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Sto caricando le informazioni... Steaming to Victory: How Britain's Railways Won the Wardi Michael Williams
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In the seven decades since the darkest moments of World War II, it seems every tenebrous corner of the conflict has been laid bare, prodded, and examined from every perspective of military and social history. But there is a story that has hitherto been largely overlooked. It is a tale of quiet heroism, a story of ordinary people who fought, with enormous self-sacrifice, not with tanks and guns, but with elbow grease and determination. It is the story of the British railways and, above all, the extraordinary men and women who kept them running from 1939 to 1945. Churchill himself certainly did not underestimate their importance to the wartime story when, in 1943, he praised "the unwavering courage and constant resourcefulness of railwaymen of all ranks in contributing so largely towards the final victory." The railway system during World War II was the lifeline of the nation, replacing vulnerable road transport and merchant shipping. The railways mobilized troops, transported munitions, evacuated children from cities, and kept vital food supplies moving where other forms of transport failed. Nearly 400 railway workers were killed at their posts, and 2,400 were injured in the line of duty. Another 3,500 railwaymen and women died in action. The trains themselves played just as vital a role. The famous Flying Scotsman train delivered its passengers to safety after being pounded by German bombers and strafed with gunfire from the air.There were astonishing feats of engineering, restoring tracks within hours and bridges and viaducts within days. Trains transported millions to and from work each day and sheltered them on underground platforms at night, a refuge from the bombs above. Without the railways, there would have been no Dunkirk evacuation and no D-Day. Michael Williams, author of the celebrated book On the Slow Train, has written an important and timely book using original research and over a hundred new personal interviews. This is their story. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)385.094109044Social sciences Commerce, Communications, Transportation Trains and Railroads Subdivisions History, geographic treatment, biography Europe British Isles - UK, Great Britain, Scotland, Ireland Standard subdivisions History, geographic treatment, biography Historical periods 1900-1999 20th Century 1940-1949VotoMedia:
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The role Britain’s railways played in the war deserves a history that details their wide range of activities while analyzing the extent of their contribution and describes how they made it possible. Unfortunately, Michael Williams’s book is not that work. While he details in it the many roles the railways played, he does so in a way that is more adulatory than analytical — so much so that a more appropriate subtitle for this book would be “A Celebration of Britain’s Railways in the Second World War,” for that would better capture the tone of his narrative. This is reflected best in his focus on the individual stories of the men and women who worked for the railways during the war, where they coped with straitened circumstances and the dangers of attack. Chapter after chapter contain tales spotlighting the heroism and sacrifice of railway employees, yet there is little effort to connect these episodes to any broader explanation of railway operations or assessment within the context of the overall war effort. This reflects his sources, as apart from a series of oral histories with the now-elderly survivors Williams bases his book on a limited number of previously-published accounts, most notably the self-congratulatory wartime histories put out by the “Big Four” railway companies immediately after the conflict. Expanding his research by consulting the archival records or by incorporating the vast body of literature about British mobilization would have made for a much stronger work that gave readers a more in-depth understanding of the contribution of Britain’s railways to the war effort.
Because of this deficiency, Williams’s book functions as more of an homage than anything else. This is particularly regrettable given the case the author makes within it for a good, thorough study of British railways that pushes past the myths and misconceptions that have accumulated around their role in the war to detail the many roles they played in it. In the end, though, what Williams provides his readers with is not a book that explains “How Britain’s Railways Won the War,” but simply salutes it as something to be assumed.
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