An epic of remarkable originality, Alone captures the heroism of World
War II as movingly as any book in recent memory. Bringing to vivid life
the world leaders, generals, and ordinary citizens who fought on both
sides of the war, Michael Korda, the best-selling author of Clouds of
Glory, chronicles the outbreak of hostilities, recalling as a prescient
young boy the enveloping tension that defined pre-Blitz London, and then
as a military historian the great events that would alter the course of
the twentieth century.
For indeed, May 1940 was a month like no other. The superior German war
machine blazed into France, as the Maginot Line, supposedly as firmly
fixed in place as the Pyramids, crumbled in days. With the fall of
Holland and Belgium, the imminent fall of Paris, the British Army
stranded at Dunkirk, and Neville Chamberlain's government in political
freefall, Winston Churchill became prime minister on this historical
nadir of May 10, 1941. Britain, diplomatically isolated, was suddenly
the only nation with the courage and the resolve to defy Hitler.
Against this vast historical canvas, Korda relates what happened and
why. We first meet him at the age of six, surrounded by his glamorous
movie family: his stage actress mother; his elegant father, Vincent,
soon to receive an Academy Award; and his devoted Nanny Low, with whom
he cites his evening prayers. Even the cheery BBC bulletins that Michael
listened to every night could not mask the impending catastrophe, the
German invasion so certain that the young boy, carrying his passport on
a string around his neck, was evacuated to Canada on an ocean liner full
of children.
Such alarm was hardly exaggerated. No one, after all, could have ever
imagined that the most unlikely flotilla of destroyers--Dutch barges,
fishing boats, yachts, and even rowboats-- would rescue over 300,000 men
off the beach at Dunkirk and home to England. The miraculous return of
the army was greeted with a renewed call for courage, and in the months
that followed, the lives of tens of millions would be inexorably
transformed, often tragically so, by these epochal weeks of May 1940.
It is this pivotal turning point in world history that Korda captures
with such immediacy in Alone, a work that triumphantly demonstrates
that even the most calamitous defeats can become the most legendary
victories.
