Brian Bond's Britain's Two World Wars against Germany comes at a pivotal stage of popular memory of the First and Second World Wars. Recent centennial events in Britain marking the beginning of the First World War, the somber display of hundreds of thousands of poppies at the Tower of London, for example, have reinforced the negative stereotype of the conflict as a futile and morally bankrupt war. Conversely, the Second World War continues to be discussed in ways more celebratory than mournful, often concentrating on Britain and the Allies' liberation of Continental Europe from Nazism. How and why the dual myths of the First World War as a wasteful, if not criminal, war and the Second World War as a morally righteous crusade have come to dominate British popular memory is the main question underpinning Bond's book.

Bond starts by locating the genesis of the two myths in the 1950s and 1960s. In the decade after the defeat of Nazi Germany, patriotic war films, the revelation at Nuremberg of Nazi and collaborationist war crimes, and a fuller understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust shaped the nascent memory of the 1939–45 war as one that was just and worth fighting. By contrast, the antiwar and antiestablishment politics of the 1960s looked back to the 1914–18 war as an example of political and military incompetence.

At the heart of these two myths is the notion that Britain prepared for, commanded, and fought the two world wars in markedly different ways. Certainly, British expectations about the length and severity of the First World War were, with few exceptions, proven wrong. But so, too, Bond demonstrates, were British expectations prior to the Second World War. The German Army moved westward much more quickly than expected in 1939–40. And, scarily, Bond reveals that British plans to endure a thunderous German offensive in 1939 and counterattack the following year were remarkably similar to the strategy of static trench warfare some thirty years before. Yet British generals of the First World War have been subjected to intense vitriol and criticism unlike anything leveled at their successors. Embodied by Douglas Haig, they have been lampooned as old, out-of-touch aristocrats who sent soldiers to die in senseless and poorly planned battles. Here, Bond continues the revisionist work of his colleagues, namely John Bourne and Gary Sheffield, by offering a softer assessment of British military leadership during the First World War. Nor was the combat experience of the First World War a complete aberration in twentieth-century warfare. During the Second World War, the fighting in Italy between 1943 and 1944 and in Northwest Europe between 1944 and 1945 could be as brutal as the earlier war on the Western Front.

Although neither the naval blockade of Wilhelmine Germany nor the strategic bombing of Nazi Germany were on their own enough to win the two wars, attrition played a significant part in British strategy in both conflicts. The naval blockade, in contrast to the bombing, has seldom been questioned along moral lines. It was at the time and continues to be regarded as a relatively humane tactic to end the war, especially when compared to German unrestricted submarine warfare. The area bombing of much of northern Germany, however, has been called into question and, provocatively, even labeled by some as a war crime. Bond expertly navigates this politically sensitive debate, demonstrating that Bomber Command in Britain had few alternatives: German control of the North Sea made a naval blockade impossible, and low-level flying missions such as dam busting were often successful but incredibly dangerous. Moreover, Bond overturns one of the most damning myths about Bomber Command: that it was woefully inaccurate when compared to the United States Army Air Forces. By the end of the war, as Bond shows, British bombing missions hit their targets far more consistently than their American counterparts.

Bond then considers how the myth of the First World War as four and a half years of relentless, industrialized slaughter, represented by the Somme, and the Second World War as one of fluid, mechanized movement, exemplified by Bernard Montgomery's campaign in North Africa, have wrongly overshadowed what was a severe learning curve in both wars. Between 1914 and 1918, the British Expeditionary Force steadily adopted a strategy of all-arms cooperation and ultimately became the war's best trained and best performing army. Likewise, the Field Force in Western Europe and Montgomery's army in North Africa were slow to realize the value of all-arms cooperation. Nonetheless, by 1945 the British Army performed nearly as well as the Wehrmacht.

Lastly, Bond addresses the myth that the Treaty of Versailles achieved little and led inexorably to the collapse of Weimar Germany, the rise of Hitler, and the Second World War. He argues convincingly that Britain satisfied more war aims after the First World War than after the Second. In 1919, Britain successfully expanded the Empire, restored Belgian sovereignty, stripped the German armed forces bare, and thus secured some semblance of a European peace. It was the failure of interwar politicians to enforce Versailles, not its terms per se, that led to another world conflict. Comparatively, the threat of Communism quickly replaced Nazism in 1945, British industry and finance were ruined, and the British Empire was in terminal decline.

Although Bond rarely falters, there are two points worth mentioning. First, all too often he becomes distracted by debates between past historians. The average reader will find little to stimulate them in these rather trifling squabbles. Second, one could argue that Bond ignores a wealth of outstanding recent scholarship on both wars, including the works of Alexander Watson, Adrian Gregory, and Jonathan Fennell.

Minor problems aside, Bond's book is an accessible, well-organized, and cogent dismantling of tens if not hundreds of factual inaccuracies and outright fabrications that have beset Britain's popular memory of the First and Second World Wars. If one book has both the authority and, importantly, the reach to change public opinion about Britain's two world wars, this book might be it.