Product Description

Warlord is the definitive chronicle of Churchill's crucial role as one of the world's most renowned military leaders, from his early adventures on the North-West Frontier of colonial India and the Boer War through his extraordinary service in both world wars. Using extensive, untapped archival materials, Carlo D'Este illuminates Churchill's character as never before, exploring his strategies behind the major military campaigns of World War I and World War II—both his dazzling successes and disastrous failures—while also revealing his tumultuous relationships with his generals and other commanders, including Dwight D. Eisenhower.

As riveting as the man it portrays, Warlord is a masterful, unsparing portrait of one of history's most fascinating and influential leaders during what was arguably the most crucial event in human history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24520 in Books
• Published on: 2009-12-01
• Released on: 2009-11-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 880 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780060575748
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. D'Este (Patton: A Genius for War) is a master analyst of 20th-century military leadership, and this book may be his finest yet. Showing a remarkable knowledge of archival and printed sources, he tells the complex story of a statesman and warrior. As a child, Winston Churchill was headstrong, highly opinionated, and virtually impossible to control. Those traits remained throughout a life he often regretted having spent in council chambers rather than on battlefields. His experiences as a young man in India, South Africa and the Sudan left him with both an abhorrence of war and a passion for soldiering. D'Este skillfully demonstrates how these traits shaped Churchill's persistent advocacy for preparedness and negotiation as means of averting war and his determination to see war through when deterrence failed. D'Este camouflages neither personal weaknesses nor questionable policies. But his expertise as a military historian provides contexts too often lacking in evaluating Churchill's roles in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, 1940's Battle of Britain and the D-Day invasion in 1944. Elegantly written, this tour de force belongs in every library addressing the 20th century. 16 pages of b&w photos, 9 maps. (Nov.)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* D’Este, a biographer of Patton and Eisenhower, has long detected an absence of objectivity about Churchill’s military career. Here he astutely lauds Churchill’s soldierly courage but questions how Churchill-the-politician acted as, in effect, an operational general. A list of battles he directly affected, from Antwerp in 1914 to Anzio in 1944, amounts to a record of military disaster, but D’Este weighs in the balance Churchill’s attitudes toward waging war and the specific decisions he made in World War II that ultimately made him victorious. Churchill’s abhorrence of inaction was evident in his youth, inducing him to seek out combat experiences he was fortunate to survive and eager to publicize. He also, D’Este argues, then formed a distrust of generals and admirals, a confidence in his own military intuition, and the flaw of dismissing military factors that bored him, such as logistics. Neither idolator nor revisionist, D’Este yields an ambivalent impression of Churchill that, while no denigration of his heroic leadership of Britain in 1940, underscores his paradoxes, such as a fascination with war’s spectacle that vied with an unfeigned horror of its carnage. It is just such paradoxes that render him perennially intriguing to the reading public. --Gilbert Taylor

Review
"An engaging narrative. . . . Well-researched, balanced, and highly readable. . . . Carlo D'Este provides us with a very human look at Churchill's lifelong fascination with soldiering, war, and command . . . with an eye for colorful quotation and telling anecdote." (The Washington Post )

"Masterful. . . . D'Este provides a blow by blow on all of the events of World War II. He is especially good at rendering the devastation Britain faced during the Blitz and the preparations for the Normandy Invasion." (The Chicago Sun-Times )

"Epic. . . . A briliantly exciting narrative. . . . D'Este has given us, finally, the lion not only in winter, but at war: impetuous, brazen, misguided, but indefatigable, indomitable, and magnanimous: the greatest and most energetic generalissimo of the 20th century." (Nigel Hamilton, The Boston Globe )

"Elegantly written, this tour de force belongs in every library addressing the 20th century. . . . D'Este is a master analyst of 20th-century military leadership, and this book may be his finest yet. . . . He tells the complex story of a statesman and warrior." (Publishers Weekly (starred review) )

"Winston Churchill's life spanned the last decades of the British Empire, and to read Carlo D'Este's enjoyable new biography is to recall the sequence of disasters that befell Britain between the final days of the Victorian era and its brush with extinction in World War II." (Robert Kagan, The New York Times Book Review )

"D'Este astutely lauds Churchill's soldierly courage but questions how Churchill-the-politician acted as, in effect, an operational general." (Booklist (starred review) )

"The many biographies of Winston Churchill have tended to paint him from a political perspective. In his new book, military historian Carlo D'Este shifts the focus onto Churchill the military leader and how his passion for wartime endeavors led to the improbable British victory in the Allied cause." (History Wire )

"Carlo d'Este, one of the finest historians of the Second World War, brings to his new book all his skills as a military analyst. Even those who think Churchill's life familiar will find this a wonderfully stimulating study." (Max Hastings )

"Carlo D'Este, among our very best military historians, has found in Winston Churchill a subject worthy of his talent. Warlord takes the familiar subject of Churchill's amazing life and makes it glitter anew." (Rick Atkinson ) --.

Customer Reviews

Knight Commander
A retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel, Carlo D'Este has had a second career as a historian. Using his military background, he has picked a narrow topic: the U.S. Army in the European theater of World War II and written some of the most informative and readable accounts of the war in print. His biography of General George S. Patton, Jr. is a work that anyone thinking of taking up this art form should read as an example of how to do it right.

With "Warlord," D'Este has moved into new territory, British military history. The readers should know that the story that unfolds on these pages is primarily European in nature. Although over half of this book is about World War II, the author is examining the British experience and that is a different topic from what he has done in the past. Pearl Harbor does not take place until page 556 (out of 700 of text) and even then, only as a dependent clause.

D'Este's research is extensive and creative. He has looked at Churchill's student records at Harrow and examined the papers of Lord Moran, the Prime Minister's personal physician. In between, he hits all the important archives.

The quality of coverage that comes from this exploration of the historical record is uneven, though, ranging from brilliant to merely adequate. The book is extremely weak on the World War I years. Serious Churchill buffs/fans/students will be disappointed. With that point made, most Americans know little of World War I and the discussion of the Great War should be more than adequate for general readers. D'Este also builds on this material. The book is much stronger when it gets to the World War II years, and the author connects much of what Churchill did in the 1940s back to the events of the 1910s, something that is uncommon in American writing on the Prime Minister.

A trait in D'Este biographies is that key figures other the principal subject have their moment to walk across the pages and voice their opinions and criticisms. The same is true here. General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, the head of the British Army for most of the war, often clashed with Churchill. D'Este pulls no punches and avoids the mistake of many biographers in siding with his subject, but he is better at narration than analysis in these moments. A number of other British generals, many of whom have ended up as forgotten figures, also get their moments and a generally sympathetic hearing from Churchill's biographer.

A clear strength is D'Este's efforts to develop Churchill's personality. He makes some keen observations, and the reader gets a good idea why Brooke found the man at times so infuriating and at others so inspirational.

Finally--and this is no little thing--this book is an easy, easy read.

Churchill the Warrior
Carlo D' Este states clearly that his purpose in writing this biography is to explore Churchill the warrior. The book, he says, "is less about events and more about Churchill the man -- his leadership, his triumphs, and his failures." D'Este succeeds in this goal.

D'Este describes Churchill as in company with men "born for war," such Frederick the Great, Oliver Cromwell and his own famous ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. Churchill, D'Este maintains, cannot be understood if one approaches him as a politician or statesman who was destined to conduct a war but rather must be understood as a warrior who realized that politics forms a part of the conduct of war.

Men "born for war," including Patton, the subject of another excellent D'Este biography, never lose their romantic and self-centered approach to war--even after confronting its most horrible conditions. Most men who experience war hate it. Men like Patton and Churchill never lose their love for it. D'Este shows that Churchill was deeply conflicted about his feelings for war. Having experienced the horrors of war first hand, he empathized deeply with the soldiers and sailors (and their families) who bear the full brunt of the horrors of war. Yet because he personally loved the danger and fighting, he wondered if he could ever forgive himself for his love of war.

D'Este goes into great detail about Churchill's relationships with his generals and admirals in WWII. Churchill tended to try to micromanage his military leaders. Sometimes that was helpful, but with a good commander it made relationships very rocky.

This book is best read together with another biography of Churchill such as William Manchester's opus on Winston Churchill (two volumes, he was regrettably unable to complete the third volume before his death). Manchester's magnificent biography sets Churchill in his life and times. D'Este explores Churchill the warrior.

D'Este explores in greater detail than most biographies Churchill's aptitude for war demonstrated in his childhood play with toy soldiers, his time at Sandhurst, his polo playing, and his fighting in India, Egypt and South Africa. WWI and WWII are similarly well covered.

We also see Churchill with all his flaws: egotistical and self-centered. Yet we begin to see that what we consider as flaws are simply part and parcel of the indomitable personality that made Churchill great at both war and statesmanship.

Churchill's first great romantic love was Pamela Plowden, later the Countess of Lytton. Though never marrying (her father refused to give her hand to Churchill), they remained lifelong friends and D'Este reveals that their correspondence was auctioned by Christie's in 2003 for nearly 300,000 pounds. She said of Churchill many years later, "The first time you meet Winston, you see all his faults, and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues."

I heartily recommend this biography for understanding a side of Winston Churchill that has not been explored by other biographers with such great depth and appreciation for his formation as a warrior and military leader.

As D'Este states in his introduction: "This is the story of the military life of Winston Churchill--the descendant of Marlborough who, despite never having risen above the rank of lieutenant colonel, came eventually to direct the military compaigns of his nation and, more than any other man, to save Britain from tyranny during his and his nation's finest hour."

The English Warrior
Martin Gilbert and William Manchester have written muti-volume biographies of the long and fascinating life of Winston Churchill. They cover his fighting life from India and South Africa to the World Wars, his political life from party-switching to Prime Minister, and his personal life from his successful marriage to his career as a painter and writer. Mr. D'este has a narrow focus of exploring his military life through a half century of war, first as a participant and then as a decision maker. This book is a long (over 800 pages) but a nice introduction to his life of Winston Churchill. It picks its stories well (for Churchill had lots of stories) and tells them well. However for the reader who is familiar with the outline of Churchill's career, this book will be a review.