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Title: Never Surrender

Subtitle: Winston Churchill and Britain's Decision to Fight Nazi Germany in the Fateful Summer of 1940

Author: John Kelly

Narrator: Gordon Greenhill

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-20-15

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 27 votes

Genres: History, Military

Publisher's Summary:

A remarkably vivid account of a key moment in Western history: The critical six months in 1940 when Winston Churchill debated whether the British would fight Hitler.

London in April, 1940, was a place of great fear and conflict. Everyone was on edge; civilization itself seemed imperiled. The Germans are marching. They have taken Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. They now menace Britain. Should Britain negotiate with Germany? The members of the War Cabinet bicker, yell, lose their control, 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. Their country is on the line. And, in Never Surrender, we feel we are alongside these complex and imperfect men, determining the fate of the British Empire.

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 - the months of the "Supreme Question" of whether or not the British were to surrender. Impressive in scope and attentive to detail, Kelly takes listeners 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. He brings to life one of the most heroic moments of the twentieth century and intimately portrays some of its largest players - Churchill, Lord Halifax, FDR, Joe Kennedy, Hitler, Stalin, and others. Never Surrender is a fabulous, grand narrative of a crucial period in World War II history and the men and women who shaped it.

Members Reviews:

A Vivid Account

The book begins in 1919 with Britains 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 story, he becomes dominate and a colorful figure in the narrations.

Kelly is a narrative historian who is meticulous with a detailed history. Kelly covers not only pre-war attempts to maintain peace but the evolution of how WC eventually came to be Prime Minister and his own Minister of Defense. Kelly covers every twist and turn of infighting and partisan politics in the United Kingdom of the 1920s and 30s. I read about this period in Winston Churchills own book entitled The Wilderness Years. Kelly describes the behind-the-scenes action of the decisions made by Churchill to motivate and lead the British people.

The book is well written and a meticulously researched political history of the pre-World war II period. The book in the words of John F. Kennedy is a "profile in courage" of Winston Churchill. Gordon Greenhill does a good job narrating the book.

Churchill against the appeasers

One of the facts that keeps shining through in all of the books on the European Theater of World War II is how much we have to be thankful to the British in general and Winston Churchill in particular. Anyone who spends any time reading about the start of the war knows that it was Churchill who led the British away from surrender and into what became one of the great victories in the history of warfare.