Four of the “grand strategists” of World War II were molded by their experiences of World War I. These, as Phillips Payson O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, reminds us, were varied and contrasting. While Winston Churchill served as Britain’s first lord of the admiralty and minister of munitions—with a six-month period as the commander of a battalion in France in between—Adolf Hitler was languishing as an obscure runner in an insignificant regiment on the Western Front. While Franklin D. Roosevelt was overseeing the building of ships and prioritizing the allocation of resources as assistant secretary of the navy, Benito Mussolini was writing bellicose articles for his own ultra-nationalist newspaper and avoiding being shot by the Austrians in the mountains above the Isonzo River.
The lessons they learned from these years were equally diverse. As a naval man steeped in the teachings of the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, Roosevelt believed first and foremost in the value of sea power: “We all know more or less that our Navy is the first line of defense and we all realise that the definition of the word ‘defense’ does not mean the prevention of hostile armed forces from landing on our seaboard,” proclaimed the future president in 1917.
No Englishman, least of all Churchill, would disagree. Britain depended upon her navy not only for her own protection but also to maintain her vast and increasingly vulnerable empire. Yet Churchill also took other lessons from the Great War, in particular the futility of sending wave upon wave of men against heavily defended positions.
Hitler left the trenches with an unshakable faith in “the power of modern, heavy artillery,” writes O’Brien. His “fetish for the heaviest and most powerful [weapons], and his disinterest in mobility and logistics, had a major impact on how World War II developed.” Mussolini, meanwhile, believed it was all a matter of determination. “He wins who wills to win,” wrote Mussolini in April 1916, after some 175,000 of his countrymen had been killed in doomed attacks against the Austrians. “He wins who has the greatest store of mental energy.” Armaments, training, and generalship were secondary. “A million cannon will not bring victory if the soldiers have not the courage to attack.”
Josef Stalin did not participate in World War I. Yet his command of Bolshevik forces in and around the city of Tsaritsyn—the future Stalingrad—during the Russian Civil War laid the foundations of “an ideological strategist,” as O’Brien calls it. “So much of his later actions when in power—the terror, the mass arrests, the beatings and murders and above all the use of secret police—were first tested by him at Tsaritsyn.”
Of course, Stalin could eschew ideology in favor of cynical pragmatism. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 not only allowed him to subsume eastern Poland and the Baltic states but also provided the preconditions for Hitler’s bid for European hegemony and thus almost destroyed the U.S.S.R. and its dictator. Later, the Red Tsar would collaborate with those paragons of capitalism Britain and the United States to end the war he helped cause.
Hitler’s “fetish for the heaviest and most powerful [weapons] and his disinterest in mobility and logistics, had a major impact on how World War II developed.”
In the first half of The Strategists, O’Brien sketches the pre-war careers of his protagonists. In the second half, he considers their merits and failures as strategists between 1939 and 1945.
The greatest mistakes are broadly accepted. Mussolini should never have entered the war, and Hitler should not have invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin reaped what he had sown with his devil’s pact of August 1939 and almost lost his state through his refusal to heed the mountain of intelligence pointing to Operation Barbarossa.
The merits are open to debate. An American who has written an admiring biography of Roosevelt’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, O’Brien gives top marks to Roosevelt and his military fixer. His Roosevelt is farsighted, consistent, and prepared: a truly grand strategist following a plan. The alternative view is that the notoriously secretive and typically cautious president operated on an ad hoc basis, often requiring sustained lobbying by Churchill and his own advisers before enacting many of the policies that led to victory.
Churchill is also credited with a plan—like the prime minister’s contemporary American critics, O’Brien sees the pursuit or defense of his empire at the root of many of his decisions—while Stalin, having proved an incompetent warlord in 1941, learns the lessons of his failures and starts trusting his commanders in 1943.
O’Brien is most interesting on the less glamorous side of war: on armaments, technology, and the lines of communication. Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt tended to make the correct production calls, while the Anglo-American duopoly understood the importance of dominating the skies and the sea lanes—what the author calls “the Air-Sea Super-Battlefield.” Their opponents did not. Demagogues and dictators they isolated themselves from professional and critical advice while nurturing an unjustified faith in their own abilities. Hitler believed himself a modern Caesar. Yet, as O’Brien shows, he remained “an infantry soldier, his understanding of war still stuck in the trenches of the last war.”
Tim Bouverie is the author of Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War
