Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945 »

Andrew Roberts is the author of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. His other books include Napoleon and Wellington, Eminent Churchillians, and Salisbury, which won the Wolfson History Prize. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Roberts writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal.

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 ix

List of Maps xiii

Acknowledgements xxix

Preface xxxiii

Introduction 1

Part I Enchantment

1 First Encounters: 1880-June 1940 9

2 Collecting Allies: June 1940-December 1941 41

3 Egos in Arcadia: December 1941-February 1942 66

4 Brooke and Marshall Establish Dominance: February-March 1942 102

5 Gymnast Falls, Bolero Retuned: February-April 1942 116

Part II Engagement

6 Marshall's Mission to London: April 1942 137

7 The Commanders at Argonaut: April-June 1942 167

8 The Masters at Argonaut: June 1942 197

9 Torch Reignited: July 1942 219

10 The Most Perilous Moment of the War: July-November 1942 260

11 The Mediterranean Garden Path: November 1942-January 1943 295

12 The Casablanca Conference: January 1943 316

13 The Hard Underbelly of Europe: January-June 1943 346

14 The Overlordship of Overlord: June-August 1943 381

Part III Estrangement

15 From the St Lawrence to the Pyramids: August-November 1943 401

16 Eureka! at Teheran: November-December 1943 429

17 Anzio, Anvil and Culverin: December 1943-May 1944 455

18 D-Day and Dragoon: May-August 1944 485

19 Octagon and Tolstoy: August-December 1944 509

20 Autumn Mist: December 1944-February 1945 533

21 Yalta Requiem: February-May 1945 548

Conclusion: The Riddles of the War 573

Appendix A The Major Wartime Conferences 585

Appendix B Glossary of Codenames 586

Appendix C The Selection of Codenames 588

Notes 589

Bibliography 615

Index 625