WINSTON CHURCHILL began to write the first of what were to be the six volumes of The Second World War in 1946. It was a work he had expected to postpone to a later stage of his life, since he had looked forward in I945 to extending his wartime leadership into the peace.The rejection of his party by the electorate was a heavy blow, which might have dulled his urge to write. But resilience was perhaps the most pronounced of his traits of character, and he had already writ-ten the history of another great war in which he had been a principal actor. Once committed to the task, he attacked it with an energy,enthusiasm and power of organisation which would have been re-markable in a professional historian of half his age.
Winston Churchill's six-volume history of the cataclysm that swept the world remains the definitive history of the Second World War.Lucid, dramatic, remarkable both for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement, it is universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction and is an enduring, compelling work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Triumph and Tragedy recounts the dramatic months as the war drew to a close: the Normandy landings, the liberation of Western Europe, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the surrender of Germany and Japan.
In his introduction, John Keegan discusses Churchill's historical meth-ods and the extraordinary achievement of The Second World War.This volume also includes appendices, an index, maps and diagrams.'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.