On the last day of 1942 Harold Macmillan left England to take up his post as British Minister Resident in North Africa. With him he had his Private Secretary, John Wyndham, two secretaries, and two typewriters prudently stolen from the ColoniaI Office. By the time he relinquished this office, in May 1945, he was responsible for British policy in the Mediterranean area, which included Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Balkans as well as North Africa.
Harold Macmillan has already told the history of the war in the Mediterranean during this period in The Blastof War; where the reader will find a lucid exposition of the great crises of the time; but the diaries reveal something rather different. Events did not happen in an orderly sequence. Usually several crises were going on at once, and could only be coped with by flying back and forth in excruciatingly uncomfortable military aeroplanes.
The diaries, which were begun almost casually as letters home to his wife, soon became a regular daily journal. They are considerably augmented from other documents written at the time and give a vivid picture of Macmillan's life: the strange mixture of grandeur and austerity, of crises and tedium. At one moment recovery from illness and reading Jane Austen in bed, at another disposing of great events; relishing the visual impact oft he North African countryside, or touring he war-ravaged landscape of Sicily and Italy. These diaries not only provide a historical record of a very unusual experience at a turning point in the Second World War, but are also a personal memoir in which the dramatis personae range frorn the familiar figures of Churchill bellowing indiscretions on the telephone and De Gaulle unpredictable in everything but his chain-smoking to the calm but effective Eisenhower
These two and a half years of the war established Macmillan as a senior and able politician and laid the ground for his political ascendancy in later years. It is a fascinating insight into his own personality and into the strategy of the SecondWorld War in Europe.
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Harold Macmillan, responsabile della politica britannica nell'area del Mediterraneo, attraverso i suoi diari, iniziati casualmente come lettere inviate alla moglie e diventate poi un vero e proprio "daily journal", ci fornisce una vivida fotografia della sua vita di quegli anni. I diari, però, non rappresentano solo una testimonianza di un momento fondamentale della Seconda Guerra mondiale, ma raccontano anche le strategie della Guerra e riportano interessanti indiscrezioni su figure di spicco quali Churchill, De Gaulle e Eisenhower. ( )