Carla V.YES indeed.

It was Wednesday July 6, 1976; I had completed work on the first edition of Hitler’s
War, which The Viking
Press (New York) were to publish in 1977; Ullstein Verlag had just published it in Germany in May as Hitler und seine Feldherren, their chief executive Wolf Jobst
Siedler having concealed from me that they had made sweeping alterations to my text (and opinions) without informing me.

I had had no alternative but to order all sales of the book stopped immediately. I was already working on my new biography, Churchill’s
War, and was to spend a few days working in the Hoover Library at Stanford
University, a few miles from Charles Burdick’s
forest cabin. He was an unforgettable “shirtsleeves” historian of the old mould: incorruptible, straight as a die, and good at his craft as well.

As for the young
Italian girl: that was Carla Venchiarutti, one of the most beautiful and gifted women I had ever met or employed; she laboured as my assistant from 1975 to the end of the decade. That week in San Francisco was also memorable for Barber Shop quartets. It was an annual competition, apparently, and those quartets were everywhere: every elevator at the Hilton opened to reveal such a quartet in mid-rehearsal.

Carla told me she even ran into three quartets rehearsing on the ferry-ride out to Alcatraz. — I published an obituary of Burdick in Action
Report No. 14.

Carla
Venchiarutti, of Udine

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