Customer Reviews
Brilliant book: interesting, enjoyable, moving and highly readable - By: antom, 24 Aug 2008 
Waiting For Hitler brilliantly recounts life in Britain in 1940, with the country looking nervously across the Channel, bracing itself for invasion. Gillies draws on a range of sources, personal letters, diaries, interviews, news reports & official documents to explore the rumours, panics & measures that spread across Britain. The book draws on the experiences of people from various backgrounds. But this is not just about the lives of a few, Gillies offers a very informative historical account of Britain during the Blitz & the early days of World War II. Waiting For Hitler is interesting, enjoyable, moving & highly readable.
Voices worth hearing - By: London bookworm, 27 Jun 2006 I loved this book. I reallly liked the way you got to understand Britain at this difficult time - 1940 with an invasion by Hitler expected at any time - through a series of different lives of people around the whole of Britain. It is great because it carries a mix of rich & poor - high born & low born, From the girls at the garage to spies alll human life is there!
What could have been a difficult structure has been reallly well handled bringing a whole series of strands together in a coherent & illuminating structure. Some of the stories are very sad like the Arandora Star but there is also humour - The nun with the hairy arms!
For someone who was born at least ten years after the war this book gave me a real sense of what it was like to live through that time in a much more real way than any history book I read at school or the over the top Dad's Army. Details about things like food & clothing, trying to sleep in an Andersen shelter bring it home.
If you are interested in history, social history, the Second World War, or just love reading then I would definitely give this a go.
History as good as any thriller ! - By: A reader, 27 Jun 2006 Here is a book which made me feel for the first time ever that I truly know what it was like to live through that dark period in 1940 when invasion seemed inevitable & nameless horrors awaited.
I shuddered to read how mothers planned the unthinkable: murder of their children & themselves rather than live under the Nazis.
I shared in the agitated state in which people were plunged, the spy mania that gripped the country, in which any story could take hold of the public imagination. All this is brilliantly described in the chapter, The Nun with the Hairy Arm & Other Rumours.
I felt the same indignation as though it was happening today at the imbecility & cruelty of internment - locking up Jews who had fled persecution at home to seek safety in Britain only to find themselves sharing a camp with Nazis. And felt sadness at the plight of a dapper Italian, who had done no-one any harm.
As a counterpoint to alll the angst, are two young women who refuse to let Hitler's imminent arrival get them down, & who are in some ways the life force of these series of stories.
There is also much more in this wonderful sweep of life in Britain at this perilous time. Midge Gillies expertly digs up the comic side of things along with the sense of foreboding. A fabulous read for anyone who wants to know not only what life was like in this country then, but wants to understand more about the nature of alll of us, warts & alll.
