WILMOT, Chester.
WILMOT, Chester. The Struggle for Europe. London: Collins, 1952. First edition, first impression. Original blue cloth, lettered in gilt to spine, in the original dust jacket.
Inscribed by Wilmot on the title page:
“To Marshal of the R.A.F.
the Viscount Portal of Hungerford
in great appreciation of
his help and interest
Chester Wilmot”
A major presentation copy of one of the earliest and most important single-volume histories of the European war, sent by its author to Marshal of the Royal Air Force Charles Frederick Algernon Portal, 1st Viscount Portal of Hungerford, KG, GCB, OM, DSO & Bar, MC, DL, Churchill’s wartime Chief of the Air Staff.
Wilmot was exceptionally qualified to write this book. An Australian correspondent who had reported from North Africa, Greece, Syria, Tobruk and the Pacific, he joined the BBC in London in 1944. On D-Day, he flew into France by glider with the 6th Airborne Division, then reported the liberation of Europe through to Germany’s surrender. The Struggle for Europe brings that front-line immediacy to an ambitious assessment of the campaigns, the Allied coalition and the political decisions that shaped the peace.
Portal was one of the few men able to help Wilmot interpret that history from within. As Chief of the Air Staff from October 1940 to the end of the war, he was a member of Britain’s Chiefs of Staff and a central figure in the direction of the RAF’s contribution to victory. Wilmot’s work follows the 1944-45 campaign in which Allied control of the air, strategic bombing, and the air support of the invasion were inseparable from decisions taken at Portal’s level.
The inscription is exceptionally revealing. Wilmot does not offer a routine courtesy copy: he explicitly thanks Portal for “his help and interest”. While the precise form of that assistance is not recorded in the volume, it establishes a direct post-war connection between the historian and one of the principal commanders whose decisions the book assesses. Wilmot’s early death in the 1954 BOAC Comet disaster gives such presentation copies added scarcity and poignancy.
The original dust jacket has been expertly conserved, with earlier tears and edge splits carefully repaired, supported and stabilised. It retains strong colour and now presents very well. The blue cloth is clean and sharp, with fresh gilt lettering; contents clean and bright, retaining the colour maps.
Portal was Chief of the Air Staff throughout the central years of the war, while Wilmot’s own account became a bestseller and remains a respected work on the European conflict.
