The Gathering Storm (Winston S. Churchill The Second World Wa) by Winston S. Churchill (PDF)

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“It is our immense good fortune that a man who presided over this crisis in history is able to turn the action he lived through into enduring literature.” —The New York Times This book is the first in Winston Churchill’s monumental six-volume account of the struggle between the Allied Powers in Europe against Germany and the Axis during World War II. Told from the unique viewpoint of a British prime minister, it is also the story of one nation’s heroic role in the fight against tyranny. Having learned a lesson at Munich they would never forget, the British refused to make peace with Hitler, defying him even after France had fallen and it seemed as though the Nazis were unstoppable. What lends this work its tension and power is Churchill’s inclusion of primary source material. We are presented with not only Churchill’s retrospective analysis of the war, but also memos, letters, orders, speeches, and telegrams, day-by-day accounts of reactions as the drama intensifies. We listen as strategies and counterstrategies unfold in response to Hitler’s conquest of Europe, planned invasion of England, and assault on Russia. Together they give a mesmerizing account of the crucial decisions made as the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The Gathering Storm covers the Treaty of Versailles, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the capitulation of Munich, and the entry of Britain into the war. This book makes clear Churchill’s feeling that the Second World War was a largely senseless but unavoidable conflict—and shows why Churchill earned the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, in part because of this awe-inspiring work.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This book, while difficult to read at times, offers an look behind the scenes between the two world wars. I learned a great deal from this book.

⭐This book includes:- the events of the war,- communications to/from Churchill,- and also some German communications.- I enjoyed that it was first hand, and includes his feelings, especially the last chapter when he becomes prime minister.

⭐This is the man who was THERE. Churchill somehow managed to analyze the military situation while staying on polite if not good terms with his fellow officeholders–yeah, even Neville Chamberlain. Fascinating reading about how the West screwed up the truce after WWI and how HItler was simply more evil and persuasive than anybody thought possible.

⭐Needless to say that reading Churchill is a privilege. It’s like having him seating in front of you telling how it all happened. However I did skip some parts about his very detailed marine operations. Him having been First Lord of the Admiralty makes it all natural that he would expound on such issues but still it gets a little distracting for those more interested in the war.

⭐Churchill is the biggest man of our times although now gone for 50 years. He had a ring-side seat to the two world wars and the writing skills to tell about it with humility, honesty, and humor. The Gathering Storm is the first of Churchill’s six volumes of history, written during the post-war period when he and his party were thrown out of office. Churchill had been an officer and First Lord of the Admiralty during WWI. He held high office after the war but resigned in 1931 due to disagreements over policy in India.During the 1930’s, Churchill was an MP but not a cabinet member. He studied the world scene carefully through his many contacts, both in and out of official duty. Since Churchill was never in any way responsible for the atrocious British policy of appeasement and non-support to allies, he was the right man to form a government in 1940 and lead the war effort.In this 700 page tome we learn how Churchill dealt with his hand. He found ways to provide input to PM’s and other leaders through letters and dinner conversations. When no one took his advice, he never questioned himself or his judgment, but instead waited for the next day. Churchill certainly understood work life balance. If he was not in the government, he could watch the world scene and write letters from the south of France while painting and dining.Churchill also gives us lots of management and leadership advice here. He never accepts any task unless the role and expectations are clear and he has the support to make it a success. He understands the value of developing a strong network that he draws on later. He also relishes his naps, realizing that even during war time, one can work all night if a good late afternoon nap is taken.

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⭐Volume 2 of Churchill’s six-volume work on World World Two provides an intriguing read. Churchill narrates the warfare in Continental Europe, the Battle of Britain, and battles in Africa. One reads about the incredible initial ease with which Hitler’s forces moved through the continent, the shifting alliances of nations on the continent, the fall of France and retreat at Dunkirk, the courage and perseverance of the British (her air force, navy, army, and people) in resisting Hitler’s advance, and success against Mussolini’s forces in the African theatre. Churchill gives details of military strategies, how they worked and where they failed, as the war progressed in Continental Europe, over the British Isles, and in the deserts of Africa. The account is so intriguing that I find myself reluctant to lay down my iPad or iPhone while reading late into the night.As always, Churchill uses colourful language that is a joy to read. Compared with volume 1, and with the narration jumping from place to place and from time to time, one feels that the content of the second volume is rather less well organised. Throughout this volume, Churchill is also liberal, as he was in volume 1, in setting out details of his speeches, directives, minutes, telegrams, etc, which the reader may find tedious at times. Nonetheless, this is more than made up for by the excitement engendered by the intricate details of developments in the war against Nazi Germany and the Axis.In all, this volume is highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of World War Two.

⭐”‘Winston is back.’ AND SO HE BLOODY WELL IS!!!” That line was from the movie with Albert Finney as Winston Churchill. See the movie first before you read the book. The book is written by one of the greatest minds of the 20th century and describes not a nice man but a good man who personally witnessed the victory of World War I and how we gave that up through successive treaties that gave all the advantages to a bloodied but not defeated Germany leading up to the next great war.This is a book about the folly of pursuing peace through unilateral disarmament. The Allies thought if only they could set the example of putting limits on their military and falling back, Germany would do the same. She didn’t and Winston Churchill consistently told them so and he suffered for it through exile in parliament and being labeled as a warmonger by his own government. But when it became clear that Winston was RIGHT, he was named First Lord of the Admiralty and then Prime Minister eight months later as the war efforts of Neville Chamberlain led to failure in Norway and Dunkirk.This is a story of standing up for what is right when everybody else refuses to see it, doing so consistently and living with the consequences and then taking your destiny and your place in history when everybody else is forced to side with you as the ideal collapses and reality sets in. I enjoyed this book immensely and I quoted the last two paragraphs as totally Winston Churchill, a man with self- confidence who rose to the occasion after suffering years of persecution and ostracization and secured his place in history!

⭐The first book in Churchill’s massive six-volume history of the Second World War, this covers the period from the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to the day when Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940. The series, among his other writings, won Churchill the Nobel Prize for Literature, although the liberal intellectual snobberati like to suggest that that was out of gratitude for his wartime leadership rather than for its literary merits. The snobberati, as usual, are wrong. This is a superbly written account of the period from one man’s viewpoint – that man happening to be one of the handful of important men who decided the fate of the world for the second half of the twentieth century at least.Despite recent attempts at revisionist history, it is still, I think, generally accepted that the conditions that allowed for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis were seeded in the Treaty of Versailles that formally ended the First World War, and then fertilized by the failures of the Allies, mainly the US, France and Britain, to act at an early stage to prevent Germany from re-arming. Exhausted from WW1 and with no appetite for further war, appeasement seemed the easier option, and the old men who ran the world dithered as Hitler began to forge a massive fighting machine and revived German pride and resentment at their treatment by the victors of the 1914-18 war. Churchill was the main opponent of appeasement, arguing consistently that Germany must be dealt with before they became too powerful for the Allies to control. Alas! How different history may have been if only his views had prevailed in the mid-1930s.Of course, in this book Churchill shows that Churchill thinks Churchill was right all along, but I tend to agree with him about that so his bias in his own favour didn’t become an issue. He is remarkably personally generous to those individuals with whom he disagreed, even as he condemns their weakness and failure to act. He tries to give their side of the arguments as fairly as he can, considering that they were proved wrong time and time again.But he is pretty brutal about failures of the national policies of the WW1 allies, especially the US’s self-interested and isolationist position of neutrality. He points out that the Allies reluctantly agreed to Wilson’s League of Nations after WW1, only for the American government then to refuse to ratify it, immediately making it a toothless tiger. He talks about the damage done, economically and politically, by the reparations forced on Germany, and how the US was unwilling to cancel debt to allow the German economy to recover, not to mention the economies of America’s erstwhile allies.But France and Britain come in for plenty of criticism too, for continuing to attempt to mollify and compromise with Hitler’s Germany long after, in Churchill’s opinion, such attempts were obviously dangerous. He talks in depth about Germany’s open and secret build-up of their army, naval power and, most frighteningly, air force, while Britain and France lagged behind, hoping that somehow war could be avoided. He barely hides his disgust at the Munich agreement and the betrayal of the Allies’ commitment to Czechoslovakia. He shows how he argued forcefully for the Allies to take a military stand before Germany overtook France and Britain in terms of military force, but to no avail. And therefore, when even the appeasers finally agreed that Germany must be stopped, the Germans had built up a huge military advantage; and the British, quickly left alone as one ally, France, was defeated, and the other, the US, sat on its haunches doing nothing, had to try to fend off an invasion long enough to allow for a massive expansion in manpower, munitions, and the vital air power – defensive and offensive – that had been allowed to fall so badly behind.Although the story is told from a personal perspective, with Churchill more than most the personal is political, and so this reads like a formal history far more than a personal memoir. Churchill claims, and I have no reason to doubt him, that he asked other people to rigorously check the facts in the book, so that there is a solid historical foundation below the upper layer of Churchill’s own opinion. One sees his mastery over detail, his ability to look at the full chessboard of war, his willingness to throw away a pawn or two to capture the queen, his courage to be open about the dangers ahead, his inspirational belief in Britain’s eventual ability to prevail which meant so much to the national psyche during the war’s darkest days. We see him pull all the political levers at his command, all the contacts and loyalties he had built up over his already long lifetime in the spotlight on the world’s stage, to bring people and nations round to his views – a long task and often seemingly futile, but he never weakened or turned away, never decided to let his reputation rest on his past achievements as many men of his age may have done. Was he perfect? Absolutely not. Opinionated, demanding, a risk taker, an imperialist to the core – I imagine the people around him found him maddening and exhausting. But he also commanded deep personal loyalty and respect from those who worked closely with him, and was admired and increasingly revered by a large majority of the general public for his steadfastness and patriotism in these early days of the war. He was the right man at the right time, and how often does that happen?I really thought this might be a turgid read, but it’s actually a first-rate history with just enough of the personal to bring out the emotional drama of war. I also realised while reading it how influential it must have been on the early interpretations of the history of the period, since it chimed in almost every particular with what I was taught about the war in school in the 1970s. I will certainly go on to read the other five volumes in the series.

⭐This is the first volume of Churchill’s six-volume memoir of the Second World War. It is in two parts. Book I describes events in the years preceding the outbreak of war, and Book II deals with the start of the war. This review is of Book I. The central idea that runs throughout the book is that the war was avoidable. It happened because we—meaning the victors in the First World War, especially Britain—believed what we wanted to believe rather than what was happening. Time and again opportunities were lost. The main reason for this was the understandable wish for peace, which was what led to the establishment of the League of Nations. Germany was supposed to be disarmed, but so too were the victorious nations. During what Churchill calls the Locust Years (1931–1935) British security was neglected shamefully, principally by the Conservatives but also by Labour and the Liberals. The result was “a picture of British fatuity and fecklessness which, though devoid of guile, was not devoid of guilt, and though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries which, even as far as they have unfolded, are already beyond comparison in human experience”.Churchill traces Hitler’s seemingly inexorable rise to power after 1933 and shows time and again how he thinks this could have been at least checked for a time and possibly completely prevented. The German invasions of the Ruhr, Austria, and Czechoslovakia were all gambles; in all of them resolute action by Britain and France could easily have called Hitler’s bluff, but nothing was done. I was familiar with this in outline but there were many surprises. For example, it seems that the German generals were so appalled by the risks that Hitler was running in his plan to invade Czechoslovakia that they were plotting to arrest him.I was also surprised at the complexities of the relationship between Mussolini and Hitler; the two dictators were initially not as cooperative or friendly to each other as they became later. And I hadn’t realised how close Russia had come in 1938 to forming an alliance with Britain and France against Germany; this might have happened if the Western powers had been less lukewarm to the idea, although Poland and the Baltic states were also unwilling to allow Russian troops to traverse their territories Statesman are not called upon to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers and the proportions are veiled in mist that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself. Having got ourselves into this awful plight of 1939, it was vital to grasp the larger hope.Throughout the period he describes in Book I Churchill was a Member of Parliament but not a minister, so his role was that of a spectator and adviser but not an actor. That was soon to change. We leave him in his home at Chartwell, accompanied by a retired Scotland Yard detective; they are both armed and taking it in turns to sleep, in case one of Hitler’s Nazis, of whom there were known to be twenty thousand in Britain, should come to assassinate him.Not the least remarkable thing about this book is its sheer readability. Before starting on it I had expected to find it rather hard going, but quite the opposite. I usually have two or three books on the go at any one time and tend to alternate between them according to my mood, I soon found myself returning to this one in preference to anything else, as I might to a thriller—which, in a sense, it is.

⭐Winton Churchill is justly famous for leading Britain through the Second World War, and he wrote his own version of the history of those times in a number of volumes. The Gathering Storm covers the pre-war years – during which Churchill was often a voice in the wilderness – and the first part of the war.It is very well written, as you might expect, and not too partisan, but there is one flaw with this version. The text is something of a mess. It is incomplete, so that various lists and tables are missing. At times one paragraph will run into the next at random, so that separate items such as quoted passages are indistinguishable from the main body. At other times the text is totally scrambled, as though two columns of text were merged randomly together.So only three stars.

⭐One of the best overall views of WW2 from the man who should know what actually happenedAdd in that he was one of the best writers of his generation and you have a comprehensive and thrilling account of one of the key periods of world historyThen consider that this is just the first part!

⭐Having read a number of histories of this period I had never read Churchill’s own account. I purchased the kindle version for taking on holiday. Of course it is biased being Churchill’s own account and written while he was still an active politician. It was fascination to understand his thinking and to realise even more how prescient he had been in the 1930s. An excellent book, I will certainly read the other volumes (I am halfway through volume 2 at the moment).

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