A Fresh Perspective on Churchill and England’s Stand against Nazi Germany – “The Splendid and the Vile”, by Erik Larson ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
World War II history, and particularly the period between the fall of France and the United States’ entry into the war, has always been of great interest to me. Most of my reading on this period has been focused on the Battle of Britain—the quite brief span of time in the late summer/early autumn of 1940 when the men and women of the Royal Air Force fought a desperate battle to prevent the Luftwaffe from achieving air superiority over the English Channel and southern England as a prelude to an invasion of the British Isles. Lately, however, I have been seeking out books that deal with the larger picture of that fateful period of over 2-1/2 years when England and the Commonwealth stood alone against the Fascist tide that had swept across continental Europe. Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile chronicles this crucial period; specifically, the first year of Churchill’s tenure as Prime Minister of England, and the author takes a unique approach, mining the journals and personal dia