The Struggle for Europe

Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe is the most highly regarded single-volume history of the Second World War in Europe. First published in 1952, the book has the advantage of the author's extensive interviews with participants from all sides of the conflict, when recollections of the war were still painfully fresh. The pattern of post-war Europe, he maintains, was determined during the fighting; he sees the shaping events through a study of wartime diplomacy and strategy and of the impact on wartime policies of the personalities of the statesmen and generals with whom the decisions lay. Throughout Wilmot hews to one guiding principle: To concern ourselves solely with the course of military events would be to tell only half the story and to see only half its significance. It is the political outcome that counts, and in this book the two are closely related at every stage.