FINEST HOUR : The Battle of Britain [Hardcover]

Phil Craig (Author), Tim Clayton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 11, 2000

Sixty years ago, Europe lay at the feet of Adolf Hitler. In a series of whirlwind campaigns between September 1939 and June 1940, Germany defeated Poland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France. It had signed a treaty with the Soviet Union, driven the British Expeditionary Force off the continent of Europe at Dunkirk, and stood poised to invade Great Britain, the only remaining belligerent. Standing between Hitler and world domination was the just-elected prime minister, Winston Churchill...and a few thousand pilots in the Royal Air Force's Fighter Command. Defeat seemed inevitable. instead, a legend was born.

Taking its readers on a breathtaking journey from open lifeboats in North Atlantic gales to the cockpits of burning fighter planes, "Finest Hour" recreates the tensions and uncertainties of the events of 1940 -- months when the fate of the world truly did hang in the balance. It is a powerful account, told through the voices, diaries, letters, and memoirs of the men and women who lived and loved, fought and died during that terrible yet ultimately triumphant year. The personal stories of these soldiers and airmen, diplomats and politicians, journalists and spies are combined with a fresh and often controversial account of the swirling political intrigues and betrayals of the period. Here are President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ambassador Joseph Kennedy; journalists Edward R. Murrow and Whitelaw Reid; Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King and French Premier Paul Reynaud. Here are the Royal Navy's assault on the French fleet, the hushed-up catastrophe of the SS "Lancastria," America's secret plans to cope with the expected defeat of Britain,and Winston Churchill's indomitable determination to bring the New World to the rescue of the Old.

A testament to a year when a nation's darkest hour became its finest, a work that blends original historical research with the experiences of ordinary people living in desperate times, "Finest Hour" is a singular achievement, an indispensable contribution to the literature of World War II.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A defeated, retreating British Expeditionary Force, the miraculous evacuation at Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the evacuation to America and the Blitz--you couldn't make the story of 1940 dull if you tried. But even the best material has to be threaded into a manageable narrative, and Tim Clayton and Phil Craig don't disappoint. Finest Hour is never less than engaging, and frequently does rather better. On the jacket blurb, Clayton and Craig seem keen to establish their bona-fides as heavyweight historians and claim to have uncovered a "fresh and controversial" account of the political intrigues and betrayals of the period. There's actually nothing really controversial on offer--at least nothing that hasn't been aired elsewhere. If this comes as a disappointment to the authors, it needn't to the reader, because we are left with something just as, if not more, valuable, namely, an accessible layperson's ride through the political and military maneuverings.

Clayton and Craig are particularly good at guiding us through the early days of Churchill's premiership. Read most populist accounts and you would imagine that the moment Churchill took office, the bulldog spirit took over and the plucky Brits stood resolute. Not so. The case for appeasement was still being made within the Cabinet up until the evacuation of Dunkirk, as Lord Halifax had a great deal of support for his conciliatory views. Bizarrely, the thing that ultimately counted against him was his title--it was felt the Upper House should not hold sway over the Commons.

Where this book excels, though, is in the quality of its eyewitness testimonies. Many books have previously used this technique of threading narrative with the first person, but few have found such eloquent speakers. Most eyewitnesses fudge the difficult bits with remarks such as "It was hell." Clayton and Craig's witnesses don't pull their punches. We hear from one Brit who shot a German officer in cold blood and had nightmares for ages afterward. We hear from the sailor who saw his gunner decapitated. We experience the stench of burnt flesh following the shelling of an ambulance. In short, we are spared nothing. It may not be comfortable reading, but it cannot be ignored. Sixty years after the men and women in these pages fought and died, there's a tendency for the rest of us to take the freedom they gave us for granted. They deserve a better memorial than a slow fading into nothingness. This book ensures they get it. --John Crace, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

While related to a PBS documentary to appear on July 10 and 17, this chronicle of one of England's darkest hours manages to stand on its own, albeit with gaps. Its focus is the summer and fall of 1940, when France collapsed, America remained neutral and Britain stood alone. Aside from a slight American accent, the prevailing voice is British; continental perspectives, including German, are conspicuously absent. Clayton, a senior research fellow at Oxford's Worchester College, and Craig, the PBS show's producer, have drawn on the experiences of a hundred or so people who were there. About two dozen of the interview subjects are what might be called "featured players": soldiers, sailors, pilots and a few civilians whose stories recur and help hold the work together. Their comments seem to have been edited honestlyAsmoothed out rather than distorted to fit editorial needs or preconceptions. One result is a certain loss of spontaneity, but another is that the text paradoxically fits the "stiff upper lip" tradition perfectly. If not all the brethren were consistently valiant, the stories still come together in a master narrative of making do, muddling through and eventually seeing Hitler off. In an age all too inclined to discount such sentiment, it is good to be reminded that the British people in 1940 did see the war as worth fightingAand fighting at all costs. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1st Touchstone ed edition (July 11, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684869306
• ISBN-13: 978-0684869308
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #763,002 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Eye Opening Account of the Battle of Britain, July 21, 2000

By 

Aussie Reader ""Rick"" (Canberra, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: FINEST HOUR : The Battle of Britain (Hardcover)

Having read many other accounts of the Battle of Britain I was unsure if this book would be able to offer anything new to the current literature. Well I was wrong, this story, presented by many of the participants, civilians, sailors, soldiers and airmen, was excellent. The authors let the people who experienced this terrible and also great time in their history tell the story.

The book starts in France at the commencement of the German invasion and follows a number of the characters through the fall of France, the start of the aerial fighting over England to the end of the Battle of Britain. The story is told from the English side with no accounts from any of the German participants but the title does say `Finest Hour', which should give you an idea, what the book is about anyhow.

I found two of the stories quite sad, one involving the German bombing of a school in London that resulted in numerous civilian casualties and how the authorities solved the dilemma of identify and processing the bodies. Another story detailed the sinking of the British liner `City of Benares' which was carrying over 90 children being sent to Canada so as to be safe from the nighttime Blitz against London.

I also found the story of the machinations between Churchill and Roosevelt over American aid to Britain during this period very interesting as was the account of the destruction of the French Fleet and their small victory later on against the British Fleet at Dakar.

Overall this is an interesting account of this pivotal period in England's history during World War Two. I am sure that many readers will find the human stories interesting and I doubt that any student of World War Two will not find something new and interesting in this account.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spellbinding Book Wonderfully Covering The Battle of Britain, July 20, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: FINEST HOUR : The Battle of Britain (Hardcover)

In one of the darkest moments of modern history, the British people stood isolated and alone against the bulwark of the fabulously successfully forces of the Third Reich, who had just finished "blitkreiging" their way across Western Europe, forcing the desperate evacuation of the battered English army from the shores of Dunkirk to save them from certain slaughter at the hands of a rampaging Wehrmacht. In this absolutely riveting book, the authors describe the extraordinary effort of the Brits in fending off the vastly superior numbers of Luftwaffe aircraft soon invading the airspace over the English countryside. As Churchill said so memorably at the time, this attempt to beat back the Nazis might well become Britain's "finest hour".

It is a tale well told, one most Americans of a certain age are familiar with. But our mere familiarity should not deter us from enjoying this endlessly entertaining and well-narrated tale, which is both extremely approachable and understandable on the one hand for the first time student, and also immensely informative and detailed regarding Churchill's knack for popular leadership and the ways in which he bedeviled his countryman into rising to the their "finest hour". It may come as a surprise to some to discover that up to the moment of defeat in France, there were still efforts at appeasement of the Nazis being bandied about within the marbled halls of Parliament. Yet the British quickly rallied round the flagpole that Winston Churchill raised on high, and he urged them on provocatively and memorably time after time.

The book also excels at telling this story from the viewpoint of eye-witness participants, and the reader is whisked memorably along by machine-gun rapid-fire of personal eyewitness testimonies that succeed brilliantly in bringing the drama into bold relief and focus, breathing life into this otherwise `oft told tale'. It is hard for one to commit the most grievous crime of hyperbole when speaking of this particular event and time in history, when the Third Reich had quickly and massively crushed all opposition against it, and the Wehrmacht swept west all the way to the English Channel. In this moment of fear, terror and expectation, the world literally held its breath as the fateful and bloody contest began. The Brits stood alone, the only obstacle to Hitler's determination to end all opposition in the west so he could concentrate on his real objective, "living space" in the east in the breadbasket region of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine. And the British, having the undivided attention of the Luftwaffe, were indeed badly outnumbered.

The reader will soon find himself glued to his armchair, unable to resist continuing as the pages resound quickly past one with a myriad of colorful details and discussions about how the defense of the home island and all that involved. Whether it be a discussion of how the Americans participated, the German views and expectations, or the experiences of a British submariner telling his sobering story, this is a book one has to put to the top of his or her reading list. I spent the weekend reading it, and my brother immediately grabbed the book away for himself to pore through in the next several days. It is indeed a wonderful book offering the reader an expansive, entertaining, and ground level view of perhaps the most celebrated time of peril and derring-do in the history of the 20th century. Truly, this was their finest hour. Enjoy!

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the most powerful tales of courage, March 3, 2001

By 

Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: FINEST HOUR : The Battle of Britain (Hardcover)

In both world wars, millions of men faced off in combat, with millions dying at the hands of those on the other side. However, the second was unlike the first in two ways. During the first, the number of civilian casualties was low, being a very small percentage of those in the military. This was reversed in the second, with the mass killing of civilians being "accepted" practice. So much so that most of the violent deaths in the war were civilian rather than military.
The second difference was that in the first, the placement of an additional thousand combatants of any skill level on any front would have been irrelevant. That is not true in the second. There is one point in the second world war where the actions of literally a few hundred fighting men quite likely altered the outcome. This collection of brave, talented and amazing men were the fighter pilots of the British Royal Air Force. This book not only chronicles their achievements, but also that of the British, who looked long odds in the eye and said, "we will not yield."
The incredibly swift defeat of the allied armies made the German war machine seem invincible. After the British managed to extract the bulk of their army from Dunkirk, the only two things preventing the Germans from launching an invasion of Britain was the Royal Air Force and Navy. However, as subsequent events clearly demonstrated, surface ships were little more than helpless against air attack. Had the Royal Navy been forced to make a stand to prevent a cross-channel invasion, it would have been chewed to pieces by the German Luftwaffe. Therefore, it all came down to a few hundred pilots, who prevented the Germans from achieving domination of the air, which would have led to a British surrender. Of course, since the other role of airplanes was to slaughter civilians by aerial bombardment, German air domination would have led to thousands of additional civilian deaths in London and other British cities.
This defeat would have led to the capitulation of Ireland, the Axis powers gaining control of other British possessions such as Gibraltar, Malta, Cypress, Palestine and Egypt with the Suez canal. It is hard to envision a scenario where an alliance with no base in Britain could have launched a successful invasion of either Europe or northern Africa. The additional resources that the Axis could have then brought against the Soviet Union may have been enough to tip the balance to their side.
One main theme throughout this book is how close Britain really was to defeat. The army that was extracted at Dunkirk was largely weaponless and incapable of fighting and much of the coast of Britain was patrolled by men with hunting shotguns and pitchforks. Reading stories of how people planned on putting broken bottles on the end of sticks to make weapons comes across as surreal. How those people ever expected to stand up against the tanks and machine guns of an invasion army is very difficult to fathom.
A secondary theme was the incredible political caution of Franklin Roosevelt, who while he despised the Germans and knew the dangers of a British defeat, was unwilling to take the slightest political risks to aid them. When he finally did act and made the trade of destroyers for navy bases, there was no great opposition. Once again, proving a point about the American presidency. No president has ever been defeated by acting decisively, it is the appearance of weakness and indecision that will get you voted out.
The second world war was won on the plains of eastern Europe, where the armies of the Axis and their allies where simply chewed into nonexistence. However, it could have been lost in the air over Britain and we all owe those who triumphed there a debt of gratitude for their courage against what were perceived to be terrible odds. This is a book about courage and what it can mean, today, tomorrow and in the future.