Robert L. Messer

Using recently declassified documents, Messer traces Byrnes's performance from the Yalta Conference through the postwar dealings with the Soviet Union. He sees the failure of the Soviet-American collaboration to continue into the postwar years as the result of several unrelated events--the struggle between Byrnes and Truman to become Roosevelt's successor in 1944, Roosevelt's use of Byrnes as his Yalta salesman, and Byrnes's distorted view of the...

Details the heroic evacuation of Allied troops from the beach at Dunkirk by both British naval ships and civilian craft in June 1940, despite heavy German bombardment.