The World Crisis Volume II: 1915

This second volume in Churchill’s five-volume series The World Crisis is by far the most personal—dealing frankly with Churchill’s failures as a military leader and his ultimately unsuccessful battle to break the European deadlock.

After the disastrous Gallipoli landings on the Dardanelles, Winston Churchill served for several months as commander of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. During this time, he served on one of the most violent stretches of the front lines, making a total of 36 courageous expeditions into No Man’s Land.

Here, Churchill provides an unflinching narrative of a particularly challenging time in World War I and in his own career—providing fascinating insight into the mental and psychological challenges faced by a major historical leader.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sir Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.”
Over a 64-year span, Churchill published over 40 books, many multi-volume definitive accounts of historical events to which he was a witness and participant. All are beautifully written and as accessible and relevant today as when first published.
During his fifty-year political career, Churchill served twice as Prime Minister in addition to other prominent positions—including President of the Board of Trade, First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Home Secretary. In the 1930s, Churchill was one of the first to recognize the danger of the rising Nazi power in Germany and to campaign for rearmament in Britain. His leadership and inspired broadcasts and speeches during World War II helped strengthen British resistance to Adolf Hitler—and played an important part in the Allies’ eventual triumph.
One of the most inspiring wartime leaders of modern history, Churchill was also an orator, a historian, a journalist, and an artist. All of these aspects of Churchill are fully represented in this collection of his works.

ABOUT THE SERIES

Rarely are events that change the world documented by a key participant, someone who was instrumental in making the military and political decisions that would shape the outcome of a world war. Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis provides the ultimate insider account—of a war intended to end all wars, a war so violent it almost undid the West altogether.

The World Crisis provides a sweeping narrative of the events of World War I that is both gripping and historically detailed—based on thousands of private letters and memos written to and by Churchill at the time. Nowhere else is the effect of this war so well conveyed by an eyewitness and historian—and so compellingly written.