Winston S. Churchill World Crisis Collection

An absorbing history of the outbreak of World War I from a true insider's point of view, the first volume of Sir Winston Churchill's five-volume The World Crisis is unsurpassed as both a historical and personal account of the earth-shaking events leading up to World War I. Beginning in 1911, when Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, this report is based on thousands of his personal letters and memos. Churchill's epic series opens with a chilling description of the Agadir Crisis, and provides an in-depth account of naval clashes in the Dardanelles, one of Churchill's major military failures. It takes readers from the fierce bloodshed of the Gallipoli campaign to the tragic sinking of the Lusitania and the tide-turning battles of Jutland and Verdun-as well as the USA's entry into the combat theatre. Written in powerful prose by a great leader who would also go on to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature, The World Crisis provides a perspective you won't find anywhere else: a dynamic insider's account of events that would shape the outcome of modern history.

This second volume in Winston 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. In this chapter of his "remarkable" eyewitness account (Jon Meacham), 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.

This epic volume-third in a five-volume history of World War I from the eyewitness perspective of a highly-placed political insider-details Winston Churchill's development of the Ten Year Rule, which gave the Treasury unprecedented power over financial, foreign, and strategic policy for years to come. In March 1916, Winston Churchill returned to England to speak once more in the House of Commons. Appointed first Minister of Munitions, then later Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air, Churchill was in a prime position to observe and document the violent end of World War I. This volume provides context for the events that came before Churchill's return, including the intense battles of Jutland and Verdun. And it provides a rare perspective in the unbiased observances of a political leader with a journalist's eye for the truth and a historian's sense of significance-qualities which helped earn him a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953.

Once the war was over, the story didn't end-not for Winston Churchill, and not for the West. The fourth volume of Churchill's series The World Crisis documents the fallout of World War I-including the Irish Treaty and the peace conferences between Greece and Turkey. The period immediately after World War I was extremely chaotic-and it takes a genius of narrative description and organization to accurately and accessibly describe it for us. Churchill, who went on to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature, depicts the international disorganization and anarchy in the period immediately after the war-with the unique perspective of both a historian and a political insider.

The conclusion of the great statesman's epic five-volume history of World War I. The fifth and final volume of Winston Churchill's series The World Crisis tells a gritty, true-to-life account of the Eastern Front-written by someone whose decisions had a profound impact on the success of war efforts both in the East and in the West. While the battle for modern civilization was being fought on the Western Front during World War I, an equally important war-with equally high stakes-was being fought on the Eastern Front, between Russia, Germany, and Germany's Austrian allies. It's rare that a historical account of World War I documents in as much detail the events of the Eastern Front as those of the West. Churchill's account was one of the first to do so, telling the story of an armed conflict that was shockingly dissimilar from its counterpart in the West.