[In the following review, Hubbard asserts that Churchill's Second World War series serves as a testament to the politician's political virtuosity and tenacity.]

This [Triumph and Tragedy] is the concluding volume of [The Second World War] made remarkable by the fact that the author not only can speak with authority on the precise events which now shape the contemporary world but whose reflections also are marshaled by the regimen of a historical perspective. Admittedly, the author's unswerving frame of reference is that vast panoply of men and institutions and events which combine to produce the British heritage, and it is with full knowledge and admiration for his forebears that he writes this chronicle with fervor, with pride, and, in this last volume, with anguish. Simply stated, the theme of the final volume is: how the great democracies triumphed, and so were able to resume the follies which had so nearly cost them their lives.

Book I opens with the Normandy landings which, having almost incredibly achieved a tactical surprise, were so successful that, combined with the massive Russian offensives in the East, they reduced the question of ultimate military victory to the simple matter of time. But throughout this recital of military triumph runs the sinister thread of Russian intransigence, always implicit in Churchill's narrative and often explicit, as in this statement which sets the whole tone of the volume: “Myself, I never had any doubts about it, for I saw quite plainly that Communism would be the peril civilization would have to face after the defeat of Nazism and Fascism.”

In Book II, aptly entitled “The Iron Curtain,” the military denouement resulting in the surrender of Germany and Japan is submerged in the awful implications of the break-up of the Allied coalition. A minor but somehow fitting theme which closes this somber recital is the General Election which saw Great Britain's most redoubtable prime minister dismissed at home in his hour of military triumph abroad.

Churchill continues to press on the judgment of the future his variance with the prevailing American strategic concept after D-Day. He reiterates his preference for a complementary thrust through the Ljubljana Gap rather than at the south of France, and he argues that the operation as conducted availed General Eisenhower of not the slightest immediate benefit but instead so weakened the Eighth Army as to stall its advance in Italy and subsequently to secure Vienna to the Russians by default. And later when military victory blossomed in the midst of Allied political disintegration, he pleaded that British and American troops stand at the point of their deepest penetration for the sake of political leverage with Stalin, and not be retired—at one point for a distance of 120 miles in Saxony and Bohemia—to what apparently were hastily accepted zones of occupation. Ideally, Churchill would have stood at the point of farthest advance after VE-Day and would not have allowed a single British or American unit to be demobilized or transferred to the Far Eastern theater until some guarantee of Russian behavior had been obtained. He surely grasped the tragedy that at that time, with our deep and bitter commitment against Japan, no American president could have issued such an order and withstood the storm of public indignation.

That Churchill, after his rude dismissal in the hour of victory, followed by a vigorous return to the political arena and a realization that his worst fears about the international situation had come to pass, could have produced this superb account of the Second World War must surely become an enduring monument to one man's fortitude and to the precious resiliency of the human spirit.