Finest Years: Churchill As Warlord 1940-45 [Paperback]

Churchill once said that "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm". Of course, there was a lot more to Winston Churchill's war leadership than his rushing with enthusiasm to the next failure. At the end of the day, the Nazis lost the war; but, for three long years, the British Army's only successful operations were evacuations, from Narvik to Dunkirk, from Greece to Crete. Churchill's greatness is not only that he never lost his enthusiasm, but that his leadership inspired the British people not to lose faith, even at the darkest hours of the war.

In this book, Max Hastings, one of the best British historians of WWII, analyzes the extraordinary success of Churchill's leadership during the war. Churchill's success is indeed astonishing. A maverick, but an ultra-conservative, Churchill came to lead Britain against the wishes of his own party because Labor wanted him to lead the coalition government. After the defeat of France, Churchill knew that the British Army could not face the full might of the Wehrmacht; but he sensed that the morale of the British people required action, and he was more afraid of inaction than of failure. He was an imaginative leader who took many controversial decisions; and he would have taken many more, if the general staff had not stood in the way. After the British victory at El-Alamein, the Anglo-American landing in North Africa, and the German defeat at Stalingrad, the tide turned. The war was not over, but it could no longer be lost by the Allies. Britain became a minor partner in the alliance with the USSR and the USA.

Many books have been written on Churchill and his war leadership. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and learned much from it. Max Hastings managed to bring something different from all the other books, including some events that are barely covered by other historians and the most controversial decisions of Churchill. Most importantly, this book made me appreciate that history might have been different without Churchill's extraordinary vitality and his larger than life personality, with faults as large as his qualities. In 1940, Churchill,s finest hour coincided with Britain's.

Just when you thought nothing new could be written about Winston Churchill and World War II, this new book by Max Hastings comes as a pleasant surprise. Hastings concentrates on "Churchill as Warlord" from 1940-1945. We learn of many of his foolish decisions (such as the early attack on Norway), not all of which were carried out by his staff (such as his proposal that before the war was over Germany be re-armed and used to hold back the advancing Russians). Hastings is harsh in his criticism of the fighting capabilities of the British Army (not the Navy or the RAF), and depicts Roosevelt as less a friend that an ally of Churchill's, who continued to oppose his imperialistic world view. Stalin emerges as the evil genius who pretty much got all that he wanted. At the end, Haskins acknowledges that Churchill and his rhetoric were just what the West needed in the dark early years of the War. A fine warts and all portrait of a great man, I recommend it highly.

"Winston's War" is, as its name implies, the story of Winston Churchill's involvement in World War II. Winston passed through a series of phases during the course of the War. At the start of the book, he provides Britain's spirit and backbone to stand alone against the might of Germany. With the invasion of Russia and the attack on Pearl Harbor, Churchill became the alliance maker. In seemingly constant motion, he bounded from conference to battlefront to home front. At the summit level, he strove to keep Roosevelt and Stalin working together and kept FDR from falling too much under Stalin's sway. Through it all he, through the force of his personality, he maintained an influence for Britain as its war contribution decreased in relationship to that of its allies.

Author Max Hastings brings out domestic political challenges that Churchill confronted when the fortunes of war were unkind to Britain. He survived a motion of censure during 1942, something most have forgotten in the shadow of his towering heroic stature. I found this book to be fascinating. The talented writing and the captivating tale it tells will draw the interest of any World War II buff.