Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945 »

Max Hastings is the author of more than twenty books, most recently Retribution. He has served as a foreign correspondent and as the editor of Britain’s Evening Standard and Daily Telegraph and has received numerous British Press awards, including Journalist of the Year in 1982 and Editor of the Year in 1988. He lives outside London.

From our foremost historian of World War II, a vivid and incisive portrait of Winston Churchill during wartime.

With unparalleled insight, Max Hastings brings to life the man and his complexities, giving us a penetrating analysis of Churchill s relationship with his nation, its allies, and its armed forces. He captures Churchill s galvanizing courage in the face of certain defeat and his brilliant and prescient wooing of President Roosevelt at a time when most British citizens and their leaders disliked the Americans. Hastings also explores Churchill s shortcomings, detailing how he nearly squandered the British troops miraculous escape at Dunkirk, illuminating how he failed to address fundamental flaws in the army, and exploring the disastrous consequences of several key decisions. Here is Churchill in all his private anxieties and inspiring public confidence, his tactical misjudgments and his strategic successes, his stubbornness and his...

The Barnes & Noble Review

Churchill got many little things wrong, but he was right, crucially so, on major points of Allied strategy. When the Americans joined the war, they were hot to invade France. Churchill dissuaded Roosevelt from mounting what, in 1942 or 1943, would have most likely been a suicide mission, and redirected Allied attention to North Africa and Italy. The Mediterranean campaign bore mixed results, but Churchill's instincts were correct. There is a poignant ambiguity about Hastings's title; after 1943, the conflict was anything but Winston's war. For a time, Churchill alone had embodied the West's hopes; but as the war turned in the Allies' favor, he was shunted aside. Roosevelt ignored his advice, and, to Churchill's horror, signed off on Stalin's subjugation of Eastern Europe. In these last years, we see a much diminished war leader. He fretted endlessly about D-Day -- "This battle has been forced upon us by the Russians and the United States military authorities," he complained in April 1944 -- and fixated on invading the Balkans. Churchill deserves our admiration; first however, as Hastings wisely insists, "history must take Churchill as a whole."