D-Day: What did you Do in the War, Grandpa?

Yes, I was there.  Well, no, not on Normandy Beach, but I do remember coming down the stairs to breakfast on the morning of June 6, 1944,  and hearing the radio news and saying "is it today?"  Yes, it is today.  I breathed a huge sigh of relief: I had long since computed the number of days* to my 17th  birthday and expressed the prayerful expectation that they would get this nuisance over with before then or I would have to go, and I would die (on the last point, I had no doubt).  So I heartily endorsed General Eisenhower's decision to smack 'em good.

I followed the newspapers thereafter and shared the general dismay when it turned out to be far harder than I had supposed it would be.  I learned about places I had never heard of (Aachan?)  Who spells a word with three a's?).** By the time the Battle of the Bulge rolled around--well, I suppose Ike wasn't too happy about it either. 

---
*3,180, with put me square into the Korean War.  But here, I had some of the best luck of my life.  Young men could "test out" of that one by getting high grades on the exam.   I guess you had to be 18 before you had to take the test: in the fall of my 17th year I remember watching my elders troop into the big open assembly hall for their moment of truth (or error, as the case may be).   By 
then, of course, we had the Eisenhower detente.   In any event, they must have suspended the test before they ever got to me.

Careful observers will be able to anticipate that I got lucky on the other end, also: by the time Viet Nam rolled around, I was too old to be of much interest to anybody.  I did have to serve a brief spell as a reserve trainee but that was more or less of  lark, of no earthly use to anybody.

**Wichita, who claims to have lived there, says my memory is faulty:  it's "Aachen," with only two As.  Very likely, but three is what I remember and two is more than enough.  And see also this.

I Can't Quite Figure Out David Gilmour

David Gilmour is the author of one of my favorite short biographies (of Giuseppe di Lampadusa, author of The  Leopard) and of several other books that I've read with pleasure and profit.   Right now I'm finishing up his In Search of Italy and I can't quite figure out what to make of it.

On the surface, it looks like it might be a yawn: a 10-peaks-in-10-weeks slog through a lot of long-forgotten dates and names.  It does start a bit slowly--about the Romans he doesn't have a lot to add but then the competition is pretty stiff. It is in the Renaissance that he really hits his stride.  Yes, there are a lot of names and dates, but this is definitely not just predigested Wiki: rather, he shows an extraordinary knack for for the crisp and lethal insight about people and correspondingly about entire social movements.  He is particularly good on the late 19th Century: his is one of the most helpful brief accounts I ever saw of the Cavour/Garibaldi revolution, giving full display to its essential fraudulence and self-delusion.  Which is not to say that his tone is particularly savage: indeed his very restraint is enough to make his account all the more telling.

And here's the puzzle.  A book like this usually begins with an account of how much the author loves his subject--at one point I had the impression that Gilmour actually lived in Italy though I now think I am mistaken.  Yet it's odd to see how someone who really loves the country could tell the story with which measured detachment--neither lost in his own enthusiasm, not choked in bitterness.  What we have instead is some marvelous story telling set against a background of almost glacial reserve.

By way of a taste, here is Gilmour's account of "the partisans," famed in song and story, who fought so valiantly (as we are told) against the retreating Germans in World War II.   You can find their memory kept green "in Verona’s Piazza Brà, beside the great Roman amphitheater," in the statue of "a young fighter of the Resistance, handsome and fearless, a rifle slung over his shoulder and an inscription with the words, ‘To those who died for Liberty’."  Gilmour elaborates:

After the armistice in 1943 Italians joined the Resistance for a variety of motives. Some were anti-fascists who wanted to defeat fascism, some were patriots who wanted to expel invaders, and more were communists who aimed for both of these things and a political revolution as well. Many , however, simply drifted into it because they were on the run from German and fascist forces. Although they were unskilled in open combat, the partisans proved to be effective in guerrilla warfare: they blew up bridges and killed fascist officials, they helped liberate the cities of the north from the German occupation, they punctured the credibility of Salò and they signalled the redemption of Italy. For some twenty months they fought courageously, and about 40,000 of them were killed. Yet there were never very many of them, perhaps 9,000 at the end of 1943, some 80,000 at the end of 1944, and about 100,000 by March 1945, when victory was certain. 1 Comparable numbers had volunteered to fight for the Republic of Salò even though most of them must have known that defeat was inevitable . The Resistance was thus not the nation in arms: it was about one-third of 1 per cent of it in arms, roughly the same proportion that had volunteered to fight the Austrians in 1848.

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 5833-5842). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

Roosevelt v de Gaulle: What Was FDR Thinking?

The rest of you puzzle over Putin, I'm still trying to figure out de Gaulle.  No, not de Gaulle, but his "allies," in this case the President of the United States.  You remember FDR, the one in the wheelchair, with the cigarette holder and the benign (if icy) smile.

Here's the thing:  de Gaulle had one overvaulting purpose which was to preserve the identity of an independent French nation, aka "the Free French."  In pursuit of his goal, he stepped on toes, kicked shins, wounded egos. But he also had a clear and coherent strategy: he also understood that to achieve his purpose, his best path was to make the French indispensable to the Allied war effort (and to make sure that the Allies knew it).   Many--perhaps most--people who encountered de Gaulle during the war did not love him, but quite a few came to understand him.  Notable example, de Gaulle drove Churchill into legendary rages.   But Churchill was not one to let personal indignation blind him to pragmatic convenience: he usually found a way to accommodate himself to de Gaulle  because he understood that at the end of th day, de Gaulle was on his side.  And Eisenhower--he certainly had his disagreements with the general, but he was usually pretty good at keeping his relationships off the boil, and he seems to have understood just what de Gaulle could do for the common cause.

The puzzle is Roosevelt.  He seems to have encountered de Gaulle in a posture of sporadically contained outrage, laced with withering contempt.   Unlike Churchill, he seems never to have let down his guard.  Worse, his rancor seems to have infected those round him--Secretary of State Cordell Hull, for example, or Secretary of War Henry M. Stimson (though Hull who wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, might well have wound up in the same posture without exterior assistance).

And why?   Particularly after D-Day, when the Allies were back on Northern European soil, and when it was clear that de Gaulle, vindicated, was evolving into an authentic national hero--what was the percentage for Roosevelt in persisting in trying to marginalize, even to humiliate, him?  Why not at least tolerate--no, why not embrace someone who was clearly emerging as the authentic voice of a liberated nation?

I don't have any answer to that one.  One might be tempted to say that FDR found de Gaulle "too conservative" for his taste.  Such a conclusion might have been a mistake--de Gaulle eluded and still elude simple characterization.    But in any event, it didn't prevent Roosevelt (or at any rate, his government) from maintaining cordial relations with the quisling Vichy statelet almost to the end.  One might speculate that Roosevelt found de Gaulle too cozy with then communists.  This would surely have been a misjudgment of the man who did more than any other to thwart communism in postwar France.  And in any event, it would be pretty rich coming from someone so chummy for so long with "uncle Joe" Stalin).

One is--I am--tempted to speculate that de Gaulle brought out the inner Roosevelt: a steely-hearted loner who really didn't like anybody very much, however well he may have concealed his isolation under a gauzy exterior of charm.  One might be tempted, but then you'd have  to explain Roosevelt's apparently genuine affection for Churchill--often at least as refractory as de Gaulle, yet a man who may well have been Roosevelt's one genuine friend.  As I say, I don't have a good answer to that one.  For valuable prizes, readers are invited to set me straight.

Great Men: a Matched Set

Once again I'm indulging my curiosity about General Charles de Gaulle who, among other achievements, personally created "the free French" in World War II by spinning threads out of his own gizzard.   You don't build such an unusual resume without being a difficult person and de Gaulle  was surely difficult.  People remember Churchill saying that "the heaviest cross I have to bear is the cross of Lorraine." Apparently it wasn't actually Churchill (it was somebody close to him).  But it's one of those remarks that lives because it sounds so right.  Here's a memorable occasion when the two alphas lock horns.  Churchill had become, shall we say, profoundly disappointed with de Gaulle, but he felt tht circumstances demanded that he try to path things up. 

 He ... carefully choreographed the meeting at Downing Street, telling [his secretary, Jock] Colville that he would rise and bow slightly but not shake hands, while indicating to the General the chair in which he should sit on the other side of the big table in the Cabinet Room. He would not speak in French but would converse through Colville as interpreter

Churchill went through this rigmarole when de Gaulle came into the room. ‘General de Gaulle, I have asked you to come here this afternoon,’ he began. Colville translated, ‘Mon Général, je vous ai invité à venir cet après-midi.’ Churchill broke in to say: ‘I didn’t say Mon Général, and I did not say I had invited him.’ 

After a little more from Churchill, de Gaulle began to speak, also correcting the translation. So the secretary left the room and called in a linguist from the Foreign Office. When he arrived, the two leaders had been sitting looking at one another silently for several minutes. After a short time, the interpreter emerged red in the face, protesting that they must be mad: both had told him he could not speak French properly so they would have to manage without him.

Fenby, Id.
 
Later:

The Prime Minister warned that some British figures suspected that his visitor had ‘become hostile and had moved towards certain fascist views which would not be helpful to collaboration in the common cause’. Rejecting the charge of authoritarianism, de Gaulle said he ‘begged the Prime Minister to understand that the Free French were necessarily somewhat difficult people: else they would not be where they were. If this difficult character sometimes coloured their attitude towards their great ally . . . [Churchill] could rest assured that their entire loyalty to Great Britain remained unimpaired.’ It was just the kind of statement designed to melt his host’s anger.

Outside, Colville tried to eavesdrop, but the double doors defeated him. He decided it was his duty to burst in – ‘perhaps they had strangled each other’. Just then, Churchill rang the bell for him. Entering, Colville found the two men sitting side by side, ‘with an amiable expression on their faces’, smoking cigars and speaking in French.

Fenby, Jonathan (2012-06-20). The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved (p. 175). Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.. Kindle Edition. 

And on a separate occasion:

[W]hen the writer and politician Harold Nicolson said that, for all the problems he caused, the General was a great man, the Prime Minister responded: ‘A great man? Why, he’s selfish, he’s arrogant, he thinks he’s the centre of the universe . . . You’re right, he’s a great man!’

Fenbyn Ibid., 133. 

Why Didn't the Japanese Make Better Use of its Conquests?

The Wichita bureau has been thinking again:

I think it is pretty well established (or at least commonly believed) that Japan lost WWII because of logistics and the US’s industrial base was much bigger (and better mobilized). That got me to wondering: Japan had over run much of N. China from the 30s on and had been in much of Korea since 1905. It had a huge army still in Manchuria after the war ended.

It had lost a major battle with the Russians (led by Zhukov) in a Cannae like envelopment - a technique he used against the Germans. So it hadn’t pushed into Siberia or tried to take Vladivostok. They also controlled SE Asia (rubber, tin and some oil) and the Dutch East Indies (oil).

But it had a huge part of the most industrialized part of China. Why didn’t it wring more military equipment and stuff out of the Chinese? Were they so poorly organized? Were the Chinese keeping them so busy that they couldn’t build an industrial base? Didn’t they have the capital base to do it?

They fought the war with the equipment that they started with - and developed little new in the way of guns or planes. The army that Zhukov captured was largely equipped with old stuff - WWI era guns and little heavy stuff. And poorly clothed. (the victory on the eve of the German invasion made Zhukov's reputation with Stalin).

To which I respond:

Most interesting and I never gave it any thought before but I suspect has something to do with the fact that they were such bloody awful conquerors. They did everything they could to demean and alienate the new subject peoples. Lots of yellow faces were glad to see Japanese coming because they were not white faces. What they got was torture and humiliation. Like the Germans in Russia but entirely unlike the British (and before them, the French) in India--who built everything on co-opting the locals and collaborating with local elites. ... 

Possible second thought: Japanese war/social machine is steady and stable but moves extremely slowly. Slow to get in gear. And slow to get out: Japanese have been in trouble since 1990 but the machine keeps grinding as if there was nothing wrong

So, what are we missing?

I Thought So...

You can feel it in the air. This sounds right:

Western Norway has the lowest unemployment rates, lowest crime rates, smallest public sector, fewest people on welfare and the most innovative economy in the country. It is generally regarded as Norway's most functional region.  ... Western Norway is a very rich region. The region is stood for around 70% of the total Gross National Product of Norway—Europe's richest country./

It's oil of course, but it's not just oil.    There's a good deal of tourism but it's not just tourism.  There's still a lot of fishing and farming--orchards--and one just gets the sense of a humming economy.  Also wet.

But then there's this:

It was early morning 09:05, 4.october 1944, when the first planes was observed. They came in from the west and turned north over the city, when they suddenly dropped their bombs. The target was the u-boat bunker, but the bombs hit everywhere, and it seemed like the RAF was carpet bombing the whole of [the Bergen borough of--ed.]  Laksevåg. One of the bombs hit Holen skole, crashing through the roof and exploded over the air-raid shelter that was housing 350 children, teachers and men from the civil airdefence. The rescue teams and firefighters that found the dead children said that at the instant of death, some of the children had clung to their teachers and was now nearly impossible to remove. Others died under collapsing walls, and of suffocation.

It is impossible to imagine the dreadful seconds in the shelter, when the lights went out, and the panic started among the children.

61 children, 2 teachers and 16 men from the civilian airdefence died on Holen Skole that day.
A total of 193 Norwegian civilians died as a result of the bomb raid, 180 was wounded, 60 houses was totally destroyed and over 700 people was homeless.

The Germans lost 12 men,2 u-boats (damaged or destroyed: U-228 and U-993) and at least one auxiliary boat (E. Bornhofen). It is believed that a few russian POW's working on the bunker was killed too, but this is not in any record and remains unknown. The Bunker was hit several times, but the bombs could not penetrate the thick roof, hence no damage was added to the bunker during this attack.

The RAF had used 93 Halifaxes, 47 Lancaster bombers and 12 mosquito's in this raid, and lost only one bomber. 1260 450 kg bombs and 172 225 kg bombs was dropped within 11 minutes.

The raid had been a partial failure.

 

Liveblogging Smith on Ike: Cannons to Right of Them, Cannons to Left of Them

I had a chance to audioread another chunk of Jean Edward Smith's Eisenhower last night.  We've moved now from 1942 to early 1944 by which time Ike is back in London getting ready for the main event.  In the standard reading, this is a narrative of slow, steady progress: North Africa, then Sicily, then Italy, then...Yet my dominant thought is: what a mass of cockups, or near cockups.  Migawd, the number of things that went wrong, or could have gone wrong.   

Start with the real heart-stopper:  D-day itself, and the plan therefor.  The focus for the moment is not Ike himself but his boss and protector, the incorruptible and saintly George C. Marshall.  Now I have long counted myself a big Marshall fan and remain so but here's the thing: Marshall was one--perhaps chief--of the party who wanted it to happen in 1942.    C'mon, hurry up, no time-wasting, Hitler is the main event, let's go for him.

And what a catastrophic blunder this would have been.  By just about all the evidence, we weren't remotely ready to take on Hitler at that point, and couldn't possibly have been so by summer.  And ironically it was Churchill--Churchill, the great romantic, the risk-taker--who put the kibosh on the plan.  Churchill remembered Dunkirk; he remembered Dieppe; ironically perhaps most of all he remembered Gallipoli, one of the darkest stains on his on career, and he (at least) understood just how dangerous a coastal invasion might be.  Had Marshall prevailed--well, let's just say we would have had a very different war.

As I say the focus here was not Ike per se, but the decision had huge consequences for Ike's career/  Thing is, grant that there would be no European invasion--still, Roosevelt felt strongly that he had to do something, to reassure the voters; he couldn't just let the Army sit on its duff for a couple of years.   And so we find ourselves in one of the most irrelevant campaigns ever fought: the whole North Africa business, which was a surreal sort of sideshow from the very beginning.   "Sideshow," in the sense, for starters, that Hitler should never have let himself get sucked into it: North Africa had exactly nothing to do with his grand strategy; all it did was suck away precious resources.   "Sideshow" also in the sense that the Allies felt no military necessity to win it: the dominant purpose was to reassure the public.    Grant that it did make life inconvenient for Hitler; still I suspect that would have seemed like a pretty insipid reason to the boots on the ground.

North Africa was, of course, Ike's first real command, and here we come to a greater irony (Smith calls it "luck").  Specifically: by only a mid exaggeration, you could say that Ike won the North African command precisely because Marshall didn't expect the campaign to happen: since it was paper only, why worry about who is in charge.

Which beings us to the next question: how'd he do?  The charitable answer would have to be:  about as well as Obama did in the first Romney debate.  Ike, the consummate staff man, seemed to have all the problems you would expect for a newbie learning how to lead an Army in the field.  The landing was a mess (a committee job, it appears); the Allies misjudged the Germans at every turn;  we remember now (if at all) for one of the great field disasters of the war: the Battle of Kasserine Pass, in Tunisia.  Per Smith, the  Allies prevailed in North Africa by their one inarguable trump card: overwhelming material advantage.  They could (and did) throw money, men and materiel into the field in dimensions that the Germans couldn't begin to match.

On to Sicily.  The landing here goes better and the battle went, on the whole, pretty well.  Smith doesn't address the question of how much Ike was culpable for the fact that Patton went off on a frolic of his own rather than standing tough at the side of Montgomery in front of Mount Etna.  But he does point to one glaring deficiency: how completely the Allies dropped the ball in letting Kesselring escape scot-free onto the mainland with his entire force--men and equipment--intact.  We remember Ike as the great planner but this seems to be a planning error of the first order.

And then Italy.  I think just about everyone agrees now that the Italian campaign is an embarrassment in American military history: poor in planning, lackluster in execution.  Taking Italy (which might have been a bad idea in the first place) surely proved more costly than planners had predicted--in resources, but also in time.  And at the end--no, midway, long before the end--Ike moves on to the much more awesome responsibiilty as director of the Normandy invasion.

 Whew.   It's a wonder we won at all, seeing as how our leader was a man who couldn't tie our shoes in the morning.  Oh, no, of course not.   Do I cook the books?  Oh yes, of course.  At the end of the day I still think--and so does Smith--that Ike was an extraordinary leader of near-indispensable abilities, just the right man for a job that few if any others could have carried off.  And even if you accept my catalog of misbegotten enterprise, you can put a positive spin on it: Ike's errors in North Africa (at least), with more charity also in Sicily and Italy, can count as rookie errors: one reason the Normandy campaign went so well is precisely because of the things that had gone wrong earlier, and because of Ike's capacity to learn from them (Genghis Khan once accidentally drowned his own army--didn't make that mistake again).

My larger point, though, is twofold.  One: you make decisions, you make mistakes.  No one's career is blemish-free, and the more decisions you make, the more mistakes.   The trick is to learn from them.  Ike probably never heard of Samuel Beckett, but we can read Ike as a textbook instance of Beckett's counsel to "try again, fail better." And two: there is absolutely nothing like good luck.  Patton remarked on Ike's luck with admiration and a touch of rueful envy.  Napoleon said luck was his first requisite in a general.   Victories like the Allies' in Europe necessarily (inevitably?) take on an air of inevitability on the rear view mirror.  But here as in so many cases, it is probably worthwhile to remember Wellington's verdict on his victory at Waterloo: a damn near run thing.

What Did We Know and When Did We Know It? An Anniversary Footnote

As the Holocaust fades into history, one persistent cloud is the question of who knew what, when.  People of a certain age probably remember stories of the shock and horror that overcame the first Western soldiers when they opened the death camps at the end of the War in 1945.  In the fifties for a time, the chant of "we never knew!  We never knew!" became a kind of bleakly comic tag line.  My guess is that as time passes, the conviction grows that well, yes, Hitler did awful things but if we had known about it we would have done something.  

For perspective, here's text from the New York Times for 70 years ago today, June 30, 1942.

“A Vast Slaughterhouse”

1,000,000 Jews Slain by Nazis, Report Says

London,June 29 (U.P.)--The Germans have massacred more than 1,000,000 Jews since he war began in carrying out Adolf Hitler's proclaimed policy of exterminating the people, spokesmen for the World Jewish Congress charged today.

They said the Nazis had established a “vast slaughterhouse for Jews” in Eastern Europe and that reliable reports showed that 700,000 Jews already had been murdered in Lithuania and Poland, 125,000 in Rumania, 200,000 in Nazi-occupied parts of Russia and 100,000 in the rest of Europe. Thus about one-sixth of the pre-war Jewish population in Europe, estimated at 6,000,000 to 7,000.000 persons, had been wiped out in less than three years.

A report to the congress said that Jews, deported en masse to Central Poland from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands, were being shot by firing squads at the rate of 1,000 daily.

Information received by the Polish Government in London confirmed that the Nazis had executed “several hundred thousand” Jews in Poland and that almost another million were imprisoned in ghettos.

A spokesman said 10,232 persons died in the Warsaw ghetto from hunger, disease, and other causes between April and June last year and that 4,000 children between the ages of 12 and 15 recently were removed from there by the gestapo to work on slave-labor farms.

The pre-Nazi Jewish population of Germany, totaling about 600,000 persons, was said to have been reduced to a little more than 100,000.

The New York Times, June 30, 1942, as reprinted in the Library of America,  Reporting World War II: Volume I (1995). 

One More Reason to Hate the Nazis, or at least Two Nazis

As if you needed one.  But consider: we spend a good deal of time persuading our children, persuading ourselves, that good and evil come all mixed up in the world, that our enemies are rarely the personification of evil, nor we the image of sainthood.  We know that this is an attitude for adults: it is in touch with reality and it laces us with a chastening humility.

But now comes Max Hastings with his admirable review of two new biographies: one of Hitler's henchman, Heinrich Himmler, the other of Himmler's henchman, Reinhard Heydrich--the one, loving and attentive progenitor of the Nazi SS; the other chief architect of the Holocaust.  It must have been a depressing enterprise, plodding through the careers of two such nasty and destructive human beings--though not, perhaps, much wore than the research necessary for Hasting's own recent Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945.  But here's the capstone, per Hastings:

If the two authors' explanations of Himmler and Heydrich remain somehow unsatisfactory, this is surely because it is impossible to explain how two such contemptibly small people could encompass such vast horrors.

So Hastings, "The Most Terrible of Hitler's Creatures," New York Review of Books February 9, 2012, 38-9, 29.  Translated, I think: forget about "a little good in the worst of us:" these guys really were evil.   They can't even claim the Eichmann excuse of stupidity: they went about the work of inflicting untold misery on others every day with zeal and panache.  It's always wrong to claim moral superiority, especially for one's self.  But for this once, maybe we really were superior.  

Appreciation: Roberts on the War Leaders

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.