I've been reading Andrew Roberts' Masters and Commanders--about World War II leadership--with interest and profit but not always with pleasure. The story revolves around the Roosevelt and Churchill and their war partnership, and even more the roles played by their military right hands--George C. Marshall in the case of Roosevelt, and in the case of Churchill, the somewhat confusingly named Alan Brooke, First Viscount Alanbrooke. The four worked intimately together from before Pearl Harbor until after V-E day, and you have to give them this: they won the war. The distressing part is the sheer humanity of it all: here we have four fully socialized adults, rich in experience of the world, under the highest degree of motivation to cooperate. Cooperate they did in a way, but with what wrangling! On so many occasions, it sounds like nothing more edifying than a four-way divorce.
Some of the issues were clearly substantive: from early on, the Americans were pressing for a cross-channel invasion, such as t last came to pass in 1944. Early on, the Brits thought the cross-channel idea was premature, and on this they were surely right: on all the evidence it appears likely that a percipitous invasion, before the troops and equipment were massed, could have been pushed back into the sea.
But the Brits also favored what Roberts characterizes (with perhaps too much charity) a Sun Tzu strategy of hitting the enemy indirectly in, e.g., Norway or Italy or elsewhere. It's easy enough to see the virtues of the Sun Tzu strategy as a provisional or improvisational mesure, before the time was right for the channel invasion. But the Brits seem to have held on to (in particular) the Italy campaign long after the time when the channel invasion was possible: if there are good reasons for this view, Roberts does not make them obvious.
Beyond mere substance, the dragon at the picnic was the matter of sheer power. Going into the war the Brits clearly saw themselves as, first of all, the more aggrieved, and, further, the more exprienced, the more civilized--the natural leader in every way. As time passed, the balance of forces changed and at some point--perhaps early 1944--the Brits woke up to the fact that they were the junior partner and there wasn't much they could do about it.
And finally, there is the matter of sheer personality. Churchill we can reccognize as the man we know from his public face, although many readers will be impressed to read just how petulant, fitful and impulsive he could be. Marshall comes across ass Americans remember him--a rock of steadiness and good manners. But he may have been (as Alanbrooke at least once observed) a bit full of himself. And it may also be true (again Alanbrooke) that he had no real feel for military strategy. Alanbrooke himself is familiar from his diaries, published some years ago. He's ambitious (he desperately wanted the D-day command); he is irascible (though how anybody could work for Churchill over so many months and not be irascible is surely a puzzle). He betrays a streak of British insularity. He made some poor judgments, misled by his ambition, his iraascibility and his insularity; still he comes across as probably the most all-around competent at military leadership of the four. The human shortcomings, such as they were, of all these three, are in no way assuaged by the petulant vanities of some of the lesser players--particularly Field Marshal Bernard Montogmery --"Monty" on the British side, and the titanically ill-tempered Admiral Ernest King on the American.
The leaves Roosevelt who,remarkably, in this account, comes across as least visible of the four. That may be because he died just as the war ended and so never got a chance to tell his own story. Yet it remains unclear exactly what Roosevelt wants at critical juncturs in this book. Clearly he wanted to win; yet on so many of the issues that divided the other participants, he seems a shadowy presence. Roberts treats him as if he were the big winner of the four; maybe, but it may be that he simply had a good knack for figuring out which way the tide was running and stepping out in front to lead it on.
Indeed, one overall lesson from Roberts' account is the relatively secondary role of Churchill and Roosevelt (about whom we remember so much) compared to those of Marshall and Alanbrooke (who are, whatever their virtues, less memorable in the public mind). Churchill and Roosevelt were the public face of the war. Yet day in and day out, it was Marshall and Alanbrooke who struggled and contended with the enemy--and at times with each other. But from the readers' standpoint, the apparent imbalance is a side issue. The fact remaains that it was the four of them who, yoked together as not always easy or willing cooperators conceived and executed the strategy that won the war.
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