Very talented journalists and editors like Max Hastings, who are also very opinionated hip-shooters, unless restrained, can have a baneful influence on public opinion. There were countervailing forces at the Daily Telegraph; who will absolve the BBC when it finally desecrates the memory of Lord Reith and acknowledges a few of its chronic errors?

To give Max Hastings full credit, he has launched a parallel movement as a historian. His book Winston's War was the beginning of the abandonment of the wobbling battlements of British historians who had held that Churchill, Brooke and others were conducting a strategy tutorial for naive Americans through most of World War II. This theory started with Arthur Bryant, who began the war praising Hitler's "Cromwellian qualities" in his Unfinished Victory (i.e. Hitler's unfinished victory over, inter alia, Britain) and ended the war as chief myth-maker, from the Brooke diaries, of the giveaway of eastern Europe to Stalin by Roosevelt.

Max played a seminal role in reorienting the conventional British historical wisdom away from this fraud and debunked the unsustainable British attachment to a Mediterranean strategy and the nonsense of an attack up the "armpit" of the Adriatic and through the (non-existent) Ljubljana Gap to take Vienna (while Stalin took all Germany and crossed the Rhine). 

Roosevelt correctly foresaw that once the Western Allies crossed the Rhine, the Germans would fight to the last woman and child in the east but surrender compulsively in the west. He was not afraid of another bloodbath in northern France and Flanders, as he was sure that unlimited quantities of American tanks and aircraft could prevent that, and he was opposed to any demarcation of occupation zones in Germany, because he thought the West could take almost all of Germany. He was correct, and the zones agreed by the European Advisory Commission were adopted by the British and Russians over American objections.

It was Churchill who assigned Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to Stalin on the "naughty piece of paper" in Moscow in October 1944, over Roosevelt's objections (though the Red Army was taking over those countries anyway), and Yalta promised democracy and independence for Poland and all of eastern Europe. The Western Allies achieved all they wanted at Yalta and if it had been a bad agreement for them, Stalin would not have violated every clause of it. The durability of the Yalta myth has been a scandal.