The Central Figure

THE HINGE OF FATE (1,000 pp.)--Winston S. Churchill--Houqhton Mifflin ($6).

The conferences in the Kremlin during those August days in 1942 were sharp and exhausting. Winston Churchill's mission was to explain to Stalin why the cross-Channel invasion would have to be delayed. By turns Stalin was truculent, sardonic, accusing; Churchill direct, blunt, vehement. At last the sessions ended in common understanding, if not complete agreement, and Stalin suggested a "few drinks" in his apartment in the Kremlin. Certainly, said Winston Churchill.

Stalin led the way, and after "many passages and rooms" and some distance in the open air, they got to his rooms, "of moderate size, simple, dignified, and four in number." In the midst of "uncorking various bottles," Stalin got an idea: How about getting Molotov to come over? Said he: "There is one thing about Molotov--he can drink."

As Churchill vividly describes things in The Hinge of Fate, Volume IV of his massive history, The Second World War, it was quite a party. It lasted from 8:30 that evening until 2:30 a.m., with a fagged and humorless Molotov patiently enduring the humor of the other two. When Churchill, with a twinkle, accused Molotov of delaying his return from the U.S. so that he could shake his NKVD guards and have a visit on the town in Manhattan, Molotov turned, Churchill thought, "rather serious." Stalin played it for a laugh: "It was not to New York he went. He went to Chicago, where the other gangsters live." At 1:30, after, a "long succession of choice dishes ... a considerable sucking-pig was brought to the table." Finding no one able to help him, Stalin polished it off by himself.

Cud for Historians. The Hinge of Fate covers the period December 1941-June 1943. Already it is clear that more than any other individual thus far--whether participant, recorder, or pure raconteur--Writer Churchill has given historians their richest cud to chew. No man, not even F.D.R. or Stalin, was so central to events or so frequently determined their course. If his history is not the last word on the events it describes, it is certainly the best foundation now in sight for the last word when it is written.

Here, as in the three previous volumes, are all the great Churchillian virtues. His candor, in a statesman commenting on events still fresh in memory, is a constant surprise. Much as it obviously pains him, he is not ashamed to voice his dismay at British mismanagement and failure at Singapore and Tobruk, where British armies surrendered to enemy forces about half their number. Admiring skill, he praised German General Rommel in a speech in the House of Commons during Britain's North African setbacks, and still sticks to his praise. When some Britons grumbled about Eisenhower's deal with French Admiral Darlan, Churchill, agreeing with Eisenhower, tartly reminded the House of Commons that "since 1776 we have not been in the position of being able to decide the policy of the United States."

Cause of Freedom. With each succeeding volume, Churchill's canny grasp of the changing world situation and Allied strategic necessities becomes more astonishing. His endless stream of memoranda to subordinates, to F.D.R., to Stalin, are magnificently informed, range from the gravest military decisions to a recommendation (to the Minister of Economic Warfare) to try a John Steinbeck novel. Reading them--and even a Churchill memo on cleaning destroyer-boilers is readable--it is possible to feel the urgency about things large & small that the man felt himself.

What is this, he asks the Minister of Agriculture, about a cut in the sugar ration for bees? "Pray let me know what was the amount previously allotted . . . what is the saving?" When, during Churchill's illness with pneumonia, his doctor prescribed a novel for light reading, he chose Defoe's gamy Moll Flanders, "about which I had heard excellent accounts, but had not found time to test them." Having finished it, he gave it to the doctor "to cheer him up. The treatment was successful."

With all his skilled eye for detail and his affectionate eye for human trivia, Churchill never lost sight of the main objective. When he speaks of that, casting up accounts as they stood in mid-1943, the Churchillian prose rolls with the old indomitable diapason: "The entry of the United States into the struggle . . . had made it certain that the cause of Freedom would not be cast away. But between survival and victory there are many stages . . . Henceforward . . . the danger was not Destruction but Stalemate [yet] the hinge had turned."

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