Will o'the Glen on Books

Churchill & Son , by journalist and author Josh Ireland explores a little-examined aspect of the life of Winston Churchill: his relationship with his only son, Randolph. I am not widely read on the subject of Winston Churchill but I have always admired him, mostly for the job he did leading the British Empire in their lonely stand against Nazi Germany in the dark early days of the Second World War. Books such as Candice Millard’s excellent  Hero of the Empire ;  Destination: Casablanca , by Meredith Hindley ;  and  Eight Days at Yalta , by Diana Preston  have shaped what I know of Winston Churchill, and aside from  The Splendid and the Vile , by Erik Larson , which deals closely with the entire Churchill clan during World War II, in the books that I have read about the elder Churchill I have seen relatively sparing mention of his son, Randolph. Churchill & Son  was therefore, revelatory in many ways. I had seen glimpses of Randolph Churchill’s ...

Meredith Hindley’s Destination Casablanca: Exile, Espionage, and the Battle for North Africa in World War II  succeeds on so many levels that I had trouble deciding where to begin this review. With so much attention having been paid in recent years to WW II action in mainland Europe and the Pacific, especially through feature films and TV mini-series that reach huge audiences ( Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, The Pacific ) it’s gratifying to see the spotlight turned on a lesser-known theater of operations. Casablanca, a port city on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, in the northwest corner of Africa, became an important place in the world in the aftermath of the fall of France, when the French government, and their military forces, capitulated to Nazi Germany, compromising with their conquerors by establishing a collaborationist Fascist government in the south of France in exchange for giving up Paris and the north. Refugees from France, and...

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...

The Yalta conference, in February 1945, comprised what is probably the most important eight-day period in modern history. The leaders of the three principal nations of the Allied alliance opposing the Axis powers – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin – met in the Black Sea resort city of Yalta to confer on subjects ranging from the conduct of the final campaigns against Nazi Germany to the configuration of Poland post-World War II; they also wrangled over the settlement of many other issues which would arise in the aftermath of the war, effectively shaping the world of the second half of the 20th century, and beyond, in the process. Diana Preston’s account of the conference, and its aftermath, is thoroughly researched and extremely well-written. The book includes vivid descriptions of the environs – the war-ravaged Black Sea resort of Yalta – and the personalities: FDR, ravaged by a multitude of physical ailments and increasingly unwell; Churchill, voluble, ...

Henry Hemming’s Agents of Influence was a real revelation to me, recounting as it does a British effort to bring the United States into World War II that went far beyond anything that I was aware of before reading this book. In addition to documenting the activities of British diplomats and the British intelligence service, MI6; not to mention the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill – to sway the U.S. government and U.S. public opinion in favor of entering the conflict in support of Great Britain, Hemming details the efforts of both the Nazi regime and the American isolationist movement, spearheaded by the “America First” organization and their spokesman, Charles Lindbergh, to keep the United States out of the war. Some might characterize the activities of the U.S.-based office of MI6, led by Canadian William Stephenson, as underhanded, and even duplicitous, but they were fighting a desperate battle to combat misinformation (while spreading a bit themselves, in a good cause) and turn ...