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Summary
Summary
"Masterly. . . . A triumph of vivid description, telling anecdotes, and informed analysis."
--The New York Review of Books
"Britain's finest contemporary military historian."
-- The Economist
An epic joint biography of four titanic figures--a President, a Prime Minister, and two Generals--who shaped the grand strategy of the Allies during World War II.
Author Notes
Andrew Roberts was born on January 13, 1963 in Hammersmith, England. He studied at Gonville and Caius College and earned his B.A. degree in Modern History in 1985. He began his post-graduate career in corporate finance as an investment banker and private company director with the London merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co. He published his first historical book in 1991.
He went on to become a public commentator appearing in several periodicals such as The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. Roberts himself is best known for his 2009 non-fiction work The Storm of War A look at the Second World War covering historical factors such as Hitler's rise to power and the organisation of Nazi Germany, the book received the British Army Military Book of the Year Award for 2010. In 2018 his work, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, made the Bestseller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Roberts offers an outstanding example of a joint biography in this study of the actions and interactions of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, George Marshall and Alan Brooke. The president, the prime minister and their respective army chiefs of staff were the vital nexus of the Anglo-American alliance in WWII. The path was anything but smooth. London-based historian Roberts (A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900) demonstrates his usual mastery of archival and printed sources to show how the tensions and differences among these four strong-willed men shaped policy within a general context of consensus. The politicians had to master strategy; the soldiers had to become political. The result was "a complicated minuet." The increasing shift of power in America's direction coincided with the achievement of the central war aims agreed on for the Mediterranean and with the viability of a cross-channel attack. Last-minute compromises continued to shape grand strategy, a good example being the choice of Dwight Eisenhower over Brooke to command Operation Overlord. Flexibility and honesty, Roberts concludes, enabled focus on a common purpose and established the matrix of the postwar Atlantic world. 16 pages of b&w photos, 7 maps. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
As the post-war battle of the memoirs revealed, the World War II Anglo-American alliance wasn't one of unbroken harmony. Its acrimony over grand strategy bursts forth in this history of the four men responsible for final decisions: FDR, Churchill, and their top military advisors, George Marshall and Alan Brooke, respectively. Both to humanize the pressure on figures now memorialized in bronze and to serve as Clio's arbiter of impassioned disagreements over the optimal strategy to defeat Nazi Germany, Roberts examines how arguments played out amongst the quartet and those in their orbit. Suspicious that the British weren't dedicated to launching a cross-channel attack, the Americans had no appreciation, felt the British, for the risk of a premature D-Day. Assessing the strategic correctness of what ensued the campaigns in North Africa and Italy, followed by Operation Overlord Roberts splits the difference by validating both Mediterranean operations up to fall 1943 and American resistance to them thereafter. Roberts reinforces his reputation for high-quality military history with this comprehensive synthesis of primary sources about the fundamental strategic decisions of WWII.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ANDREW ROBERTS is one of those prolific and popular historians that Britain seems to produce in almost as great an abundance as the plastic poppies that are worn on Remembrance Day (Veterans Day to us Yanks). Since his first book came out in 1991 - a biography of Lord Halifax, the British foreign minister in the late 1930s - he has written nine others and edited four more. That works out to one volume every 16 months. You might expect that this Stakhanovian pace would endanger the quality of the finished product. Yet to judge by "Masters and Commanders," that's not the case. Given the amount of research that has gone into this book, you would hardly know it's been little more than two years since the appearance of his last one, "A History of the English-speaking Peoples Since 1900." In his preface, Roberts emphasizes the fact that he has made extensive use of documents that were "previously quoted from only on the Internet." This is a reference to the "verbatim notes" of British war cabinet meetings prepared by Lawrence Burgis, known as "Thrushy," the assistant secretary of the cabinet office. "There were strict rules against officials keeping diaries," Roberts notes, but Burgis did so anyway in violation of the Official Secrets Act. He wasn't alone. Just about everyone involved in high-level negotiations somehow found time to write an account of what transpired, and Roberts appears to have digested all of their notes, diaries and memoirs. While there are no big revelations here, Roberts succeeds in deepening our understanding of the complex interactions between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt (the "masters" of the title) and their senior military advisers (or "commanders"), Field Marshal Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Gen. George C. Marshall, the United States Army chief of staff who was primus inter pares on the Joint Chiefs. Although everyone involved later boasted of how harmoniously they had worked together - and on the whole they did - there were plenty of rough patches. At the end of one particularly rancorous session with his American counterparts, Brooke wrote in his diary, "Another poisonous day!" Clockwise from top left: Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Brooke. One of the longest-running and most contentious disputes concerned when and where to open a second front in Western Europe. Marshall and his protégé, Dwight Eisenhower, argued for an invasion in 1942 or 1943 because they believed that the West was the only place where Germany could be defeated. Churchill and Brooke, who had developed a healthy respect for the fighting prowess of the Germans in World War I and the early years of World War II, wanted to postpone a Channel crossing until the enemy had been softened up. They won Roosevelt over to their cause. He, alone of the four men, admitted he was an "amateur strategist," but as a professional politician he calculated that the American people would not tolerate indefinite inaction. So along with Churchill he pushed for an American-led landing in North Africa in 1942 over the initial opposition of both Marshall and Brooke, who viewed it as a sideshow. After Rommel's Afrika Korps had been defeated in May 1943, the question was where to strike next. Once again Churchill and Brooke argued against an invasion of France, and once again they got their way with Roosevelt's blessing. British and American forces landed first in Sicily, then on the Italian mainland. These operations drove Marshall to distraction because he feared they would lead to a morass similar to Gallipoli in 1915, another operation that Churchill had championed. "I was furious when he tried to push us further into the Mediterranean," the normally placid general later recalled. In a rare use of profanity, he told the prime minister that "not one American soldier is going to die on that goddamned island" thereby scotching a proposal to invade Rhodes. Marshall finally got his way in 1944 when, with Churchill's reluctant acquiescence, the decision was made to launch Operation Overlord. Marshall did not, however, get his wish to lead the D-Day landings, because Roosevelt deemed him too valuable in Washington. Brooke was equally disappointed not to be chosen, but the job was slated to go to an American. Like Marshall, he bore his acute disappointment with, in Churchill's words, "soldierly dignity," at least in public. In private Brooke seethed over this "blow," made worse because the prime minister had previously promised him the job. As Roberts points out, the Normandy landings would probably have failed if they had taken place earlier in the war, as Marshall had desired. The seasoning that American troops received in North Africa was critical to their ultimate success. It also helped that many German divisions were tied down in Italy. But, Roberts argues, the Italian offensive became counterproductive once the Allies proceeded beyond Rome, which contributed little to Germany's ultimate defeat. It is to Roberts's credit that he realizes neither Americans nor Britons had a monopoly on military wisdom. Too many writers, then and now, are wont to champion their own nation's strategists. Brooke, for one, dismissed all who disagreed with him as simpletons. Of Marshall, he wrote in his diary, "A big man and a very great gentleman, who inspired trust, but did not impress me by the ability of his brain." Such sniping was a reflection of Brooke's acerbic personality. A subordinate called him "ruthless, decisive, shorttempered to the point of rudeness, remote." He met his match in the American chief of naval operations, Adm. Ernest J. King, a hard-drinking Anglophobe who was described by a British officer as "tactless, petty and parochial; and a hot-tempered and rigid disciplinarian." At one meeting, a participant recalled, "King almost climbed over the table at Brooke. God he was mad." The clashes between the two men might have seriously damaged Allied unity were it not for the interceding influence of the war's unsung hero, Field Marshall John Dill, the senior British military representative in Washington. Noted for his "sincerity, modesty, frankness, integrity and self-discipline," Dill developed a close friendship with Marshall and played a vital role in smoothing out trans-Atlantic disagreements. After he died in November 1944, Anglo-American interactions became notably testier. But by then the war was well on its way to being won. THE ultimate triumph in the West had much to do, Roberts writes, with the Combined Joint Chiefs of Staff system that was set up in 1942 over Brooke's objections. This structure allowed British and American military planners to coordinate their efforts. Issues that could not be resolved at the staff level were kicked upstairs, which gave Marshall and Brooke an incentive to reach agreement on their own. A united front of senior officers could usually block ill-considered ideas like Churchill's enthusiasm for invading Norway. This provided the Allies a crucial advantage over Nazi Germany, where most of Hitler's mad schemes were implemented without military professionals being able to exercise much of a restraining influence. Committee work may not be terribly glamorous, but "Masters and Commanders" shows that it can be vitally important, and also surprisingly entertaining. Max Boot, the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author, most recently, of "War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today."
Kirkus Review
A richly detailed examination of the military and civilian leaders of Britain and America during World War II. Just before Franklin Roosevelt's death in April 1945, when Nazi Germany had all but collapsed, U.S. military commander George C. Marshall wrote, "Our greatest triumph really lies in the fact that we achieved the impossible, Allied military unity of action." Schooled in the wars of the 19th century and the trenches of WWI, Marshall shared military background but little else with his British counterpart, Alan Brooke. In 1942, the American newcomers to the European theater found that, even after defeats nearly every time British forces met German ones on the ground, the British general staff was not inclined to have former colonials in command. Fantastic rows ensued as both the British and the American armies aligned command structures closely enough to cooperate in battle. It cost the British leadership considerable effort to convince American counterparts that the war in North Africa was not a sideshow, while the Americans believed that the British were "viscerally opposed to any cross-Channel operation ever taking place," all the way up to D-Day and the Normandy landings. Even very late in the war, Roberts (A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, 2007, etc.) notes, those leaders sharply disagreed on matters of both strategy and tactics. Yet amazingly, Marshall, Churchill, Roosevelt and Brooke developed an effective partnership in the West. Historians disinclined to the Great Man school of historical writing may object to the notion, but clearly powerful personalities and no small degree of luck were involved. Roberts's narrative sometimes reads like an exercise in game theory, with each player trying to secure maximum advantage without ending the game or, worse, losing all. His book will be of value to students not just of military history, but also diplomacy, business and other endeavors requiring negotiation. Excellent and essential. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
One might well ask why the world needs yet another rehash on the leaders of the great crusades of World War II in Europe, but much-published historian Roberts (A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900) has identified a previously untapped source of inside information on how the four controlling personalities of the Anglo-British Alliance managed a vast and disparate campaign: Lawrence Burgis. Burgis was present at War Cabinet meetings in both World Wars and kept voluminous notes and a diary. To do so was strictly illegal, but the results are a mother lode for historians today. Burgis and a couple of other clandestine diarists provide much of the texture in Roberts's narrative of the relationships among the four principals: Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall, and Alanbrooke. Although not a book calculated to change anyone's mind about the course or outcome of the war, this is a well-told story, with fresh insights into the decision-making processes and the influence of personality upon great events. For all readers of military history.-Edwin B. Burgess, U.S. Army Combined Arms Research Lib., Fort Leavenworth, KA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| List of Illustrations | p. ix |
| List of Maps | p. xiii |
| Acknowledgements | p. xxix |
| Preface | p. xxxiii |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| Part I Enchantment | |
| 1 First Encounters: 1880-June 1940 | p. 9 |
| 2 Collecting Allies: June 1940-December 1941 | p. 41 |
| 3 Egos in Arcadia: December 1941-February 1942 | p. 66 |
| 4 Brooke and Marshall Establish Dominance: February-March 1942 | p. 102 |
| 5 Gymnast Falls, Bolero Retuned: February-April 1942 | p. 116 |
| Part II Engagement | |
| 6 Marshall's Mission to London: April 1942 | p. 137 |
| 7 The Commanders at Argonaut: April-June 1942 | p. 167 |
| 8 The Masters at Argonaut: June 1942 | p. 197 |
| 9 Torch Reignited: July 1942 | p. 219 |
| 10 The Most Perilous Moment of the War: July-November 1942 | p. 260 |
| 11 The Mediterranean Garden Path: November 1942-January 1943 | p. 295 |
| 12 The Casablanca Conference: January 1943 | p. 316 |
| 13 The Hard Underbelly of Europe: January-June 1943 | p. 346 |
| 14 The Overlordship of Overlord: June-August 1943 | p. 381 |
| Part III Estrangement | |
| 15 From the St Lawrence to the Pyramids: August-November 1943 | p. 401 |
| 16 Eureka! at Teheran: November-December 1943 | p. 429 |
| 17 Anzio, Anvil and Culverin: December 1943-May 1944 | p. 455 |
| 18 D-Day and Dragoon: May-August 1944 | p. 485 |
| 19 Octagon and Tolstoy: August-December 1944 | p. 509 |
| 20 Autumn Mist: December 1944-February 1945 | p. 533 |
| 21 Yalta Requiem: February-May 1945 | p. 548 |
| Conclusion: The Riddles of the War | p. 573 |
| Appendix A The Major Wartime Conferences | p. 585 |
| Appendix B Glossary of Codenames | p. 586 |
| Appendix C The Selection of Codenames | p. 588 |
| Notes | p. 589 |
| Bibliography | p. 615 |
| Index | p. 625 |
