Winston's War

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Based on historical events, Winston's War is a 2003 novel by Michael Dobbs that presents a fictional account of the struggle of Winston Churchill to combat the appeasement policies of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

[edit] Plot summary

The story starts with Chamberlain’s 1938 triumphant return to 10 Downing Street, a public hero after the signing of the Munich Agreement declaring "peace in our time". The story ends with the fall of the Chamberlain government, and the appointment of Churchill as Prime Minister.

Churchill, relegated to the periphery of British politics, lashes out against appeasement in spite of almost no support from fellow parliamentarians or the British press.

The novel includes many of the momentous historical personages of the day: Chamberlain, the ailing and pacifist Prime Minister; Churchill, the political outcast, whose pugnacity created opprobrium in the public eye; Joseph Kennedy the defeatist, pro-Hitler and anti-Semitic U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James; Guy Burgess, the alcoholic BBC journalist, (of later Cold War infamy); The machiavellian newspaper mogul, Max Aitken, (Lord Beaverbrook), and the stuttering and insecure King George VI, who personally detests Churchill and tries to persuade his good friend, Lord Halifax, to take the reins of leadership.

Winston's War is the first in a series of novels by Dobbs about Churchill's wartime leadership. The sequel Never Surrender continues the story line over the first few weeks of Churchill's premiership.