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David Irving - Churchills War - Volume One |
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Egységár (darab):
9 000 Ft.
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The Struggle for Power Winston Churchill was a man who destroyed two empires, one of them the enemy’s. This is the conclusion reached by David Irving in CHURCHILL’S WAR. “When I was born in 1938” observes the author, “The British Empire was at its most magnificent extent. By the end of the 1939/45 war, it was becoming extinct”. Irving who took ten years to complete HITLER’S WAR, now a recommended work at military staff colleges and in universities including the Open University, spent more than ten years from 1976 to 1986 preparing this complimentary biography of Churchill. Working exclusively from primary records in many languages including unpublished Polish, Czech, Israeli, as well as scholarly research in British and foreign archives like Washington, Paris and Moscow. Irving Has built up brick by brick, 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 devout two volumes to CHURCHILL’S WAR. The first, The struggle for Power, begins with Churchill in disgrace and battling to survive in a hostile political environment. The second, The triumph and Decline, begins with Pearl Harbour (1941) and ends with Potsdam and his Party’s surprising electoral defeat. Irving has created and unusual portrait tof the man who fought the toughest war in human history, leading his own country and peple to what has proved to be a Pyrrhic victory: an imperial; nation without an Empire, and, perhaps opening up a political vacuum which has since been 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 iognored by his predecessors: how Churchill thwarted the only chances that Europe had of peace in 1939 and 1940; how he willingly unleashed a cruel bombing war that killed one million Europeans. The author has re-examined several controversial issues, including Britain’s role ;in political assassinations and the deaths lf leading figures like Admiral Darlan. We watch him take and retain absolute control of Britain’s brilliant intelligence and code breaking organisations, which reassured him - alone – that Hitler never intended to invade the United Kingdom or bomb London. Chapters reveal how Britain lost world supremacy in atomic power and civil aviation. On Churchill’s strained relations with his son and daughters there are touching sidelights cast by their unpublished papers; but a harsher light is thrown on the hard drinking, cynicism, brutality, deceit and callousness of Winston’s Cabinet as shown by unpublished portions of their diaries (Eden, Cunningham, Alanbrooke, Cadogan, Martin and others). These reveal their prime minister rejoicing in slaying, being intocicated by the “roar of cannon” and exhilarated by his own graphic oratory. David Irving has written a stout picture of a tough old warrior, aged sixty as te book begins – emerging from a political wilderness to fight a war with a detertmined energy that appalled men even half his age. “Some chicken, some neck!” was his famous epigram at Ottowa at the end of 1941. Bu as the war gained momentum, did he realise that the outcome would be the end of Britain as a world power, and the emergence of a super Soviet power house that was to replace it? Hard cover, 666 pages. |
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