SOURCE: A review of The Second World War, Vol. I, The Gathering Storm, in American Political Science Review, Vol. 43, No. 2, April 1949, pp. 357-58.

In the following review, Fox discusses Churchill's role in the beginnings of World War II as recounted in the first volume of his memoir.

That American university teaching and research in international relations in the 1930's dealt with essentially irrelevant materials is dramatically illustrated by Mr. Churchill's book [The Second World War,Vol. I, The Gathering Storm] It was, for example, as late as the Munich crisis that this reviewer finally came to understand that “security” was the key word in the phrase “collective security.”

For a decade and in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, men of good will in Britain and America continued to teach and to preach that if nations would only be “collective” enough the security would take care...