Never Surrender, John Kelly
Never Surrender, John Kelly
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Never Surrender
Winston Churchill and Britain's Decision to Fight Nazi Germany in the Fateful Summer of 1940

Author: John Kelly

Narrator: Gordon Greenhill

Unabridged: 10 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/20/2015


Synopsis

“WWII scholar John Kelly triumphs again” (Vanity Fair) in this remarkably vivid account of a key moment in Western history: The critical six months in 1940 when Winston Churchill debated whether England should fight Nazi Germany—and then decided to “never surrender.”London in April, 1940, is a place of great fear and conflict. The Germans have taken Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. The Nazi war machine now menaces Britain, even as America remains uncommitted to providing military aid. Should Britain negotiate with Germany? The members of the War Cabinet bicker, yell, and are divided. Churchill, leading the faction to fight, and Lord Halifax, cautioning that prudence is the way to survive, attempt to usurp one another by any means possible. In Never Surrender, we feel we are alongside these complex and imperfect men, determining the fate of the British Empire, and perhaps, the world.Drawing on the War Cabinet papers, other government documents, private diaries, newspaper accounts, and memoirs, historian John Kelly tells the story of the summer of 1940. Kelly takes readers from the battlefield to Parliament, to the government ministries, to the British high command, to the desperate Anglo-French conference in Paris and London, to the American embassy in London, and to life with the ordinary Britons. We see Churchill seize the historical moment and ultimately inspire his government, military, and people to fight. Kelly brings to life one of the most heroic moments of the twentieth century and intimately portrays some of its largest players—Churchill, Lord Halifax, Hitler, FDR, Joe Kennedy, and others. Never Surrender is a fabulous, grand narrative of a crucial period in World War II and the men and women who shaped it. “For lovers of minute-by-minute history, it’s a feast” (Huffington Post).

About John Kelly

John Kelly specializes in narrative history. He is the author of The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People; The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death; The Most Devastating Plague of all Time; Three on the Edge; and more. Kelly lives in New York City and Sandisfield, Massachusetts.


Reviews

Very readable account of the decisive months of 1940. John Kelly’s book tells the story of the decisive six months of 1940 that could have sent world history down a very different path as the members of the British War Cabinet debated whether to negotiate with Hitler or to continue the war. The story......more

Goodreads review by Jean

The book begins in 1919 with Britain’s strong resolve of “never again to go to war”; with three million dead no one wanted to think of war again. Kelly writes a careful and detailed story; Churchill is rarely mentioned in the first one hundred pages of this 384 page book. Once WC appears in the stor......more

Goodreads review by Bfisher

Most people in France and Britain, high and low, in the interwar years were determined not to repeat the mistake of going to war as in 1914. When France and Britain went to war again in 1939, they were dreading the specter of another Western Front, and they were almost completely unprepared for the......more