchill's memoirs may well rather dwell on the Battle of Britain, but to Edgerton these naval defeats cast a far longer shadow, ending the RN's two-century hegemony over a whole hemesphere, leaving the post-war end of Empire a forgone conclusion – and having nothing at all to do with any unpreparedness of appeasement. Midway was no more predictable as a victory… and American tribulations around the Asian littoral ever since are largely a matter of its grasping (often absent-mindedly) to pick up the pieces amid a vacuum left by unforseeable and basically spontaneous British combustion.
In sum: our Empire had a hip tech-led strategy after all… but still lost WW2… in weak leadership at sea… to the United States.
So the Clauswitzian lesson here is simply that battles matter; so refreshing to read after decades of Marxist or Neo-liberal materialism and economic determinism about global power. Battles don't matter cumulatively, necessarily, but quite often as decisive fulcrums where so very much is prone to random chance. This debate echoes Roman historiography, where the causative weight of far-from-inevitable battlefield disasters – especially at Adrianople (378) – have long been cast as mere symptoms of inexorable social or economic decline at least since Edward Gibbon invented modern academic history in his 1776 classic. I've raised this dilemma with my History students this semester: just because there are systemic implications trending human societies towards some configuration (technolgical implications, sociological, implications) does exclude a decisive role for random chance.
The same point applies to business strategy, or social policy, any other strategic context: it is a profound fallacy to assume cause and effect are proportionate. Obscurities can have comprehensive consequences. New technology is not destiny – and not necessarily even a strategy.
It's why history is inherently of the humanities: history is a literature, and certainly not a social science. Theories of history are not falsifiable because history does not repeat itself (when it does, unexpectedly) Even if we could press a 'rewind' button and rerun the same events, we would almost certainly not see causititve variables yield the same results.
Sometimes… stuff happens.
August 29, 2014
More often or not, I come across a work of history and think - this is a good book. Very rarely do I come across a book that changes my entire perception of an historical event. This book is one of them.
Students of WW2 history are familiar with the image of plucky Britain standing up to the Nazi juggernaut. Edgerton takes a mills bomb to this idea and blows it out of the water!
Using a barrage (no pun intended) of stats, tables and pages of brilliantly researched data, Edgerton turns one of the enduring myths of WW2 on its head. If anything, it was Germany that was the underdog.
The sheer scale of Britain's empire, the resources at its disposal, and its ability to fight and dictate war on its terms, made victory inevitable. Edgerton rightly points to the horrendous attrition on the Eastern Front and compares it with Britain's losses - we got off lightly. part of that was Britain's goal to fight a modern war. In contrast, the low mechanization of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army was a reminder of the slaughter of the Great War.
Edgerton demolishes myths about Britain's food supply (only the Americans were better feed) manpower (how can a country with a global empire of 500 million suffer a manpower shortage) and tank production.
Now, tank production is a double edged sword, and one of the very few bones of contention I have with this book. Yes, Britain produced more tanks, but it was the quality and the training that made the difference in match ups against the Germans.
Edgerton highlights the General Grant as an example of a British tank with a better main gun than its German counterpart (Panzer Mark IV)
Yes, the Grant's 75mm was better than the mark IV's short barrelled equivalent, but the panzer's armament was turret mounted, whilst the Grant had its 75mm fixed in the hull, reducing its arc of fire. A moot point, but crucial in tank Vs tank combat. If the author had spent less time buried in stats and more playing miniature wargames, he'd know this!!!
Jokes aside, Britain's war machine is an insightful and at times, brilliant read.
Students of WW2 history are familiar with the image of plucky Britain standing up to the Nazi juggernaut. Edgerton takes a mills bomb to this idea and blows it out of the water!
Using a barrage (no pun intended) of stats, tables and pages of brilliantly researched data, Edgerton turns one of the enduring myths of WW2 on its head. If anything, it was Germany that was the underdog.
The sheer scale of Britain's empire, the resources at its disposal, and its ability to fight and dictate war on its terms, made victory inevitable. Edgerton rightly points to the horrendous attrition on the Eastern Front and compares it with Britain's losses - we got off lightly. part of that was Britain's goal to fight a modern war. In contrast, the low mechanization of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army was a reminder of the slaughter of the Great War.
Edgerton demolishes myths about Britain's food supply (only the Americans were better feed) manpower (how can a country with a global empire of 500 million suffer a manpower shortage) and tank production.
Now, tank production is a double edged sword, and one of the very few bones of contention I have with this book. Yes, Britain produced more tanks, but it was the quality and the training that made the difference in match ups against the Germans.
Edgerton highlights the General Grant as an example of a British tank with a better main gun than its German counterpart (Panzer Mark IV)
Yes, the Grant's 75mm was better than the mark IV's short barrelled equivalent, but the panzer's armament was turret mounted, whilst the Grant had its 75mm fixed in the hull, reducing its arc of fire. A moot point, but crucial in tank Vs tank combat. If the author had spent less time buried in stats and more playing miniature wargames, he'd know this!!!
Jokes aside, Britain's war machine is an insightful and at times, brilliant read.
August 28, 2019
On the way back from a trip to the UK I dipped into the bookstore at the airport and couldn't resist a 3 for 2 Sonderangebot. The main inspiration was David Edgerton's book on the mobilisation of the Empire in Britain's War Machine. I got excited by the tables of British and overseas production as well as the maps of oil pipelines and major centres of war production. Topping that is the list of highest awards from the Royal Commission of Awards for Inventions! Edgerton weaves contemporary and newly made graphics very well and I look forward to reading it some day.
September 13, 2025
I have finished reading “Britain’s War Machine” by David Edgerton.
The central argument of this book is bold and simple. The modern myth of the Britain being “alone” and in some way underpowered when it came to deciding to enter the Second World War is inaccurate. Far from being backward the country was well armed, well fed, dynamic economically and well-armed.
In fact, so well off and well resourced was the UK that the British Government often got distracted with various kinds of inventions and gadgets, much to the encouragement of Winston Churchill. While a few of these managed to yield some useful results to help the war effort, the author proved the case very well that mainly British innovators were better at developing pre-existing technologies further rather than inventing something completely original. Some of Churchill’s pet were costly follies that went nowhere, such as a trench digging tractor.
This book is unapologetically nerdy. VERY nerdy, which is not off-putting in the least to my nerdy self. Not only is it not afraid in engaging in nuance in debates about British war management, it dives right in to nuance and probes it’s deep depths and analyses it’s entrails. To prove a point about how much the UK was NOT in immediate danger of starving, the author takes the reader through a very detailed look at the extensive civilian fleets open to the British Government including lots of refrigerated ships and an extensive network of food imports from countries outside of the Empire. Put simply our maritime trade network (and Royal Navy to protect it) was so extensive, that the loss of Western European markets was a problem, but one that could be more easily overcome by our country over many others.
There were some interesting and highly technical discussions in the book comparing the mechanisation of British land forces as compared to other Allies and German forces. Contrary to many reports the British land forces were more mechanised than the German forces, and it’s tanks were similarly matched to German ones during the brief campaign that led to Dunkirk and the fall of France. This led to the interesting observation that while mechanisation of an armed force could be a big advantage to that force, it is not always as decisive in a battle or a campaign as one would presume it was. Not only did the Allies have a mechanisation advantage, but Oil for our side was a lot easier to come by as well.
The main goal of this book is to debunk misleading British nationalist myths about the war which has distorted how victory was achieved. From 1945 onwards the “alone” myth was encouraged to become popular, only recently have we begun to appreciate the empire’s contribution in manpower, supplies and production. The author advances the interesting historical counterfactual, if the Japanese didn’t attack British colonies in the East in 1942 and the same colonial manpower was thrown into Europe, how soon would the war have ended? Indeed, in terms of war fighting capability for the UK the loss of the East was more of a problem than the loss of France.
The intelligence with which this book was written cannot be faulted. What I think it could have been improved was how it drew arguments together. There are so many myriad threads of argument that I think some more clear summarising could have helped at the end of each chapters. This is something the book “How the Allies Won the War” by Richard Overy did exceptionally well after VERY big deep dives into key areas of the same war.
The book ends on a serious note which, I think is both poignant and a little misleading. The author makes it clear that our country’s unique advantages of the time (island geography, air superiority, powerful Navy and wealth), meant that unlike poorer countries more in the path of the Axis we had the option to engage in the fighting more indirectly. This meant that the human cost of the fighting, while still large and tragic for us, was not as much as the Soviet Union. According to the author this means that perhaps our enthusiasm for the UK’s victory should be seen in more perspective.
I take it point. But I would point out the author that we became engaged in the war to maintain the balance of power in Europe. However, the Soviet Union became involved because it’s selfish and evil leadership collaborated with Nazi Germany, only to be betrayed. Motives matter.
The central argument of this book is bold and simple. The modern myth of the Britain being “alone” and in some way underpowered when it came to deciding to enter the Second World War is inaccurate. Far from being backward the country was well armed, well fed, dynamic economically and well-armed.
In fact, so well off and well resourced was the UK that the British Government often got distracted with various kinds of inventions and gadgets, much to the encouragement of Winston Churchill. While a few of these managed to yield some useful results to help the war effort, the author proved the case very well that mainly British innovators were better at developing pre-existing technologies further rather than inventing something completely original. Some of Churchill’s pet were costly follies that went nowhere, such as a trench digging tractor.
This book is unapologetically nerdy. VERY nerdy, which is not off-putting in the least to my nerdy self. Not only is it not afraid in engaging in nuance in debates about British war management, it dives right in to nuance and probes it’s deep depths and analyses it’s entrails. To prove a point about how much the UK was NOT in immediate danger of starving, the author takes the reader through a very detailed look at the extensive civilian fleets open to the British Government including lots of refrigerated ships and an extensive network of food imports from countries outside of the Empire. Put simply our maritime trade network (and Royal Navy to protect it) was so extensive, that the loss of Western European markets was a problem, but one that could be more easily overcome by our country over many others.
There were some interesting and highly technical discussions in the book comparing the mechanisation of British land forces as compared to other Allies and German forces. Contrary to many reports the British land forces were more mechanised than the German forces, and it’s tanks were similarly matched to German ones during the brief campaign that led to Dunkirk and the fall of France. This led to the interesting observation that while mechanisation of an armed force could be a big advantage to that force, it is not always as decisive in a battle or a campaign as one would presume it was. Not only did the Allies have a mechanisation advantage, but Oil for our side was a lot easier to come by as well.
The main goal of this book is to debunk misleading British nationalist myths about the war which has distorted how victory was achieved. From 1945 onwards the “alone” myth was encouraged to become popular, only recently have we begun to appreciate the empire’s contribution in manpower, supplies and production. The author advances the interesting historical counterfactual, if the Japanese didn’t attack British colonies in the East in 1942 and the same colonial manpower was thrown into Europe, how soon would the war have ended? Indeed, in terms of war fighting capability for the UK the loss of the East was more of a problem than the loss of France.
The intelligence with which this book was written cannot be faulted. What I think it could have been improved was how it drew arguments together. There are so many myriad threads of argument that I think some more clear summarising could have helped at the end of each chapters. This is something the book “How the Allies Won the War” by Richard Overy did exceptionally well after VERY big deep dives into key areas of the same war.
The book ends on a serious note which, I think is both poignant and a little misleading. The author makes it clear that our country’s unique advantages of the time (island geography, air superiority, powerful Navy and wealth), meant that unlike poorer countries more in the path of the Axis we had the option to engage in the fighting more indirectly. This meant that the human cost of the fighting, while still large and tragic for us, was not as much as the Soviet Union. According to the author this means that perhaps our enthusiasm for the UK’s victory should be seen in more perspective.
I take it point. But I would point out the author that we became engaged in the war to maintain the balance of power in Europe. However, the Soviet Union became involved because it’s selfish and evil leadership collaborated with Nazi Germany, only to be betrayed. Motives matter.
June 13, 2017
The blurb suggested a popular history that would make a narrative case that the popular view of British war production (that it wasn't good enough) was false. The book is actually a pretty dry academic recounting of British war production (a third of the book is notes and references) with a lot of facts, figures, and names, and not so much narrative. It does occasionally get round to the case it promises - British war production was strong and innovative, easily the match of Germany and the USA early in the war, outstripping Germany handily by the end, although many of the inventions that became famous during and after the war (PLUTO, Mulberry, the bouncing bomb) had very little impact.
An interesting story, competently if uninspiringly told.
An interesting story, competently if uninspiringly told.
August 19, 2019
An interesting read that sets out to challenge the conventional received narrative about Britain in the Second World War, starting from the argued premise that a Britain versus Nazi Germany conflict was a sure win for Britain (not necessarily easy but sure). The author offers lots of evidence to support that view (supported by 81 pages of end notes and a 36 page bibliography). He also goes to the trouble to explain how the received version of this history emerged and was propagated by both politicians and historians. You don't need to be convinced but if you wish to be considered a serious student of World War Two you need to read this book.
July 10, 2022
Clearly a lot of painstaking research has gone into this book and the result is an incredibly comprehensive account of Britain’s economic and technological affairs during the war. However, I’m still not sure I get the point, which seems to be that Britain entered the war as a super power and ended the war not as a superpower but still a powerful nation?! Well that was already my understanding. I think this book is busting myths I wasn’t aware of. Perhaps it would be more enlightening to 20th century grads but to me, it wasn’t that revelatory. 🤷🏻♂️ However, it’s definitely staying on the shelf as a reference of facts and figures.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 24, 2023
Four stars for this comprehensive book because while it’s detailed, heavily researched and fascinating (5 stars), it’s also a marathon slog to read (3 stars). Heavy in technical detail and statistics, the author’s arguments against the idea that Britain was a perky little fighter who single-handedly fended off the Nazis (and sacrificed itself for the world selflessly) is authoritative and convincing. Bottom line: without its friends and family (Empire) Britain would have fared much worse.
January 15, 2021
An interesting book, if rather hard going at times, which resulted in me dipping in and out of it over several months. It certainly raises questions over many of the shibboleths that we are brought up to accept within Britain abut World War 2. Rather less entertaining that Peter Hitchen's "The Phoney Victory", but more detailed and analytical, the combination is a good one.
March 27, 2024
When I started this book, I was initially a little disappointed. However, it grew on me and proved very thought-provoking. It references other books I have in my collection; some of these being my father's. It gave these an interesting context: for me at least.
June 7, 2017
A good debunking of many myths about British war production.
December 16, 2017
Excellent. It needed to be said.
April 26, 2022
Not a good read bit long
May 24, 2023
Excellent exposition of Britain's position in the Second World War, questioning the self congratulation of Scylla and the backwardness of Corelli's Charybdis.
May 28, 2024
Excellent book, an eye opener. Recommended
March 28, 2018
When it comes to the Second World War, the British historical imagination is defined by the image of 1940: a plucky little island, standing alone against the Nazi juggernaut that had just rolled over western Europe. The underdog status suggested by this image magnified both the heroism of the Battle of Britain and the subsequent victory scored over Germany five years later. Yet such a view, as David Edgerton stresses, is wildly inaccurate. Contrary to the popular myth, Britain stood at the head of an empire of nearly half a billion people, with the resources to wage war quite easily. Moreover, it was a war waged with an advanced and heavily mechanized military effort, one even more so than that possessed by their enemy. Edgerton details all of this in his revisionist analysis of the war, one that takes a bulldozer to many longstanding misconceptions to give readers a better understanding of how the British waged, and won, the war.
Edgerton begins by describing the considerable economic resources Britain possessed during the war. Theirs was an imperial economy capable of tapping a range of resources from foodstuffs to oil, as well as the manufactures and skills provided by the colonies. This was connected to the home country by a merchant fleet which also gave Britain access to the economic might of the United States and which actually grew over the course of the conflict. Edgerton describes the good use to which these goods were put, noting the improvements in diet for millions and arguing, again contrary to the popular myth, that the war materiel produced was of equal or even superior quality to that of their enemies and often of their allies as well. All of this was managed by a state that gave considerable support to its scientists and technicians, many of whom developed the advanced weaponry which Britain used to win the war.
Forcefully argued and backed by a wealth of statistics, Edgerton’s book provides a powerful corrective to many misconceptions about Britain’s war effort. Yet in some respects Edgerton deploys his arguments too broadly, often glossing over or ignoring the flaws that served as the basis of contemporary criticisms about the quality of British weapons (such as in naval air, which is mentioned only once and in passing). Moreover, his analysis raises an interesting question that is left unaddressed: if the British war machine outclassed that of the Germans in both quality and quantity, then why did the war last as long as it did? Edgerton suggest Japan’s entry (which deprived Britain of the resources of her east Asian colonies) as a key factor, but this is only a partial example and begs further analysis. Such an examination would have added greatly to the value of this already important book, which should be read by anyone with an interest in British history or the Second World War.
Edgerton begins by describing the considerable economic resources Britain possessed during the war. Theirs was an imperial economy capable of tapping a range of resources from foodstuffs to oil, as well as the manufactures and skills provided by the colonies. This was connected to the home country by a merchant fleet which also gave Britain access to the economic might of the United States and which actually grew over the course of the conflict. Edgerton describes the good use to which these goods were put, noting the improvements in diet for millions and arguing, again contrary to the popular myth, that the war materiel produced was of equal or even superior quality to that of their enemies and often of their allies as well. All of this was managed by a state that gave considerable support to its scientists and technicians, many of whom developed the advanced weaponry which Britain used to win the war.
Forcefully argued and backed by a wealth of statistics, Edgerton’s book provides a powerful corrective to many misconceptions about Britain’s war effort. Yet in some respects Edgerton deploys his arguments too broadly, often glossing over or ignoring the flaws that served as the basis of contemporary criticisms about the quality of British weapons (such as in naval air, which is mentioned only once and in passing). Moreover, his analysis raises an interesting question that is left unaddressed: if the British war machine outclassed that of the Germans in both quality and quantity, then why did the war last as long as it did? Edgerton suggest Japan’s entry (which deprived Britain of the resources of her east Asian colonies) as a key factor, but this is only a partial example and begs further analysis. Such an examination would have added greatly to the value of this already important book, which should be read by anyone with an interest in British history or the Second World War.
June 11, 2022
An enormous collection of facts, statistics and insights into the UK in WWII.
However, I wasn't sure what Edgerton's point was. He sets out the UK as a major superpower in 1939. Indeed it was but he does gloss over the economic problems of the inter-war years. The early setbacks of WWII he dismisses as "normal reverses" for an empire that held all the cards. He really doesn't own the existential peril that the UK faced. Because he doesn't own that he doesn't need to address why so imperious a power should face such peril from outside. There is a nod to "if it wasn't for those pesky Japanese" and their invasion of the UK's far eastern possessions. But I would have thought that was the whole point. In any event, it doesn't ring true as a synoptic account of WWII economics.
Fascinating detail though.
However, I wasn't sure what Edgerton's point was. He sets out the UK as a major superpower in 1939. Indeed it was but he does gloss over the economic problems of the inter-war years. The early setbacks of WWII he dismisses as "normal reverses" for an empire that held all the cards. He really doesn't own the existential peril that the UK faced. Because he doesn't own that he doesn't need to address why so imperious a power should face such peril from outside. There is a nod to "if it wasn't for those pesky Japanese" and their invasion of the UK's far eastern possessions. But I would have thought that was the whole point. In any event, it doesn't ring true as a synoptic account of WWII economics.
Fascinating detail though.
February 7, 2020
I loved this book! To me, Edgerton's work is what Hanson's The Second World Wars would have looked like if it had been done properly. The British War Machine is too wide-ranging for me to do it justice in this short review, but it is basically a top-level industrial and economic overview of Britain in World War Two. Edgerton presents a revisionist take on Britain's global position, convincingly arguing that the U.K. never stood alone against Germany. Instead, it was well-endowed due to its imperial holdings and well-support by the British Dominions. Edgerton also shows that it was 1942, when Japan began its Pacific rampage, that Britain's position was seriously weakened, not 1940. Indeed, the entire book is full of fascinating, revisionist takes that seriously undermine the conventional narrative of Britain during the Second World War. I learned, for example, that Northern Ireland was largely excluded from the British war boom, that the U.K. had the most mechanized, tank-heavy force in the war, and that British industry was much more flexible than that of the Americans (and Britain was much more efficient in shipbuilding). I also learned many interesting facts about global logistics and the politics of food rationing that I would have never even considered before. As with all books like this, there are some pages were Edgerton goes into an excessive amount of detail on the exact numbers of units produced, but this barely bothered me because these facts, while occasionally tedious, were rarely superfluous. Edgerton has two more books that look interesting, and I'm really hoping to read them in the next few months.
May 13, 2013
Interesting in how the British war industry and economy came to be presented in the post-war decades. Edgerton shows the economy as very efficient, overshadowed however by the massive economic development of the USA in the 1940s. Professional academics of the 1960s and '70s were pro-marxist, and therefore downplayed this, preferring to build up the wartime achievements of the USSR. Others liked a popular image of a small island fighting a continent. An unusual and as such quite original work, well referenced.
July 14, 2016
Useful corrective to the "plucky underdog" narrative of WW2 which saw the British standing alone against an overwhelming foe. Edgerton draws attention to the quantity and quality of the British Empire's matériel, particularly in 1940 and 1941. As a contemporary cartoonist observes the Empire was standing "alone" - all 500m of its citizens. It could have used some more qualitative research. How good were the British radios, guns, binoculars compared to the German army's? And the book would have benefited from more rigorous organisation. Too many chapters read like index cards.
July 31, 2012
I bought this book because of its cover, which promised new insights, but I found it to be heavy going and rather academic, without giving me any new fundamental insights. If you have not read them yet and are looking for different perspectives then I would recommend "Bloodlands" or "The Pity of War".
January 12, 2013
Very interesting.
A barrage of statistics to disprove some common myths about Britain especially in the first years of WW2.
Britain was more powerful, less alone, more imperial, more scientific , producing more aircraft than Germany fom erly on ... Which begs the question of why the rapid relative decline in the 40s. Well argued. Fascinating.
A barrage of statistics to disprove some common myths about Britain especially in the first years of WW2.
Britain was more powerful, less alone, more imperial, more scientific , producing more aircraft than Germany fom erly on ... Which begs the question of why the rapid relative decline in the 40s. Well argued. Fascinating.
January 6, 2014
An interesting read that explores Britain's industrial capacity for making war in WW11. It can be quite dry at times and has extensive facts and figures. The title is somewhat misleading in that it's focus is industrial capacity and not the appropriateness of what was produced.
May 26, 2012
My review will be published in the Summer 2012 issue of Finest Hour (Churchill Centre).
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