David Edgerton is an unusual historian. Operating at the interface between science and business, he has a prodigious appetite for materials that most of his peers run a mile from – company histories, industrialists' memoirs or government reports. He loves statistics and technical details and worships machines. The very names of aero engines – the Rolls-Royce Vulture, the Bristol Centaurus, the Napier Sabre – seem to give him a thrill. The great strength of his study of British science and industry in the second world war is that, by coming at the subject from a new angle, it offers an unfamiliar picture of the war, one dominated not by bluff airmen, bayonet-wielding infantrymen, sailors on Arctic convoys, blitzed housewives, Bletchley codebreakers or Penguin-reading intellectuals, but by backroom boys – grey men with slide rules, workers toiling through the night shift in Orwellian arms factories, chemists in laboratories and civil servants on committees.
The book opens with a magnificent survey of British trade and manufacture at the beginning of the war, designed to underpin an argument for which Edgerton makes bold claims of novelty. Far from being a plucky underdog in 1940, he says, Britain was a first-class power, with the world's largest navy, the greatest aircraft production of any country and a small but uniquely mechanised army – pre-war appeasement having gone hand in hand with rearmament. Her leaders were rightly confident in their ability to wage a devastating war of machines. The British army did not lose nearly all its equipment at Dunkirk; it had enough spare capacity left at home for Churchill to send tanks to Egypt in August 1940. Nor was Britain "alone" between June 1940 and June 1941: she had behind her a vast empire and global financial investments. These resources enabled the British to fight the war as they chose rather than as they had to, and to pay a much lighter price than most of the other belligerents.
The crisis of the Battle of the Atlantic, Edgerton argues, came not in 1943 but in late 1941. Nor was Britain ever really under siege or blockaded. Imports stayed at pre-war levels in value, most food was not rationed and was available in quantity. Meat and cheese imports actually increased. Oil products, fuel oil, petrol, aviation spirit and lubricating oils were all imported in unprecedented quantities. Contrary to popular belief, Churchill's wartime coalition was one of the most techno-literate in British history, with four scientifically trained ministers; most of the important work in wartime science was not done by prominent intellectuals such as JD Bernal but by obscure figures within the military bureaucracy; and Barnes Wallis and Frank Whittle did not have to struggle against Whitehall indifference – they were cosseted and indulged by the authorities. As for wartime solidarity: "The second world war brought the classes together, but neither side liked what it saw."
How convincing is all this? Edgerton himself makes two major qualifications to his thesis. British confidence in victory in 1940 turned out to rest on a colossal underestimation of the Germans' capacity to exploit labour and resources in the European nations they conquered. And, great as Britain's resources were, they proved quite unequal to the extra challenge posed by the Japanese victories in late 1941. Thereafter, the British relied on the wealth and manufacturing strength of the United States to carry them through. But even beyond that, many of Edgerton's other targets belong more to popular mythology than to historical orthodoxy. Churchillian rhetoric apart, no serious historian has ever suggested that Britain was "alone" in 1940. Accounts of the desert war bring out the major contribution made by Dominion troops; only a major industrial power could have sunk the Bismarck or devastated Hamburg.
Even where Edgerton is undoubtedly right, his argument is not helped by some strange omissions. He says nothing about industrial relations, gives no coherent overview of scientific policy-making or weapons procurement, and makes no comparisons with other countries. When it comes to assessing how the great machines performed on the battlefield, he tends to go awol: the discussion of tank design is strewn between different chapters and proves disappointingly inconclusive; there is no proper explanation of why British air defences did not work at all in 1940 yet could shoot down V1 rockets in 1944. It is not clear whether Edgerton supports or disputes the claim made by Churchill's critics – that most of the scientific work that really determined the outcome of the war, such as radar, was done before 1940, under Chamberlain's patronage, whereas Churchill and his crony Lindemann pursued many expensive mare's nests.
Then there is the writing. Initially, Edgerton's boyish enthusiasm – and the illustrations and tables that generously stud the volume – sweep the reader along. Soon, though, his assumption of knowledge on the reader's part, blurring of big points, fluffing of anecdotes and habit of offering lists of names instead of argument begin to irritate. Academic point-scoring seems to matter more than clarity.
In particular, Edgerton seems obsessed by two classic predecessors – The People's War (1969), Angus Calder's romantic evocation of wartime solidarity, and The Audit of War (1986), Correlli Barnett's savage critique of the wartime coalition's failure to address the long-standing weaknesses of British industry. Edgerton first took on Barnett during a series of exchanges in the London Review of Books and New Left Review in the 1990s – exchanges that, even if he didn't win them, helped establish his reputation. Now, in Britain's War Machine, he dismisses Barnett as a "declinist" and does not engage with his detailed arguments at all, yet the whole book is a celebratory counterblast to Barnett's pessimism, a piece of historical public relations. Equally, Edgerton plays down the important work of scientists such as Patrick Blackett and Solly Zuckerman largely because Calder's very brief examination of wartime science, written 42 years ago, before the Ultra story had emerged, made far too much of it.
One reason why books on the second world war keep coming is that historians have opened up new perspectives by moving away from the battlefield to subjects such as medicine or nutrition, once thought of only specialist interest. Two years ago Adam Tooze transformed perceptions of the Holocaust by placing it firmly within Nazi economic and social policy; more recently, Lizzie Collingham pulled off a similar trick with food. Both writers offered full-scale, narrative-driven reassessments of their subjects. By contrast, David Edgerton's book, though brilliant in places and consistently lively, stimulating and authoritative, represents a missed opportunity.
Ben Shephard is the author of The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (Bodley Head)
