the second world war by winston s churchill

It is a good tale, told by a master story-teller, who did, after all, win the Nobel prize for literature but would the Booker prize for fiction have been more appropriate?Ĭhurchill spent much effort in the late 1930s in trying to warn of the danger that Hitler posed to Europe, and of the lack of Britain's preparedness for war. The evidence for this supposed truth is Churchill's view of the 1930s as 'the years that the locust hath eaten', during which the Western powers, by their own folly, allowed Germany to re-arm never again, the message went, must this be allowed to happen. Its central theme - the futility of appeasement and the need to stand up to dictators - is one that has been taken for granted as a self-evident truth in Western society, both during the period of the Cold War and subsequently. It is no exaggeration to claim that it has strongly influenced the behaviour of Western politicians from Harry S. This is a difficult task, because The Gathering Storm has been one of the most influential books of our time. If you want controversy, it must come in the form of an argument to counter the central thesis of The Gathering Storm, namely that Churchill was right and his critics wrong. There is, in fact, nothing very controversial about the claim that Churchill was alone in his opposition to appeasement it was one he made himself in 1948, and is generally acknowledged.

The second world war by winston s churchill