Sir Martin Gilbert (1936-2015) was a leading British historian and the author of more than eighty books. Specializing in 20th century history, he was the official biographer of Winston Churchill and wrote a best-selling eight-volume biography of the war leader’s life.
Born in London in 1936, Martin Gilbert was evacuated to Canada with his family at the beginning of World War II as part of the British government’s efforts to protect children from the brutal bombings of the Luftwaffe. He was made a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, in 1962. He is the author of several definitive historical works examining the Holocaust, the First and Second World Wars, and the history of the 20th century.
In 1990, Gilbert was designated a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and was awarded a Knighthood in 1995. Oxford University awarded him a Doctorate in 1999. Gilbert was a sought-after speaker on Churchill, Jewish history, and the history of the 20th century, and traveled frequently to lecture at colleges, universities, and organizations around the world.
Few have written about the atrocities of the Holocaust with the combined skill, thoughtfulness, and rigorous devotion to political, social, and military context as Sir Martin Gilbert.Focusing on firsthand narratives from survivors and supported by contextual scholarship, Gilbert presents a masterful cross-section of the experiences of the millions of European Jews who lost their homes, careers, families, and lives at the hands of Hitler’s "Final Solution." The accounts of these journeys are at once unique and unified by both their tragedy and by their triumphs.Gilbert’s vast knowledge on the subject, coupled with his frank and readable style, makes Final Journey accessible to readers and scholars alike. The text is supported by 84 photographs—many of which were published for the first time with the title’s first edition in 1979—and 24 pages of maps prepared by the author, which help to bring the stories of the men, women, and children back to life in unflinching detail.
They called it the War to End All Wars, but it was only the beginning of the global conflicts that rocked the 20th Century. The First World War redrew national boundaries, eliminated monarchies, and left millions of soldiers and civilians dead, and its impact has continued to shape the Western political and social landscape since.
In this sweeping narrative, best-selling historian Martin Gilbert provides a view of the conflict that’s both global and personal, drawing on eyewitness accounts, contemporary reporting, and first-hand documentation. It offers an immediate, compelling voice to familiar historical events, bringing new facets of the conflict to life and personalizing the tale with gripping survivor testimonies.
This volume takes up the story of "Churchill’s War" with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and carries it on to the triumph of V–E Day, May 8, 1945, the end of the war in Europe.Within a week of Pearl Harbor, Hitler and Mussolini had declared war on the United States. Thus Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin were now leaders of the great alliance that held the assurance of ultimate victory. But in 1942, the first year of the new alliance, the war went badly on every front, and Churchill faced serious criticism at home.In this volume, Martin Gilbert charts Churchill’s tortuous course through the storms of Anglo-American and Anglo-Soviet suspicion and rivalry and between the clashing priorities and ambitions of other forces embattled against the common enemy: between General de Gaulle and his compatriots in France and the French Empire; between Tito and other Yugoslav leaders; between the Greek Communists and monarchists; between the Polish government exiled in London and the Soviet-controlled "Lublin" Poles.Amid all these cares and dangers Churchill had to find the course of prudence, of British national interest, and, above all, of the earliest possible victory over Nazism. In doing so he was guided by the most secret sources of British Intelligence: the daily interception of the messages of the German High Command. These pages reveal, as never before, the links between this secret information and the resulting moves and successes achieved by the Allies.
