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The familiarity of this epic story encourages the illusion of historical determinism. We imagine an inevitability to Hitler's militarism, France's shame at Vichy, or Britain's resilience during months of murderous air raids on London. A more informed view of history, however, suggests its shocking contingency.
 A German diplomat once described Winston Churchill as "the only Englishman Hitler is afraid of." But as Olson emphasizes, Churchill was considered politically radioactive—belligerent, a backbencher and a crank, yesterday's politician: "The Churchillian qualities that many before had seen as serious flaws—his combativeness, high-flown rhetoric, soaring romanticism, egotism—became, in these calamitous days, essential virtues." It might never have happened. Even after Churchill joined the government, he refused to assist the rebels in a political coup. It was up to them to orchestrate Chamberlain's ouster and his selection as prime minister. It is worth recalling how they managed it, despite the hazards and setbacks along the way.
Olson's book is not without its weaknesses. Her account is sometimes superficial, prone to clichés, and occasionally wanders off course. We learn much more than we need to know, for example, about the sexual exploits of some of these parliamentarians. She is at her best when she keeps her central narrative in mind—the daring of political outcasts to shake a nation loose from its moral apathy. Their numbers were never very large. They were dismissed as warmongers. Their minority status frustrated plans to directly challenge Chamberlain's government. One of them, Dick Law, after complaining to Felix Frankfurter, an advisor to President Roosevelt and a Supreme Court Justice, got an earful. "My dear Dick, the trouble with you people is that your acts don't line up with your convictions," Frankfurter told him in the summer of 1939. "Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world."
We hear a good deal nowadays about the dangers of excessive certitude—a necessary caution, to be sure—but very little about the virtue of unswerving resolve. Winston Churchill was blessed to have attracted just enough resolute rebels when they were most required. A visit to his home at Chartwell suggests that he was well aware of the debt he owed them. In the lush garden there, inscribed in a stone walkway, are these words: "It does not do to wander too far from sober men."
One way to appreciate the magnitude of the task facing Churchill and his rebel MPs is to read alternative visions for peace and security that were popular in their day. The prolific H. G. Wells, best-known for his science fiction, had long been interested in politics. His polemical work The New World Order, published in 1940, offers a window into the socialist mindset typical in Great Britain on the eve of all-out war.
For starters, the book suffers from a refusal to distinguish between democracies and dictatorships. Britain's Ministry of Information, for example, is likened to the propaganda machine of Joseph Goebbels. It is an "open question," Wells claims, whether the legislative bodies of America and Great Britain are any more responsive to the people "than the dictators we denounce so unreservedly." In a work approaching 200 pages, he virtually ignores the barbarism and race-based fury of the Third Reich. He shows little interest in an alliance of democracies to keep the peace, and—writing in 1940, remember—regards Hitler's Reich as merely a tiresome replay of the Kaiser's Germany. "The war, the Chamberlain-Hitler War, is being waged so far by the British Empire in quite the old spirit," he writes. "There is the same disregard of any more fundamental problem."
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