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Lanny Budd #7
A World to Win
[Spoiler Alert: transcribed from this edition's original dust jacket] At the opening of this story—in Vichy in 1940—Lanny Budd has been the intimate of the world's great—famous and notorious—for more than twenty years. Outwardly the friend and confidant of the Nazi and fascist gangsters, this secret agent of Franklin D. Roosevelt is one of the most amazing figures in modern fiction. Between his visit to Laval in 1940 and his interview with Stalin in 1942, his encounters with history in this book involve him in a series of unparalleled adventures. He is captured by French patriots who think him a Nazi agent, and has a narrow escape. He is thrown out of England because of his involvement in Hess's flight to Scotland. In America, too, he ferrets out fascist activities and even uncovers a plot against the life of the President, a plot which came ominously close to fulfillment.
A high spot in A World to Win is Lanny's concern with the beginnings of the atomic bomb. After preliminary study with Einstein himself—including some delightful interludes of Mozart duets with the physicist—he departs on his most dangerous mission, which ends in the icy waters of the Arctic. A fabulous cruise through the Pacific on a luxury yacht brings him to Hong Kong on December 7, 1941, where he is once more in the center of the whirlwind. There follows a laborious journey through China, a stay in war-torn Yenan, and refuge in friendly Russia. The book concludes with a vivid personality sketch of Stalin, and with Lanny's audience with that not-so-inscrutable leader.
Here is more than mere plotting; here is history coming to life, the dramatic days through which we have just lived made even more memorable in Sinclair's epic narrative of our own time, of which this is the seventh novel. As with each book in the series, this one can be enjoyed for its own separate story, or as part of the sweeping account of an era.
A high spot in A World to Win is Lanny's concern with the beginnings of the atomic bomb. After preliminary study with Einstein himself—including some delightful interludes of Mozart duets with the physicist—he departs on his most dangerous mission, which ends in the icy waters of the Arctic. A fabulous cruise through the Pacific on a luxury yacht brings him to Hong Kong on December 7, 1941, where he is once more in the center of the whirlwind. There follows a laborious journey through China, a stay in war-torn Yenan, and refuge in friendly Russia. The book concludes with a vivid personality sketch of Stalin, and with Lanny's audience with that not-so-inscrutable leader.
Here is more than mere plotting; here is history coming to life, the dramatic days through which we have just lived made even more memorable in Sinclair's epic narrative of our own time, of which this is the seventh novel. As with each book in the series, this one can be enjoyed for its own separate story, or as part of the sweeping account of an era.
581 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1946
175 people are currently reading
580 people want to read
About the author
Upton Sinclair
713 books1,182 followersUpton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. The Jungle has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after the initial publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.
Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
August 1, 2025
This is the seventh book in an 11 book series by Upton Sinclair. These books were apparently written in the 1940s although they have just recently been converted into the audible system which is my mechanism for experiencing books these days. Each book in the series is about 1000 pages long so the audible format is an important asset in completing this significant series.
This book finally reaches the time when the United States enters World War II with the historic event of Pearl Harbor. Lanny happens to be on a cruise on a yacht in the South Pacific at the time of that event and spends time in Hong Kong and then China. As continues to be true, he manages to interact with the significant people in history. In this book, he goes through the area of China, where Mao is and meats briefly with him. Lanny and his new wife, then go on to Moscow where he meets with Stalin. He is then headed back to the US and a renewed interaction with President Roosevelt.
This book finally reaches the time when the United States enters World War II with the historic event of Pearl Harbor. Lanny happens to be on a cruise on a yacht in the South Pacific at the time of that event and spends time in Hong Kong and then China. As continues to be true, he manages to interact with the significant people in history. In this book, he goes through the area of China, where Mao is and meats briefly with him. Lanny and his new wife, then go on to Moscow where he meets with Stalin. He is then headed back to the US and a renewed interaction with President Roosevelt.
not-for-me
October 16, 2023******************
*The Jungle 3 stars
the Lanny Budd Series:
1. World's End 4 stars
2.Between Two Worlds 4 stars
3.Dragon's Teeth 4 stars
4.Wide Is the Gate 3 stars
5,Presidential Agent TBR
6Dragon Harvest TBR
7.A World to Win TBR
8.Presidential Mission TBR
9.One Clear Call TBR
10.O Shepherd, Speak! TBR
11.The Return of Lanny Budd TBR
*The Jungle 3 stars
the Lanny Budd Series:
1. World's End 4 stars
2.Between Two Worlds 4 stars
3.Dragon's Teeth 4 stars
4.Wide Is the Gate 3 stars
5,Presidential Agent TBR
6Dragon Harvest TBR
7.A World to Win TBR
8.Presidential Mission TBR
9.One Clear Call TBR
10.O Shepherd, Speak! TBR
11.The Return of Lanny Budd TBR
December 16, 2016
When I first heard that Upton Sinclair had written a WWII book I had to wonder: how the hell will he manage to fit the war into his ideals? Turns out, he did a good job. This book was written pretty closely to the end of the war, so this is nearly first hand. I found it surprising that so many Americans back in the day supported Hitler . . . and then Trump was elected. Wow. There are a lot more American Nazis that I thought there were. It's interesting because Lanny Budd, the protagonist, gets to have a few conversations with top Nazis. I'm talking Hitler and Hess, here. It's interesting to see what these people were like one on one. We don't get a lot of that. It's all groupthink when it comes to Nazis. I also like that we got to see him talking with Chairman Mao and Stalin. Very interesting stuff. Unexpected: Sinclair was pretty good with sexy scenes, at least for his day. But the best scenes are when Lanny is hanging out with FDR in the president's bedroom, talking about nailing Hitler. It's very interesting because nearly all of this happens before Pearl Harbor. The only thing I didn't like about this book is how it drags in a lot of places. A lot of unnecessary information is stuffed into this book. Don't get me wrong, the travelogue part is kind of interesting. I get the feeling that Sinclair actually went to a lot of these places. Maybe he had conversations with very important people, like Lanny did. But when this book drags, it DRAGS. Aside from that, I'm glad I read it.
November 19, 2020
This series of books needs to be a TV mini-series. I try to read 2 books a year from the series, while my husband read them all straight through without a break. They are long and wordy at times, but man, I sure have enjoyed meeting the historical figures populating the times, a timeline of events world-wide, and a discussion of political thought. This particular volume covered a lot of territory, and a lot of events. I am a Lanny Budd fan, but this particular year in his life was extraordinary. I am looking forward to the next volume.
July 21, 2025
a forrest gump of WWII
July 2, 2019
The title comes halfway through the book in a quote, "Workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a world to win!"; nazi occupation of Europe is almost complete and nazis attacking Russia is imminent.
A World to Win, seventh volume in the World's End series, begins where the previous one, Dragon Harvest, had left off - Paris taken, France overrun and humiliated as the temporary finale of Germany occupying Europe- beginning with Rhineland and going on to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, low countries or Benelux as they are now called, and the final humiliation, armistice signed at the spot where WWI armistice was signed - and now, Lanny is in Vichy, talking to Pierre Laval, who heads the supposedly unoccupied France.
"“It has happened just about as I told you, M. Budd.” Lanny said it was so, and thought that the death of something like a hundred and twenty-five thousand Frenchmen, and the captivity of ten or twelve times as many, signified less to Pierre Laval than the ability to say: “C’est moi qui avait raison!”"
Laval invited Lanny home and he dined with the family that thought France had victory in saving Paris from destruction unlike Warsaw and Rotterdam; Laval ranted about Blum and Mandel whom he hated because they, unlike him, hadn't betrayed the workers who had brought them to power like he was, and he didn't believe Lanny was non political; after all, he had taken messages from Comtesse De Portes and Marshal Petain.
"And then the old Maréchal. No serpent ever slipped into its hole more silently than Pierre Laval trying to slip into the mind of Lanny Budd and find out why he wanted to see the head of the French State and what he was going to say to that venerable warrior. Lanny was all innocence; the Maréchal was a friend, Lanny’s father had known him since World War I and before that, and as salesman for Budd Gunmakers had tried to persuade him that America had a better light machine gun than France. Now the Maréchal had asked Lanny to try to bring Britain into the armistice, and Lanny had failed, and wanted to tell the old gentleman how sorry he was.
"Tactfully the host imparted the fact that when a man is eighty-four years of age his mind is not so active, he tires easily, his memory fails, and he needs guidance. The Maréchal had around him a horde of self-seekers, all trying to pull him in different directions. They played upon his pride in France and his memories of French glory; it was hard for him to face the fact that France was beaten, and that her future was in German hands, and nowhere else. “We cannot have it two ways,” declared this black serpent with a white necktie. “If we are going to be friends we have to mean it and act accordingly.” When the visitor said, “I agree with you wholeheartedly,” Pierre went on to suggest that Lanny Budd should advise his aged friend to declare war upon Britain, and to turn over to the Germans the remainder of that French Fleet which the British had just attacked with shameless treachery in the ports of North Africa."
Laval offered to pay Lanny, who said that Hitler and Göring had offered it too, and he didn't need money, and preferred to get by on his income as an art expert. Laval reminded him in crass terms that money was necessary. Lanny was driven back to Vichy next day, from Châteldon where Laval had bought the castle in the town he had been born and had grown up in, and he questioned Lanny, which Lanny didn't mind because that told Lanny what Laval thought, knew, and didn't know. Lanny came to know that Laval hated Maréchal, the venerated old soldier, and was counting weeks that the old man might live, but nazis needed Pétain, France respected the Verdun hero, nobody respected laval; so Laval had to stand it. He told Lanny Pétain was playing both sides and had to choose.
"Pétain wouldn’t let the Nazis have the French Fleet, or the air force in Africa, or the troops in Syria; he clung to these things as the last pawns in a lost game; he promised this and that, and then delayed to keep the promise, and argued over petty details in his stubborn dotard’s way, and not even the shrewd Vice-Premier could be sure whether it was stupidity or malice."
Lanny was checked into a smaller hotel, and went strolling into art galleries, before ordering a light lunch in a sidewalk cafe.
"There were several million refugees in Vichy France, and as many discharged soldiers who had no place to go and nothing to do; many had no shelter but the trees in the park, and no food but what they could beg or steal."
Lanny had received a code communication from Raoul and met him, they strolled out along the river before meeting. They talked about the situation. Lanny told him Britain would go on fighting, not give up, and the workers in France had to give priority to fighting Hitler, and forget class struggle.
"The Nazis want us to hate the British, because Britain is the last bulwark against them; and that tells us what to do. If Hitler can get the use of what is left of the French Fleet he can control the Mediterranean, and take the Suez Canal and the oil of Mesopotamia. That is where the fight is going, and where we have to help.”"
Lanny returned to town, walking alone, and went to meet Pétain. He remembered Lanny, and wanted to know about Hitler and his thinking, and Lanny had learned to respond so that he wasn't exposed but truth was there plain to see.
" When he tried to talk about the Fleet, and the infamy which the British had committed, his hands shook and he broke down, and one of his military aides had to come to the rescue. “I will never give up the Fleet, either to the British or Germans!” And then: “Go and see Darlan; he will tell you.” To the aide he added: “Take him to the Admiral.”"
Lanny had the appointment next morning and met Darlan, reminding him that he knew not only Robbie but Beauty too, and had been at Bienvenu for tea shortly after WWI. Lanny let him know Lanny knew of his Cagoulard association through the De Bruyne men.
"“There is one report which I have often wondered about, Monsieur l’Amiral: that you had planned to put those officers of the Fleet who supported the corrupt regime on board the Jean Bart and take her out to sea and sink her.”
"“I meant it, absolutely. We could have spared that old battleship, and that kennel full of Red dogs would never have been missed by my service.”"
News about Lanny being interested in buying paintings had spread, and he was invited to many homes. He found one worth buying and managed the transaction, and mansged to rent a car with a driver, and was driven to Bienvenu. Riviera was overflowing with refugees from North, and Bienvenu had more than its share, but Lanny told Beauty that he had to go back to England and U.S. soon enough, anyway, and that his father needed his help was cover enough. He arranged through Jerry Pendleton who ran a travel bureau to fly to Madrid via Cannes and Marseille, to thence take a train to Lisbon and fly onwards to London.
"To Lanny Madrid had seemed the most desolate of capitals. The Nazis, with all their crimes, were at least efficient and put up a fine show; whereas Franco was nothing but a little wholesale murderer in the cause of his medieval Church. He didn’t even know how to repair the buildings he had smashed in the course of three years of civil war, and they stood there, gaping wrecks open to the sky. The Germans, who wanted his iron ore and copper, had to come and supervise the getting of it, the only means of collecting the huge debt due them for having set the Caudillo on his throne. He had two or three million of his people in prisons and concentration camps; shootings went on night after night, and famine stalked the streets of the great metropolis. On the stairs of the subway swarms of miserable, half-starved child bandits clamored to sell you lottery tickets and filthy postcards.
"The landlords and the ecclesiastics—often the same persons—had won their war, and were prosperous and fat as always through the centuries. Lanny did not need to enter their palaces and ask questions, because he had got it all in Vichy and Cannes. He knew that Hitler had Franco’s written permission to march through Spain whenever he felt strong enough to take Gibraltar; he knew about the arrangements for Il Duce to send the bombing planes, and about the submarine refueling system from Spanish ports.
"Lisbon, which had become the spy center of Western Europe. The dictator who ruled this little country couldn’t be sure which side was going to win, and he shrewdly played each against the other and raked in the cash. In his capital was the same contrast of riches with bitter poverty; you could buy costly perfumes stolen from the shops of Paris, and you could see barefooted women carrying huge loads of farm produce upon their heads. Nowhere could you escape the sight of German “tourists” wearing golf costumes, and if you talked in any café on the swanky Avenida da Liberdade, you might discover several persons trying to overhear what you said."
Croydon had been bombed. After finally landing, they were taken to London in a bus.
" ... you could see how the fields of Southern England had trenches dug across them, and logs, carts, cast-off motor cars, and other obstructions to make trouble for planes and gliders that might drop down in the night. Lanny was astonished to see how much of such defense work had been done since his last visit; also by the number of bomb craters, even in the open fields. Homeguardsmen were active everywhere."
He called The Reaches and was told Rick was in town working at the Daily Clarion. They met at the predetermined obscure hotel and talked, Lanny telling him about everything he'd been at, since Dunkirk. Vichy was persecuting Jews and leftists at behest of the nazis. Rick spoke about situation of Britain. A considerably large quantity of equipment from tanks to guns had been lost to Germany when evacuating soldiers at Dunkirk, and defence of the island was left to what was left, and old equipment had been brought out to service.
"England for twenty miles back from the coast had been declared a military zone, and day and night labor was turning it into one vast fortification. Every beach was mined, and covered with a tangle of tightly strung barbed wire; there was hidden artillery of all sizes, and no end of pillboxes with machine guns, carefully camouflaged. There were great railway guns which could be rushed from place to place. Most important of all, the period of the Sitzkrieg had been utilized to devise and install a series of pipes extending out under the sea, connected with oil tanks and heavy pumps. In case of an invasion attempt, oil would be poured out in floods; it would rise to the surface, and there was a magnesium device to ignite it, so that the invaders would find themselves caught in an inferno of flame. And even when they came to the shore, they would find the beaches ablaze, and flamethrowers concealed behind garden hedges. Rick told about the situation he had discovered on his return from Dunkirk. Tanks, artillery, trucks, machine guns, all the costly equipment of an army of two or three hundred thousand men had been lost in Flanders; the Germans had it, and the British had only one fully equipped brigade to defend their shores; troops guarding the beaches had to be armed with shotguns, sporting rifles, even muskets out of museums. “Your President saved us,” declared the baronet’s, son. “Have you heard what he did?”
"“I didn’t see an American or British paper till I got to Lisbon.”
"“This hasn’t been published yet, that I know of. You had a million World War I rifles in your arsenals, and Roosevelt had them loaded onto fast steamers and sent over to us. They are out-of-date, but they saved us once and might have done it again. He’s been letting us buy some torpedo boats and other small stuff that your navy can spare. They are sold to private dealers who resell them to us; that’s according to your laws, it appears.”
"“It wouldn’t appear so well during an election year,” was the reply.
"“I know, I know,” said Rick. “You have about a hundred over-age destroyers, left from the last war. We need them the worst way in the world, to keep our convoys on top of the water. We’re trying our best to buy them ..."
They spoke about what if the nazi invasion of the island happened, and Rick was definite about the British spirit of determination to fight at every step. Lanny reminded him civilians couldn't fight panders and bombers, and what about the fleet?
"We’ll do another Dunkirk—put our fighting men on board every sort of ship we can get together, and the Fleet will escort them to Canada. We’ll fight from there, and come back home some day. My understanding is, we have already given that promise to Roosevelt in writing; and we’ve taken the first step by shipping every ounce of gold in the Bank of England’s vaults to New York and Montreal and other places of safety. That was quite an adventure, believe me—and it’s strictly hush-hush!”"
They exchanged news of friends and family. Rick's father, Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, was working despite his age, and Rick's younger son Rick junior was following his father and older brother alfy by joining the air force. Alfy was married to a neighbour's daughter and she was expecting. Lanny asked if he could meet Alfy to question him about the planes, which Robbie would find valuable as test in field.
Rick told him that there was news in the wind about Wickthorpe resigning due to his political stance, and lanny asked him not to report that story, since that would instantly connect Rick with Lanny, and this wouldn't go well with the image Lanny was trying to maintain as cover. Lanny visited Wickthorpe, and heard it himself from the couple after dinner. They were definite about the war being a mistake, and Wickthorpe was trying to bring about a truce. They consulted him, and he spoke about Wickthorpe influencing the government.
He saw Frances, and she was growing up, and thrilled with his visits. He had to hurry this time, though, across the Atlantic, staying at Wickthorpe only long enough to make a couple of visits to Rosemary to buy another painting. Her younger son had been evacuated at Dunkirk, and older one was a prisoner of war. Lanny had his Clipper seat arranged through his father's lawyer, and Rick called to say Alfy would be meeting him, so he went up to London.
Alfy was definitely red, unlike his pink parents; "he saw this war as a deliberate assault of the German cartels—steel, coal, power, and munitions—upon the labor movements of the rest of the world. Hitler was a puppet of these interests; they had bought him the guns, without which he would have remained a street-corner rabble-rouser. The end of the war “must be the overthrow of those giant exploiters, not merely in Germany but all over the world; otherwise it would be a “defeat in the victory,” as Lanny’s friend Herron had written after the last war—and what a prophet he had proved to be!
"Alfy explained that the Hun flyers were trying to counter the British blockade. They had their bases close to the coast of France; indeed they had them all along the coast of Europe, from Narvik in Northern Norway all the way to the Spanish border. They were trying to establish command of the Channel and block off the British ports; they were coming in flights of five hundred at a time; bombing ships and shipping, docks and harbor installations, oil depots, and everything of military value. For the most part they came at night, because their daytime losses had been too heavy. But night bombing wasn’t accurate; and now the British had a wonderful new night-fighter with a device for seeing in the dark so ultra-secret that even Alfy didn’t know what it was. He revealed also that the British had constructed great numbers of imitation air bases to fool the Germans; they were so good that the Germans were dropping more bombs on them than on the real ones; so good that the British flyers had trouble in remembering not to land on them.
"Like the century-old duel between gun and armor on battleships was the duel between safety and maneuverability on pursuit planes. Alfy pointed out that there was such a thing as having too much maneuverability; more than the human organism could make use of. If you turned at a speed of more than two hundred miles, you were pretty sure to black out, and you might not come to until you had hit the ground, or until the enemy had drilled you through. The Englishman drew an extraordinary picture of what it meant to be carrying on an air duel four or five miles above the ground, breathing from an oxygen tank, pursuing an enemy who was ducking and dodging at the terrific speeds these planes could now attain. The Hun was swerving; you almost had him in your sights, and if you could swerve a tiny fraction more you would have him; but there came, as it were, a yellowish-gray curtain before your eyes, the first warning of the blackout; you had to know exactly how far you could go toward unconsciousness, and you might have to make that decision a dozen times in the course of a prolonged duel of wits with your opponent—he facing exactly the same problem. If you straightened out, you would lose your man; also, you might discover another enemy plane on your tail, one who might get you in his sights."
Lanny told him of a new idea Robbie was working out but asked him not to speak of it, a flight suit. Alfy talked about how it was easier for Germans, and how serious for his colleagues, who were determined and serious.
"The Royal Air Force had been a volunteer organization, and the pilots were mostly of the upper class. Alfy said: “I hate to admit it, but it’s the old school tie that is doing the job, because there’s nobody else. But that won’t be true for long; we’re having to take qualified men wherever we can find them now. And that’s all to the good; if we don’t break down England’s caste system, we’ll find this war was hardly worth fighting.”"
They spoke about U.S. isolationism and Roosevelt, and party politics compulsions that turned republican politics opposite of Lincoln policies. They had dinner in a small place.
"They talked about their two families, home news which would be of no interest to enemy ears; everyone was on the alert just then, because more than fifty empty parachutes had been found in various open places in England and Scotland—which meant that enemy spies had come down during the night. These spies would undoubtedly be English-looking and English-speaking men and perhaps women, so the newspapers warned; they would be saboteurs, equipped with explosives and incendiary materials; or they would carry suitcases containing radio transmitting sets, powerful enough to reach the French coast or submarines lying close to shore."
Air raid sirens sounded as they were finishing dinner, and they went out, there were hundreds of planes in the sky, and then waves of larger ones came, bombers, which bombed some houses close. So they walked to the tube, which was crowded.
"The place was packed almost to suffocation, and the conditions were not pleasing to persons of refined sensibilities. There was public clamor for Government to “do something about it,” but Government had a lot of other things on their hands at the moment. It seemed more important to use steel for guns and ammunition than for the building of an underground city for seven million Londoners, to say nothing of the inhabitants of Portsmouth and Southampton and Sheffield and Birmingham and all the rest."
A World to Win, seventh volume in the World's End series, begins where the previous one, Dragon Harvest, had left off - Paris taken, France overrun and humiliated as the temporary finale of Germany occupying Europe- beginning with Rhineland and going on to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, low countries or Benelux as they are now called, and the final humiliation, armistice signed at the spot where WWI armistice was signed - and now, Lanny is in Vichy, talking to Pierre Laval, who heads the supposedly unoccupied France.
"“It has happened just about as I told you, M. Budd.” Lanny said it was so, and thought that the death of something like a hundred and twenty-five thousand Frenchmen, and the captivity of ten or twelve times as many, signified less to Pierre Laval than the ability to say: “C’est moi qui avait raison!”"
Laval invited Lanny home and he dined with the family that thought France had victory in saving Paris from destruction unlike Warsaw and Rotterdam; Laval ranted about Blum and Mandel whom he hated because they, unlike him, hadn't betrayed the workers who had brought them to power like he was, and he didn't believe Lanny was non political; after all, he had taken messages from Comtesse De Portes and Marshal Petain.
"And then the old Maréchal. No serpent ever slipped into its hole more silently than Pierre Laval trying to slip into the mind of Lanny Budd and find out why he wanted to see the head of the French State and what he was going to say to that venerable warrior. Lanny was all innocence; the Maréchal was a friend, Lanny’s father had known him since World War I and before that, and as salesman for Budd Gunmakers had tried to persuade him that America had a better light machine gun than France. Now the Maréchal had asked Lanny to try to bring Britain into the armistice, and Lanny had failed, and wanted to tell the old gentleman how sorry he was.
"Tactfully the host imparted the fact that when a man is eighty-four years of age his mind is not so active, he tires easily, his memory fails, and he needs guidance. The Maréchal had around him a horde of self-seekers, all trying to pull him in different directions. They played upon his pride in France and his memories of French glory; it was hard for him to face the fact that France was beaten, and that her future was in German hands, and nowhere else. “We cannot have it two ways,” declared this black serpent with a white necktie. “If we are going to be friends we have to mean it and act accordingly.” When the visitor said, “I agree with you wholeheartedly,” Pierre went on to suggest that Lanny Budd should advise his aged friend to declare war upon Britain, and to turn over to the Germans the remainder of that French Fleet which the British had just attacked with shameless treachery in the ports of North Africa."
Laval offered to pay Lanny, who said that Hitler and Göring had offered it too, and he didn't need money, and preferred to get by on his income as an art expert. Laval reminded him in crass terms that money was necessary. Lanny was driven back to Vichy next day, from Châteldon where Laval had bought the castle in the town he had been born and had grown up in, and he questioned Lanny, which Lanny didn't mind because that told Lanny what Laval thought, knew, and didn't know. Lanny came to know that Laval hated Maréchal, the venerated old soldier, and was counting weeks that the old man might live, but nazis needed Pétain, France respected the Verdun hero, nobody respected laval; so Laval had to stand it. He told Lanny Pétain was playing both sides and had to choose.
"Pétain wouldn’t let the Nazis have the French Fleet, or the air force in Africa, or the troops in Syria; he clung to these things as the last pawns in a lost game; he promised this and that, and then delayed to keep the promise, and argued over petty details in his stubborn dotard’s way, and not even the shrewd Vice-Premier could be sure whether it was stupidity or malice."
Lanny was checked into a smaller hotel, and went strolling into art galleries, before ordering a light lunch in a sidewalk cafe.
"There were several million refugees in Vichy France, and as many discharged soldiers who had no place to go and nothing to do; many had no shelter but the trees in the park, and no food but what they could beg or steal."
Lanny had received a code communication from Raoul and met him, they strolled out along the river before meeting. They talked about the situation. Lanny told him Britain would go on fighting, not give up, and the workers in France had to give priority to fighting Hitler, and forget class struggle.
"The Nazis want us to hate the British, because Britain is the last bulwark against them; and that tells us what to do. If Hitler can get the use of what is left of the French Fleet he can control the Mediterranean, and take the Suez Canal and the oil of Mesopotamia. That is where the fight is going, and where we have to help.”"
Lanny returned to town, walking alone, and went to meet Pétain. He remembered Lanny, and wanted to know about Hitler and his thinking, and Lanny had learned to respond so that he wasn't exposed but truth was there plain to see.
" When he tried to talk about the Fleet, and the infamy which the British had committed, his hands shook and he broke down, and one of his military aides had to come to the rescue. “I will never give up the Fleet, either to the British or Germans!” And then: “Go and see Darlan; he will tell you.” To the aide he added: “Take him to the Admiral.”"
Lanny had the appointment next morning and met Darlan, reminding him that he knew not only Robbie but Beauty too, and had been at Bienvenu for tea shortly after WWI. Lanny let him know Lanny knew of his Cagoulard association through the De Bruyne men.
"“There is one report which I have often wondered about, Monsieur l’Amiral: that you had planned to put those officers of the Fleet who supported the corrupt regime on board the Jean Bart and take her out to sea and sink her.”
"“I meant it, absolutely. We could have spared that old battleship, and that kennel full of Red dogs would never have been missed by my service.”"
News about Lanny being interested in buying paintings had spread, and he was invited to many homes. He found one worth buying and managed the transaction, and mansged to rent a car with a driver, and was driven to Bienvenu. Riviera was overflowing with refugees from North, and Bienvenu had more than its share, but Lanny told Beauty that he had to go back to England and U.S. soon enough, anyway, and that his father needed his help was cover enough. He arranged through Jerry Pendleton who ran a travel bureau to fly to Madrid via Cannes and Marseille, to thence take a train to Lisbon and fly onwards to London.
"To Lanny Madrid had seemed the most desolate of capitals. The Nazis, with all their crimes, were at least efficient and put up a fine show; whereas Franco was nothing but a little wholesale murderer in the cause of his medieval Church. He didn’t even know how to repair the buildings he had smashed in the course of three years of civil war, and they stood there, gaping wrecks open to the sky. The Germans, who wanted his iron ore and copper, had to come and supervise the getting of it, the only means of collecting the huge debt due them for having set the Caudillo on his throne. He had two or three million of his people in prisons and concentration camps; shootings went on night after night, and famine stalked the streets of the great metropolis. On the stairs of the subway swarms of miserable, half-starved child bandits clamored to sell you lottery tickets and filthy postcards.
"The landlords and the ecclesiastics—often the same persons—had won their war, and were prosperous and fat as always through the centuries. Lanny did not need to enter their palaces and ask questions, because he had got it all in Vichy and Cannes. He knew that Hitler had Franco’s written permission to march through Spain whenever he felt strong enough to take Gibraltar; he knew about the arrangements for Il Duce to send the bombing planes, and about the submarine refueling system from Spanish ports.
"Lisbon, which had become the spy center of Western Europe. The dictator who ruled this little country couldn’t be sure which side was going to win, and he shrewdly played each against the other and raked in the cash. In his capital was the same contrast of riches with bitter poverty; you could buy costly perfumes stolen from the shops of Paris, and you could see barefooted women carrying huge loads of farm produce upon their heads. Nowhere could you escape the sight of German “tourists” wearing golf costumes, and if you talked in any café on the swanky Avenida da Liberdade, you might discover several persons trying to overhear what you said."
Croydon had been bombed. After finally landing, they were taken to London in a bus.
" ... you could see how the fields of Southern England had trenches dug across them, and logs, carts, cast-off motor cars, and other obstructions to make trouble for planes and gliders that might drop down in the night. Lanny was astonished to see how much of such defense work had been done since his last visit; also by the number of bomb craters, even in the open fields. Homeguardsmen were active everywhere."
He called The Reaches and was told Rick was in town working at the Daily Clarion. They met at the predetermined obscure hotel and talked, Lanny telling him about everything he'd been at, since Dunkirk. Vichy was persecuting Jews and leftists at behest of the nazis. Rick spoke about situation of Britain. A considerably large quantity of equipment from tanks to guns had been lost to Germany when evacuating soldiers at Dunkirk, and defence of the island was left to what was left, and old equipment had been brought out to service.
"England for twenty miles back from the coast had been declared a military zone, and day and night labor was turning it into one vast fortification. Every beach was mined, and covered with a tangle of tightly strung barbed wire; there was hidden artillery of all sizes, and no end of pillboxes with machine guns, carefully camouflaged. There were great railway guns which could be rushed from place to place. Most important of all, the period of the Sitzkrieg had been utilized to devise and install a series of pipes extending out under the sea, connected with oil tanks and heavy pumps. In case of an invasion attempt, oil would be poured out in floods; it would rise to the surface, and there was a magnesium device to ignite it, so that the invaders would find themselves caught in an inferno of flame. And even when they came to the shore, they would find the beaches ablaze, and flamethrowers concealed behind garden hedges. Rick told about the situation he had discovered on his return from Dunkirk. Tanks, artillery, trucks, machine guns, all the costly equipment of an army of two or three hundred thousand men had been lost in Flanders; the Germans had it, and the British had only one fully equipped brigade to defend their shores; troops guarding the beaches had to be armed with shotguns, sporting rifles, even muskets out of museums. “Your President saved us,” declared the baronet’s, son. “Have you heard what he did?”
"“I didn’t see an American or British paper till I got to Lisbon.”
"“This hasn’t been published yet, that I know of. You had a million World War I rifles in your arsenals, and Roosevelt had them loaded onto fast steamers and sent over to us. They are out-of-date, but they saved us once and might have done it again. He’s been letting us buy some torpedo boats and other small stuff that your navy can spare. They are sold to private dealers who resell them to us; that’s according to your laws, it appears.”
"“It wouldn’t appear so well during an election year,” was the reply.
"“I know, I know,” said Rick. “You have about a hundred over-age destroyers, left from the last war. We need them the worst way in the world, to keep our convoys on top of the water. We’re trying our best to buy them ..."
They spoke about what if the nazi invasion of the island happened, and Rick was definite about the British spirit of determination to fight at every step. Lanny reminded him civilians couldn't fight panders and bombers, and what about the fleet?
"We’ll do another Dunkirk—put our fighting men on board every sort of ship we can get together, and the Fleet will escort them to Canada. We’ll fight from there, and come back home some day. My understanding is, we have already given that promise to Roosevelt in writing; and we’ve taken the first step by shipping every ounce of gold in the Bank of England’s vaults to New York and Montreal and other places of safety. That was quite an adventure, believe me—and it’s strictly hush-hush!”"
They exchanged news of friends and family. Rick's father, Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, was working despite his age, and Rick's younger son Rick junior was following his father and older brother alfy by joining the air force. Alfy was married to a neighbour's daughter and she was expecting. Lanny asked if he could meet Alfy to question him about the planes, which Robbie would find valuable as test in field.
Rick told him that there was news in the wind about Wickthorpe resigning due to his political stance, and lanny asked him not to report that story, since that would instantly connect Rick with Lanny, and this wouldn't go well with the image Lanny was trying to maintain as cover. Lanny visited Wickthorpe, and heard it himself from the couple after dinner. They were definite about the war being a mistake, and Wickthorpe was trying to bring about a truce. They consulted him, and he spoke about Wickthorpe influencing the government.
He saw Frances, and she was growing up, and thrilled with his visits. He had to hurry this time, though, across the Atlantic, staying at Wickthorpe only long enough to make a couple of visits to Rosemary to buy another painting. Her younger son had been evacuated at Dunkirk, and older one was a prisoner of war. Lanny had his Clipper seat arranged through his father's lawyer, and Rick called to say Alfy would be meeting him, so he went up to London.
Alfy was definitely red, unlike his pink parents; "he saw this war as a deliberate assault of the German cartels—steel, coal, power, and munitions—upon the labor movements of the rest of the world. Hitler was a puppet of these interests; they had bought him the guns, without which he would have remained a street-corner rabble-rouser. The end of the war “must be the overthrow of those giant exploiters, not merely in Germany but all over the world; otherwise it would be a “defeat in the victory,” as Lanny’s friend Herron had written after the last war—and what a prophet he had proved to be!
"Alfy explained that the Hun flyers were trying to counter the British blockade. They had their bases close to the coast of France; indeed they had them all along the coast of Europe, from Narvik in Northern Norway all the way to the Spanish border. They were trying to establish command of the Channel and block off the British ports; they were coming in flights of five hundred at a time; bombing ships and shipping, docks and harbor installations, oil depots, and everything of military value. For the most part they came at night, because their daytime losses had been too heavy. But night bombing wasn’t accurate; and now the British had a wonderful new night-fighter with a device for seeing in the dark so ultra-secret that even Alfy didn’t know what it was. He revealed also that the British had constructed great numbers of imitation air bases to fool the Germans; they were so good that the Germans were dropping more bombs on them than on the real ones; so good that the British flyers had trouble in remembering not to land on them.
"Like the century-old duel between gun and armor on battleships was the duel between safety and maneuverability on pursuit planes. Alfy pointed out that there was such a thing as having too much maneuverability; more than the human organism could make use of. If you turned at a speed of more than two hundred miles, you were pretty sure to black out, and you might not come to until you had hit the ground, or until the enemy had drilled you through. The Englishman drew an extraordinary picture of what it meant to be carrying on an air duel four or five miles above the ground, breathing from an oxygen tank, pursuing an enemy who was ducking and dodging at the terrific speeds these planes could now attain. The Hun was swerving; you almost had him in your sights, and if you could swerve a tiny fraction more you would have him; but there came, as it were, a yellowish-gray curtain before your eyes, the first warning of the blackout; you had to know exactly how far you could go toward unconsciousness, and you might have to make that decision a dozen times in the course of a prolonged duel of wits with your opponent—he facing exactly the same problem. If you straightened out, you would lose your man; also, you might discover another enemy plane on your tail, one who might get you in his sights."
Lanny told him of a new idea Robbie was working out but asked him not to speak of it, a flight suit. Alfy talked about how it was easier for Germans, and how serious for his colleagues, who were determined and serious.
"The Royal Air Force had been a volunteer organization, and the pilots were mostly of the upper class. Alfy said: “I hate to admit it, but it’s the old school tie that is doing the job, because there’s nobody else. But that won’t be true for long; we’re having to take qualified men wherever we can find them now. And that’s all to the good; if we don’t break down England’s caste system, we’ll find this war was hardly worth fighting.”"
They spoke about U.S. isolationism and Roosevelt, and party politics compulsions that turned republican politics opposite of Lincoln policies. They had dinner in a small place.
"They talked about their two families, home news which would be of no interest to enemy ears; everyone was on the alert just then, because more than fifty empty parachutes had been found in various open places in England and Scotland—which meant that enemy spies had come down during the night. These spies would undoubtedly be English-looking and English-speaking men and perhaps women, so the newspapers warned; they would be saboteurs, equipped with explosives and incendiary materials; or they would carry suitcases containing radio transmitting sets, powerful enough to reach the French coast or submarines lying close to shore."
Air raid sirens sounded as they were finishing dinner, and they went out, there were hundreds of planes in the sky, and then waves of larger ones came, bombers, which bombed some houses close. So they walked to the tube, which was crowded.
"The place was packed almost to suffocation, and the conditions were not pleasing to persons of refined sensibilities. There was public clamor for Government to “do something about it,” but Government had a lot of other things on their hands at the moment. It seemed more important to use steel for guns and ammunition than for the building of an underground city for seven million Londoners, to say nothing of the inhabitants of Portsmouth and Southampton and Sheffield and Birmingham and all the rest."
July 2, 2019
The title comes halfway through the book in a quote, "Workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a world to win!", when the German occupation of Europe is almost complete, and war by Germany against Russia is imminent and expected.
A World to Win, seventh volume in the World's End series, begins where the previous one, Dragon Harvest, had left off - Paris taken, France overrun and humiliated as the temporary finale of Germany occupying Europe- beginning with Rhineland and going on to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, low countries or Benelux as they are now called, and the final humiliation, armistice signed at the spot where WWI armistice was signed - and now, Lanny is in Vichy, talking to Pierre Laval, who heads the supposedly unoccupied France.
"“It has happened just about as I told you, M. Budd.” Lanny said it was so, and thought that the death of something like a hundred and twenty-five thousand Frenchmen, and the captivity of ten or twelve times as many, signified less to Pierre Laval than the ability to say: “C’est moi qui avait raison!”"
Laval invited Lanny home and he dined with the family that thought France had victory in saving Paris from destruction unlike Warsaw and Rotterdam; Laval ranted about Blum and Mandel whom he hated because they, unlike him, hadn't betrayed the workers who had brought them to power like he was, and he didn't believe Lanny was non political; after all, he had taken messages from Comtesse De Portes and Marshal Petain.
"And then the old Maréchal. No serpent ever slipped into its hole more silently than Pierre Laval trying to slip into the mind of Lanny Budd and find out why he wanted to see the head of the French State and what he was going to say to that venerable warrior. Lanny was all innocence; the Maréchal was a friend, Lanny’s father had known him since World War I and before that, and as salesman for Budd Gunmakers had tried to persuade him that America had a better light machine gun than France. Now the Maréchal had asked Lanny to try to bring Britain into the armistice, and Lanny had failed, and wanted to tell the old gentleman how sorry he was.
"Tactfully the host imparted the fact that when a man is eighty-four years of age his mind is not so active, he tires easily, his memory fails, and he needs guidance. The Maréchal had around him a horde of self-seekers, all trying to pull him in different directions. They played upon his pride in France and his memories of French glory; it was hard for him to face the fact that France was beaten, and that her future was in German hands, and nowhere else. “We cannot have it two ways,” declared this black serpent with a white necktie. “If we are going to be friends we have to mean it and act accordingly.” When the visitor said, “I agree with you wholeheartedly,” Pierre went on to suggest that Lanny Budd should advise his aged friend to declare war upon Britain, and to turn over to the Germans the remainder of that French Fleet which the British had just attacked with shameless treachery in the ports of North Africa."
Laval offered to pay Lanny, who said that Hitler and Göring had offered it too, and he didn't need money, and preferred to get by on his income as an art expert. Laval reminded him in crass terms that money was necessary. Lanny was driven back to Vichy next day, from Châteldon where Laval had bought the castle in the town he had been born and had grown up in, and he questioned Lanny, which Lanny didn't mind because that told Lanny what Laval thought, knew, and didn't know. Lanny came to know that Laval hated Maréchal, the venerated old soldier, and was counting weeks that the old man might live, but nazis needed Pétain, France respected the Verdun hero, nobody respected laval; so Laval had to stand it. He told Lanny Pétain was playing both sides and had to choose.
"Pétain wouldn’t let the Nazis have the French Fleet, or the air force in Africa, or the troops in Syria; he clung to these things as the last pawns in a lost game; he promised this and that, and then delayed to keep the promise, and argued over petty details in his stubborn dotard’s way, and not even the shrewd Vice-Premier could be sure whether it was stupidity or malice."
Lanny was checked into a smaller hotel, and went strolling into art galleries, before ordering a light lunch in a sidewalk cafe.
"There were several million refugees in Vichy France, and as many discharged soldiers who had no place to go and nothing to do; many had no shelter but the trees in the park, and no food but what they could beg or steal."
Lanny had received a code communication from Raoul and met him, they strolled out along the river before meeting. They talked about the situation. Lanny told him Britain would go on fighting, not give up, and the workers in France had to give priority to fighting Hitler, and forget class struggle.
"The Nazis want us to hate the British, because Britain is the last bulwark against them; and that tells us what to do. If Hitler can get the use of what is left of the French Fleet he can control the Mediterranean, and take the Suez Canal and the oil of Mesopotamia. That is where the fight is going, and where we have to help.”"
Lanny returned to town, walking alone, and went to meet Pétain. He remembered Lanny, and wanted to know about Hitler and his thinking, and Lanny had learned to respond so that he wasn't exposed but truth was there plain to see.
" When he tried to talk about the Fleet, and the infamy which the British had committed, his hands shook and he broke down, and one of his military aides had to come to the rescue. “I will never give up the Fleet, either to the British or Germans!” And then: “Go and see Darlan; he will tell you.” To the aide he added: “Take him to the Admiral.”"
Lanny had the appointment next morning and met Darlan, reminding him that he knew not only Robbie but Beauty too, and had been at Bienvenu for tea shortly after WWI. Lanny let him know Lanny knew of his Cagoulard association through the De Bruyne men.
"“There is one report which I have often wondered about, Monsieur l’Amiral: that you had planned to put those officers of the Fleet who supported the corrupt regime on board the Jean Bart and take her out to sea and sink her.”
"“I meant it, absolutely. We could have spared that old battleship, and that kennel full of Red dogs would never have been missed by my service.”"
News about Lanny being interested in buying paintings had spread, and he was invited to many homes. He found one worth buying and managed the transaction, and mansged to rent a car with a driver, and was driven to Bienvenu. Riviera was overflowing with refugees from North, and Bienvenu had more than its share, but Lanny told Beauty that he had to go back to England and U.S. soon enough, anyway, and that his father needed his help was cover enough. He arranged through Jerry Pendleton who ran a travel bureau to fly to Madrid via Cannes and Marseille, to thence take a train to Lisbon and fly onwards to London.
"To Lanny Madrid had seemed the most desolate of capitals. The Nazis, with all their crimes, were at least efficient and put up a fine show; whereas Franco was nothing but a little wholesale murderer in the cause of his medieval Church. He didn’t even know how to repair the buildings he had smashed in the course of three years of civil war, and they stood there, gaping wrecks open to the sky. The Germans, who wanted his iron ore and copper, had to come and supervise the getting of it, the only means of collecting the huge debt due them for having set the Caudillo on his throne. He had two or three million of his people in prisons and concentration camps; shootings went on night after night, and famine stalked the streets of the great metropolis. On the stairs of the subway swarms of miserable, half-starved child bandits clamored to sell you lottery tickets and filthy postcards.
"The landlords and the ecclesiastics—often the same persons—had won their war, and were prosperous and fat as always through the centuries. Lanny did not need to enter their palaces and ask questions, because he had got it all in Vichy and Cannes. He knew that Hitler had Franco’s written permission to march through Spain whenever he felt strong enough to take Gibraltar; he knew about the arrangements for Il Duce to send the bombing planes, and about the submarine refueling system from Spanish ports.
"Lisbon, which had become the spy center of Western Europe. The dictator who ruled this little country couldn’t be sure which side was going to win, and he shrewdly played each against the other and raked in the cash. In his capital was the same contrast of riches with bitter poverty; you could buy costly perfumes stolen from the shops of Paris, and you could see barefooted women carrying huge loads of farm produce upon their heads. Nowhere could you escape the sight of German “tourists” wearing golf costumes, and if you talked in any café on the swanky Avenida da Liberdade, you might discover several persons trying to overhear what you said."
Croydon had been bombed. After finally landing, they were taken to London in a bus.
" ... you could see how the fields of Southern England had trenches dug across them, and logs, carts, cast-off motor cars, and other obstructions to make trouble for planes and gliders that might drop down in the night. Lanny was astonished to see how much of such defense work had been done since his last visit; also by the number of bomb craters, even in the open fields. Homeguardsmen were active everywhere."
He called The Reaches and was told Rick was in town working at the Daily Clarion. They met at the predetermined obscure hotel and talked, Lanny telling him about everything he'd been at, since Dunkirk. Vichy was persecuting Jews and leftists at behest of the nazis. Rick spoke about situation of Britain. A considerably large quantity of equipment from tanks to guns had been lost to Germany when evacuating soldiers at Dunkirk, and defence of the island was left to what was left, and old equipment had been brought out to service.
"England for twenty miles back from the coast had been declared a military zone, and day and night labor was turning it into one vast fortification. Every beach was mined, and covered with a tangle of tightly strung barbed wire; there was hidden artillery of all sizes, and no end of pillboxes with machine guns, carefully camouflaged. There were great railway guns which could be rushed from place to place. Most important of all, the period of the Sitzkrieg had been utilized to devise and install a series of pipes extending out under the sea, connected with oil tanks and heavy pumps. In case of an invasion attempt, oil would be poured out in floods; it would rise to the surface, and there was a magnesium device to ignite it, so that the invaders would find themselves caught in an inferno of flame. And even when they came to the shore, they would find the beaches ablaze, and flamethrowers concealed behind garden hedges. Rick told about the situation he had discovered on his return from Dunkirk. Tanks, artillery, trucks, machine guns, all the costly equipment of an army of two or three hundred thousand men had been lost in Flanders; the Germans had it, and the British had only one fully equipped brigade to defend their shores; troops guarding the beaches had to be armed with shotguns, sporting rifles, even muskets out of museums. “Your President saved us,” declared the baronet’s, son. “Have you heard what he did?”
"“I didn’t see an American or British paper till I got to Lisbon.”
"“This hasn’t been published yet, that I know of. You had a million World War I rifles in your arsenals, and Roosevelt had them loaded onto fast steamers and sent over to us. They are out-of-date, but they saved us once and might have done it again. He’s been letting us buy some torpedo boats and other small stuff that your navy can spare. They are sold to private dealers who resell them to us; that’s according to your laws, it appears.”
"“It wouldn’t appear so well during an election year,” was the reply.
"“I know, I know,” said Rick. “You have about a hundred over-age destroyers, left from the last war. We need them the worst way in the world, to keep our convoys on top of the water. We’re trying our best to buy them ..."
They spoke about what if the nazi invasion of the island happened, and Rick was definite about the British spirit of determination to fight at every step. Lanny reminded him civilians couldn't fight panders and bombers, and what about the fleet?
"We’ll do another Dunkirk—put our fighting men on board every sort of ship we can get together, and the Fleet will escort them to Canada. We’ll fight from there, and come back home some day. My understanding is, we have already given that promise to Roosevelt in writing; and we’ve taken the first step by shipping every ounce of gold in the Bank of England’s vaults to New York and Montreal and other places of safety. That was quite an adventure, believe me—and it’s strictly hush-hush!”"
They exchanged news of friends and family. Rick's father, Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, was working despite his age, and Rick's younger son Rick junior was following his father and older brother alfy by joining the air force. Alfy was married to a neighbour's daughter and she was expecting. Lanny asked if he could meet Alfy to question him about the planes, which Robbie would find valuable as test in field.
Rick told him that there was news in the wind about Wickthorpe resigning due to his political stance, and lanny asked him not to report that story, since that would instantly connect Rick with Lanny, and this wouldn't go well with the image Lanny was trying to maintain as cover. Lanny visited Wickthorpe, and heard it himself from the couple after dinner. They were definite about the war being a mistake, and Wickthorpe was trying to bring about a truce. They consulted him, and he spoke about Wickthorpe influencing the government.
He saw Frances, and she was growing up, and thrilled with his visits. He had to hurry this time, though, across the Atlantic, staying at Wickthorpe only long enough to make a couple of visits to Rosemary to buy another painting. Her younger son had been evacuated at Dunkirk, and older one was a prisoner of war. Lanny had his Clipper seat arranged through his father's lawyer, and Rick called to say Alfy would be meeting him, so he went up to London.
Alfy was definitely red, unlike his pink parents; "he saw this war as a deliberate assault of the German cartels—steel, coal, power, and munitions—upon the labor movements of the rest of the world. Hitler was a puppet of these interests; they had bought him the guns, without which he would have remained a street-corner rabble-rouser. The end of the war “must be the overthrow of those giant exploiters, not merely in Germany but all over the world; otherwise it would be a “defeat in the victory,” as Lanny’s friend Herron had written after the last war—and what a prophet he had proved to be!
"Alfy explained that the Hun flyers were trying to counter the British blockade. They had their bases close to the coast of France; indeed they had them all along the coast of Europe, from Narvik in Northern Norway all the way to the Spanish border. They were trying to establish command of the Channel and block off the British ports; they were coming in flights of five hundred at a time; bombing ships and shipping, docks and harbor installations, oil depots, and everything of military value. For the most part they came at night, because their daytime losses had been too heavy. But night bombing wasn’t accurate; and now the British had a wonderful new night-fighter with a device for seeing in the dark so ultra-secret that even Alfy didn’t know what it was. He revealed also that the British had constructed great numbers of imitation air bases to fool the Germans; they were so good that the Germans were dropping more bombs on them than on the real ones; so good that the British flyers had trouble in remembering not to land on them.
"Like the century-old duel between gun and armor on battleships was the duel between safety and maneuverability on pursuit planes. Alfy pointed out that there was such a thing as having too much maneuverability; more than the human organism could make use of. If you turned at a speed of more than two hundred miles, you were pretty sure to black out, and you might not come to until you had hit the ground, or until the enemy had drilled you through. The Englishman drew an extraordinary picture of what it meant to be carrying on an air duel four or five miles above the ground, breathing from an oxygen tank, pursuing an enemy who was ducking and dodging at the terrific speeds these planes could now attain. The Hun was swerving; you almost had him in your sights, and if you could swerve a tiny fraction more you would have him; but there came, as it were, a yellowish-gray curtain before your eyes, the first warning of the blackout; you had to know exactly how far you could go toward unconsciousness, and you might have to make that decision a dozen times in the course of a prolonged duel of wits with your opponent—he facing exactly the same problem. If you straightened out, you would lose your man; also, you might discover another enemy plane on your tail, one who might get you in his sights."
Lanny told him of a new idea Robbie was working out but asked him not to speak of it, a flight suit. Alfy talked about how it was easier for Germans, and how serious for his colleagues, who were determined and serious.
"The Royal Air Force had been a volunteer organization, and the pilots were mostly of the upper class. Alfy said: “I hate to admit it, but it’s the old school tie that is doing the job, because there’s nobody else. But that won’t be true for long; we’re having to take qualified men wherever we can find them now. And that’s all to the good; if we don’t break down England’s caste system, we’ll find this war was hardly worth fighting.”"
They spoke about U.S. isolationism and Roosevelt, and party politics compulsions that turned republican politics opposite of Lincoln policies. They had dinner in a small place.
"They talked about their two families, home news which would be of no interest to enemy ears; everyone was on the alert just then, because more than fifty empty parachutes had been found in various open places in England and Scotland—which meant that enemy spies had come down during the night. These spies would undoubtedly be English-looking and English-speaking men and perhaps women, so the newspapers warned; they would be saboteurs, equipped with explosives and incendiary materials; or they would carry suitcases containing radio transmitting sets, powerful enough to reach the French coast or submarines lying close to shore."
Air raid sirens sounded as they were finishing dinner, and they went out, there were hundreds of planes in the sky, and then waves of larger ones came, bombers, which bombed some houses close. So they walked to the tube, which was crowded.
"The place was packed almost to suffocation, and the conditions were not pleasing to persons of refined sensibilities. There was public clamor for Government to “do something about it,” but Government had a lot of other things on their hands at the moment. It seemed more important to use steel for guns and ammunition than for the building of an underground city for seven million Londoners, to say nothing of the inhabitants of Portsmouth and Southampton and Sheffield and Birmingham and all the rest.
A World to Win, seventh volume in the World's End series, begins where the previous one, Dragon Harvest, had left off - Paris taken, France overrun and humiliated as the temporary finale of Germany occupying Europe- beginning with Rhineland and going on to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, low countries or Benelux as they are now called, and the final humiliation, armistice signed at the spot where WWI armistice was signed - and now, Lanny is in Vichy, talking to Pierre Laval, who heads the supposedly unoccupied France.
"“It has happened just about as I told you, M. Budd.” Lanny said it was so, and thought that the death of something like a hundred and twenty-five thousand Frenchmen, and the captivity of ten or twelve times as many, signified less to Pierre Laval than the ability to say: “C’est moi qui avait raison!”"
Laval invited Lanny home and he dined with the family that thought France had victory in saving Paris from destruction unlike Warsaw and Rotterdam; Laval ranted about Blum and Mandel whom he hated because they, unlike him, hadn't betrayed the workers who had brought them to power like he was, and he didn't believe Lanny was non political; after all, he had taken messages from Comtesse De Portes and Marshal Petain.
"And then the old Maréchal. No serpent ever slipped into its hole more silently than Pierre Laval trying to slip into the mind of Lanny Budd and find out why he wanted to see the head of the French State and what he was going to say to that venerable warrior. Lanny was all innocence; the Maréchal was a friend, Lanny’s father had known him since World War I and before that, and as salesman for Budd Gunmakers had tried to persuade him that America had a better light machine gun than France. Now the Maréchal had asked Lanny to try to bring Britain into the armistice, and Lanny had failed, and wanted to tell the old gentleman how sorry he was.
"Tactfully the host imparted the fact that when a man is eighty-four years of age his mind is not so active, he tires easily, his memory fails, and he needs guidance. The Maréchal had around him a horde of self-seekers, all trying to pull him in different directions. They played upon his pride in France and his memories of French glory; it was hard for him to face the fact that France was beaten, and that her future was in German hands, and nowhere else. “We cannot have it two ways,” declared this black serpent with a white necktie. “If we are going to be friends we have to mean it and act accordingly.” When the visitor said, “I agree with you wholeheartedly,” Pierre went on to suggest that Lanny Budd should advise his aged friend to declare war upon Britain, and to turn over to the Germans the remainder of that French Fleet which the British had just attacked with shameless treachery in the ports of North Africa."
Laval offered to pay Lanny, who said that Hitler and Göring had offered it too, and he didn't need money, and preferred to get by on his income as an art expert. Laval reminded him in crass terms that money was necessary. Lanny was driven back to Vichy next day, from Châteldon where Laval had bought the castle in the town he had been born and had grown up in, and he questioned Lanny, which Lanny didn't mind because that told Lanny what Laval thought, knew, and didn't know. Lanny came to know that Laval hated Maréchal, the venerated old soldier, and was counting weeks that the old man might live, but nazis needed Pétain, France respected the Verdun hero, nobody respected laval; so Laval had to stand it. He told Lanny Pétain was playing both sides and had to choose.
"Pétain wouldn’t let the Nazis have the French Fleet, or the air force in Africa, or the troops in Syria; he clung to these things as the last pawns in a lost game; he promised this and that, and then delayed to keep the promise, and argued over petty details in his stubborn dotard’s way, and not even the shrewd Vice-Premier could be sure whether it was stupidity or malice."
Lanny was checked into a smaller hotel, and went strolling into art galleries, before ordering a light lunch in a sidewalk cafe.
"There were several million refugees in Vichy France, and as many discharged soldiers who had no place to go and nothing to do; many had no shelter but the trees in the park, and no food but what they could beg or steal."
Lanny had received a code communication from Raoul and met him, they strolled out along the river before meeting. They talked about the situation. Lanny told him Britain would go on fighting, not give up, and the workers in France had to give priority to fighting Hitler, and forget class struggle.
"The Nazis want us to hate the British, because Britain is the last bulwark against them; and that tells us what to do. If Hitler can get the use of what is left of the French Fleet he can control the Mediterranean, and take the Suez Canal and the oil of Mesopotamia. That is where the fight is going, and where we have to help.”"
Lanny returned to town, walking alone, and went to meet Pétain. He remembered Lanny, and wanted to know about Hitler and his thinking, and Lanny had learned to respond so that he wasn't exposed but truth was there plain to see.
" When he tried to talk about the Fleet, and the infamy which the British had committed, his hands shook and he broke down, and one of his military aides had to come to the rescue. “I will never give up the Fleet, either to the British or Germans!” And then: “Go and see Darlan; he will tell you.” To the aide he added: “Take him to the Admiral.”"
Lanny had the appointment next morning and met Darlan, reminding him that he knew not only Robbie but Beauty too, and had been at Bienvenu for tea shortly after WWI. Lanny let him know Lanny knew of his Cagoulard association through the De Bruyne men.
"“There is one report which I have often wondered about, Monsieur l’Amiral: that you had planned to put those officers of the Fleet who supported the corrupt regime on board the Jean Bart and take her out to sea and sink her.”
"“I meant it, absolutely. We could have spared that old battleship, and that kennel full of Red dogs would never have been missed by my service.”"
News about Lanny being interested in buying paintings had spread, and he was invited to many homes. He found one worth buying and managed the transaction, and mansged to rent a car with a driver, and was driven to Bienvenu. Riviera was overflowing with refugees from North, and Bienvenu had more than its share, but Lanny told Beauty that he had to go back to England and U.S. soon enough, anyway, and that his father needed his help was cover enough. He arranged through Jerry Pendleton who ran a travel bureau to fly to Madrid via Cannes and Marseille, to thence take a train to Lisbon and fly onwards to London.
"To Lanny Madrid had seemed the most desolate of capitals. The Nazis, with all their crimes, were at least efficient and put up a fine show; whereas Franco was nothing but a little wholesale murderer in the cause of his medieval Church. He didn’t even know how to repair the buildings he had smashed in the course of three years of civil war, and they stood there, gaping wrecks open to the sky. The Germans, who wanted his iron ore and copper, had to come and supervise the getting of it, the only means of collecting the huge debt due them for having set the Caudillo on his throne. He had two or three million of his people in prisons and concentration camps; shootings went on night after night, and famine stalked the streets of the great metropolis. On the stairs of the subway swarms of miserable, half-starved child bandits clamored to sell you lottery tickets and filthy postcards.
"The landlords and the ecclesiastics—often the same persons—had won their war, and were prosperous and fat as always through the centuries. Lanny did not need to enter their palaces and ask questions, because he had got it all in Vichy and Cannes. He knew that Hitler had Franco’s written permission to march through Spain whenever he felt strong enough to take Gibraltar; he knew about the arrangements for Il Duce to send the bombing planes, and about the submarine refueling system from Spanish ports.
"Lisbon, which had become the spy center of Western Europe. The dictator who ruled this little country couldn’t be sure which side was going to win, and he shrewdly played each against the other and raked in the cash. In his capital was the same contrast of riches with bitter poverty; you could buy costly perfumes stolen from the shops of Paris, and you could see barefooted women carrying huge loads of farm produce upon their heads. Nowhere could you escape the sight of German “tourists” wearing golf costumes, and if you talked in any café on the swanky Avenida da Liberdade, you might discover several persons trying to overhear what you said."
Croydon had been bombed. After finally landing, they were taken to London in a bus.
" ... you could see how the fields of Southern England had trenches dug across them, and logs, carts, cast-off motor cars, and other obstructions to make trouble for planes and gliders that might drop down in the night. Lanny was astonished to see how much of such defense work had been done since his last visit; also by the number of bomb craters, even in the open fields. Homeguardsmen were active everywhere."
He called The Reaches and was told Rick was in town working at the Daily Clarion. They met at the predetermined obscure hotel and talked, Lanny telling him about everything he'd been at, since Dunkirk. Vichy was persecuting Jews and leftists at behest of the nazis. Rick spoke about situation of Britain. A considerably large quantity of equipment from tanks to guns had been lost to Germany when evacuating soldiers at Dunkirk, and defence of the island was left to what was left, and old equipment had been brought out to service.
"England for twenty miles back from the coast had been declared a military zone, and day and night labor was turning it into one vast fortification. Every beach was mined, and covered with a tangle of tightly strung barbed wire; there was hidden artillery of all sizes, and no end of pillboxes with machine guns, carefully camouflaged. There were great railway guns which could be rushed from place to place. Most important of all, the period of the Sitzkrieg had been utilized to devise and install a series of pipes extending out under the sea, connected with oil tanks and heavy pumps. In case of an invasion attempt, oil would be poured out in floods; it would rise to the surface, and there was a magnesium device to ignite it, so that the invaders would find themselves caught in an inferno of flame. And even when they came to the shore, they would find the beaches ablaze, and flamethrowers concealed behind garden hedges. Rick told about the situation he had discovered on his return from Dunkirk. Tanks, artillery, trucks, machine guns, all the costly equipment of an army of two or three hundred thousand men had been lost in Flanders; the Germans had it, and the British had only one fully equipped brigade to defend their shores; troops guarding the beaches had to be armed with shotguns, sporting rifles, even muskets out of museums. “Your President saved us,” declared the baronet’s, son. “Have you heard what he did?”
"“I didn’t see an American or British paper till I got to Lisbon.”
"“This hasn’t been published yet, that I know of. You had a million World War I rifles in your arsenals, and Roosevelt had them loaded onto fast steamers and sent over to us. They are out-of-date, but they saved us once and might have done it again. He’s been letting us buy some torpedo boats and other small stuff that your navy can spare. They are sold to private dealers who resell them to us; that’s according to your laws, it appears.”
"“It wouldn’t appear so well during an election year,” was the reply.
"“I know, I know,” said Rick. “You have about a hundred over-age destroyers, left from the last war. We need them the worst way in the world, to keep our convoys on top of the water. We’re trying our best to buy them ..."
They spoke about what if the nazi invasion of the island happened, and Rick was definite about the British spirit of determination to fight at every step. Lanny reminded him civilians couldn't fight panders and bombers, and what about the fleet?
"We’ll do another Dunkirk—put our fighting men on board every sort of ship we can get together, and the Fleet will escort them to Canada. We’ll fight from there, and come back home some day. My understanding is, we have already given that promise to Roosevelt in writing; and we’ve taken the first step by shipping every ounce of gold in the Bank of England’s vaults to New York and Montreal and other places of safety. That was quite an adventure, believe me—and it’s strictly hush-hush!”"
They exchanged news of friends and family. Rick's father, Sir Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, was working despite his age, and Rick's younger son Rick junior was following his father and older brother alfy by joining the air force. Alfy was married to a neighbour's daughter and she was expecting. Lanny asked if he could meet Alfy to question him about the planes, which Robbie would find valuable as test in field.
Rick told him that there was news in the wind about Wickthorpe resigning due to his political stance, and lanny asked him not to report that story, since that would instantly connect Rick with Lanny, and this wouldn't go well with the image Lanny was trying to maintain as cover. Lanny visited Wickthorpe, and heard it himself from the couple after dinner. They were definite about the war being a mistake, and Wickthorpe was trying to bring about a truce. They consulted him, and he spoke about Wickthorpe influencing the government.
He saw Frances, and she was growing up, and thrilled with his visits. He had to hurry this time, though, across the Atlantic, staying at Wickthorpe only long enough to make a couple of visits to Rosemary to buy another painting. Her younger son had been evacuated at Dunkirk, and older one was a prisoner of war. Lanny had his Clipper seat arranged through his father's lawyer, and Rick called to say Alfy would be meeting him, so he went up to London.
Alfy was definitely red, unlike his pink parents; "he saw this war as a deliberate assault of the German cartels—steel, coal, power, and munitions—upon the labor movements of the rest of the world. Hitler was a puppet of these interests; they had bought him the guns, without which he would have remained a street-corner rabble-rouser. The end of the war “must be the overthrow of those giant exploiters, not merely in Germany but all over the world; otherwise it would be a “defeat in the victory,” as Lanny’s friend Herron had written after the last war—and what a prophet he had proved to be!
"Alfy explained that the Hun flyers were trying to counter the British blockade. They had their bases close to the coast of France; indeed they had them all along the coast of Europe, from Narvik in Northern Norway all the way to the Spanish border. They were trying to establish command of the Channel and block off the British ports; they were coming in flights of five hundred at a time; bombing ships and shipping, docks and harbor installations, oil depots, and everything of military value. For the most part they came at night, because their daytime losses had been too heavy. But night bombing wasn’t accurate; and now the British had a wonderful new night-fighter with a device for seeing in the dark so ultra-secret that even Alfy didn’t know what it was. He revealed also that the British had constructed great numbers of imitation air bases to fool the Germans; they were so good that the Germans were dropping more bombs on them than on the real ones; so good that the British flyers had trouble in remembering not to land on them.
"Like the century-old duel between gun and armor on battleships was the duel between safety and maneuverability on pursuit planes. Alfy pointed out that there was such a thing as having too much maneuverability; more than the human organism could make use of. If you turned at a speed of more than two hundred miles, you were pretty sure to black out, and you might not come to until you had hit the ground, or until the enemy had drilled you through. The Englishman drew an extraordinary picture of what it meant to be carrying on an air duel four or five miles above the ground, breathing from an oxygen tank, pursuing an enemy who was ducking and dodging at the terrific speeds these planes could now attain. The Hun was swerving; you almost had him in your sights, and if you could swerve a tiny fraction more you would have him; but there came, as it were, a yellowish-gray curtain before your eyes, the first warning of the blackout; you had to know exactly how far you could go toward unconsciousness, and you might have to make that decision a dozen times in the course of a prolonged duel of wits with your opponent—he facing exactly the same problem. If you straightened out, you would lose your man; also, you might discover another enemy plane on your tail, one who might get you in his sights."
Lanny told him of a new idea Robbie was working out but asked him not to speak of it, a flight suit. Alfy talked about how it was easier for Germans, and how serious for his colleagues, who were determined and serious.
"The Royal Air Force had been a volunteer organization, and the pilots were mostly of the upper class. Alfy said: “I hate to admit it, but it’s the old school tie that is doing the job, because there’s nobody else. But that won’t be true for long; we’re having to take qualified men wherever we can find them now. And that’s all to the good; if we don’t break down England’s caste system, we’ll find this war was hardly worth fighting.”"
They spoke about U.S. isolationism and Roosevelt, and party politics compulsions that turned republican politics opposite of Lincoln policies. They had dinner in a small place.
"They talked about their two families, home news which would be of no interest to enemy ears; everyone was on the alert just then, because more than fifty empty parachutes had been found in various open places in England and Scotland—which meant that enemy spies had come down during the night. These spies would undoubtedly be English-looking and English-speaking men and perhaps women, so the newspapers warned; they would be saboteurs, equipped with explosives and incendiary materials; or they would carry suitcases containing radio transmitting sets, powerful enough to reach the French coast or submarines lying close to shore."
Air raid sirens sounded as they were finishing dinner, and they went out, there were hundreds of planes in the sky, and then waves of larger ones came, bombers, which bombed some houses close. So they walked to the tube, which was crowded.
"The place was packed almost to suffocation, and the conditions were not pleasing to persons of refined sensibilities. There was public clamor for Government to “do something about it,” but Government had a lot of other things on their hands at the moment. It seemed more important to use steel for guns and ammunition than for the building of an underground city for seven million Londoners, to say nothing of the inhabitants of Portsmouth and Southampton and Sheffield and Birmingham and all the rest.
July 20, 2020
The Lanny Budd series was written between 1940 and 1953. A World to Win (Book 7) was released in 1946. The embers of the World War 2 were still hot and people were reflecting back on whom to blame for the carnage. In his Lanny Budd series, Upton Sinclair does not shy away from naming real people who he considered Nazi and Fascist sympathizers.
Upton Sinclair’s unflattering portrayal of William Randolph Hearst as a dotard and a Nazi and Fascist sympathizer surprised me; not that it wasn’t true, but because Hearst was still alive and his family still had significant media, political, and social influence. In real life, Hearst and Upton Sinclair had a personal relationship which turned into bad blood between them that pre-dated World War 2. Nevertheless, I am surprised that his publisher, his agent, or any book sellers were willing to face the wrath of the Hearst family for what Upton Sinclair had written about the patriarch of the family.
I continue to marvel at Upton Sinclair’s storytelling ability and the never ending twists and turns in the life of Lanny Budd. The vast number of different historical figures that he encounters and how Upton Sinclair is able to weave them into the story is impressive, e.g., Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Soon Ching-ling (wife of Sun Yat-sen), Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), Stalin.
One of the historical figures that has been prominent throughout most of the series is Rudolf Hess. Hess’s flight to Scotland in 1941 is something that never made sense to me. Although A World to Win is a historical fiction, it gives a a very plausible account as to how and why Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland. It was a cloak-and-dagger mission cooked up by British Intelligence that worked to perfection. I still can’t believe Rudolf Hess was that gullible.
A World to Win is a novel that expands the entire world. From an auto road trip across the USA; a pleasure yacht journey across the South Pacific to Hong Kong; to an arduous journey across China; to a rickety plane ride from China to Outer Mongolia; and across the Soviet Union to Moscow.
Upton Sinclair’s embrace of the virtues of socialism and communism must have also put immense political pressure on him and his publisher during the post-war McCarthyism and the Red Scare witch hunts. Many of the concerns and conflicts that Upton Sinclair (as Lanny Budd) predicted between communism and capitalism comes to reality with the Korean War during the final year release of the Lanny Budd series.
Upton Sinclair’s unflattering portrayal of William Randolph Hearst as a dotard and a Nazi and Fascist sympathizer surprised me; not that it wasn’t true, but because Hearst was still alive and his family still had significant media, political, and social influence. In real life, Hearst and Upton Sinclair had a personal relationship which turned into bad blood between them that pre-dated World War 2. Nevertheless, I am surprised that his publisher, his agent, or any book sellers were willing to face the wrath of the Hearst family for what Upton Sinclair had written about the patriarch of the family.
I continue to marvel at Upton Sinclair’s storytelling ability and the never ending twists and turns in the life of Lanny Budd. The vast number of different historical figures that he encounters and how Upton Sinclair is able to weave them into the story is impressive, e.g., Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Soon Ching-ling (wife of Sun Yat-sen), Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), Stalin.
One of the historical figures that has been prominent throughout most of the series is Rudolf Hess. Hess’s flight to Scotland in 1941 is something that never made sense to me. Although A World to Win is a historical fiction, it gives a a very plausible account as to how and why Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland. It was a cloak-and-dagger mission cooked up by British Intelligence that worked to perfection. I still can’t believe Rudolf Hess was that gullible.
A World to Win is a novel that expands the entire world. From an auto road trip across the USA; a pleasure yacht journey across the South Pacific to Hong Kong; to an arduous journey across China; to a rickety plane ride from China to Outer Mongolia; and across the Soviet Union to Moscow.
Upton Sinclair’s embrace of the virtues of socialism and communism must have also put immense political pressure on him and his publisher during the post-war McCarthyism and the Red Scare witch hunts. Many of the concerns and conflicts that Upton Sinclair (as Lanny Budd) predicted between communism and capitalism comes to reality with the Korean War during the final year release of the Lanny Budd series.
December 15, 2021
So in this series, first book published in 1940 - written maybe just as Germany was invading Poland - this book was published in 1946 so likely written and postured in a victorious post conflict situation.
So it seems that Sinclair is taking more liberties in what FDR or other might have said, FDR having died already,- and he, Sinclair, is exposing his socialist sentiments and dedications. I don't want to put spoilers in here but the presentations and judgments of the Chinese and Russians is so leaning towards the uplifting sharing of socialism are a bit over the top (to me in 2021) - and I would also say that the forward in the following book enhances this view of Sinclair.
In the meanwhile I have to maintain that I have read a biography of Sinclair and it seems he had a photographic memory and has put together so many details - the World to Win takes place in the last quarter of 1941 and first half of 1942 so he had a lot of reference materials by 1944-5 when he wrote and published it.
The series is worth reading, for me, the chapters continue to be short and easily digestible and conducive to a daily diet. I am on the 8th of 11 books and I have been with Lanny Budd, the main character, every day for about seven or eight months now and when it is over I may miss the fellow - unless his socialistic promotions get out of hand.
The first three books, especially based upon when they were written are very good and the third book of the series won the Pulitzer Prize - maybe due to the appropriate truthful message of that year.
So it seems that Sinclair is taking more liberties in what FDR or other might have said, FDR having died already,- and he, Sinclair, is exposing his socialist sentiments and dedications. I don't want to put spoilers in here but the presentations and judgments of the Chinese and Russians is so leaning towards the uplifting sharing of socialism are a bit over the top (to me in 2021) - and I would also say that the forward in the following book enhances this view of Sinclair.
In the meanwhile I have to maintain that I have read a biography of Sinclair and it seems he had a photographic memory and has put together so many details - the World to Win takes place in the last quarter of 1941 and first half of 1942 so he had a lot of reference materials by 1944-5 when he wrote and published it.
The series is worth reading, for me, the chapters continue to be short and easily digestible and conducive to a daily diet. I am on the 8th of 11 books and I have been with Lanny Budd, the main character, every day for about seven or eight months now and when it is over I may miss the fellow - unless his socialistic promotions get out of hand.
The first three books, especially based upon when they were written are very good and the third book of the series won the Pulitzer Prize - maybe due to the appropriate truthful message of that year.
March 27, 2020
Sinclair’s historical spy yarns in The Lanny Budd series have our debonair socialite moving only in the highest circles. In A World To Win, set in 1940 to 1942, Lanny takes his orders from FDR and navigates Vichy France, infiltrates Germany and the appeasers in England, and has vivid encounters with Hitler, Goring and Hess, William Randolph Hearst, and even Albert Einstein. Hindered by skeptical French resistance and a life-threatening plane crash, Lanny convalesces on a yacht that moors in Hong Kong on the eve of Pearl Harbor, and he needs Mao’s help to escape China and make a date with Stalin to get Uncle Joe’s report on war with the Nazis and his reflections on the Soviet system. Escapist, sure, but the prose deftly gives character voices a contemporaneous vibe in exploring prevailing attitudes of the times: French pragmatic fatalism concerning Nazi occupation; to appease or not appease in England; the isolationist debate in U.S.; and the German view that the Brits should stand down because the Nazis are willing to take care of the red menace for the betterment of all of Europe and the West. I have Pulitzer Prize-winning Dragon’s Teeth from the series, and will add it to the list one day.
Was this review helpful? I am an avid world war based fiction reader and author. You can read more of my takes at https://brodiecurtis.com/curtis-takes/.
Was this review helpful? I am an avid world war based fiction reader and author. You can read more of my takes at https://brodiecurtis.com/curtis-takes/.
May 2, 2018
The weakest of the Lanny Budd series so far. Lanny travels the world, does spy stuff, goes into danger, meets famous people, and romances lovely women. But somehow, Sinclair managed to make it boring. (I don't know if I will continue with this series. Several of the earlier volumes were quite good, and Dragon's Teeth was excellent. So ... maybe.)
November 30, 2022
Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong
America has entered WWII, Russia becomrs an ally against Japan. Lanny Budd contines to be part of history. And we readers are given an amazingly detailed understanding of events.
America has entered WWII, Russia becomrs an ally against Japan. Lanny Budd contines to be part of history. And we readers are given an amazingly detailed understanding of events.
February 20, 2021
Amazing. So much interesting history.
May 6, 2025
One of my favourites so far. The whole series is absolutely compelling. The parallels with today's political scenario are fascinating and scary.
October 17, 2017
Summary: Presidential Agent 103, in the guise of an art dealer, embarks on a series of journeys, planned and unplanned, in which he gathers significant intelligence for the Allied cause in its fight against Nazism.
Most of us know Upton Sinclair as the author of The Jungle, an expose’ of conditions in Chicago meat packing plants at the beginning of the twentieth century. I was unaware that he was author of the Lanny Budd series of eleven novels, named after the primary character, the son of an American arms dealer, a gentleman of tact and insight who moves among the major figures of the first half of the twentieth century, and eventually becomes Presidential Agent 103, using the cover of a fine art dealer to travel into occupied France and Germany to gather intelligence against the Nazis critical to the allied threat. The third book in the series, Dragon’s Teeth won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Novel. The series went out of print for years only to recently be resurrected by Open Road Media.
Some of you may remember The Winds of War by Herman Wouk. The main character of that book “Pug” Henry was also an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and met with a number of world leaders. Reading A World to Win, I couldn’t help but wonder if Wouk had drawn his inspiration, consciously or not, from this work, published 25 years earlier. In the course of this novel, Budd meets with Marshal Petain, Hermann Goering, Rudolph Hess, Adolph Hitler, alludes to meetings with Churchill, hobnobs with William Randolph Hearst, is entertained by the widow of Sun Yat-sen, meets Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), and finally, at the end of the novel, Joseph Stalin.
After each of his forays, including a kidnapping by underground forces who suspected him of Nazi ties when he was actually on their side, escapes from Luftwaffe bombings, and other perils including a near fatal plane crash, he has late evening meetings in the bedroom of Franklin Roosevelt where P. A. 103 is debriefed. During one of these, he even gives Roosevelt the words, “the arsenal of democracy,” that Roosevelt used in one of his famous speeches! This incident underscores Budd’s singular ability to endear himself to whoever he is with, even those he inwardly despises, like Hitler, and keep them persuaded that he is nothing other than a disinterested art dealer.
At the same time, Budd’s endearing qualities draw him into affairs of the heart with two women. Lizbeth is the young daughter of a Baltimore industrialist, beautiful but incapable of anything beyond conventional conversation on conventional subjects. Laurel Creston, her cousin is a socialist-leaning anti-Nazi journalist who Lanny helped escape from the Gestapo, and easily his intellectual equal. While on his “missions” for the president, he refuses to consider either, given his dangerous lifestyle. But when “furloughed” after the plane crash, which also destroyed his “cover,” he finds himself in a different place.
Things get even more interesting when Lanny gets invited on a cruise to Hong Kong (where a psychic had predicted Lanny would die) by Lizbeth’s father. Laurel also manages an invitation, leading to an interesting predicament. Who he ends up with, how they escape the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, and how they end up meeting Mao and Stalin, I will leave you to discover.
One detects in the book Sinclair’s life and interests–Baltimore where he grew up, interests in psychics and spiritualism, and socialist leanings, which characterize Laurel, and in a more chastened form, Lanny himself, despite his loyalty to Roosevelt and to his arms manufacturer father.
While the idea stretches credulity that Budd could somehow manage to meet all these great personages in one novel, and end up traveling around the world, the journey is rip-roaring good fun. The closest this seemed to me to get to a plot was the recurring allusions to Budd’s death in Hong Kong, fantastic at best, until Hong Kong becomes a cruise destination and we realize that his arrival date coincides with the attack on Pearl Harbor and Japan’s invasion. At the same time, there are seasons of reading when one does not particularly care as long as the book keeps your attention.
I should say that I started this series with this book which is number seven, which happened to be available at a discount in e-book form. It was definitely good enough that I want to go back and read the series from the beginning. If that sounds interesting to you, Open Road has a page showing all eleven novels in their proper sequence, and other Sinclair works, with links to purchase them in different e-formats.
Most of us know Upton Sinclair as the author of The Jungle, an expose’ of conditions in Chicago meat packing plants at the beginning of the twentieth century. I was unaware that he was author of the Lanny Budd series of eleven novels, named after the primary character, the son of an American arms dealer, a gentleman of tact and insight who moves among the major figures of the first half of the twentieth century, and eventually becomes Presidential Agent 103, using the cover of a fine art dealer to travel into occupied France and Germany to gather intelligence against the Nazis critical to the allied threat. The third book in the series, Dragon’s Teeth won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Novel. The series went out of print for years only to recently be resurrected by Open Road Media.
Some of you may remember The Winds of War by Herman Wouk. The main character of that book “Pug” Henry was also an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and met with a number of world leaders. Reading A World to Win, I couldn’t help but wonder if Wouk had drawn his inspiration, consciously or not, from this work, published 25 years earlier. In the course of this novel, Budd meets with Marshal Petain, Hermann Goering, Rudolph Hess, Adolph Hitler, alludes to meetings with Churchill, hobnobs with William Randolph Hearst, is entertained by the widow of Sun Yat-sen, meets Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), and finally, at the end of the novel, Joseph Stalin.
After each of his forays, including a kidnapping by underground forces who suspected him of Nazi ties when he was actually on their side, escapes from Luftwaffe bombings, and other perils including a near fatal plane crash, he has late evening meetings in the bedroom of Franklin Roosevelt where P. A. 103 is debriefed. During one of these, he even gives Roosevelt the words, “the arsenal of democracy,” that Roosevelt used in one of his famous speeches! This incident underscores Budd’s singular ability to endear himself to whoever he is with, even those he inwardly despises, like Hitler, and keep them persuaded that he is nothing other than a disinterested art dealer.
At the same time, Budd’s endearing qualities draw him into affairs of the heart with two women. Lizbeth is the young daughter of a Baltimore industrialist, beautiful but incapable of anything beyond conventional conversation on conventional subjects. Laurel Creston, her cousin is a socialist-leaning anti-Nazi journalist who Lanny helped escape from the Gestapo, and easily his intellectual equal. While on his “missions” for the president, he refuses to consider either, given his dangerous lifestyle. But when “furloughed” after the plane crash, which also destroyed his “cover,” he finds himself in a different place.
Things get even more interesting when Lanny gets invited on a cruise to Hong Kong (where a psychic had predicted Lanny would die) by Lizbeth’s father. Laurel also manages an invitation, leading to an interesting predicament. Who he ends up with, how they escape the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, and how they end up meeting Mao and Stalin, I will leave you to discover.
One detects in the book Sinclair’s life and interests–Baltimore where he grew up, interests in psychics and spiritualism, and socialist leanings, which characterize Laurel, and in a more chastened form, Lanny himself, despite his loyalty to Roosevelt and to his arms manufacturer father.
While the idea stretches credulity that Budd could somehow manage to meet all these great personages in one novel, and end up traveling around the world, the journey is rip-roaring good fun. The closest this seemed to me to get to a plot was the recurring allusions to Budd’s death in Hong Kong, fantastic at best, until Hong Kong becomes a cruise destination and we realize that his arrival date coincides with the attack on Pearl Harbor and Japan’s invasion. At the same time, there are seasons of reading when one does not particularly care as long as the book keeps your attention.
I should say that I started this series with this book which is number seven, which happened to be available at a discount in e-book form. It was definitely good enough that I want to go back and read the series from the beginning. If that sounds interesting to you, Open Road has a page showing all eleven novels in their proper sequence, and other Sinclair works, with links to purchase them in different e-formats.
October 29, 2019
As with the other Lanny Buds novels, I really wanted to like this more than I did. The series is such an effective and clever construct, planting a young Lanny along the edges of pivotal early 20th century events, his character weaving through social, military, and most interestingly political movements and figures, giving us a rich and detailed inner view through the lens of a well to do socialist.
Sinclair moves very slowly and in great detail, giving events and ideologies their proper due, which also reveals a realistic and natural pacing between the events, giving us a glimpse and feel which is lost in history books. The perspective of conservatives and traditionalists across the globe doing all they could to stop Bolshevism, even when it meant siding with Fascists, may have been exaggerated but nevertheless was very interesting to me. Many historical events which I learned at a high level fall much more logically into place.
But...some of the characters, especially the women, are so painfully and insultingly hollow, and maybe most annoying at least to this modern reader, Lanny is absolutely flawless.
It’s worth charging through this, however—the feel you get for these events is worth it.
Sinclair moves very slowly and in great detail, giving events and ideologies their proper due, which also reveals a realistic and natural pacing between the events, giving us a glimpse and feel which is lost in history books. The perspective of conservatives and traditionalists across the globe doing all they could to stop Bolshevism, even when it meant siding with Fascists, may have been exaggerated but nevertheless was very interesting to me. Many historical events which I learned at a high level fall much more logically into place.
But...some of the characters, especially the women, are so painfully and insultingly hollow, and maybe most annoying at least to this modern reader, Lanny is absolutely flawless.
It’s worth charging through this, however—the feel you get for these events is worth it.
March 11, 2025
This novel masquerades as an espionage thriller. Underneath the plot Sinclair delivers a scathing critique of the motives and behavior of politicians, nation states, and industrial behemoths in World War Two. As a dedicated socialist, well-to-do art dealer Lanny Budd leans on his family’s aristocratic and industrial ties to spy on Nazis and fascists, but the situations this lands him in play havoc with his credibility and conscience.
I enjoyed great swaths of this book, but Sinclair had a tendency to lay on the sentimentality of socialism with a trowel, at times sounding sexist and racist, despite his best intentions. I tried to read the prose as the voice of the characters, but that wasn’t always possible. It came off as somewhat anodyne and even artificial at times.
Having stated that, I had a lot of fun with sinckair’s fictional renderings of real historical figures like Stalin, mao, and Eleanor Roosevelt. I don’t think Sinclair really understood women well, but he does evince keen insight into human psychology at large.
I enjoyed great swaths of this book, but Sinclair had a tendency to lay on the sentimentality of socialism with a trowel, at times sounding sexist and racist, despite his best intentions. I tried to read the prose as the voice of the characters, but that wasn’t always possible. It came off as somewhat anodyne and even artificial at times.
Having stated that, I had a lot of fun with sinckair’s fictional renderings of real historical figures like Stalin, mao, and Eleanor Roosevelt. I don’t think Sinclair really understood women well, but he does evince keen insight into human psychology at large.
March 18, 2018
This was published in 1946 and set in 1940-42, so so close to contemporaneously. As always Sinclair’s device of using Lanny as an eyewitness to history totally sucked me in as he (and I, vicariously) meet the movers and shakers—F.D.R., Marshall Petain, Mao Tse-Tung, Joseph Stalin, to name a few. As world events grind inexorably closer to the abyss, then careen over it following Pearl Harbor, it is hard not to cross fingers and hope that, magically, this time the carnage to come is avoided.
December 29, 2020
I don't often write reviews and I'm a pretty easy grader but man, this book was terrible. Budd's (and seemingly Sinclair's) blind love of socialism is annoying - its like reading propaganda. Budd's seemingly random love of seances feels out of place.
On the positive, the historical descriptions are interesting and enlightening though we learn them through a flat, robot like character in Lanny Budd.
The pace at times moves slow and its hard discern what the plot is besides one agent moving through a war.
It got worse as it went along but I was too many pages in to quit.
On the positive, the historical descriptions are interesting and enlightening though we learn them through a flat, robot like character in Lanny Budd.
The pace at times moves slow and its hard discern what the plot is besides one agent moving through a war.
It got worse as it went along but I was too many pages in to quit.
February 23, 2025
Another very good entry in the series though the tone of this one is subtly different as it was published after the end of WWII and the tone of knowing what will happen runs through this book where it didn't in the previous novels. In those stories, when the outcome of the war was still unknown, there was a disquiet that imparted a sense of dread and concern that all might not end well. That is now missing, but the story was still strong and interesting. A very good read. Recommended.
August 16, 2025
This is the seventh in an eleven book series. For a Lanny Budd novel, this was short, at fewer than 700 pages. Despite the ridiculousness of the protagonist meeting FDR, Einstein, Chairman Mao, and Stalin, this is one of the more entertaining of the series.
September 29, 2017
Fiction
November 19, 2018
3 1/4 stars
Read
February 12, 2021Thoroughly enjoyed this book. A historical fiction that is steeped in facts and information. A series of 11 books, I am now starting with book 1.
September 1, 2024
i was hoping time would go a little quicker with this one..
glad to travel through china.. with lanny.
and! he got married again. :)
glad to travel through china.. with lanny.
and! he got married again. :)
November 3, 2024
A magnificent series
Read every book, you will not regret it
Read every book, you will not regret it
December 3, 2025
gora antifaxismoa
January 12, 2026
It's fun to immerse yourself in Lanny Budd's world for a bit.
July 24, 2025
Book 7 of the Lanny Bud series is as good as the previous 6, adding complexity and depth to a fascinating character and historical timeline. The parallels to world politics then shares a troubling similarity to current politics. Sinclair is a fabulous writer creating an amazing family storyline that facilitates his interfacing with multiple world leaders. His characters and events are all highly believable.
July 26, 2011
A World to Win is the seventh book of the epic historical narrative in Upton Sinclair’s World’s End Lanny Budd series. This spellbinding book covers the period or 1940-1942 following the Nazi partial occupation of France and the formation of the Vichy government.
Lanny Budd, the protagonist in this classic series is the debonair, suave and wealthy American peace lover. He is intimately connected to every powerful political and military figure on the European continent and the corridors of power in the United States. As a renowned art expert as his camouflage, he is secretly Presidential Agent 103 for President Roosevelt.
The story opens with Lanny meeting with the French leaders, politically and militarily, following the German occupation of Paris. He flies to London and meets with his closest friend Rick, a left wing journalist, and finds himself in the middle of the horrendous bombing of London by the German Luftwaffe. Winston Churchill is now the undisputed leader of the British Empire and determined to defeat the Nazi’s, after years of appeasement by the ruling aristocrats and politicians in Britain.
Lanny is “in the loop” as Rudolph Hess is tricked by British intelligence services into descending into Scotland in a misguided attempt to prevent an all out German-British war.
Lanny is captured by French underground patriots who believe he is a Nazi agent and has a harrowing escape. Ironically, he is attempting to give money to this very underground resistance movement when he is captured. By itself this part of the story is compelling and clearly illustrates Lanny’s cleverness, ingenuity and persuasiveness in the face of grave personal danger.
In his most dangerous mission as a presidential agent, Lanny is briefed on the development of the Atomic Bomb project headed by Albert Einstein himself. On his mission to Germany to ferret out German advancements in developing the bomb, Lanny’s plane crashes in the arctic waters off the coast of Newfoundland and he is severely injured. A long recuperation follows.
A fabulous around the world cruise follows Lanny’s long hospitalization. The cruise aboard the yacht Oriole is owned by a wealthy Baltimore man who wants Lanny to marry his daughter Lizbeth. Lizbeth, her father and Lanny are startled to learn at the last minute before the yacht sails that her cousin, Laurel Creston will be joining the cruise. The reader will remember Laurel as the anti-Nazi journalist whom Lanny ingeniously help to escape the Gestapo in Dragon’s Harvest.
On December 7, 1941 the Oriole is anchored off the coast of Hong Kong as the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. As I mentioned in my review of Dragon’s Harvest, you the reader were going to meet the future Mrs. Lanny Budd. Read how the astrological warning by a Rumanian living in Germany predicted several years earlier that Lanny would die in Hong Kong almost comes about. It almost comes true but Lanny and Laurel narrowly escape a besieged Hong Kong with a laborious journey through China, war-torn Yenan to find themselves guests of Stalin in friendly Russia. This book concludes with a lengthy interview between Stalin and Lanny.
Here is history coming to life. Follow all of the characters that make for Lanny’s extended families. From Beauty Budd and her wonderful husband, Parsifal Dingle, Robbie Budd, Rick and Nina, Rosemary, Irma and “Ceddy” and the rest of the rich cast of wonderful characters we have grown to love from the very beginning with World’s End.
A World to Win captures that period in world’s history that is must reading. No one can describe the times like Upton Sinclair has done with these classics. The best is yet to come with Presidential Agent, Presidential Mission, One Clear Call, O’ Shepherd Speak! and The Return of Lanny Budd.
Please visit our website at: www.uptonsinclairinstitute.com. You may read reviews of all 11 books in the series and learn much much more about Upton's life and works. You can purchase the books at a savings up to 30% off the retail price and receive free shipping. You may also contact the publisher, Frederick Ellis at frederick659@yahoo.com, or me at jsc12109@hotmail.com.
Stephen Courts
July 26, 2011
Columbus, Ohio
Lanny Budd, the protagonist in this classic series is the debonair, suave and wealthy American peace lover. He is intimately connected to every powerful political and military figure on the European continent and the corridors of power in the United States. As a renowned art expert as his camouflage, he is secretly Presidential Agent 103 for President Roosevelt.
The story opens with Lanny meeting with the French leaders, politically and militarily, following the German occupation of Paris. He flies to London and meets with his closest friend Rick, a left wing journalist, and finds himself in the middle of the horrendous bombing of London by the German Luftwaffe. Winston Churchill is now the undisputed leader of the British Empire and determined to defeat the Nazi’s, after years of appeasement by the ruling aristocrats and politicians in Britain.
Lanny is “in the loop” as Rudolph Hess is tricked by British intelligence services into descending into Scotland in a misguided attempt to prevent an all out German-British war.
Lanny is captured by French underground patriots who believe he is a Nazi agent and has a harrowing escape. Ironically, he is attempting to give money to this very underground resistance movement when he is captured. By itself this part of the story is compelling and clearly illustrates Lanny’s cleverness, ingenuity and persuasiveness in the face of grave personal danger.
In his most dangerous mission as a presidential agent, Lanny is briefed on the development of the Atomic Bomb project headed by Albert Einstein himself. On his mission to Germany to ferret out German advancements in developing the bomb, Lanny’s plane crashes in the arctic waters off the coast of Newfoundland and he is severely injured. A long recuperation follows.
A fabulous around the world cruise follows Lanny’s long hospitalization. The cruise aboard the yacht Oriole is owned by a wealthy Baltimore man who wants Lanny to marry his daughter Lizbeth. Lizbeth, her father and Lanny are startled to learn at the last minute before the yacht sails that her cousin, Laurel Creston will be joining the cruise. The reader will remember Laurel as the anti-Nazi journalist whom Lanny ingeniously help to escape the Gestapo in Dragon’s Harvest.
On December 7, 1941 the Oriole is anchored off the coast of Hong Kong as the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. As I mentioned in my review of Dragon’s Harvest, you the reader were going to meet the future Mrs. Lanny Budd. Read how the astrological warning by a Rumanian living in Germany predicted several years earlier that Lanny would die in Hong Kong almost comes about. It almost comes true but Lanny and Laurel narrowly escape a besieged Hong Kong with a laborious journey through China, war-torn Yenan to find themselves guests of Stalin in friendly Russia. This book concludes with a lengthy interview between Stalin and Lanny.
Here is history coming to life. Follow all of the characters that make for Lanny’s extended families. From Beauty Budd and her wonderful husband, Parsifal Dingle, Robbie Budd, Rick and Nina, Rosemary, Irma and “Ceddy” and the rest of the rich cast of wonderful characters we have grown to love from the very beginning with World’s End.
A World to Win captures that period in world’s history that is must reading. No one can describe the times like Upton Sinclair has done with these classics. The best is yet to come with Presidential Agent, Presidential Mission, One Clear Call, O’ Shepherd Speak! and The Return of Lanny Budd.
Please visit our website at: www.uptonsinclairinstitute.com. You may read reviews of all 11 books in the series and learn much much more about Upton's life and works. You can purchase the books at a savings up to 30% off the retail price and receive free shipping. You may also contact the publisher, Frederick Ellis at frederick659@yahoo.com, or me at jsc12109@hotmail.com.
Stephen Courts
July 26, 2011
Columbus, Ohio
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