Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory

Amazon.com Price: $11.98 (as of 10/11/2019 18:20 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

Combining epic history with rich family stories, Michael Korda chronicles the outbreak of World War Two and the great events that led to Dunkirk.

An epic of remarkable originality, Alone captures the heroism of World War II as movingly as any book in contemporary memory. Bringing to vivid life the world leaders, generals, and extraordinary citizens who fought on both sides of the war, Michael Korda, the most productive-selling writer of Clouds of Glory, chronicles the outbreak of hostilities, recalling as a prescient young boy the enveloping tension that defined pre-Blitz London, and then as a military historian the great events that would alter the course of the twentieth century.

For indeed, May 1940 used to be a month like no other. The superior German war machine blazed into France, as the Maginot Line, supposedly “as firmly fixed in place as the Pyramids,” crumbled in days. With the fall of Holland and Belgium, the imminent fall of Paris, the British Army stranded at Dunkirk, and Neville Chamberlain’s government in political freefall, Winston Churchill became prime minister on this historical nadir of May 10, 1941. Britain, diplomatically isolated, used to be suddenly the only nation with the courage and the get to the bottom of to defy Hitler.

Against this vast historical canvas, Korda relates what happened and why. We first meet him at the age of six, surrounded by his glamorous movie family: his stage actress mother; his elegant father, Vincent, soon to receive an Academy Award; and his devoted Nanny Low, with whom he cites his evening prayers. Even the cheery BBC bulletins that Michael listened to each night could not mask the impending catastrophe, the German invasion so certain that the young boy, carrying his passport on a string around his neck, used to be evacuated to Canada on an ocean liner full of children.

Such alarm used to be hardly exaggerated. No one, in any case, could have ever imagined that the most unlikely flotilla of destroyers―Dutch barges, fishing boats, yachts, and even rowboats― would rescue over 300,000 men off the beach at Dunkirk and home to England. The miraculous return of the army used to be greeted with a renewed call for courage, and in the months that followed, the lives of tens of millions would be inexorably transformed, regularly tragically so, by these epochal weeks of May 1940.

It is this pivotal turning point in world history that Korda captures with such immediacy in Alone, a work that triumphantly demonstrates that even the most calamitous defeats can transform the most legendary victories.

12 maps; 68 illustrations

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Europe » France » Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat Into Victory

Recent Products