Churchill’s War Vol. III: The Sundered Dream

Three Decades in the Making

The first volume of Churchill’s War, subtitled The Struggle for Power, was published in 1987. It covered Churchill’s career through the outbreak of war in 1939, drawing on files that had been closed to other historians — including Churchill’s own private papers, the diaries of his inner circle, and intelligence files from the National Archives at Kew.

Volume II, Triumph in Adversity, followed in 2001, taking the story through the crisis years of 1940–1943. It drew extensively on the decoded signals intelligence (ULTRA) and the private diaries of Churchill’s military secretary, Major General Sir Hastings “Pug” Ismay.

Volume III has been in preparation since the early 2000s. The delay was caused in part by the landmark libel trial in 2000, which consumed years of Irving’s time and resources, and in part by the sheer scale of documentation involved.

What the New Documents Show

The final volume covers a period of extraordinary consequence: the Allied conferences at Tehran and Yalta, the D-Day landings, the strategic bombing campaign, the advance into Germany, and the political decisions that shaped the post-war world. Irving has drawn on material that was either classified or unavailable when the earlier volumes were published.

Key sources include newly declassified Cabinet Office files, the complete wartime diaries of Lord Alanbrooke (Churchill’s Chief of the Imperial General Staff), private correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt that was withheld from the official record, and signals intelligence relating to the final months of the war in Europe.

The Sundered Dream

The subtitle — The Sundered Dream — refers to the central irony of Churchill’s war: that in defeating Nazi Germany, Britain lost its empire, its financial independence, and its status as a world power. Churchill entered the war to preserve British greatness; he ended it by handing half of Europe to Stalin and mortgaging Britain’s future to Washington.

Irving’s narrative follows Churchill through these final years with the same documentary rigour that characterised the first two volumes — day by day, often hour by hour, from the original documents and diaries of those who were present.

The Editing Process

The manuscript is currently being professionally copy-edited by Christina Palaia of Emerald Editorial Services, working through the text in batches of approximately six chapters each. The editing follows MHRA citation style, consistent with the earlier volumes. The complete manuscript runs to 54 chapters.

A Different Kind of Churchill Biography

The official Churchill biography, begun by his son Randolph and completed by Sir Martin Gilbert, runs to eight volumes and millions of words. It is comprehensive but inevitably sympathetic. Irving’s work takes a different approach: it is built from the same archives but does not assume that Churchill was always right, always noble, or always honest.

The result is a portrait of Churchill that is more complex, more human, and often more revealing than the authorised version. It is not a work of debunking but of primary-source reconstruction — the war as it was experienced by those who fought it, not as it was later packaged for posterity.

“Irving is a patient, meticulous researcher who has a better understanding of the German archival system than perhaps any other English-speaking historian.”
— Professor Donald Cameron Watt, London School of Economics