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Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman, "Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-40" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Description: The British Army won a convincing series of victories between 1916 and 1918. But by 1939 the British Army was an entirely different animal. The hard-won knowledge, experience and strategic vision that delivered victory after victory in the closing stages of the First World War had been lost. In the inter-war years there was plenty of talking, but very little focus on who Britain might have to fight, and how. Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman's book Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-40 (Bloomsbury, 2023) clearly illustrates how the British Army wasn't prepared to fight a first-class European Army in 1939 for the si...