ABSTRACT
Military histories of the second world war explore almost every conceivable aspect of the campaign in every conceivable format: from scholarly works to popular narratives, from global surveys to micro studies. In Britain the most influential history was written by Winston Churchill, whose war memoirs at once gained a semi-official status because of the authority of Churchill as a wartime leader, because he published his version of events so soon after the end of the conflict, and because his commentaries made extensive use of government papers. The memoirs helped to shape a number of assumptions about Britain’s conduct of the war. They popularised the idea that the fight against Germany was a crusade for democracy against totalitarianism. Underpinning this was the belief that Britain sought to defeat its enemies from the start and never considered the possibility of a negotiated peace, a defiant stance which apparently intensified after May 1940. In pursuit of victory the memoirs describe an almost unbroken sequence of wise strategic decisions. Finally, the most powerful assumption of all was the certainty that the price of Britain’s victory in 1945 was worth paying.
