The Hinge Of Fate (The Second World War)

by Winston S. Churchill

Book Overview

The British prime minister's dramatic account of how the Allies turned the tide of World War II.In the first half of the book, Winston Churchill describes the fearful period in which the Germans... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395410584
• Release Date: May 1986
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Length: 952 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 1.7" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Turning the tide with rhetoric

The "Hinge" refers to the direction of continuous defeats changing into winning. Just before the hinge point people in Britain had gotten so fed up with bad news that a motion of censure was presented in parliament. If it had passed Churchill would have had to leave. The motion was presented by important members of parliament. To survive Churchill faced the challenge of making a speech to turn the tide. One of the many interesting aspects of his speech is, that it was built around the concept of responsibility. He started with the responsibility of Parliament and ending with his own responsibility as Prime Minister, Chairman of the War Cabinet and Minister of Defense. He said that parliament should be the basis of stability in the country. The members of parliament were probably flattered by that idea , even though in parliament the members of the opposition try to bring the government down. Of course the situation was unusual in that the government was a coalition government with members of the conservative and labour party. Churchill presented in a very clear way which organizations carried what kind of responsibilities, the role of the war cabinet , of the central military staffs staffs, of the commanders in the field. Lincoln won the vote on the censure overwhelmingly. Churchill's book is especially interesting because he describes in equal detail the political action and the military action and how these interact.

Maps and tables too blurry to use

Kindle edition: Maps and tables are reproduced too small and too blurry to use. The blurriness makes words illegible even with a magnifying glass: that is, words and numbers are not only too small, they are also blurred into completely unreadable spots of ink. This is a serious defect. Also, Churchill quotes many letters, telegrams, speeches and so on. In the printed version, these quotes are separated from Churchill's regular text by whitespace. The Kindle edition whimsically starts a long quote in regular type, then prints subsequent paragraphs in italics, then returns to regular type when Churchill takes up the narrative again. This way of distinguishing the quote is confusing even when it works, and in (for example) one-paragraph letters it doesn't even work; the reader is confused when the narration starts up again, thinking he is still in a letter from Roosevelt to the Prime Minister. If Kindle weren't a brand new technology there'd be nothing to do but return the book. As things stand, I hope for better later on -- and "better" that doesn't cost me another few hundred bucks.

1942-1943 Crucial Years in the World Conflict

Winston plods along with the hostilities in the Pacific theater such as they are. The British embarrassment of the fall of Singapore along with the loss of the Dutch East Indies send the signal that Great Britain is no longer the Empire of old. The American sea victories of the Coral Sea and Midway Island seems to solidify the proceedings in the Pacific Theater. The travel of Winston to Russia to pacify Stalin provides a period of calm for the Allies to proceed with their plans for the invasion of the European continent. The essence of the Casablanca Conference was the terms of the Allies determination of "Unconditional Surrender". This ultimately led to the final brutal Battle of Berlin in May, 1945. We are told of the siege of Stalingrad and the victory at Sea in the Atlantic Ocean by the British and American Navies. It was at this time that Mr. Churchill knew that the war would be won. Winston tends to ramble to show his side of the proceedings. However I still give him 5 Stars. His research of course is first rate. However many passages were long and dragged out. He could have used more appendices.

Losing, but knowing victory is coming

As Hinge fo Fate opens in early 1942, The Japanese had just destroyed most of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor; Japan was about to drive Britain from Southeast Asia and (perhaps) invade Australia; German and Italian troops under Romel were about to invade Egypt, and Stalin's Russia was under attack by the German Army, which had completed itsoccupation of virtually all of Europe, from France to Norway, Lithuania to Greece. Parliament was calling for Churchill's head. This was a true world war (contrast, Bush's War on Terror)--and Britain was losing. Churchill's reaction--the entry of America and Russia into the war as Britain's allies guaranteed that the Allies would ultimately win--Britain, US, and USSR simply had greater resources than Germany, Japan and Italy. Thus it was only a matter of time. The attack by Parliament was a sign of a healthy, strong democracy--as Churchill said, how many countries had strong enough political institutions to allow this type of no holds barred debate while under attack, and still survive. And survive they did. The first half of Hinge of Fate describes a series of worldwide disasters, unbroken by a single significant Allied victory. Then came the legendary battle of Alamein--where General Montgomery beat Rommel, the Allied landing on the north coast of Africa, the US Naval victories at Midway and in the Coral Sea, and Russia's effective resistance against the German Army at Stalingrad and in the Caucasus Mountains. By the end of 1942, it was not yet clear that tha tAllies would win, but they looked a whole lot batter than they did at the beginning. Along the way, Churchill gives us his impressions of the politics involved--both internal British, within the larger Commonwealth, among the Allies--and particularly his relationship and struggles with Stalin--and the tension between the British (focused on Europe) and the Americans (pushing for more resources to fight the Japanese in the Pacific). Hinge of Fate continues Churchill's inimitable style, mixing contemporaneous, detailed, memos, telegrams, letters, and directives he wrote, the responses he received, connected by new (in 1950) commentary by Churchill himself. This makes no pretesne at being an "objective" or multi-focused history of WWII. It is clearly, and exclusively, the war from Churchill's unique perspective. But, what a perspective!

Churchill devised a special method for writing

Winston Churchill was remarkable, as much as for any other reason, for the sheer volume of words he produced. In a long life, during which he was often preoccupied by both family matters (he had four children) and matters of state, he nevertheless found the time to compose an inordinate number of books. I say compose, because he perfected a system during the first war, which revealed its efficacy more than ever in the second, of working through secretaries. There are many odd anecdotes told about Churchill, not the least of which is that his secretaries, sometimes working in rotation throughout much of the night, were obliged to attend to him and take down what he said, even in the bath. This way of getting the material down in print proved to be very effective, as the tens of thousands of published pages of his work amply demonstrates. His long history of the Second World War continues with "The Hinge of Fate." Although he was personally assured that the American entry into the war meant the ultimate defeat of Germany, he still had to see to the day to day running of the war machine, and counter the perverse effects of both German victories and British pessimism. Now began, as well, the long battle with Stalin about opening up a second front in France, to take some of the heat off the Russian armies in the East. In fact, his relationship with the Russian leader is one of the most interesting sources of anecdotal references throughout this series. This is history being well told by a man who was, while perhaps not a trained historian as such, so steeped in the history of his family and his country, that he an utterly unique point of view. The fact that he was also a central figure in the war itself, means that we have, if you like, a one in a million chance victory on our hands, as though we had just won a lottery of sorts, by being able to read him.