A Strategic Biography Of World War II
A Strategic Biography Of World War II
A review of 'The Strategists' by Phillips Payson O'Brien
Phillips Payson O’Brien. The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler — How War Made Them and How They Made War. Dutton, 2024. 544 pp.
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The personal is political, and “grand strategy in World War II was far more personal than we might believe,” Phillips Payson O’Brien writes. Forget the public displays and political communications of wartime. “One of the best, and most overlooked, ways of understanding grand strategy is not to be distracted by speeches or even written plans, which are often the smoke and mirrors of policy,” he explains. Words are fungible where men and machines are not.
Instead, one should start by looking at how armed forces are organized and what equipment is built for them. These structural and material choices involve the commitment of significant amounts of money, and they involve decisions that affect the way societies are impacted more than plans or speeches. Once made, it is much harder to change them.
Commanders-in-chief make essential choices, from the top-down, “with or without the opinions of advisers, of the strategic plan that the state should follow” in wartime, directing the “creation and allocation” of resources, namely armed forces.
Rather than a Powerpoint slide decision-loop of “ends, ways, and means,” the decisions of the most important World War II strategists developed from very generalized ideas about how to win. “Grand strategy in World War II was made in a chaotic, dynamic situation, not a rational and planned one,” O’Brien argues. He wants to bring “the study of grand strategy away from the bureaucracies and the well-thought-out, written-down plans and towards the dynamic state of flawed individuals making personal choices.”
Examining the histories of five men — Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler — to discern the roots of their behavior and understand their interactions, O’Brien has written a strategic biography of the Second World War.
Adolf Hitler demanded heavier tanks with bigger guns. He demanded more resources be put into dive-bombers, a technology that would not outlast the war, instead of fighters to protect Germany, because he thought of aircraft as a kind of artillery. The vast majority of German formations lacked motor transport — trucks and jeeps — relying instead on animal-drawn wagons for logistics from the nearest railhead, with disastrous results. O’Brien argues these were the strategic choices of a dispatch courier who largely served behind the lines in the First World War, in a reserve unit that rarely saw intense combat (the so-called List Regiment). Hitler came away with the erroneous impression that “firepower and protection were more important than speed and mobility” in battle.
Hitler had undervalued sea power before the war and began the Battle of Britain without the means to follow through by air or sea. Thus “attacking the USSR in 1941 came directly out of Hitler’s failure to defeat Britain in the Battle of Britain in 1940, and it showed how his inability to fight Britain had boxed him in,” O’Brien writes. He had built “a brilliant land army but a seriously deficient air-sea force, which would fail spectacularly a year later when it was asked to fight an enemy Hitler had assumed and hoped he would not have to fight,” followed by the United States. Hitler was also late to appreciate the need for more u-boats to prevent an Allied build-up of forces in Europe.
Unable to get out of his own way, Hitler was “the most delusional” of the grand strategists of World War II, O’Brien says, while “Mussolini was the most pathetic.” Sent to the front as a jingo journalist in 1915, the future Italian dictator was somehow absent during all eleven major battles at the Isonzo, taking from his war experience that swagger, bravado, and bluff were the keys to victory. “He wins who wills to win,” Mussolini famously said. “He wins who has the greatest store of mental energy, of will power. A million cannon will not bring victory if the soldiers have not the courage to attack.” This fake-it-until-you-make-it approach worked to make him dictator of the nation, but then it did not prepare Italy for the next war.
“Both dictators had come out of World War I determined to transform their respective nations into great empires, and believed that their personal genius would be a key element in that transformation. Both created deeply flawed war machines” out of their personal shortcomings at strategy, O’Brien writes.
If Hitler got worse at strategic decision-making as the war progressed, Stalin got better — for long enough to win, at least, whereupon he relapsed into old habits. O’Brien calls him “the best-worst strategist” of the war.
Glossing Stalin’s biography, O’Brien locates the roots of his character in the Russian Orthodox seminary where he learned “the power of suspicion and control.” Stalin later recalled the system of “spying, penetrating into the soul, humiliation” that had been used against him, and which also describes the state he constructed. A Bolshevik agitator during the First World War, Stalin would distinguish himself as a military leader in the ensuing Russian Civil War by mismanaging the Red Army forces around Tsaritsyn and blaming his failures on other people. Certain elements of his military biography, such as his supposed command in the capture of the Krasnaia Gorka fortress outside Saint Petersburg, were purely myths of Stalin’s own making.
Paranoia led Stalin to purge most of his generals on the eve of war. Despite his prewar buildup of forces, contempt for the enemy led to humilating initial defeats in the Winter War with Finland. Overconfidence in his pact with Hitler resulted in the catastrophic early battles with Germany. For the first time in his life, after the shock of German invasion had worn off, Stalin heeded wise counsel and stopped trying to micromanage everything. Particularly after the results of Stalingrad, when Stalin finally let competent subordinates do the planning, Gen. Georgy Zhukov remarked on his growth as an operational strategist. Getting to this point was painful, however.
It also required making friends with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Soviet Union received hundreds of thousands of trucks, vast amounts of aluminum bauxite ore, and millions of tons of munitions from the United States during the war. Stalin secured these supplies by convincing Roosevelt of his sincere hatred of Hitler — and advanced his postwar aims by privileging FDR over Winston Churchill. With the end of Hitler’s reich and the death of Roosevelt, Stalin slipped back into paranoid autarky. Roosevelt had never made his vision for the postwar world clear to his vice president, either. Harry Truman had to learn global strategy on the job, without the benefit of Rossevelt’s background. It was a recipe for strategic divergence and the Cold War.
O’Brien locates the strategic wellsprings of Roosevelt in two sources. First came Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 was the most influential text on navalism in the early 20th century. Mahan wrote that “control of the sea” was the objective of sound naval policy, an idea that was extended to control of the air during the First World War. Roosevelt’s service as an Assistant Secretary of the Navy in that conflict developed his understanding of modern war as a matter of machinery. America could out-produce the enemies of democracy. Roosevelt “was in many ways one of the most farsighted and prepared of all the grand strategists” in World War II, O’Brien writes.
The other important early development in Roosevelt was his rejection of imperialism and the depradations of colonialism, which he blamed for the world wars. He regularly took up the non-imperialist debate position while attending school at Groton, pushed for Philippine independence before the war with Japan, and ultimately had to browbeat Churchill into abandoning his imperial strategy in the Mediterranean. Italy was only a problem for the British Empire, whereas the defeat of Germany required the invasion of France.
Of the five leaders studied in this book, Churchill is the most tragic figure in O’Brien’s estimation, for defense of the empire was his “lodestar.” Possessed of “a global, imperial, technological and economic understanding of war,” Churchill’s strategic vision differed strongly from Roosevelt in this lone respect. Both men understood what O’Brien calls the “Air-Sea Super-Battlefield.” They divided the Atlantic in the middle, limiting the areas of responsibility of their respective navies, and cooperated on strategic technological development, such as radar and sonar.
Churchill, who had made a whole career of imperial wars in India and Africa, had a different format to his negotiations with Stalin over the shape of postwar Europe. Whereas Roosevelt tried to stand on principle, Churchill was transactional, willing to divide shares of interest: 50-50 in Hungary, 75-25 in favor of Russia in Bulgaria, and so on. Removed from office by the 1945 election, Churchill watched helplessly as India gained independence and the dissolution of the British Empire began. Roosevelt had only the barest vision of decolonization. Nevertheless, it was the Roosevelt agenda that took on real form in the United Nations and the postwar world.
A professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, Phillips O’Brien has written a popular history in easy, approachable prose. Entire shelves of books have been written about all five of the leaders studied in this single volume. O’Brien makes a convincing argument that their personalities were decisive in both victory and defeat. Character matters in our commanders-in-chief, especially whenever they collide.
