The Second World War is a history of the period from the end of the First World War to July 1945, written by Winston Churchill. Churchill labelled the "moral of the work" as follows: "In War: Resolution, In Defeat: Defiance, In Victory: Magnanimity, In Peace: Goodwill".[2]
Churchill wrote the book, with a team of assistants, using both his own notes and privileged access to official documents while still working as a politician; the text was vetted by the Cabinet Secretary. Churchill was largely fair in his treatment, but wrote the history from his personal point of view. He was unable to reveal all the facts, as some, such as the use of Ultra electronic intelligence, had to remain secret. From a historical point of view the book is therefore an incomplete memoir by a leading participant in the direction of the war.
The book was a major commercial success in Britain and the United States. The first edition appeared in six volumes; later editions appeared in twelve and four volumes, and furthermore there is also a single-volume abridged version.
When Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, he intended to write a history of the war then beginning. He said several times: "I will leave judgements on this matter to history—but I will be one of the historians." To circumvent the rules against the use of official documents, he took the precaution throughout the war of having a weekly summary of correspondence, minutes, memoranda and other documents printed in galleys and headed "Prime Minister's personal minutes". These were then stored at his home and Churchill wrote or dictated letters and memoranda with the intention of placing his views on the record, for later use as a historian. The arrangements became a source of controversy when The Second World War began appearing in 1948. Churchill was a politician, not an academic historian and was Leader of the Opposition, intending to return to office, so Churchill's access to Cabinet, military and diplomatic records denied to other historians was questioned.[3]
It was not known at the time that Churchill had done a deal with Clement Attlee and the Labour government which came to office in 1945. Attlee agreed to allow Churchill's research assistants access to all documents, provided that no official secrets were revealed, the documents were not used for party political purposes and the typescript was vetted by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook. Brook took a close interest in the books and rewrote some sections to ensure that British interests were not harmed or the government embarrassed.[4] Churchill's privileged access to documents and his knowledge gave him an advantage over other historians of the Second World War for many years. The books had enormous sales in both Britain and the United States and made Churchill a rich man for the first time.[5][6] The gathered documents were placed in chronologies by his advisers, and this store of material was further supplemented by dictated recollections of key episodes, together with queries about chronology, location and personalities for his team to resolve.[7] Churchill also wrote to many fellow actors requesting documents and comments.[7] Once all was collected and collated, Churchill began writing in earnest, dictating almost all of the work, with the notable exception of several long passages in Volume I.[7]
Themes
As various archives have been opened, several deficiencies of the work have become apparent. Some of these are inherent in the position Churchill occupied as a former prime minister and a serving politician. He could not reveal ongoing military secrets, such as the work of the code breakers at Bletchley Park, or the planning of the atomic bomb.[8] As stated in the author's introduction, the book concentrates on the British war effort.[2] Other theatres of war are described largely as a background.[9] He modified a number of passages when he learnt that General Dwight Eisenhower was to run for the US presidency, removing any remarks which might harm the "special relationship" which he intended to establish (or re-establish) with the new president.[4] In order to uphold the unity of the Commonwealth, Churchill did not mention that he had serious disagreements with strategy in the first half of 1941 with the Australian prime minister Robert Menzies and the New Zealand prime minister Peter Fraser, both of whom had major doubts about the wisdom of dispatching Australian and New Zealand soldiers to the defense of Greece in 1941.[10]
The British historian David Reynolds noted that Churchill in volume one, The Gathering Storm, skipped over the 1920s as his actions in the 1920s did not support his self-image as a far-sighted leader who was aware of the threat from the Axis states. Reynolds noted that Churchill did not mention that during his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1929 he had fought for greater social spending to combat the appeal of the British Communist Party to the British working class by cutting defense spending.[11] In the decade or so after the Russian Revolution, Churchill saw Soviet Russia as the principle enemy, but he viewed the Soviet challenge to Britain as ideological, not military. In December 1924 Churchill dismissed any prospect of a war with Japan as he told the prime minister Stanley Baldwin at a cabinet meeting: "A war with Japan! I do not believe there is the slightest chance of that in our lifetime".[12] Accordingly, Churchill argued that the budget for the Royal Navy should be cut as Japan was the only naval power capable of challenging British power in Asia and the reduced expenditure should be used for social programs.[13] Churchill portrayed himself in The Gathering Storm, as being in the political "wilderness" in the 1930s because of his opposition to the appeasement of Nazi Germany, but in fact the real reason for Churchill being in the "wilderness" was his opposition to the Government of India Act which devolved much power to the Indians as a preparatory step towards ending the Raj.[14] Alongside his absolute opposition towards any measure that would weaken the Raj, Churchill had led a backbenchers rebellion in 1930-1931 with the aim of toppling Baldwin (who supported the Government of India Act) as the leader of the Conservative Party, which to his exclusion from the cabinet when the National Government was formed in 1931.[15] Reynolds noted that the impression given in The Gathering Storm was Churchill was sent out to the "political wilderness" for his prescient warnings about Nazi Germany when in fact the reason for his being on the political margins was that he had been very disloyal towards Baldwin who understandably did not want a man who had tried to depose him as Tory leader in the cabinet.[16] Churchill portrayed Anthony Eden-who served twice as his Foreign Secretary in 1940-1945 and again in 1951-1955-as an especially noble anti-appeaser when in fact he regarded Eden in the 1930s as both a political lightweight prone to excessive ambition and bad judgement and until 1938 as an appeaser.[17]
Churchill had a strong belief in the power of strategical bombing to win wars and in a speech in the House of Commons on 28 November 1934 predicted that a Luftwaffe strategical bombing against London would kill between 30,000-40, 000 Londoners in the first week and in July 1936 claimed that a single Luftwaffe bombing raid on London would kill at least 5, 000 people.[18] In reality, German strategical bombing of British cities killed or wounded about 147, 000 people between 1939-1945 and the major problem was less people being killed by bombing, but rather the homelessness caused by the destruction of houses and apartments.[19] Churchill admitted in The Gathering Storm that he made exaggerated claims about the killing capacity of Luftwaffe strategical bombing against British cities as a means tp spur the government to spend more on the Royal Air Force (RAF).[20] In a note he sent to research assistant Bill Deakin on 30 June 1947, Churchill asked: "Surely there was some fighting in 1931 between Japan and China?"[21] Churchill gave only very brief mentions of the crisis in Asia caused by Japan's invasion of China in 1937 along increasing strident Japanese claims that all of of Asia should be in the Japanese sphere of influence, which gave a distorted picture of British politics as the government of Neville Chamberlain was highly concerned about the prospect of Japan taking advantage of a war in Europe to seize Britain's colonies in Asia.[22]
Churchill felt very strongly that it would had been better for Britain to go to war in 1938 during the Sudetenland crisis for Czechoslovakia rather than in 1939 during the Danzig crisis for Poland, which was reflected in his account of the two crises.[23] During the Danzig crisis, Churchill believed that a "Grand Alliance" of Britain, France and the Soviet Union would had deterred Hitler from invading Poland, and in The Gathering Storm strongly criticised Neville Chamberlain for believing that Poland was the stronger ally than the Soviet Union.[24] Churchill felt that Chamberlain should tried harder to reach an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1939, which he believed would had prevented World War Two.[25] The principle problem during the talks for the "peace front" in 1939 was that the Soviets kept insisting on transit rights for the Red Army into Poland, which the Poles absolutely refused to cede. Reynolds noted that during the Danzig crisis that British leaders first confronted in embryonic form a recurring problem during Churchill wartime premiership, namely it was not really possible to be both an ally of Poland and the Soviet Union at the same time, and that a choice had to be made.[26] Reynolds noted that "many historians" tended to agree with Churchill's comparison of the Sudetenland crisis with the Danzig crisis, and feel that Churchill was correct in arguing that it would had been far better to go to war for Czechoslovakia in 1938 rather than for Poland in 1939.[27]
Reflecting the "Great Man" view of history, reviewers noted that Churchill gave readers the picture of "an almost stationary world upset by the wild ambitions of a few wicked men", which also reflected the politics of the Cold War.[28] In the Cold War, Churchill saw the principle enemy as the Soviet Union and envisioned West Germany, Italy and Japan as British allies, which led him to portray the origins of World War Two in very personalised terms as due to the "wickedness" of leaders such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Churchill wrote in an almost admiring tone that Mussolini was one of the exceptional leaders able to blend history to his will, and portrayed Il Duce as a man who perverted Italian politics by preventing the "normal" course of Italian history from occurring.[29] Reynolds wrote that there was a greater continuity of Italian history than what Churchill had portrayed as successive Italian prime ministers during the Liberal era (1860-1922) had pursued imperialistic policies, and the expansionism of the Fascist regime was merely a more aggressive continuation of the foreign policy of the Liberal era.[30] Likewise, Churchill portrayed Hitler very much as a "Great Man" able to blend history to his will owning to his determination and intelligence, which suggests that Nazism was only Hitlerism, and that if Hitler had never lived, there would have been no Nazi Germany as German history would continue on as "normal".[31] Churchill tended to downplay continuities in German history as the imperialistic war aims held by the leaders of the Reich towards both Western Europe and Eastern Europe during the First World War and the absolute refusal to accept the borders with Poland imposed by the Treaty of Versailles during the Weimar Republic. In the Cold War, Churchill supported West German rearmament and as such he portrayed the Wehrmacht in a relatively favorable light, which reflected his viewpoint of West Germany as an ally against the Soviet Union.[32] Churchill tended to portray the Wehrmacht generals more as victims of Hitler rather than his followers, and presented as fact the self-serving claims made by Wehrmacht generals after 1945 that during the Sudetenland crisis of 1938 that they would had staged a military coup to overthrow Hitler, which was prevented by the Munich Agreement.[33] Churchill was informed by his research assistants that these claims being made by the Wehrmacht generals were dubious at best, and were clearly meant to be a rationalisation for serving the Nazi regime with the implication that it was the British and French governments by signing the Munich Agreement who were responsible for them serving Hitler rather than themselves.[34] Churchill wanted to present in The Gathering Storm the thesis that if only he had been prime minister in 1938, the Second World War would have been avoided altogether, which led him to accept at face value the claims of the Wehrmacht generals that they were set upon deposing Hitler in 1938 along with their claims to be "prisoners" of Hitler after the Munich Agreement.[35]
During his time as wartime prime minister, Churchill believed that a strategical bombing campaign against German cities might be sufficient to win the war, and as such had devoted immense sums of money to the Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force.[36] Churchill in the The Second World War books played down his support for strategical bombing as many of the wartime claims made by the RAF leaders as Air Marshal Arthur Harris of Bomber Command that strategical bombing alone could defeat Germany proved to be highly erroneous, and instead portrayed the strategical bombing more as a supplement to the campaigns on land instead of the war-winning campaign that it was envisioned of at the time.[37] Churchill did not mention that there was a major disagreement in 1944 between the Americans who favored an "oil plan" of bombing German oil facilities as the best way to cripple the Wehrmacht vs. the RAF who were committed to the "area bombing" of German cities.[38] The omission about the debate between the "oil plan" vs. "area bombing" was to give the impression that there was no alterative to "area bombing", which became controversial after the war.[39] In the same way, Churchill sought to distance himself from the Anglo-American bombing of Dresden between 13-15 February 1945 by including a memo he had written right after the destruction of Dresden saying that such attacks were not longer necessary.[40]
Reynolds likewise noted Churchill sometimes engaged in national stereotypes. In his account of his summit with the French Premier Paul Reynaud on 16 May 1940, Churchill portrayed Reynaud along with Maurice Gamelin and Édouard Daladier as hopelessly defeatist figures which in turn reflected the faiblesse of France, which he used in contrast to the fighting spirit and courage of the British.[41] Reynolds noted that the actual transcript of the Anglo-French summit showed that Gamelin was indeed depressed as Churchill portrayed him, but that Reynaud and Daladier-though worried by the German victory in the Second Battle of Sedan-were no-where near as defeatist as Churchill portrayed them.[42] The British historian Max Hastings noted that the picture that Churchill painted in Their Finest Hour of a British people solidly united under his leadership for a victory over Nazi Germany was not true, and in May-June 1940 much of the British aristocracy along with a number of MPs favored making peace with Germany under the grounds that the Reich was invincible and the best course of action was to make peace with Hitler where there was still time.[43] Hastings wrote the principle differences between the British and French experiences of the war in 1940 was that in France leaders such as Marshal Philippe Pétain and Marshal Maxime Weygand signed an armistice with Germany, a course of action very favored by a number of 'Establishment' figures such as the former prime minister David Lloyd George and Lord Tavistock, both of whom had openly advocated peace with the Reich as the best way to save the British empire when there was still time.[44]
Likewise, Reynold noted that Churchill supported the "deal with Darlan" in 1942 under which Admiral François Darlan defected over to the Allied side, bringing with him Algeria and Morocco, and at the time saw Darlan as a better French ally than Charles de Gaulle, which he sought to deny in The Second World War, giving the impression that he always backed de Gaulle.[45] The picture of Darlan varied from volume to volume. In volume 2, Their Finest Hour, Darlan was depicted as a devious and dishonest leader, a corrupt pro-Nazi schemer whose word was unreliable as a justification for the British attack on the French naval base at Mers-el-Kébir in 1940.[46] In volume 3, The Hinge of Fate, Churchill portrayed Darlan as a honorable, but misguided French patriot.[47][48] Reynolds also noted that Churchill's picture of the Soviet Union tended to vary depending upon the politics of the moment. In The Gathering Storm which was published in 1948 (before the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb), Churchill portrayed the Soviet Union as little better than the Axis states as reflected in his account of the Spanish Civil War which portrayed the Republicans and Nationalists as both equally savage and deserving of condemnation.[49] After the Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949 along with the decision by both superpowers to develop hydrogen bombs, Churchill was greatly worried about the prospect of a nuclear war that would be an end of humanity.[50] As such, Churchill in the later volumes The Second World War played up the possibility of reaching any understanding with the Soviet Union that would prevent a nuclear Third World War and portrayed Joseph Stalin as someone who could more or less be trusted to keep his word in support of his thesis about preventing nuclear war.[51]
Legacy
1960s paperback edition in 12 volumes shared some titles with the first edition but for different portions of the work.
The Second World War can be read by students of the period as a memoir by a leading participant, rather than a comprehensive history by a professional and detached historian. The Second World War, particularly the period from 1940 to 1942 when Britain fought with the support of the Empire and a few Allies, was the climax of Churchill's career and his inside story of those days is unique and invaluable.
American historian Raymond Callahan, reviewing In Command of History by David Reynolds about Churchill's The Second World War, wrote:
The outlines of the story have long been known—Churchill wrote to put his own spin on the history of the war and give himself and his family financial security, and he wrote with a great deal of assistance.
Callahan concluded that notwithstanding any changes to historians' understanding of the book, now that what Churchill wrote has been compared in detail to the released archives, Churchill "remains the arresting figure he has always been—dynamic, often wrong, but the indispensable leader" who led Britain to "its last, terribly costly, imperial victory." In Callahan's view, Churchill was guilty of "carefully reconstructing the story" to suit his postwar political goals.[52]
John Keegan wrote in the 1985 introduction to the series that some deficiencies in the account stem from the secrecy of Ultra intelligence. Keegan held that Churchill's account was unique, since none of the other leaders (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Hideki Tojo) wrote a firsthand account of the war. However, De Gaulle's war memoirs also offer a first-hand account of the war. Churchill's books were written collaboratively, as he solicited others involved in the war for their papers and remembrances.[8]
Editions
The Second World War has been issued in editions of six, twelve and four volumes, as well as an abridged single-volume. Some volumes in these editions share names, such as Triumph and Tragedy, but the contents of the volumes differ, covering varying portions of the book.
The country of first publication was the United States, preceding publication in the United Kingdom by six months. This was a consequence of the many last minute changes which Churchill insisted be made to the London Cassell edition, which he considered definitive.[1]
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill's history of Britain and its colonies from Caesar's invasions of Britain (55 BC) to the end of the Second Boer War (1902)
General bibliography
Best, Geoffrey (2002). Churchill: A Study in Greatness. London: Continuum.
Gilbert, Martin (1992). Churchill: A Life. New York: Macmillan. p.879.
Hastings, Max (2010). Winston's War. New York: Knopf Doubleday. ISBN9780307593122.
Reynolds, David (2004). In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War. London: Allen Lane.
↑ Wheatcroft, Geoffrey (18 July 2012). "Winston Churchill, the author of victory". Review of 'Mr Churchill's Profession' by Peter Clarke, Bloomsbury, 2012. Times Literary Supplement. Retrieved 29 November 2012.
1 2 3 Keegan, John (1985). Introduction. Vol.VI Triumph and tragedy. p.ix.{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
1 2 Keegan, John (1985). "Introduction". The Second World War. Vol.1, The Gathering Storm. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
↑ Nicolson, Harold (1967). The War Years, 1939–1945. Vol.II of Diaries and Letters. New York: Atheneum. p.205. Diary entry dated 14 January 1942.
Arthur Neville Chamberlain was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940 and Leader of the Conservative Party from May 1937 to October 1940. He is best known for his foreign policy of appeasement, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, ceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. Following the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, Chamberlain announced the declaration of war on Germany two days later and led the United Kingdom through the first eight months of the war until his resignation as prime minister on 10 May 1940.
David John Cawdell Irving is an English author who has written on the military and political history of World War II, especially Nazi Germany. He was found to be a Holocaust denier in a UK court in 2000 as a result of a failed libel case.
Alan John Percivale Taylor was a British historian who specialised in 19th- and 20th-century European diplomacy. Both a journalist and a broadcaster, he became well known to millions through his television lectures. His combination of academic rigour and popular appeal led the historian Richard Overy to describe him as "the Macaulay of our age". In a 2011 poll by History Today magazine, he was named the fourth most important historian of the previous 60 years.
The Munich Agreement was an agreement reached in Munich on 30 September 1938, by Nazi Germany, Great Britain, the French Republic, and Fascist Italy. The agreement provided for the German annexation of part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland, where more than three million people, mainly ethnic Germans, lived. The pact is also known in some areas as the Munich Betrayal, because of a previous 1924 alliance agreement and a 1925 military pact between France and the Czechoslovak Republic.
Jean Louis Xavier François Darlan was a French admiral and political figure. Born in Nérac, Darlan graduated from the École navale in 1902 and quickly advanced through the ranks following his service during World War I. He was promoted to rear admiral in 1929, vice admiral in 1932, lieutenant admiral in 1937 before finally being made admiral and Chief of the Naval Staff in 1937. In 1939, Darlan was promoted to admiral of the fleet, a rank created specifically for him.
Appeasement, in an international context, is a diplomatic negotiation policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy of the British governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy between 1935 and 1939. Under British pressure, appeasement of Nazism and Fascism also played a role in French foreign policy of the period but was always much less popular there than in the United Kingdom.
Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax,, known as the Lord Irwin from 1925 until 1934 and the Viscount Halifax from 1934 until 1944, was a senior British Conservative politician of the 1930s. He held several senior ministerial posts during this time, most notably those of Viceroy of India from 1926 to 1931 and of Foreign Secretary between 1938 and 1940. He was one of the architects of the policy of appeasement of Adolf Hitler in 1936–1938, working closely with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. After Kristallnacht on 9–10 November 1938 and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, he was one of those who pushed for a new policy of attempting to deter further German aggression by promising to go to war to defend Poland.
The attack on Mers-el-Kébir on 3 July 1940, during the Second World War, was a British naval attack on neutral French Navy ships at the naval base at Mers El Kébir, near Oran, on the coast of French Algeria. The attack was the main part of Operation Catapult, a British plan to neutralise or destroy neutral French ships to prevent them from falling into German hands after the Allied defeat in the Battle of France. The British bombardment of the base killed 1,297 French servicemen, sank a battleship and damaged five other ships, for a British loss of five aircraft shot down and two crewmen killed. The attack by air and sea was conducted by the Royal Navy, after France had signed armistices with Germany and Italy, coming into effect on 25 June.
Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia,, is an English popular historian, journalist and member of the House of Lords. He is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New-York Historical Society. He served as a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 2013 to 2021.
Philip Henry Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian, was a British politician, diplomat and newspaper editor. He was private secretary to Prime Minister David Lloyd George between 1916 and 1921. After succeeding a cousin in the marquessate in 1930, he held minor office from 1931 to 1932 in the National Government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald.
Andreas Fritz Hillgruber was a conservative German historian who was influential as a military and diplomatic historian who played a leading role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. In his controversial book Zweierlei Untergang, he wrote that historians should "identify" with the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front and asserted that there was no moral difference between Allied policies towards Germany in 1944 and 1945 and the genocide waged against the Jews. The British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Hillgruber was a great historian whose once-sterling reputation was in ruins as a result of the Historikerstreit.
Ralph Follett Wigram was a British government official in the Foreign Office. He helped raise the alarm about German rearmament under Hitler during the period prior to World War II.
The French State, popularly known as Vichy France, as led by Marshal Philippe Pétain after the Fall of France in 1940 before Nazi Germany, was quickly recognized by the Allies, as well as by the Soviet Union, until 30 June 1941 and Operation Barbarossa. However, France broke with the United Kingdom after the destruction of the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir. Canada maintained diplomatic relations until the occupation of Southern France by Germany and Italy in November 1942.
The percentages agreement was a secret informal agreement between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin during the Fourth Moscow Conference in October 1944. It gave the percentage division of control over Eastern European countries, dividing them into spheres of influence. It is also known as the naughty document, a nickname coined by Churchill himself due to his concerns regarding American reaction to any deal with such strong imperialist undertones, although in reality U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt was consulted tentatively and conceded to the agreement. The content of the agreement was first made public by Churchill in 1953 in the final volume of his memoir. The US ambassador Averell Harriman, who was supposed to represent Roosevelt in these meetings, was excluded from this discussion.
Into the Storm or Churchill at War(alt. title) is a 2009 biographical film about Winston Churchill and his days in office during the Second World War. The movie is directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan and stars Brendan Gleeson as the British Prime Minister. Into the Storm is a sequel to the 2002 television film The Gathering Storm, which details the life of Churchill in the years just prior the war. Into the Storm had its first public premiere on HBO and HBO Canada on 31 May 2009.
The Anglo-French Supreme War Council (SWC) was established to oversee joint military strategy at the start of the Second World War. Most of its deliberations took place during the period of the Phoney War, with its first meeting at Abbeville on 12 September 1939. The final three sessions were held in France during the German blitzkrieg of May and June 1940.
Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World is a book by Patrick J. Buchanan, published in May 2008. Buchanan argues that both world wars were unnecessary and that the British Empire’s decision to join the wars had a cataclysmic effect globally. One of Buchanan's expressed purposes is to undermine what he described as a "Churchill cult" in America's elite. Buchanan focuses particularly on how Winston Churchill helped influence Britain into the world wars with Germany in 1914 and in 1939.
Verlorene Siege is the personal narrative of Erich von Manstein, a German field marshal during World War II. The book was first published in West Germany in 1955, then in Spain in 1956. Its English translation was published in 1958 for distribution in the UK and the US.
The Fall of Berlin is a 1950 Soviet war and propaganda film, in two parts separated in the manner of a serial. It was produced by Mosfilm Studio and directed by Mikheil Chiaureli, with a script written by Pyotr Pavlenko and a musical score composed by Dmitri Shostakovich. Portraying the history of the Second World War with a focus on a highly positive depiction of the role Soviet leader Joseph Stalin played in the events, it is considered one of the most important manifestations of Stalin's cult of personality, and a noted example of Soviet realism. After De-Stalinization, the film was banned in the Eastern Bloc for several decades.
The diplomatic history of World War II includes the major foreign policies and interactions inside the opposing coalitions, the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers, between 1939 and 1945.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
