The World Crisis

The World Crisis is Winston Churchill's account of the First World War, published in six volumes (technically five, as Volume III was published in two parts). Published between 1923 and 1931: in many respects it prefigures his better-known multivolume The Second World War. The World Crisis is analytical and, in some parts, a justification by Churchill of his role in the war. Churchill denied it was a "history," describing the work in Vol. 2 as "a contribution to history of which note should be taken together with other accounts."

His American biographer William Manchester wrote: "His masterpiece is The World Crisis, published over a period of several years, 1923 to 1931, a six-volume, 3,261-page account of the Great War, beginning with its origins in 1911 and ending with its repercussions in the 1920s. Magnificently written, it is enhanced by the presence of the author at the highest councils of war and in the trenches as a battalion commander". The British historian Robert Rhodes James writes: "For all its pitfalls as history, The World Crisis must surely stand as Churchill’s masterpiece. After it, anything must appear as anticlimax". Rhodes James further comments, "Churchill’s literary work showed a certain decline in the 1930s" and that his Marlborough and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples have more of a rhetorical note than The World Crisis.

The news he was writing about the war was all over London; he chose The Times for the serial rights rather than the magazine Metropolitan, and with advances from his English and American publishers, he told a guest in 1921 that it was exhilarating to write for half a crown a word (a pound for eight words). The title was settled as The World Crisis rather than Sea Power and the World Crisis. Geoffrey Dawson of The Times had suggested The Great Amphibian. The question of copyright and of quoting confidential government documents was raised by Bonar Law, but other authors, including Fisher, Jellicoe and Kitchener, had already used such documents in writing their own memoirs.

Successive volumes were published from 1923 to 1931 by Thornton Butterworth in England and Charles Scribner’s Sons in America. The first (American) advances enabled him to purchase a new Rolls-Royce in August 1921. In 1922, he had purchased Chartwell, a large house requiring expensive repairs and rebuilding. He justified his position and actions such as on the Dardanelles Campaign. The reception was generally good, but an unnamed colleague said, "Winston has written an enormous book about himself, and called it The World Crisis." Arthur Balfour said he was reading Churchill’s "autobiography disguised as a history of the universe".

Although nominally starting in 1911 when Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, the narrative commences in 1870 with the Franco-Prussian War and ends with Turkey and the Balkans. Churchill comments on German "threats of war" over recognition by Serbia of the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, which led to talks between the British and French General Staffs over concerted action in the event of war. "Algeciras was a milestone on the road to Armageddon." (pp. 32–33) Again over Agadir and the French in Morocco in 1911 Germany was "prepared to go to the very edge of the precipice", and was surprised by the British reaction (the Mansion House speech of Lloyd George).

The design and ordering of the British dreadnought fleet has a chapter, given his involvement. The start of the war in France is followed by the Admiralty and Fisher, and the naval battles of Coronel and the Falklands. The last chapter is on the bombardment of the English "open towns" of Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby by the German battle-cruiser squadron when nearly 500 civilians were killed; there was "much indignation at the failure of the Navy but the Navy could not explain for fear of compromising our secret information".

1915 is described as a "year of ill-fortune to the cause of the Allies", starting with the Deadlock in the West, mention of Tanks and Smoke, and ending with the Dardanelles campaign (Gallipoli). Churchill complains in his preface that "upon me alone among the high authorities concerned (with the Dardanelles) was the penalty inflicted – not of loss of office, for that is a petty thing – but of interruption and deprivation of control while the fate of the enterprise was still in suspense".

This volume starts with the Allied High Command at the beginning of 1916, and the combatants evenly matched for a prolonged struggle. There are chapters on Verdun, Jutland, the Somme, the Roumanian disaster, the removal of Ferdinand Foch and Joseph Joffre after the Somme (Robert Nivelle replacing the latter as French Commander-in-Chief), and American intervention. A chapter on Britain covers the Derby scheme and conscription, the Press and Lloyd George becoming prime minister. During the first eighteen months of the events covered, Churchill was out of office and he commanded a battalion in the line at 'Plugstreet' in Flanders early in 1916.