Three Down

THE GRAND ALLIANCE (903 pp.)--Winston S. Churchill-Houghton Mifflln ($6).

Historians of World War II may yet recognize their great debt to British Prime Minister Clement Attlee. By enforcing a measure of leisure on Winston Churchill, Mr. Attlee has probably hastened the progress of the finest single contribution so far to the history of the war. The Grand Alliance is the third and longest volume of Churchill's war memoirs and covers the year 1941. It seems to be more hurriedly written, as if against time, but it brings that critical year stirringly alive, conveys with enormous authority and engaging candor its crushing despair and growing hopes.

Churchill has plaited into this book a whole fistful of narrative threads. It was a year of almost continuous desert warfare, of disaster in Greece and Crete, of crippling losses to U-boats, of devastating blitz, of almost unbroken defeat. What is much more remarkable than their coherent presentation is Churchill's astonishing grasp of innumerable and vastly complex situations as they arose and developed. The greatness of his leadership has never been better documented.

As always, Churchill goes far beyond mere recording. Describing the ruthless German blitz of undefended Belgrade, before Hitler had turned on Russia, he writes: "Out of the nightmare of smoke and fire came the maddened animals released from their shattered cages in the zoological gardens ... A bear, dazed and uncomprehending, shuffled through the inferno with slow and awkward gait down towards the Danube. He was not the only bear who did not understand."

Nor is he bashful about being pleased with himself. Of one crisp, logical note which he wrote to Japan's Foreign Minister Matsuoka he says: "I was rather pleased with this when I wrote it. and I don't mind the look of it now." And he is never so enmeshed in the making of history as to lose his sense of humor. Because of F.D.R.'s success in getting Moscow to underwrite religious freedom in the United Nations Pact, "I promised Mr. Roosevelt to recommend him for the position of Archbishop of Canterbury if he should lose the next Presidential election. I did not however make any official recommendation to the Cabinet or the Crown upon this point, and as he won the election in 1944 it did not arise."

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