The 37th International Churchill Conference will be held online this fall on 23 and 24 October. While the conference will be based in Britain and include several live sessions, there will also be pre-recorded material from various locations around the world. For the first time, the International Churchill Society will be able to showcase its global membership in a unique way. Registration information will follow this summer. Read More >
Damien Lewis, Churchill’s Shadow Raiders: The Race to Develop Radar, WWII’s Invisible Secret Weapon, Citadel Press, 2020, 389 pages, $27. ISBN: 978–0806540634
Lamentably the role of technology in the Second World War has received relatively little attention compared to major campaigns, particularly given the importance of technology in winning the war. The conflict was fundamentally a technological race for better military intelligence and improved weaponry. In this regard, Damien Lewis’s Churchill’s Shadow Raiders reveals the crucial role of radar in defeating the Luftwaffe, itself a precedent for the Anglo-American landings in 1944. Read More >
Derek Leebaert, Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945–1957, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019, 612 pages, $35.00. ISBN–978-0374250720
It was not so long ago that the world (as we now know it) began taking shape. The Second World War was in the process of concluding, and many of the successful movers and shakers of the time had not yet grasped the changes that were in store. Euphoria over the “great victory” clouded their judgment. At the close of the war, many remained fixated on the concept of “the Big Three,” the belief that the British Empire was still a capable player and co-equal partner with the much stronger “superpowers” of the United States and the Soviet Union. Read More >
As we live through a period of uncertainty and stress, it is worth recalling that in all of Winston Churchill’s long and eventful life, no period placed him under greater strain than his first weeks as Prime Minister, eighty years ago. By the end of June 1940, France had collapsed; the British army had largely been evacuated from the continent but was denuded of equipment; German invasion seemed imminent. Observing the effects these events had on her husband’s nature, Clementine Churchill wrote him what is the only known letter between them from all of 1940: Read More >
The Bachelor’s Club of London had been Winston Churchill’s first club membership at the age of twenty in 1895. It also was the source of his preferred writing instruments during his earliest years as a professional writer. Loathing the pens in India, he had beseeched his mother in a February 1898 letter to send him a box from the Bachelor’s Club “of the sort I like. The Hall porter knows. They cost 4/– but are very good.” Read More >
In June 2016, this column featured a chalkware statue of Winston Churchill made by the American artist Verdan Lolayne. For decades the Lolayne piece was documented and described as the only wartime likeness of Churchill made in America. Only last month, however, another wartime piece made in America was discovered and is publicly shown here for the very first time! Read More >
