Expanding the War Rooms

Not only did Winston Churchill know his history but he was well aware of the part he himself played in it.  His comment that it would be best to ‘leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history’ was only partly made tongue in cheek, for write his own story, in the form of a history of the Second World War, is just what he did. It was Robert Rhodes James’s contention that, if Churchill’s life had ended in 1938 or 1939, there would be a case for considering his career a failure and his role more historical than historic. Whatever the merit of such a hypothesis, it is undeniable that the Second World War provided Churchill with the setting in which he could achieve his ‘finest hour’ and become the personality so widely regarded, decades after his death, as meriting a litany of heroic titles.