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September 1939. All over Europe, the lights were going out. In Berlin, a maniac was hell bent on war, surrounded by a crowd of sycophants who knew he was mad but could do nothing to stop him. In London, a discredited prime minister was conferring with the German ambassador, who was longing for the British to take a stand and crush his Nazi compatriots once and for all. In Rome, Paris, Warsaw and Washington, others watched helplessly from the sidelines, powerless to prevent it as Europe and then the world slid inexorably into a war that threatened to engulf them all.
This is the story of a momentous day, but it is also a snapshot of the whole world at the end of an extraordinary week. Everyone remembered where they were on 3 September 1939, from Marlene Dietrich and Mahatma Gandhi to Charles de Gaulle, Eamon de Valera, Clark Gable, Vivian Leigh and ex-Kaiser Wilhelm in Holland. Many of the characters who featured in Nicholas Best's previous book The Greatest Day in History, about the 1918 Armistice, appear again here, their stories fully updated.
For ordinary people too, 3 September 1939 was a day they would never forget. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material, both military and civilian, Best tells a compelling tale of the men and women from all around the world who stopped whatever they were doing that Sunday and braced themselves as the clock struck eleven and Neville Chamberlain came to the microphone at 10 Downing Street to announce that the British and their Empire were at war again for the second time in a generation.
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