Book Review: The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 by William Manchester
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After a lifetime striving to obtain the greatest political office one can achieve, you are faced with one of the greatest military threats your nation as ever had to deal with. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 is the final volume William Manchester’s biographical trilogy that was finished by Paul Reid that covers the five years that define Churchill to the world.

While title of the book indicates that it will cover the last quarter-century of Churchill’s life—and it does—almost 90% covers his tenure in 10 Downing Street from his ascension to Prime Minister through V-E Day almost 5 years to the day. Reid using Manchester’s established research and interviews as well as adding his own follows the path Winston Churchill had to tread both militarily as Britain’s war leader to defend the Home Islands from invasion as well as the outlying possessions that sustained the Home Islands in food and material while getting whatever assistance he can from the United States over the course a year until the German invasion of the Soviet Union followed later by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Now with powerful allies, though now with another war on the other side of the world, Churchill’s problems were not solved but only multiplied as different strategic and post-war visions from the Soviet Union and the United States as well as their contributions to the overall war effort soon eclipsed that of the British not only in the war but in the eventual peace. The last tenth of the book dealt most with Churchill’s time as leader of the opposition to Attlee’s Labour government that came to power after the July 1945 election while also being considered the greatest statesmen in the world at the same. But once he achieved his goal of obtaining 10 Downing through the ballot box, but ill-health and that change in American and Soviet leaderships sent the rapidly freezing Cold War out of his hands diplomatically while his long-time loyal supporters looked ease him out but not in a way that would cause massive public dissatisfaction of backstabbing him. The last ten years of his life after his resignation are covered in about as many pages with a sadness of the inevitable but how he remained himself until the end.

While the first two volumes of this biographical trilogy gave showcased Churchill’s path towards his “date with destiny”, this was the volume anyone interested in Churchill was interested in. Looking from an American point-of-view at Churchill’s leadership role along with his various decisions and reactions that saw the war from British point-of-view gave a greater scope to the vast conflict, especially in the overall European theater. The personal and political relationships between Churchill to both Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin on one level to various British and American military commanders on another while also being a political leader on the home front showed the numerous plates that he had to spin, many times without success when it came to various strategic plans especially in Italy and the Balkans the latter of which would shape the early Cold War. Reid and Manchester, from an American point-of-view, took on the myth of Churchill’s opposition to D-Day that Eisenhower and other propagated especially when facts bore out that Churchill’s insistence that Montgomery review the initial plans that resulted in the Overlord plan that took place on June 6 in which Churchill wholeheartedly supported. The surprising fact that the “warmonger” Churchill attempted throughout his second premiership to organize a summit early in the hardening Cold War with the threat of atomic then nuclear war—one with only losers and no winners—beginning to loom large was a surprise and often overlooked.

Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 portrays the Churchill of 1940 when Britain stood alone in which he is remember by history then follows the rest of his war years in detail, especially how the greatest empire in history at the beginning of the war would be the distant third major war power at the end of it. The research of both William Manchester and Paul Reid brings into focus for the reader the short-term and long-term military decisions Churchill dealt with as well as numerous political realities he had to either fight or acquiesce to throughout the war years and later upon his post-war premiership.

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