Readable History

THE SECOND WORLD WAR: VOL. V, CLOSING THE RING (749 pp.)--Winston Churchill--Houghton Mifflin ($6).

Winston Churchill likes to work in bed, but it is sometimes hard to believe that he ever sleeps in one. Mentally, at least, he seems to have spent every minute of World War II on his toes. In Closing the Ring (Vol. V of The Second World War, at least one more volume to come), there is the same insatiable appetite for knowing the whole score every minute that gives the continuing snap of excitement to the entire work. Subordinates with less than Churchillian lust for living hard in dangerous times could never be sure that the Prime Minister would take their human weaknesses for granted. In April, 1944 he radioed to the British ambassador to Greece: "You speak of living on the lid of a volcano. Wherever else do you expect to live in times like these?"

To many of his associates, Churchill himself must have seemed the volcano. The year covered by Closing the Ring (June 1943 to D-day 1944) included the assaults on Sicily and Italy, the enlarging war in the Pacific and the massive preparations for the Normandy invasion. Yet Churchill found time to swoop down on laggard officials everywhere, keep a sharp eye on everything from poultry-feed supplies to stocks of playing cards, and make a run through Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Kingly Advice. What makes this work of Churchill's much more than the "contribution to history" he modestly claims for it is its lusty, unflagging readability. When Anthony Eden was worried about the consequences if the exiled King Peter of Yugoslavia got married in 1943, Churchill wrote: "Are we not fighting this war for liberty and democracy? My advice to the King, if you wish me to see him, will be to go to the nearest Registry Office and take a chance. So what?"

Nor could he stand apart when it seemed that Cuba might be overlooked while other legations got a raise in status: "Great offence will be given if ... this large, rich, beautiful island, the home of the cigar, is denied." And not even the imminence of D-day could keep him from correcting Britain's Director of Military Intelligence: "Why must you write 'intensive' here? 'Intense' is the right word. You should read Fowler's Modern English Usage on the use of the two words."

Reasonable Latitude. The legend that he tried to block the Normandy invasion at the Churchill-Stalin-F.D.R. meeting in Teheran he brands as completely false. He backed the plan to the hilt. Nor, says Churchill, did he,try for a Balkan invasion. What he did fight for, and did not get, was a conquest of the Aegean Islands that might bring Turkey into the war on the allied side. Because they blocked his pet plan, both F.D.R. and Eisenhower got a taste of Churchillian wrath: "There ought, I think, to be some elasticity and a reasonable latitude in the handling of our joint affairs ... I will not waste words in explaining how painful this decision is to me."

Closing the Ring tells "How Nazi Germany was isolated and assailed on all sides." Like the other four volumes it has no peer among the hundreds of books that have already covered much of the same ground, either in the zest of telling or the enormous authority behind the statement of events. Churchill's differences with Russia and the U.S. over military policy are discussed with the candor that has become his trademark and the good sense that was rarely swamped, whatever the provocation.

But what is best remembered after the chronological flow of events has begun to blur is the fine sensibility that accompanied the sense: Prime Minister to General Ismay--"Operations in which large numbers of men may lose their lives ought not to be described by code-words which imply a boastful and overconfident sentiment, such as 'Triumphant,' or, conversely, which are calculated to invest the plan with an air of despondency, such as 'Woe-betide,' 'Massacre,' 'Jumble' ... After all, the world is wide, and intelligent thought will readily supply an unlimited number of well-sounding names which ... do not enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called 'Bunnyhug' or 'Ballyhoo.' "

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