Churchill's War - Volume One

Best-selling historian, David Irving, spent more than ten years from 1976 to 1986 preparing this biography of Churchill. Working exclusively from primary research in many languages - including unpublished Polish, Czech, Israeli as well as scholarly research in British and foreign archives like Washington, Paris, and Moscow - Irving built a monumental account of Britain’s wartime leader.

At first, Irving intended to research Churchill's life from 1936 to the end; but sheer size of the story forced him to narrow his focus, and devote two volumes to CHURCHILL'S WAR. This one, The Struggle for Power, begins with Churchill in disgrace and battling to survive in a hostile political environment. The sevond, The Triumph and Decline, begins with Pearl Harbour (1941) and ends with Potsdam and his party's surprising electoral defeat. Irving has created an unusual portrait of the man who fought the toughest war in human history, leading his own country and people to what has proved to be a pyrrhic victory: an imperial nation without an Empire, and perhaps opening up a political vacuum which was then filled by the Soviet Union.

Unstinting in his praise of the achievement of an elder statesman in uniting and inspiring a moribund Mother Country to make one last great effort, Irving turned up from the archives tarnished details concealed, disbelieved, or ignored by his predecessors: how Churchill thwarted the only chances that Europe had a peace in 1939 and 1940 and how he willingly unleashed a cruel bombing war that killed one million Europeans.