The longest biog­ra­phy in his­to­ry takes a long step to com­ple­tion with pub­li­ca­tion of  The Churchill Doc­u­ments, Vol. 19, Fate­ful Ques­tions, Sep­tem­ber 1943-April 1944. (Order your copy here). Fas­tid­i­ous­ly com­piled by the late Sir Mar­tin Gilbert and edit­ed by Dr. Lar­ry Arnn, these 2700 pages serve up anoth­er fresh con­tri­bu­tion of doc­u­ments cru­cial to our under­stand­ing of Churchill in World War II. It is a vast new con­tri­bu­tion to Churchill scholarship.

Win­ston S. Churchill, the offi­cial biog­ra­phy con­sists of eight nar­ra­tive vol­umes and now nine­teen com­pan­ion or doc­u­ment vol­umes, all kept in print and offered at mod­est prices as both hard­back and elec­tron­ic editions.

There are four more to go and the “great work” will be com­plete, at thir­ty-one total vol­umes. Vol­ume 20 (lat­er this year), will take us through the 1945 elec­tion. Vol­umes 21-23 will cov­er the oppo­si­tion years 1945-51, the sec­ond pre­mier­ship 1951-55, and the finale 1955-65. The Great Work will be fin­ished by 2019. We will cel­e­brate in sev­er­al unique ways.

Documents 1943-44

The doc­u­ments take the read­er from the Allied inva­sion of Italy to the first Big Three con­fer­ence at Teheran, Russ­ian suc­cess­es on the East­ern Front, fraught argu­ments over tac­tics and strat­e­gy as the Allies began clos­ing in on Nazi Ger­many.  The third of four com­pan­ion vol­umes to Gilbert’s nar­ra­tive Vol­ume 7, Fate­ful Ques­tions takes us to the eve of  D-Day: the inva­sion of France in June 1944.

I played just a bit part as one of the edi­tors-perusers of this gigan­tic screed. The real thanks are owed to Soren Geiger and our Churchill stu­dent Asso­ciates, grad­u­ate and under­grad­u­ate, who start­ed with Mar­tin Gilbert’s “wodges” of documents–virtually one wodge for each day of Churchill’s life.