In my recent blogs we have been examining the last months of World War II, which ended, in the words of Winston Churchill, in both triumph and tragedy.
My new book will be published on May 8th, VE Day, and I borrowed Churchill’s words as the title. Two stories play out in parallel, as they did in 1945: the grinding campaigns in Europe to batter down the remnants of Hitler’s Third Reich, and the agonizing slog through the Pacific islands toward Japan, a slog which could only be ended by the final hammer blows at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As I was writing this sixth book in my Breaking Point series I was astonished, as I aways am, by the scale and brutality of the conflict and the fortitude of the men and women who lived through it.
The war ended in Europe on May 8th and in the Pacific on August 14th, 1945. It ended, contrary to the words of T S Eliot, not with a whimper but with a bang. But did it really end? To misquote Clausewitz’s famous dictum, it seems to me that peace was a continuation of war by other means. And that is what I’m exploring in Book 7.
Thanks, as always, to my readers. I hope you enjoy Triumph and Tragedy.
