12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Victory blunted, January 21, 2007
"Old men, worn down by war, who couldn't properly finish what they had begun. It summed up the story of Yalta." - Author Michael Dobbs, in CHURCHILL'S TRIUMPH
From February 4 - 11, 1945, Churchill, Stalin and FDR met at Yalta in the Crimea to tie up the loose ends of World War II. Each had an agenda: the American President wanted the establishment of the United Nations, Russia's entry into the war against Japan, and his personal place in history; the British Prime Minister wanted a free Poland (as, unstated, a block to Soviet westward expansion); the Communist Party Secretary General wanted territory in Eastern Europe and spoils. In the end, it was the wily, rapacious Stalin that dominated the conference. FDR, exhausted and sick and with only eight weeks to live, no longer had the mental energy to perceive and resist Uncle Joe's duplicity. And Winston, though he fought like a lion, was, much like the British Empire, no longer relevant to the larger designs of the world's two new superpowers, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
CHURCHILL'S TRIUMPH, presumably solidly based in the factual history of the summit, is a fictional narrative of the conference as seen through the eyes of Winston, who, apparently ignored and abandoned by his friend Roosevelt, is beside himself with frustration at his inability to alter the course of diplomacy and appeasement.
Perhaps the most engaging character of the story is that of Churchill's manservant, the loyal but cheeky Frank Sawyers, a real person who, unfortunately, exited history after leaving his master's service in 1946. (Loyal readers of Michael Dobb's will remember Sawyers from a previous book in the Churchill series,
Churchill's Hour. Indeed, Google "Frank Sawyers" and there's virtually no information on the man beyond his inclusion in the author's books - a pity.)
CHURCHILL'S TRIUMPH suffers, I think, from the inclusion of a fictitious subplot involving a refugee Pole, Marian Nowak, held virtual prisoner by the Russians and pressed into service by his jailers as a plumber at Churchill's borrowed Crimean residence, the Vorontsov Palace. The uneasy relation between the British PM and Nowak, which carried through to the end of the book set in 1963, allowed Winston to pronounce what he thought his nebulous triumph at Yalta to have been. But to me, this subplot seemed contrived and, at its conclusion, overly melodramatic. Another sidebar, this taking place in the fictitious Polish village of Piorun, was sufficient to illustrate the validity of Winston's ominous forebodings regarding Soviet intent in Eastern Europe.
The Yalta story, as the basis for a novel about Churchill, is powerful enough by itself and doesn't need embellishment. Particularly revelatory of the conference were the words of Octavius from Shakespeare's "Julius Ceasar" quoted by the PM as they put their signatures to paper in the concluding signing ceremony:
"Let us do so, for we are at the stake and bayed about with many enemies. And some that smile have in their hearts, I fear, millions of mischiefs."
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Winston Churchill in the War Years, June 28, 2009
"Churchill's Triumph" is the final book in a four-book series of historical novels by British political insider Michael Dobbs. The four books, on Winston Churchill during the war years, are "Winston's War," on Britain's disastrous intervention in Norway in the early days of the war, "Never Surrender," set in May 1940 on Churchill's rise to power against all odds, and "Churchill's Hour," the year, 1940-41, when the United Kingdom stood alone against the Nazis. Few of us appreciate how desperately close England came to losing the war in 1940-41.
"Churchill's Triumph" is about the Yalta Conference, which brought Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin together for the last time as the final defeat of Germany was in sight. The military "facts on the ground" gave Stalin the dominant hand, and he was after control of as much of Europe as possible. FDR, two months away from death, focused his declining strength on establishing the United Nations and keeping Stalin in the continuing war against Japan. Churchill wanted to stop Stalin short of the English Channel, and tried his best to save Poland. We know how that turned out. The book's subtitle is "A Novel of Betrayal."
Dobbs writes superbly, and I found these books compulsively readable, much easier going than histories covering the same ground would be. I believe Dobbs when he says he sticks scrupulously to the well-known history of the period, but still the reader gets as close to the characters as in any well-written novel. And oddly enough,knowing the ending in advance doesn't detract at all from the suspense. I thorougly enjoyed all four books and learned a lot. Now I'm seeking out and reading everything else this author wrote.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
THOUGH NOT AS WELL KNIT, STILL ANOTHER CHAPTER IN A COMPELLING HISTORICAL DRAMA, April 20, 2011
Michael Dobbs, Winston's War (2002, 2009) and Churchill's Triumph (2005, 2008)
A principal advisor for British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and the holder of a Ph. D. in nuclear defense studies, Michael Dobbs knows of what he writes when he takes on British politics. These are two of his series of novels following the career of Winston Churchill from his accession to the prime ministership in 1940 through the momentous meeting of Churchill, Stalin and FDR in Yalta in 1945, which settled the fate of Poland and, by inference, other eastern European countries for decades. The subtitle of the first novel is "A Novel of Conspiracy" and the conspiracies are largely the work of prime minister Neville Chamberlain who came back to England from giving away Czechoslovakia to Hitler and talked about how he had earned England "peace in our time," only to discover within the next year that he hadn't. The second book has as its subtitle "A Novel of Betrayal." The betrayal is FDR's, who was so eager to secure Stalin's approval of the United Nations that he moved away from his wartime ally Churchill and gave away Poland and large parts of China to the crass and ruthless Stalin. There are lapses of style and construction in both novels but they're almost beside the point, so compelling is the story Dobbs tells and so appealing is the larger than life figure of their protagonist.
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