This is a new examination of the politics of strategy and the background to them during Churchill's first year as Britain's wartime leader. It draws extensively both on official archives and on the private papers of many of the political and military leaders. Among the individual topics considered and reinterpreted are Churchill's relations with Chamberlain and the Conservative Party, the political repercussions of the fall of France and the Battle of Britain, and the emergence of a strategy for the Middle East and Greece that would affect the postwar settlement of Europe.