The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 Paperback – November 5, 2013

William Manchester's third volume biography of Winston Spencer Churchill (WSC) Defender of the Realm 1940-1965 is based on his notes and assisted by journalist Paul Reid is a worthy addition and completes the 3 volume epic story of the life and history of WSC who along with FDR and Stalin led the Allies to victory against the Axis in WW II. It is an amazing story. This is a continuation of Manchester's earlier works The Last Lion: Vision of Glory 1874-1932 and The Last Lion: Alone, 1932-1940 and completes the story. William Manchester met WSC on a cruise from Britain to America in the 1950's and dedicated his life to capturing all the most salient aspects of the man many consider the person who saved Britain and for that matter Western Christian Civilization when it was at its most dire crisis in the 1939 - 1942 period. This is monumental work, well crafted and reads well. There appears to be no break in the prose style from Volume I thru Volume III which suggests that Mr. Reid studied Manchester's style and rythm to capture his writing method flawlessly. Not easy to do. Manchester had wrote another great biography on General Douglas MacAuthur, American Ceasar published in 1976 which is widely accepted as the definitive work of this 5 star American general who saved South Korea from conquest and slavery by the communist forces of Kim Il Sung in 1950 when he proposed and persuaded the General Staff to accept the plan of the Inchon landing instead of abandoning the mainland as most American generals and policy makers thought was the best and only course of action. This roughly 3000 page work of Vol I thru III will be seen as the same for WSC in the decades to come. There are no similar works that read as well as this. None that even come close to this quality reading and I have read quite a few WSC biographies and his books (he wrote roughly 50).I first became a Churchill fan when I was working in Lagos, Nigeria as an oil field expatriate in 1980 and there in the airport book store was Winston's autobiography "My Early Life". Nigeria being a former British Colony had a fair amount of symbols and artifacts of the British Empire even then. He wrote it in the 1920's when he was in his early fifties. If you really want to understand WSC you need to read this work because it shows how incredible lucky he was and how he had one heck of a guardian angel who spared him time and again for greater glory later in life. He was in four wars by the time he was 25 including the last calvary charge of the British Empire in the Sudan in 1898. However I digress........back to the last volume of Manchester's work which after decades of being discussed and was thought dead because Manchester had a stroke was thought not able to finish it has now been published finally in the Year of our Lord 2012.This volume begins with the invasion of France by the Germans in May of 1940. The Western allies of Belgium, France and Britain are in a defensive mode and seemingly in a strong position behind the Maginot Line. The allies are confident they are ready mainly; well, because they have more of everything except perhaps aircraft than Germany. They are thinking in WW I terms and this will cost them the Battle of France. Winston has just been appointed Prime Minister on May 10 which is the position he has assiduously sought most of his adult life and when he finally gets hold of the reigns of power it is a complete nightmare. As the Battle of France begins all seems well; but the Germans have a suprise in store for them. It is Manstein's and Guderian's plan (Case Yellow) to fake the main thrust thru Holland in a flanking attack thru the low lands. This is what Ally intelligence predicts Germany will do.Instead the Germans put their strongest attack force with most of the panzers in the Ardennes which is deemed nearly impenetrable. Besides the massive thick woods there is the barrier of the large fast-flowing Meuse river to stop any breakthrough. Everything looks well thru the eyes of the Allies that they are ready for any sort of attack. The Germans though have seen the future and realize that if they can catch the allies unawares and use a secret weapon and better tactics they can break the allies in two. So they fake with a strong attack thru Holland (Army Group B) making it appear to be the main thrust and while the allies surge there they cut thru the Ardennes (Army Group A) to reach the Meuse River which appears to be strongly defended. It is not. The secret weapon is the 88MM gun - a high velocity gun that can penetrate thick concrete gun houses and the defending tanks situated on the opposite side of the river. The Germans use their engineers to quickly build pontoon bridges. Stuka dive bombers are also used to destroy French tanks surging to stop the crossing. The Wermarcht know to mass their panzers while the ally tanks are mostly scattered - another big Ally mistake. The allies are pushed back and scattered from the Meuse, the Wermarcht pours through and panic ensues as the panzers speed towards the Atlantic coast. Fuel needed for the panzers is obtained from French petrol stations. For perhaps 48 hours the Allies have no idea what has happened as they are still focused on Army Group B where they are convinced the main fighting is taking place such is the confusion at the top levels.This is the dire situation that greets WSC in his beginning weeks as the PM in this Vol III. All hell has broken lose and his formidable ally - France has just received a mortal wound and the ally Belgium capitulates. According to WSC later in life he says that one of the biggest shocks of his life was after learning of the German breakthrough thru the Ardennes and the subsequent race to the channel by the same - He asked the French Military Leaders where their major reserves were to counter this breakthough. He was told that there was no such reserve forces to stop the panzers. All of this and more are covered in this wonderful book that has finally been released which covers the years 1940-1965 of the The Last Lion. Highest recommendation; you will not be disappointed. Strongly suggest you buy all three volumes of Manchester's epic historical work and also buy WSC's History of the English Speaking Peoples which won the Pulitzer prize in 1956 and which took WSC 20 years to write when he wasn't leading the British Commonwealth forces against the Axis forces.If there is something that WSC provides as a gift to future generations is that people should study history. Like historian Will Durant, WSC being the prolific student of history came to realize that history keeps repeating itself and that the more he studied history and the further he saw in the past; the further into the future he could see. This is most profound and is something that most people don't understand; WSC came to realize this gradually thru his study of history. That was WSC's special gift - the ability to see the future based on what he knew from the past because he studied it. He wasn't always right and he made many errors but he kept coming back into the arena and he was right on the major issues in defense of his people.

William Manchester's monumental three volume biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion, began with the 1984 publication of the first volume, Visions of Glory, 1874–1932 and continued with second in 1989, Alone, 1932–1940. I devoured these books when they came out, and eagerly awaited the concluding volume which would cover Churchill's World War II years and subsequent career and life. This was to be a wait of more than two decades. By 1988, William Manchester had concluded his research for the present volume, subtitled Defender of the Realm, 1940–1965 and began to write a draft of the work. Failing health caused him to set the project aside after about a hundred pages covering events up to the start of the Battle of Britain. In 2003, Manchester, no longer able to write, invited Paul Reid to audition to complete the work by writing a chapter on the London Blitz. The result being satisfactory to Manchester, his agent, and the publisher, Reid began work in earnest on the final volume, with the intent that Manchester would edit the manuscript as it was produced. Alas, Manchester died in 2004, and Reid was forced to interpret Manchester's research notes, intended for his own use and not to guide another author, without the assistance of the person who compiled them. This required much additional research and collecting original source documents which Manchester had examined. The result of this is that this book took almost another decade of work by Reid before its publication. It has been a protracted wait, especially for those who admired the first two volumes, but ultimately worth it. This is a thoroughly satisfying conclusion to what will likely remain the definitive biography of Churchill for the foreseeable future.When Winston Churchill became prime minister in the dark days of May 1940, he was already sixty-five years old: retirement age for most of his generation, and faced a Nazi Germany which was consolidating its hold on Western Europe with only Britain to oppose its hegemony. Had Churchill retired from public life in 1940, he would still be remembered as one of the most consequential British public figures of the twentieth century; what he did in the years to come elevated him to the stature of one of the preeminent statesmen of modern times. These events are chronicled in this book, dominated by World War II, which occupies three quarters of the text. In fact, although the focus is on Churchill, the book serves also as a reasonably comprehensive history of the war in the theatres in which British forces were engaged, and of the complex relations among the Allies.It is often forgotten at this remove that at the time Churchill came to power he was viewed by many, including those of his own party and military commanders, as a dangerous and erratic figure given to enthusiasm for harebrained schemes and with a propensity for disaster (for example, his resignation in disgrace after the Gallipoli catastrophe in World War I). Although admired for his steadfastness and ability to rally the nation to the daunting tasks before it, Churchill's erratic nature continued to exasperate his subordinates, as is extensively documented here from their own contemporary diaries.Churchill's complex relationships with the other leaders of the Grand Alliance: Roosevelt and Stalin, are explored in depth. Although Churchill had great admiration for Roosevelt and desperately needed the assistance the U.S. could provide to prosecute the war, Roosevelt comes across as a lightweight, ill-informed and not particularly engaged in military affairs and blind to the geopolitical consequences of the Red Army's occupying eastern and central Europe at war's end. (This was not just Churchill's view, but widely shared among senior British political and military circles.) While despising Bolshevism, Churchill developed a grudging respect for Stalin, considering his grasp of strategy to be excellent and, while infuriating to deal with, reliable in keeping his commitments to the other allies.As the war drew to a close, Churchill was one of the first to warn of the great tragedy about to befall those countries behind what he dubbed the “iron curtain” and the peril Soviet power posed to the West. By July 1950, the Soviets fielded 175 divisions, of which 25 were armoured, against a Western force of 12 divisions (2 armoured). Given the correlation of forces, only Soviet postwar exhaustion and unwillingness to roll the dice given the threat of U.S. nuclear retaliation kept the Red Army from marching west to the Atlantic.After the war, in opposition once again as the disastrous Attlee Labour government set Britain on an irreversible trajectory of decline, he thundered against the dying of the light and retreat from Empire not, as in the 1930s, a back-bencher, but rather leader of the opposition. In 1951 he led the Tories to victory and became prime minister once again, for the first time with the mandate of winning a general election as party leader. He remained prime minister until 1955 when he resigned in favour of Anthony Eden. His second tenure as P.M. was frustrating, with little he could to do to reverse Britain's economic decline and shrinkage on the world stage. In 1953 he suffered a serious stroke, which was covered up from all but his inner circle. While he largely recovered, approaching his eightieth birthday, he acknowledged the inevitable and gave up the leadership and prime minister positions.Churchill remained a member of Parliament for Woodford until 1964. In January 1965 he suffered another severe stroke and died at age 90 on the 24th of that month.It's been a long time coming, but this book is a grand conclusion of the work Manchester envisioned. It is a sprawling account of a great sprawling life engaged with great historical events over most of a century: from the last cavalry charge of the British Army to the hydrogen bomb. Churchill was an extraordinarily complicated and in many ways conflicted person, and this grand canvas provides the scope to explore his character and its origins in depth. Manchester and Reid have created a masterpiece. It is daunting to contemplate a three volume work totalling three thousand pages, but if you are interested in the subject, it is a uniquely rewarding read.