TAKING LONDON

A ham-fisted account of the Battle of Britain.

A frequent collaborator with Bill O’Reilly in the gee-whiz school of history, Dugard does not confront a fact without spinning it into the moral equivalent of a tweet, as these two complete paragraphs suggest: “The British like Hitler. A lot.” One of the author’s glancing examples is that of the future King Edward VIII teaching his niece, the future Queen Elizabeth II, how to do the Nazi salute. Alas for Hitler, Winston Churchill wasn’t buying it. Churchill looms large over this narrative, though Dugard peppers the text with characters straight out of a 1960s epic film, including heroic soldiers and RAF pilots, sneering Nazis, children’s toys lying in ruined streets. For all the purple flourishes, the author takes care with the historical details. He extensively analyzes Britain’s reluctance to enter into armed conflict with Germany, as well as the Nazis’ going for broke on the air war in the summer of 1940, sending wave after wave of bombers until, finally, Britain’s war machine kicked into gear and “the workers, skilled and unskilled, men and women alike, stood to their lathes and manned the workshops under fire as if they were batteries in action.” Those words are Churchill’s, by far the better writer than Dugard, who favors chyronworthy telegraphic prose. Entire paragraphs again: “A single German U-boat could kill the highest levels of Anglo-American leadership with a single well-placed torpedo.” “The Germans are coming back.” “And yet five German bombs will make this morning quite unforgettable.” That the narrative is full of action is thanks to the facts of the matter, which don’t really need Dugard’s breathlessness. Readers with an interest in the early years of World War II would do better to read Churchill’s Their Finest Hour.

A lead balloon of a book.