The Island Holds

The Few won the Battle of Britain. The system let them win it - and when the bombers came at night, the same country had no system at all.

In the summer of 1940, one country was left at war with Germany, and everyone neutral expected it to negotiate. What stood between the island and the fate of the continent was not courage - France had not lacked courage, and it saved nothing. It was the Dowding System: radar stations feeding a filter room feeding sector controllers over dedicated telephone lines, the world's first integrated air defence network, finished with about four months to spare. The Luftwaffe never fully understood it was fighting one. It bombed the radar stations for a fortnight, decided they did not matter, and stopped. Germany lost an air battle to a technology it had also invented - and had not thought to organise.

Then the bombers came at night, and the system did not work at all. For eight months Britain's night defences shot down almost nothing - kill figures close to zero - while London burned on fifty-seven consecutive nights, then Coventry, then the provincial cities. The Blitz was endured, not defeated. And beneath both air campaigns ran the war Churchill said was the only thing that ever really frightened him: a tonnage war in the Atlantic that Britain came closer to losing than it ever came to losing the air battle.

The Island Holds is Volume 3 of The Second World War Chronicles, a ten-volume history of the war, and it stands fully alone. It opens at Mers-el-Kébir, where Britain fired on the fleet of an ally of six weeks earlier, and closes as three million men stand on the Soviet frontier. No reconstructed dialogue, no invented eyewitnesses - and where the numbers are contested, the range is given and the disagreement named.

What you'll learn:

• How the Dowding System actually worked - and why the filter room, not the radar aerial, was the real invention
• Why Sea Lion was not a plan but an aspiration with a barge shortage
• The honest arithmetic of the air battle: both sides over-claimed by roughly double, and German intelligence put Fighter Command at its last hundred aircraft when it was wrong by a factor of seven
• Why night defence failed for eight months - and what finally fixed it
• What was actually known before Coventry burned, and why the Ultra myth refuses to die
• How the tonnage war was turned by evasion - convoys routed around wolfpacks by a codebreak, a victory won by battles that never happened
• Hood and Bismarck, Taranto and Crete, and the year the Mediterranean opened

This book is for you if:

• You want the Battle of Britain as a correctly-run defensive battle rather than a miracle
• You suspect the standing answers - the Few, the Blitz spirit - explain less than they seem to
• You want the Atlantic given equal weight with the air battle, because on the numbers it was the closer-run thing
• You prefer contested figures given as ranges, with the disagreements named

Begin at first light off an Algerian harbour, with a destroyer carrying an emissary to an ally - and, behind her, the guns that would be used if he failed. The year that decided whether there would be a war left to fight starts there.