A Six-Course Feast

...When he left Downing Street in 1945, he made a "remarkable bargain" (Reynolds's phrase) with the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, the custodian of government documents, under which a vast quantity of his wartime papers were classified as his personal property, and he was allowed to remove them physically to the archive at his country house, Chartwell in Kent...

...Readers must judge for themselves by studying the chapters that Reynolds provides for each volume...

...He compares the production of the work to the effort of a big research group in science directed by a A vast quantity of his wartime papers were classified as his personal property, and he was allowed to remove them physically to the archive at his country house, Chartwell in Kent...

...As he came out of both episodes with great personal credit, to omit them must have cost him a pang...

...Reynolds notes that Denis Kelly, the office-manager of the Syndicate, when asked if the great man really wrote the book himself, replied it was "almost as superficial a question as asking a master-chef, `Did you cook the whole banquet with your own hands...

...66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005 Indeed the impression that emerges from this fascinating book is that Churchill was a historian of great passion, insight, romantic and almost poetic gifts, huge industry and remarkable power, but also an operator of considerable ruthlessness...

...By the time he returned to power at the Paul Johnson's many books include Modern Times, Intellectuals, A History of the English People, and A History of the American People...

...Fifthly and most important perhaps, the work had an impact on how we see the history of the war and its aftermath which for many decades was almost determinative, and still helps to shape the received history...

...He learned a lot about this experience, especially the need to get possession of, and make use of, official papers...

...Reynolds thinks that many of the most important assessments and telegrams Churchill wrote while the war was on were classified by him with a view to future use in his memoirs...

...Third, the work was a documentary history as well as a personal memoir...

...As it turned out, Writing the Second World War Clementine Churchill was by David Reynolds right...

...The work won the Nobel Prize for Literature...

...Churchill was obliged by President Truman to omit the provisions of the Quebec Agreement on nuclear weapons research, and the need for continuing secrecy forbade any mention of "Operation Enigma" and the successful Allied efforts to break enemy codes...

...There were, as he shows, many exaggerations (e.g., on the air victory of 15 September 1940, which Churchill presents as the climax of the Battle of Britain, and is a rhetorical passage of great power: he gives the German air losses on this day as 183, whereas they were actually, as the German records show, only 56...

...major figure who gets the credit...

...On the other hand, he often exaggerates his foresight and judgment, and is unfair to his critics, enemies, and opponents, and sometimes to his friends and colleagues, like the long-suffering Anthony Eden...

...The book has five remarkable characteristics, all of which Reynolds brings out in generous detail...

...He donated all these papers to the Chartwell Trust and, adds Reynolds, "it in turn sold [them] to Lord Camrose [the owner of the London Daily Telegraph] as part of the clever legal device to avoid the punitive taxation that would have made the memoirs financially point-less...

...Both British and American publishers made fortunes from the work and so did Churchill's agent and Riviera host, Emery Reves...

...These remained top secret for many years, even after Churchill was dead...

...If Churchill had remained in power, it might never have been written at all...

...When the results of the 1945 General Election came through in July, ending Churchill's five-year premiership and bringing him back to earth with a bump, his wife said: "Maybe it is a blessing in disguise...

...J S THE WORK, THEN, TRUE HISTORY...

...In effect, the period of revision-ism did not begin until after his death, and by then many of the verdicts he sought to impose had already become part of the concrete and granite of historical teaching, exceedingly hard to undermine and replace...

...There were also drafts on the background history of events put together by "the Syndicate"—the team of research assistants headed by Bill Deakin, Henry Pownall, and Gordon Allen...

...In 1967, this was reduced to 30 years, but by then Churchill was dead, having got in with his documents well ahead of the pack...

...Fourthly, the work was both a personal achievement and a team effort...

...Churchill had earlier dealt with the First World War in about 750,000 words, provoking the famous quip from his cabinet col-league Lord Balfour: "Winston has written an enormous book about himself and called it The World Crisis...

...Not only did dismissal (RANDOM HOUSE, 656 PAGES, $35) by the electorate save Churchill from making strategic Reviewed by Paul Johnson errors of judgment in the immediate postwar period, especially over India, where he would have tried to hang on, but enforced idleness, after his hectic industry during the war years, made it possible for him to get down immediately to the business of telling his side of the war-time story...

...Here the documentation was all important...

...The original book deal of May 1947 (for a projected five volumes) brought Churchill B O O K S I N R E V I E W $2.23 million, which Reynolds says in today's money "might be estimated at anything between $18 million and $50 million...

...As Reynolds points out, the British documents to which Churchill alone had full access were permanently locked up (except to certain select official historians) until in 1958 Parliament enacted legislation on access, but even this concession included the "Fifty Year NOVEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65 B O O K S I N R E V I E W Rule," which meant half a century had to elapse be-fore the public could ask to see a particular document...

...In addition Churchill got huge sums from Time-Life and the New York Times...

...He fought hard, and took no prisoners, and on the whole he won the war of words too, as he had earlier won the war of deeds...

...Second, by any standards this was one of the most successful books ever written, both financially and in terms of readers...

...In addition, other experts, including military men who held important positions in the war, were called in to supply drafts of particular events, not always successfully...

...It is hard to say how widely the work is still read, half a century after it was published, though as there are still millions of volumes of it on the shelves of public and private collections, one must assume it is still dipped into...

...If you add the indexes, the total reaches 2,050,000...

...The wartime minutes and telegrams formed the core, but Churchill also dictated a number of pas-sages on key episodes that he remembered with particular intensity...

...Churchill was also lucky in that, during the seven years it took him to write and publish the work, he had virtually no competition...

...Eliot, and only one other historian, Theodore Mommsen, the German chronicler of ancient Rome...

...For purposes of comparison, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is about 1,100,000 words...

...But in a sense the question is irrelevant, since the message of the work, and many of its details, have passed into the public historical memory, at least in the English-speaking world, and probably much wider...

...To which Churchill replied wryly: "It apIn Command of History: pears to be very effectively Churchill Fighting and disguised...

...Being in opposition, and moving (all things considered) with all deliberate speed, Churchill published before, long before, the various generals, admirals, air marshals, and politicians who might have helped to shape the vision of history...

...On 12 May 1954, when it was all done, Churchill himself remarked: "Looking back it seems almost incredible that one could have got through all those six volumes and I sup-pose nearly two million words...

...There were also suppressions...

...Hitler, Mussolini, and Roosevelt were dead...

...64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005 end of 1951, the bulk of the work had been done...

...The only condition was that their publication had to be approved by the government of the day...

...It was based upon what the author called "the three Ds—document, dictation and drafts...

...This bargain not only made it easy for Churchill to document his work in full but also further benefited the Churchill family financially...

...Reynolds thinks the analogy apt: "Churchill did not chop the vegetables, and he did not lay the tables or mix all the sauces, but he knew how to get a six-course meal on the table in the right order and at more or less the right time—not just a meal but a feast...

...Bill Deakin, an academic who was the only professional historian in the Syndicate, played a particularly important role in revisiting the entire text of one of the volumes, The Hinge of Fate, when Churchill lacked the time to do it himself...

...Stalin wrote no memoirs, thinking official Soviet history would do instead...

...The fact that Churchill was not the sole author does not, in Reynolds's view, diminish his achievement...

...At the time of the Nobel prizewinning (1953), the Daily Telegraph, which serialized the last volume in London, stated that volumes one to five had already sold 6 mil-lion copies, and extracts had appeared in 50 papers in 40 countries, concluding: "No book has ever so swiftly achieved such dissemination...

...In fact there were 1,631,000 words of text, plus a further 278,000 in the appendices, making 1,909,000...

...This meant, Reynolds writes, "that Churchill had joined an elite group containing Britons such as Kipling, Shaw and T.S...

...B O O K S I N R E V I E W A Six-Course Feast HIS REMARKABLE BOOK, which won the Wolfson History Prize when it was published in Britain In 2004, tells the inside story of how Winston Churchill recorded his version of the Second World War in six massive volumes...

...First, size...

...In writing his masterpiece describing the course of the greatest of all wars, and his own role in it, he knew very well that he was fighting for his place in history...

...And, as he once truly remarked (May 1938), "Words are the only things that last for ever...