The Vimy trap: or, how we Learned to stop worrying and love the Great War
Germany during the First World War. Last, while British memory views the Second World War as a great victory over a continental foe, the SecondWorldWar was politically a defeat in comparison to the First. After 1918, Britain emerged as the dominant power in the world and had gained control of a large portion of Germany's overseas empire; following 1945, Britain conversely found itself as a second tier power to the United States and was faced with growing independence movements in many overseas colonies. Bond pins the blame for these conflicting memories on popular culture and literature. Following the First WorldWar, soldier poets and authors published antiwar works that painted a negative image of combat experience andmilitary leadership, a topic Bond discusses in further detail in his The Unquiet Western Front (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) Following the Second World War, British cinema produced a large number of films that celebrated British victories over Nazi Germany and reinforced the image of a 'good' Britain triumphing over an 'evil'Germany. Like the soldier authors and poets ofWorldWar I, Winston Churchill's authored histories of the SecondWorld War became authoritative texts that gained worldwide recognition and a disproportionate value within the historiography. In both cases, society latched onto these creative works and treated them as authoritative. Britain's TwoWorld Wars against Germany is part of a growing field of works dedicated to re examining Britain's popular memory of the two world wars. Bond's analysis could be expanded upon to include other theatres of operation. But he succeeds in persuading the reader that British experience in both world wars was closer than popular memory would have one believe. The short length of the work, coupled with Bond's direct style of writing, make the work of interest to both scholars and general readers with an interest in British military history. The work would serve well as a textbook at both the upper undergraduate and graduate levels, but would be best served as a reference book in a military history seminar to stimulate discussion on the conflicting specifics of remembering each war.