Michael Dobbs: Churchill's Hour

It was a grim sort of year, 1941. As it dawned, Adolf Hitler's apparently unstoppable Nazi hordes were all but the masters of Europe.

In the previous 16 months of war with Britain and France, Hitler's forces had swept across much of Poland in the east and through France and the Low Countries in the west.

The Battle for France had been lost and the British Army unceremoniously turfed off the continent at Dunkirk. The Battle of Britain might be said to have been won, but was to be replaced by the Blitz, a nightly calamity of death and destruction for London and other major cities.

And Britain stood alone.

It is at this bleak sunrise, one of little hope and with the probability that Britain and its Empire might not see out the year intact, that Michael Dobbs' third book in his fictionalisation of Prime Minister Winston Churchill's war opens.

He took Churchill from the political wilderness to Prime Minister, and Britain from the humiliating appeasement of Munich to war in the first book, Winston's War. In the second, Never Surrender, it was Churchill's duel with Hitler and the Battle of Britain. And in this, the third, Dobbs mines what can perhaps be seen as Britain and its Prime Minister's darkest hour.

Churchill's 1941 was a year of military disasters — the sinking of the Hood, Britain's largest battleship, reverses in the Middle East and the loss of Greece and Crete — and of growing unease that Japan might soon strike at British interests in the East.

Churchill saw drawing America into war — in the face of congressional isolationism and Roosevelt's declaration in October 1940 that "[American] boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars" — as the key to Britain's survival. And it is this that forms the heart of Dobbs' book.

We know that America was drawn into war with Germany when the latter inexplicably declared war on the former in the days following Japan's attack at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. This knowledge makes Churchill's constant remonstrations — with Roosevelt, the new American ambassador to London, and anybody who will listen — repetitive and wearisome. Dobbs, a fluid, often humorous and engaging writer, is clearly aware his core story lacks surprise. So to give his fictionalisation some dramatic crunch he invents a role for Churchill.

It is enough to say that the careful reader will certainly and easily guess what Hobbs is up to, so that there is, shall we say, no real bombshell as the Japanese begin dropping their own on Pearl Harbor.

It is, however, in the drawing together of Churchill's political and domestic lives — Churchill's daughter-in-law Pamela (wife of his son Randolph) has a pivotal affair with American Lend-Lease czar Averall Harriman — that Dobbs gives us something new and intriguing. Churchill balances his dual roles of father of a beleaguered nation and of a disordered family, each demanding the utmost of his insight and leadership. Through this the author gives us more than mild suspense and history.

And Dobbs' Churchill is a vivid, voluble creation. A mixture of known fact and fiction, he smokes like a Turk, drinks like a thirsty sailor and, when the black dogs of depression come snapping, he throws tantrums, weeps or simply disappears within himself.

If its thrills are minor, it is in letting the reader spend time with a great man in his darkest year that Churchill's Hour offers its small but agreeable pleasures.

Harper-Collins, $34.99

* Greg Dixon is an Auckland freelance writer.