[In the following review, Slosson notes that the appendices of Churchill's Second World War series contain the most interesting and valuable information, particularly Churchill's confidential war-time papers.]

Clemenceau, outstanding statesman of France in the First World War, wrote reminiscently of the “grandeurs and miseries of victory”; Winston Churchill, the British pilot of the Second, writes now of Triumph and Tragedy. After both wars (perhaps after all great wars) victory involved also disappointment and disillusionment during the years of postwar reconstruction. Though Churchill carries his narrative only to the day which closed his wartime premiership, the shadow of impending trouble with Russia is thrown across every page. If there is a topic sentence which may serve as the key to the whole book it is a remark, very incidentally introduced in the course of a defense of his Grecian policy in 1944, “I saw quite plainly that Communism would be the peril civilisation would have to face after the defeat of Nazism and Fascism” (p. 305). Though the first five volumes of [The Second World War] told of many defeats, and this final volume carries victory in an unbroken crescendo from D-Day to the Potsdam conference in the heart of defeated Germany, its tone is sadder than that of the earlier works. Russia is already making trouble; eastern Europe appears doomed; Roosevelt “the greatest American friend we have ever known” is dead; and a new Labour government has displaced Churchill's. This last disappointment, though Churchill calls it a blessing “quite effectively disguised” (p. 675), has perhaps been a boon to history. Would the author have lived to finish his great prose epic of the war if his time had been taken up by office duties during all the postwar years?

The chief interest in the military narrative is a reiterated argument for his own strategic views as against the American, especially in two matters: the expedition to southern France, when Churchill would have preferred an advance in the Adriatic region toward Vienna; and the withdrawal to lines agreed on with the Russians, instead of pressing on in Saxony and Bohemia in order to minimize the area of Russian occupation. Churchill may have been in the right on both occasions, as he perhaps was in the right in urging a more vigorous venture at the Straits in the First World War, but it is hard for the lay reader to pass judgment on disputes in which a minister who was, after all, a civilian, was opposed by much expert military opinion.

The political narrative is largely taken up by negotiations with Russia, and particularly by Churchill's vain attempt to secure a really independent government for Poland. Stalin, flexible on most issues (Churchill distinctly praises him for keeping out of the 1944 troubles in Greece), was blunt to the point of brutality in his insistence that Poland was a Russian sphere of influence. Churchill shows how callously Stalin permitted the Germans to wipe out Warsaw, and even refused to permit British and American planes to land “on Soviet territory” after dropping aid to the distressed Poles (p. 133). Russia seemed to make promises for a free Poland at Yalta, but these were all later betrayed. Churchill wanted to send a vigorous protest at these violations (chapter Vi), but Roosevelt, while agreeing in principle, was willing to grant Russia a little more time to make concessions.

There were other ominous signs of future trouble: Stalin's accusations against the good faith of Britain and America in the matter of German surrenders on the western front (chapter Vii); Russia's “overwhelming influence in the Balkans,” and the “iron curtain” (the phrase was used in a telegram to President Truman as early as May 12, 1945) across central Europe (p. 573); Tito's attempt to seize Trieste and to keep out the British and Americans, an episode which led to Truman's first vigorous protest against Communist policy (p. 555). On the other hand, Churchill did not seem greatly concerned over Russia's stand on the Great Power veto in the United Nations, feeling that Britain herself might need the veto power some day (p. 355). Stalin, informed about the atom bomb, showed merely a friendly general interest, no special curiosity. Perhaps this was because he already knew more, as a result of espionage, than it was tactful to admit.

As in all the books of this series, the appendix is the richest and raciest part, for here are the confidential minutes and notes and telegrams of the Prime Minister, in all their informal undress. Perhaps no other contemporary statesman was so little a specialist. Everything is fish for his net, the most trivial as well as the most important issues. We find, for instance, “to call a British division an Indian division is really going below the level of grovelling to which we have been subject” (p. 692); the persecution of the Jews during the war by Nazi orders was “the most horrible crime committed in the whole history of the world” (p. 693); “I know it is the modern view that all rich people should be put to death wherever found, but it is a pity that we should take up that attitude” (p. 695); “that China is one of the world's four Great Powers is an absolute farce” (p. 701); “Make sure that the beer goes to the troops under the fire of the enemy before any of the parties in the rear get a drop” (p. 709); “attention should be drawn” to misspelling in Foreign Office telegrams (p. 749); “This war would never have come unless, under American and modernising pressure, we had driven the Habsburgs out of Austria and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany” (p. 750); “What is the point of bringing 500 tons of fish per day to London if only one-half of it is edible” (p. 761); postwar fraternization with the enemy should be allowed, since Russia permits it, “We are dignified and insulting, and the Russians are boon companions and enslavers” (p. 762).