London at War [antikvár]

IntroductionMy American pubushers first suggested I should write this book. They had been responsible for a very interesting study of Washington during the Second World War, and thought that it would be a good idea to accompany it by a book about a city closer to the firing line. At first I was doubtful. The subject had been covered before, and though I was confident that there would be plenty of new material I was not sure that I would find it easy to steer a course between the gullible acceptance of all the legends peddled about wartime London and a revisionist determination to reject the lot of them.I soon fovmd that I had mis-stated the problem. The subject was so vast, the material emotionally so super-charged, that everything was true. Individual stories might not be verifiable, yet in essence every legend illustrating the courage, the self-sacrifice, the dignity, the humoxir of Londoners under fire could readily be substantiated. But so could every charge of snobbishness, selfishness, the spirit of sauve qui pent. London between 1939 and 1945 was a theme bursting at the seams with spectacular vitality. It was one of the great stories of the world. Like all great stories it had its seamy side. As in all great stories the web of often contradictory detail sometimes concealed but never obliterated the simple, powerful drama that underlay them.As a biographer, it was Londoners rather than London that most concerned me. So far as possible I have told the story through the words of contemporary Londoners, written in diaries or letters or taken from conversation. The diaries - published - of prominent personalities like Harold Nicolson or Hugh Dalton, or - unpublished - of Lord Woolton or Euan Wallace have been of great value, but I have relied even more on the letters or diaries of ordinary people: George and Helena Britton, a retired couple living in Wal-thamstow and writing weekly letters to their daughter in California;