Author guest post from John Harte.

John Harte’s new book called Churchill’s Enemies 1927-1940 was published at the end of May 2025. It will be distributed in the United States and Canada in August. It is the third of his books to be published so far by Pen & Sword Military in the UK. His previous two books with them include a true espionage story surrounding the development of the first atomic bomb. It is called The Race For the Atom Bomb: How Soviet Russia Stole the Plans of the Manhattan Project. The other is the prequel of Churchill’s Enemies, entitled Churchill’s Challenges 1918-1927.

Since Harte was born in 1925 – midway between two World Wars – he had the dubious advantage of experiencing most of what he writes about at firsthand. He grew up in London during World War 2, and observed the Battle of Britain from a rooftop, He experienced the bombing of London and the arrival of the VI and V2 pilotless aircraft and rocket projectiles. Churchill’s Enemies is his fifth book about Winston Churchill. Whereas Churchill’s Challenges describes the first two of his monumental challenges when he was Secretary of State for the Colonies, Churchill’s Enemies describes his third, which would turn out to be the biggest challenge of his life. They were Communist, fascist, and Islamist fanatics who were determined to behave cruelly and irrationally in order to destroy democracy and replace it with barbaric authoritarian rule. Today we need to be reminded that Islam means total obedience to tyrants.

It was unfortunate that, when The Race for the Atom Bomb was published in 2023, a blockbuster film about Robert Oppenheimer – who managed the Manhattan Project – was released at the same time. It led some potential readers to believe it was a book-of-the-film. That is not the case. Whereas the film focused on Oppenheimer’s trial by the Atomic Energy Commission as a possible security risk, John Harte’s book very largely focuses on espionage. Stalin sent the KGB’s star spymaster and her star secret agent to Los Alamos in New Mexico, to find out how to make an atomic bomb by stealing the physicist’s plans of how to make a Russian bomb ahead of Nazi Germany and the Allies. At the core of Harte’s book is the extraordinary Kitty Harris, a KGB spy with more than a dozen code names that led America’s FBI and the CIA, and Britain’s MI5 into innumerable dead-ends, while the real Kathrine Harrison fell in love with Oppenheimer and married him.

Churchill’s Challenges 1918-1927 was published by Pen & Sword in May 2024. It describes his experiences when appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies by Prime Minister Lloyd George, after the German-led Turkish Empire was defeated by the Allies in 1918. The leadership vacuum in the Middle East had to be effectively filled before the Turks had an opportunity to return, or the Red Army descended on Mesopotamia from the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War in 1917-1923. It was not Churchill’s first experience of Islamist fanatics. Nor did he want the job. But he had no choice. That book focuses largely on his leadership of a team of Arabists in replanning the Middle East and enthroning two descendants of the prophet – in Iraq and Jordan. It also describes how he kept the new ideology of Communism from spreading over Soviet borders into the British Isles.

By that time, news of anarchy in postwar Germany was emerging when Churchill was out of office in a government reshuffle. That is the main focus of Churchill’s Enemies 1927-1940. It describes the rise of the fascist dictators in Europe; Benito Mussolini in Italy, the discontented rebel called Adolf Hitler in Germany, and General Franco in Spain. As well as examining German society at the time, and the Nazi death cult, it throws light on today’s swing to the political far-right for the same reasons – an attempt to quell the chaos caused by too much liberalism. As Israel’s National Security expert Dan Schueftan would claim on March 26, 2025, “Too much Liberalism is the enemy of Liberalism. Too much Nationalism is the enemy of Nationalism.”

Joh Harte was originally an investigative journalist specializing in Fascism and Communism, as well as Apartheid in South Africa. He wrote for three leading newspapers in the UK and two in South Africa, before concentrating on writing books about modern history. The aim of all of his books is to discover the foundations in the past for the crisis that is occurring today.

Order books by John Harte here.