Churchill's War, Volume I: The Struggle for Power

Churchill's War, Volume I: The Struggle for Power is David Irving's standard work on the early years of Winston Churchill and his war, based, like his work on Hitler, on interviews and documents exclusively available to him and thirty years of research in British and international archives.

This first volume chronicles an almost unbroken series of disasters in his life, from Gallipoli and the Chanak crisis to the defeat of France and the military fiasco in Greece.

The contract for the biography was signed with major British publishers in October 1972.

Churchill's War, Volume I: The Struggle for Power, is the first volume that appeared fifteen years later, in 1987, and the second fourteen years after. It benefits from the release to the public domain of thousands of files, including the most secret, which even the official biographer has been unable to see. In the thirty years of its gestation, the world has turned, the landscape of history has shifted, and entire areas now tremble to the tread of the enforcers of political correctness.

Mr Irving is no longer the enfant gâté of the media. Publishers who fell over themselves in the 1970s to publish him now come under assault from international organisations if they even hint at doing so again.

(The secret files of Macmillan Ltd show that in July 1992 - on the same day as the author was returning triumphant from the KGB archives in Moscow with the Goebbels diaries - their editors-in-chief took the decision, under outside pressure, to burn all his remaining works in secret, and not inform him they were doing so.)

Unlikely but true stories dominate this volume: How Churchill clawed his way back into power, how he was used by the Jews and used them, how he started the saturation bombing war, how he innocently but often exposed himself to young girls and statesmen alike; how he sank the Bismarck and sold out the British Empire to the Americans.

How his historic speeches were three times broadcast for him by ‘Larry the Lamb’, as he was in no condition to broadcast; how he dictated to and dominated his ministers; how his drink problem grew out of control, which did not escape the attention of foreign statesmen.

The human Winston Churchill reaches boldly out of this first volume as from the second: bullying, bold, incorrigible, and callous, hectoring his ministers but subservient to both Moscow and Washington and mindlessly sacrificing the British empire's interests when those powers so dictated.

The unpalatable picture that emerges of this war leader in Real History is unchallengeable - that he willingly fomented, prosecuted, and indeed prolonged the war against Hitler, not in pursuit of any fundamental British empire interest, for Britain and her empire were never threatened by Hitler's Germany; but to acquire money and power after years in the wilderness and poverty; and that he was undismayed to see the British empire ruined in the process.

The volume reproduces many photographs and documents, many in colour. Vol.2 has been published and is available from this bookstore. Vol. 3 follows.

Churchill's War, Volume I: The Struggle for Power, has 700 pages, including notes and an index.