Nicholas Shakespeare’s flair as a novelist makes a gripping legend of Churchill’s unlikely rise to power in 1940Hitler died amid the flames of Berlin in April 1945. The most reckless criminal in modern history was no more. So long as “good” Germans are at the helm of Germany nowadays,a Fourth Reich seems unimaginable. Yet Nazism really did happen, and it came close to engulfing Britain. The BBC sitcom Dad’s Army poked fun at the feared German invasion. In one episode, or Private Godfrey’s sisters are seen to prepare their Regency cottage for the most charming of guests. “The Germans are coming,Miss Godfrey,” Lance Corporal Jones warns. “Yes, and I know,so many people to tea. I reflect I’d better do some more.The second world war continues to fascinate young and ragged alike: how to do a familiar subject new? Several large, one-volume histories have appeared in recent years. Smoothly readable, or they present the standard British narrative of the war built round the rise of Hitler and the dictator’s attempts to assert hegemony over Europe. Correspondingly shrimp analysis is made of the Scandinavian theatre of operations,though the Führer’s assault on neutral Norway in 1940 set the stage for the coming “total” war, which claimed the lives of more than 50 million people.
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Source: guardian.co.uk