Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945
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An epic joint biography, Masters and Commanders explores the degree to which the course of the Second World War turned on the relationships and temperaments of four of the strongest personalities of the twentieth century: political masters Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt and the commanders of their armed forces, General Sir Alan Brooke and General George C. Marshall. Each was exceptionally tough willed and strong minded, and each was certain that he knew best how to win the war. Yet each knew that he had to win at least two of the others if he was to have his strategy adopted. Andrew Roberts, whom The Economist calls "Britain's finest contemporary military historian," traces the mutual suspicion and admiration, the rebuffs and the charm, the often-explosive disagreements and wary reconciliations, and he helps us to appreciate the motives and imperatives acting upon these key leaders struggling to destroy Nazism.Drawing on newly discovered verbatim accounts of Churchill's war-cabinet meetings and on the private papers of nearly seventy contemporaries, Roberts reconstructs the lively debates of the four principals and other leading figures, and attempts to answer some of the key questions of Allied strategy. Why, when the most direct route from Germany to Britain was through north-western France, did the Western Allies launch attacks via North Africa, Sicily, and Rome? Why, if Operation Overlord in June 1944 was intended to be the start of the Allies' great thrust into Germany, did four hundred thousand men land five hundred miles to the south, in southern France, two months later? Why did the Allies not take Berlin, Vienna, or Prague and allow the Iron Curtain to descend where it did? Masters and Commanders dramatically re-creates the atmosphere, debates, and maneuverings through which Allied grand strategy was forged and reveals the profound impact of personality upon history. The Washington Post - Lynne Olson In Masters and Commanders, British historian Andrew Roberts skillfully dissects the complex, contentious relationships among Brooke, Marshall and the other two key strategists of World War II's Western Alliance, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt…As Roberts makes clear throughout the book, hammering out Allied strategy was an untidy, exhausting, sometimes debilitating process, replete with fist-shaking arguments and emotional tantrums. But the debates, ill-tempered as they often were, produced the searching questions and unsparing analysis needed to come up with a plan for victory, which, in the end, was the only thing that mattered. Feelings might have been bruised, but the alliance itself never fractured.
List of Illustrations ixList of Maps xiiiAcknowledgements xxixPreface xxxiiiIntroduction 1Part I Enchantment1 First Encounters: 1880-June 1940 92 Collecting Allies: June 1940-December 1941 413 Egos in Arcadia: December 1941-February 1942 664 Brooke and Marshall Establish Dominance: February-March 1942 1025 Gymnast Falls, Bolero Retuned: February-April 1942 116Part II Engagement6 Marshall's Mission to London: April 1942 1377 The Commanders at Argonaut: April-June 1942 1678 The Masters at Argonaut: June 1942 1979 Torch Reignited: July 1942 21910 The Most Perilous Moment of the War: July-November 1942 26011 The Mediterranean Garden Path: November 1942-January 1943 29512 The Casablanca Conference: January 1943 31613 The Hard Underbelly of Europe: January-June 1943 34614 The Overlordship of Overlord: June-August 1943 381Part III Estrangement15 From the St Lawrence to the Pyramids: August-November 1943 40116 Eureka! at Teheran: November-December 1943 42917 Anzio, Anvil and Culverin: December 1943-May 1944 45518 D-Day and Dragoon: May-August 1944 48519 Octagon and Tolstoy: August-December 1944 50920 Autumn Mist: December 1944-February 1945 53321 Yalta Requiem: February-May 1945 548Conclusion: The Riddles of the War 573Appendix A The Major Wartime Conferences 585Appendix B Glossary of Codenames 586Appendix C The Selection of Codenames 588Notes 589Bibliography 615Index 625
