Triumph In The West By Arthur Bryant
Triumph In The West By Arthur Bryant
Hardcover
Publisher: Collins 1959
Used - Very Good+. This book is in very good condition. The Dust Jacket has some very limited signs of wear, edge worn/bumped and the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. The book is protected with a Cellophane cover.
It provides a fly-on-the-wall recounting of Churchill and his right-hand military chief, Alan Brooks, who was instrumental in saving so many soldiers at Dunkirk and then was appointed by Churchill to lead Britain's military effort to take apart the Third Reich. The book is based on Brooks' meticulously kept daily war diary as well as his post-war commentary on that diary with added context by Bryant compactly describing what was happening in the major theaters of war as Brooks and Churchill, the rest of the military and the Americans, Russians and, to some extent, Free French argued and politicked each other about the direction of the war. It seems almost every consequential meeting and conversation between Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt is recounted in simple but thorough detail. From the vantage point of decades into the future, the Allied war strategy looks so logical. In reality, no one knew what would work, the Americans and Stalin wanted an early attack on France even as Americans kept all the landing craft for their Pacific strategy. It was Brooks who figured out the best way was to begin to take away the Mediterranean from Germany and he fought everyone to keep his plan intact. This against the reality that Britain failed over and over in the beginning of the war. Finally, Brooks insisted Montgomery take over the 8th Army in the desert, and Montgomery succeeded where others failed miserably and finally beat Rommel, the first German domino that fell. Maybe most entertaining is the personal picture Brooks gives of Churchill, a supremely difficult boss who had to be corralled from pursuing creative adventures yet who single-handedly provided the British people needed, a spirit that barely existed before he became Prime Minister.
