Alan Allport

Less a revisionist history than a contrarian one, Britain at Bay, Alan Allport's first volume of a history tracking Britain's involvement in the Second World War, is a huge disappointment. It is tolerably written (though not impressively so), reasonably comprehensive and certainly provocative. Unfortunately, I often found the provocation to be unnecessary – and underhand.

Allport's thesis here is that our conventional view of Britain in the Second World War is a myth – a "Shire Folk myth", in fact (pg. 8). Using J. R. R. Tolkien's Hobbit creations as an analogy (one that makes sense, but which feels out of place in an academic work and I cringed whenever it was mentioned), Allport says that the view of Britain as an unassuming, innocent Shire forced to go out and battle an evil, encroaching enemy (Mordor/Germany) in order to save the world by mere pluck and good cheer, is an incorrect one.

Well, obviously. No serious person believes that. Yes, the conventional telling of Britain in the Second World War does have a bit of mythologising to it – Spitfires, Blitz spirit, etc. – and this is regurgitated in the commemorative "coffee table books" that, at one point, Allport unnecessarily sneers at (pg. 302). But that's what history is, really – a rigorous mythologising, a story with all the chaff cut off through decades of research and scrutiny. There's certainly an argument to be made that our Second World War myth still has some chaff stuck to it – our narrative still follows in broad sweeps the paths shaped by Churchill's post-war histories and the propaganda machine of the war years – but also an argument that we no longer know what we were. The people of 1940s Britain knew they weren't innocent Shire Folk, but curators of the world's largest Empire – a fact misunderstood nowadays, when Empire is only mentioned and taught as a guilt trip on the 18th-century slave trade. The sanitised Spitfires-and-cups-of-tea mythology is certainly closer to the truth than what Allport serves up in Britain at Bay, and in hewing so close to his cherished Shire Folk analogy, Allport ends up expending all his energy in attacking something of a straw man.

I was looking forward to an alternative angle on Britain's war; as a university history graduate, the promise of looking at the tired old "long island story" with fresh eyes had great appeal. I remember, many years ago as a teenage World War Two buff, realising with a start that Poland in 1945 barely figured in British policy, and was subsumed into the Communist sphere without any real objection, when it had been the very reason – on the face of it – that Britain had gone to war in 1939. It forced me to look at the greyer areas of the story with more fascination, and I hoped Allport's book would be a more comprehensive approach to the same. Unfortunately, it's such a biased thesis presented by the Liverpool historian that, remarkably, I began to think of the book at times as unacademic.

Allport's assault on his Shire Folk straw man is so relentless that a whole other book would need to be written to account for all of them. So, to spare your sanity and mine, I'll try to summarise just some of the flurry of blows, particularly those that are below the belt.

Any goodwill the astute reader has towards Allport's argument takes a knock very early on – as early as chapter two in fact. Titled 'Ulster Kristallnacht', this chapter begins a frequent and seedy attempt on Allport's part to equate imperial Britain with Nazi Germany. Britain was to the Irish what Germany was to the Jews, so the argument runs (pg. 20), and this hysterical moral equivalence has two particularly unedifying characteristics in Britain at Bay. The first is that it's obviously nonsensical: even leaving aside that there was no corresponding Ulster Auschwitz (nor, even the most frenzied IRA supporter would agree, could there ever be), British actions in Ireland were a reactive policing action, however heavy-handed, not the concerted racial policy pushed with malevolent intent by the Nazis. Allport reels off Catholic death tolls (pg. 21), but even he cannot hide that these were caused by the breakdown of law and order, not a government policy of genocide. For all that British policy in Ireland deserves criticism, it's disgraceful to imply they were.

The second unedifying characteristic of this argument – which Allport outright states, on page 58, when he says that there were "uncomfortable parallels between the blood-and-soil rhetoric of National Socialism and the language of Anglo-Saxon empire" – is the underhand way Allport presents it. He slips in the phrase "nights of broken glass" when talking about civil unrest in Ireland (pg. 22) and quotes as "proof" of Britain's moral equivalence with the Nazis an Irish progressive who says Britain had a greater grip on the country than Hitler did on his own (pg. 20). In truth, the fact that an activist said this proves nothing other than that people can spout hyperbole, and historians can quote them.

The Irish matter seems to warp Allport's rationality, and he proves unable to think clearly whenever the issue is mentioned. He condemns Britain for arresting some Irishmen after a bomb attack in an English city – it's a chilling assault on their civil liberties, you see, and they're targeted for their nationality – even as he goes on to admit that "all of the detained men had to be released later in the day for want of evidence" – those damn British Nazis and their writs of habeas corpus! – "including a couple of suspects who, it turned out later, really had been involved in planting the bomb" (pg. 24). This is hardly Kristallnacht. Britain at Bay reaches an early nadir when it presents uncritically the peculiar – and, to my knowledge, unprecedented – argument that Britain fought World War Two because it hated Catholics. You see, to many Irishmen "the war was about defending an uncompromising Protestantism that saw little distinction between the threats of continental fascism and continental Popery" (pg. 24). Bear in mind this is 1939, not 1588 – I doubt the people of Britain gave much thought to the Pope, let alone as a threat. It's such a strange course for Allport to take, particularly so early on in the book.

The above is the most egregious example of alienating contrarianism in Britain at Bay, but it is far from the only one. If "Britain was Nazi to the Irish" is the most outlandish claim of the book, other claims show Allport's casual dishonesty. His approach to the Battle of Britain is just one example of how he is not seeking balance, but to put his finger on the scales. He fixates on the Boulton-Paul Defiant, a hapless and ill-conceived British fighter plane which had a rear gunner rather than any forward-facing armament – in his quest to destroy the Spitfire/Hurricane "myth" (pg. 302). He claims Churchill wanted the Defiant to take priority in production over other fighter planes – this quote may be true, but it serves as evidence of Allport's zeal in leaving no minor stone unturned in his quest for humiliating factoids. He makes the Defiant fiasco the centrepiece of his Battle of Britain analysis, despite admitting that Fighter Command only had two Defiant squadrons at the start of the Battle (pg. 303), which were quickly withdrawn. He handwaves this "small" number away by saying they represented "the battle the Air Ministry was initially hoping to fight" and the calamity was avoided only through chance (pg. 303), ignoring the fact that adaptability on the field is considered a key marker of success in war. To borrow a phrase, the fixation on the Defiant represents the history Allport was hoping to write, and his disingenuous commitment to forcing such square pegs into round holes is shown most baldly when he claims that "Churchill, in his 'Fight them on the Beaches' speech on 4 June, said that the Defiant had been 'vindicated as superior' to all existing German fighter planes" (pg. 302). This, of course, is manna from heaven for a myth-busting contrarian: the bulldog Churchill, in one of his most famous speeches, ludicrously stating that a useless and dangerously exposed plane was superior to the Messerschmitt 109. But it is also basely false. Here, for comparison, is the actual text from Churchill's speech (which Allport does not reproduce):

"This was a great trial of strength between the British and German Air Forces… All of our types – the Hurricane, the Spitfire and the new Defiant – and all our pilots have been vindicated as superior to what they have at present to face. When we consider how much greater would be our advantage in defending the air above this island against an overseas attack, I must say that I find in these facts a sure basis upon which practical and reassuring thoughts may rest. I will pay my tribute to these young airmen."

An inclusive and politic addition of the Defiant, listed with other aeroplane types, in a tribute to the bravery of the RAF pilots – far from the clumsy and myopic praise exclusive to the Defiant which Allport's line suggests. Churchill's speech was also delivered before the Battle of Britain was underway and the Defiant was so cruelly exposed, whereas its position in Allport's argument would lead you to believe, if you didn't have your wits about you, that it was a stubborn commitment to the machine even after it had proven to be a death-trap. (As a side note, Allport later describes Churchill's later speech where he famously paid tribute to 'the Few' as "a perfunctory gesture of gratitude to Fighter Command" (pg. 443). If not for the eyebrow-raising claim, mentioned earlier, that Britain waged war on Germany because it distrusted the Pope – a hot take powerful enough to heat your home through the winter energy crisis – this remark about Churchill's "perfunctory gesture" would be the most remarkable Allport-ism of them all.)

It's disturbing when context doesn't appear to matter to a historian, and such looseness with the academic record was something I noticed with disturbing frequency in Britain at Bay. They might all seem like minor points, and nit-picking on my part, but sleight-of-hand is always subtle and minor. You read a history book hoping to be educated, but instead it felt like my brain cells were white blood cells fighting off an incursion; I had to use my pre-existing knowledge of the war to filter out Allport's biases, and even in the moments the book delivered something useful or thoughtful I had that doubt at the back of my mind as to what the author's angle was.

Indeed, it's hard to pin down what the angle is. It can't be unprofessionalism, because Allport is an academic with a good reputation, however poorly it is reflected in Britain at Bay. His commitment to 'Ulster Kristallnacht' could be explained in part by his Liverpool roots and any corresponding Irish affinity there, but it wouldn't tell the whole story. There are two other possibilities which present themselves to me.

The first is that he may be overzealous in his 'Shire Folk' mythbusting; certainly, this is the most diplomatic criticism I can make of his book. An example of this may be found in the approach to two different British naval actions of 1940. Allport expends a lot of words on Mers-el-Kébir, an inglorious act where the Royal Navy sank a French fleet that was bound to be turned over to victorious Germany. But he expends not a single one on Taranto, when British aircraft sank Italian ships in harbour – a Pearl Harbor in miniature. The resoundingly successful, well-planned and strategically important Battle of Taranto doesn't get a single mention in Britain at Bay, not even in the index, whereas Allport dwells on the inglorious Britons drowning French seamen at Mers-el-Kébir. Allport paints layers of the self-interested British, saying that "the British think of their cross-Channel alliance ending with Dunkirk. The French think of it ending with the dying sailors of Dunkerque in Mers-el-Kébir harbour" (pg. 161). It's a good line but, again, false – on the very next page, Allport admits that the French had already surrendered to Germany, severing their alliance. One shudders to think how the balance of power in the Atlantic – and the Channel – could have changed if Germany received the entire French fleet intact, but Allport doesn't address this. Mers-el-Kébir, in his telling, is a British PR exercise designed to impress the Americans.

This mention of Dunkirk leads one to propose the second possibility for what Allport's angle might be. He writes that the popular narrative of 1940 is of "blameless Shire Folk let down by their hopeless Gallic allies" but, in standing alone after the fall of France, Britain could move "from a misbegotten partnership with an incompetent and untrustworthy pack of foreigners back to a noble self-sufficiency on home soil. In 1940, the story goes, the British took back control" (pg. 161). That phrase, 'took back control', is surely no coincidence. Allport had earlier referred to a British politician as an isolationist, "one of the hard Brexiters [sic] of his day" (pg. 97) and, sadly, his own politics can be said to intrude on his narrative – if not his entire thesis.

His assault on the straw man Shire Folk myth, perpetuated in his mind by those "adulatory coffee table books" I mentioned earlier, could be said in part to be a response to Brexit. Histories sometimes make the mistake of trying to re-fight the battles of 1940 with hindsight; Allport – who lives in America – might be doing something altogether more curious, which is trying to re-fight the domestic political battles of 2016. By trashing a key part of Britain's history, part of a narrative of success and self-sufficiency, Allport's aim might not be to educate, but to recruit numbers for a quixotic second vote on the EU referendum. His strange arguments might only seem so because he is prioritising manoeuvres against contemporary political topics above the weaving of a judicious historical narrative. This would explain why he spikes any congratulations for the Jewish Kindertransport by pointing the finger at a wider hostile environment for refugees (pg. 294), and why he claims that the Second World War was "never Scotland's war in quite the same way as it was England's. And Scotland will never care about it in the same way" (pg. 278) – something that would be a surprise to countless numbers of Scottish war dead. Sadly, people often get hysterical when they talk about politics – particularly when they're on the losing side – and this perhaps explains Allport's dishonesty more than any claims of academic incompetence or mythbusting myopia. All's fair in love and ideology.

Whatever the reason, it's a damn shame, because Allport can be engaging when he sticks to bracing revisionism as opposed to sour contrarianism. He attempts a rehabilitation of Neville Chamberlain – predictable, given his contrarian streak, but it's more successful than other attempts I've seen. His analysis of the 'Blitzkrieg' campaign of 1940 is one of the soberest I've ever read, as he does not allow himself to be duped by the claims of German military exceptionalism which took root immediately after the defeat. When he discusses the Maginot Line, the Ardennes and the character of the French general Gamelin, it is one of the rare occasions when he lives up to his observation that "things that might seem obvious now were far from obvious then" (pg. 100). To his credit, he declines to indulge the conspiracy theory that Churchill deliberately sacrificed Coventry to the Luftwaffe bombers (pg. 342) and gives more prominence to the unjustly obscure intervention in Iraq in 1941. Granted, he tries to present the British occupation of the latter – dictated by the emerging strategic considerations and performed in skin-deep collusion with their new Soviet ally – as equivalent to the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland (pg. 436), but even small pockets of stale air are to be embraced when you're drowning.

Nevertheless, the peculiarities abound more than the nuggets of gold and silver. Once you are aware of Allport's methods, they're hard to ignore, even if the bulk content of Britain at Bay remains inoffensive. You pay attention to things that might otherwise have slipped by, and you're more inclined to be critical when you see things delivered without the appropriate academic balance. He says 'Eagle Day' in the Battle of Britain was not decisive, and throws in examples of the vagaries of German decision-making to "prove" it (pg. 325). But the reason Eagle Day is seen as a turning point in the Battle is because it was the closest the RAF came to being overwhelmed, but managed to endure – how can it get more decisive than that?

Allport says the Blitz wasn't "a national community enduring a common ordeal" because it was predominantly London-based and "the countryside was scarcely affected at all" (pg. 359) – a facile point. And he repeats without much qualification the idea that any German invasion of Britain would have failed because of the strength of the Royal Navy (pg. 304), completely ignoring the growing importance of air power in naval warfare. (If only he'd remembered to include Taranto in his book…) Royal Naval superiority would have been for naught if the Luftwaffe controlled the skies – hence why the Battle was fought! Allport ignores the newly-established potency of planes in sinking even capital ships – despite the Luftwaffe's poor anti-ship record (pg. 327). He ignores, no doubt, until it suits him to remember. I'm sure he'll be critical enough when it comes to the sinking of the battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse in his purported second volume. Perhaps – mirroring his approach to the Boulton-Paul Defiant and the similarly doomed death-trap the Fairey Battle – by including some emotive scene about sailors drowning in oil due to uniquely British ineptness and failure to recognise that air power now trumped sea power.

Britain at Bay is an odd book. It's a tolerably written history that ruins itself by its overcommitment to savaging a two-dimensional straw man, and in doing so compels the savvy reader to look a bit closer at Allport's suspect approach. There's occasional method in Allport's Shire Folk madness – "Every time during the Second World War that the British attempted to muddle through with inspired amateurism, the result was a disaster. Every time they accomplished something, it was because of careful planning and professional expertise" (pg. 249) – but his arguments lack the honesty and balance necessary to make this thesis emphatic. He might disapprove of the mild, unreflective conservatism of those "coffee table books", but it's hard to say where you could put Allport's own contribution. It's certainly not pride of place among the military histories on the shelf.

At one point in Britain at Bay, after the fall of France, Allport quotes the historian Marc Bloch on the self-interested strategizing of the British at Dunkirk. Abandoning the French to their fate – it's Allport's contention that France might have been saved, at least in part, if Britain had not cut and run – Bloch says of the British fighting men that "heroes they may have been, but they were not saints" (pg. 260). Allport quotes this – British perfidy, after all, being one of his underlying themes – but since when were heroes not enough? Britain was not on a quest for sainthood – it wasn't a nation of saints – nor, for that matter, one of Shire Folk. It was a nation like any other – better, perhaps, than most, given its democratic polity – and one which made the decisions it did in light of challenging and ever-changing moral and geopolitical circumstances. Better a hero than a saint anyway – heroes fail and rise again to win, whereas saints are passive; they bleed and are martyred and forgotten. The fact that Britons have long considered their war generation to be the former and not the latter suggests they're already aware of the limitations and qualifiers to their remarkable, hard-won victory. It's just a shame that Allport doesn't know that they already know – he could have saved both himself and the reader some time.… (altro)

A very good discussion and analysis of the British Army in World War Two, looks at all its strengths, weakness, failures and successes. You come away better informed, with greater sympathy for those involved and also with better understanding of the issues that faces both the army and the men involved. I'd recommend this for anyone interested in social history, the Second World War, and British society's as a whole. It's a world now fading rapidly from memory with veterans and those around them at the time passing away and this will soon be written history rather than living history but I was impressed with the quality of the effort made to try to document this before it fades into the mists of time.… (altro)