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De Gaulle, always determined to give the world his version of the great events in which he had been involved, recounts the first of these salvations in The War Memoirs. This work—originally published in three volumes between 1954 and 1959—is justly celebrated for its sonorous prose, its sharply personal portraits of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, its narrative sweep, and its self-confident tone. It pleads without modesty the case for de Gaulle’s place in history.

In our February 13 issue, Robert O. Paxton reads a new edition of Charles de Gaulle’s “sonorous” memoirs, and takes the measure of the man who “saved France twice.”

Below, alongside Paxton’s essay, we have collected five articles from our archives about some of the leaders, resistance fighters, and collaborationists of World War II.

Robert O. Paxton
De Gaulle’s Gamble

After the defeat of 1940, Charles de Gaulle was convinced that even a minor contribution to the war against the Axis would assure France’s place among the victors.

Ferdinand Mount
Nasty, Brutish, and Great

“Churchill did speak of war as cruel and barbarous, but like Charles de Gaulle, he thought of it as a normal and even socially progressive part of life. At the end of 1917, after the most frightful slaughter in human history, he told the poet Siegfried Sassoon that ‘the present war…had brought about inventive discoveries which would ameliorate the condition of Mankind’—in sanitation, for example. Twenty years later, he still thought the same. He told his private secretary in October 1940, ‘A lot of people talked a lot of nonsense when they said wars never settled anything; nothing in history was ever settled except by wars.’”

—June 6, 2019

James Chace
The Winning Hand

“Elected to a third term in 1940, Roosevelt now believed he had prepared the American people for war if it came. What Churchill later called Roosevelt’s “most unsordid act” was his invention of the Lend-Lease program shortly after getting word from the British prime minister in December 1940 that Britain was simply running out of money to pay for American munitions and other aid. America would lend Britain whatever it needed—at no cost—and Britain would pay America in kind, by giving back what it had borrowed when it could.”

—March 11, 2004

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István Deák
Survivor in a Sea of Barbarism

“Miklós Horthy was a patriot who fought to preserve Hungary’s independence, but because he was also staunchly anti-Bolshevik and anti-liberal he alternately courted and defied Hitler. has been described, in various places, as an arch-reactionary, a liberal- conservative, a constitutional head of state, a dictator, a proto- or semi-fascist, and simply a fascist…. Horthy changed his views and methods often, depending on the prevailing political situation and on who, at one time or another, had the greatest influence over him.”

—April 8, 1999

Mary McCarthy
The Forgotten People

“Homage to the Spanish Exiles mingles reporting, reminiscence, extracts from letters, taped interviews, and constitutes a remarkable history of the Spanish civil war, much more evocative than such respected ‘objective’ histories as Hugh Thomas’s and, as far as I can judge, very accurate in dates, order of events, leading “personalities,” political interplay of groups and factions, estimated casualties. Here for the first time I have read about the Spanish Republicans in the French Resistance and in the Nazi deportation squads.”

—February 12, 1987

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L. S. Stavrianos
Greece’s Other History

“With the Axis occupation of Greece in 1941, Ares Velouchiotes finally came into his own. In the mountains of Roumele he became a folk hero—the leading resistance fighter in all Greece, a glamorous figure who, with his mounted bodyguard in their black berets, became legendary. True, he was feared for his violence and harsh discipline. ‘Your rods are only for pissing,’ he warned his men, and if any of his followers molested women or stole peasant produce they were summarily executed. He did establish unprecedented security in his domain, but in the process became the object of fear and vilification on the part of the old politicians and intellectuals of Athens.”

—June 17, 1971

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