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Masters and Commanders - How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West

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In "Masters and Commanders", British historian Andrew Roberts combines the availability of several private memoirs and diaries with the official record and published accounts to evaluate the US-UK strategic partnership that produced victory in the West during the Second World War. Roberts focuses on the complex relationships between President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill as heads of government with each other and with their senior military advisors, General George Marshall and General Sir Alan Brooke.

Roberts reconstructs the formal and informal interactions of Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff from their first conference in Newfoundland in 1941 to their last at Yalta in 1945. He examines the contentious debates over strategy, resources, and politics with an eye to the way personality and professionalism shaped the outcomes between strong-minded and capable leaders. In the process, he provides welcome sunlight on the contributions of Marshall and Brooke, overshadowed in history by more publicized leaders such as Eisenhower and Montgomery.

Roberts very capably captures the shifting dynamic of the US/UK alliance between 1941 and 1945, as initially superior British experience and forces in being eventually gave way to the maturing strategic thinking and far vaster resources of the Americans. In the process, Roberts closely reviews a number of topics of enduring interest to students of the Second World War, including the timing of OVERLORD, the efficacy of the Mediterranean strategy, and the influence of post-war considerations on the invasion of Germany.

"Masters and Commanders" walks an intriguing line between serious scholarship and popular history. At over 500 pages, the length may discourage the general reader, despite the accessibility of Roberts' narrative. The knowing student of the Second World War may find few startling revelations in Roberts' even-handed conclusions, but much to enjoy in the details. "Masters and Commanders" is highly recommended to students of the strategy of the Second World War.

This is a wonderful book covering the interpersonal dynamics at the highest levels of command betwen the British and Americans in World War II. It is NOT for the casual reader, except that many of Roberts' presentations should become common knowledge among all those interested in World War II.

The author in an Englishman, and the book is written in British English. He must be commended for his even-handedness as I could detect in only a very few places a slight pro-British bias. An example would be in his discussion of Dragoon (which the author felt was unnecessary) that the effort should have been made in the Scheldt estuary to open up Antwerp, but then he fails to mention that the Scheldt could have been opened immediately after Antwerp was captured and that it wasn't was strictly due to Montgomery's negligence. There are other small items missing (can't cover everything in only 585 pages) such as why the British were on the left flank in Normandy (that was then used as the reason why the British would gain control over Northern Germany.) The planner who put Montgomery on the left flank was General Frederick Morgan, the British General in charge of the planning for the cross-Channel invasion while Eisenhower and the armies were slaving away in the Mediterranean.

That being said, there is so much good here I don't know where to begin. The problems in running the Allied show were immense and almost every other book on World War II simply skates over the very real problems between the British and Americans as if we were always one big happy family. The truth is that Churchill often subordinated military reality to political fantasies, Roosevelt was a mediocre intellect who was influenced by cronies who were very pro-Soviet (and even Soviet agents,) Brooke was a general who had never won a battle but felt he knew everything and that Americans were all idiots, and Marshall (like Eisenhower) had never commanded troops in battle. That they struggled through to victory seems like a miracle. How that came about is the subject of this book.

In short, the American plan was to build up their forces as rapidly as possible and strike across the Channel into France at the earliest opportunity. Marshall and Roosevelt felt the shortest path to victory lay through France to Germany with the Soviets coming from the East through Russia and Poland into Germany. The British had known only defeat by the Germans until October, 1942, and wanted to nibble around the edges of the Germany conquests until the German Army lost much of its combat effectiveness. This approached was supported by all the post-war analyses of effectiveness that have shown that the German soldier was clearly better than his Soviet, British or American counterpart by as much as fifty percent. Brooke, in particular, seemed to overrate the Germans to the point where it eliminated aggressiveness on his part (but only toward the Germans -- he retained it toward the Americans.)

The British talked the Americans into Torch, the invasion of North Africa, against Marshall's better judgment (even to the end of the war.) The conference at Casablanca was seen by the Americans as a British victory, one which they would not allow again. In a very large sense, Churchill and Brooke overplayed their hand as experts among innocents, and after obtaining American agreement for Husky and the subsequent invasion of Italy (and the mission creep up the Italian peninsula), the Americans hardened and paid the British back with interest. Churchill's much-loved diversions like Norway, the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean were simply discarded out of hand by Marshall and Roosevelt when they came up.

Eventually, of cource, the United States carried the lion's share of the fighting and as early as the summer of 1944, Great Britain could no longer supply replacements to maintain its fighting strength. Brooke's many battles to delay Overlord and divert troops into areas to serve British imperial interests ultimately came to grief. After the spring of 1944, the American planners were totally dominant, and British influence on strategy became minimal. In retrospect it seems incredible that Brooke expected to be named Supreme Commander in Europe when ultimately two-thirds of the forces would be American.

There are many interesting side elements in this work such as the British using large numbers of Canadian troops, resources and financial support without giving the Canadians a seat at the planning and control table. In fact, the British spoke for all the Dominion forces, Australian, Indian, South African and New Zealanders without sharing power while usually including them in tabulations of British strenght. And when a Dominion government went against the British as did the Australians in calling for their two divisions to be returned from the Middle East to defend Australia, Churchill became angry beyond control. It was no small wonder that the American planners felt that the British were just using everyone else to defend or regain their empire. Americans would do everything they could to defend England but not British interests throughout the world.

Oh gosh, I could go on and on like this for many pages -- there are so many issues fully discussed in this work. The subjects come alive through their diaries and post-war writings, much of which the author quotes with the comment that they were unfair, misleading or untrue. Yes, both sides lied to each other, sometimes angrily and with great passion. Unfortunately, Roosevelt generally refused to have notes taken at his meetings and then never got the chance to present his side in print. Nonetheless, the author has managed cover Roosevelt's input and decisions very well.

In conclusion, this is an extremely valuable work and destined to become a classic on World War II. I recommend this work without reservation and commend the author for his fine writing and scholarship. We are all the better for his work.

Masters and Commanders is an excellent, extremely detailed account of the occasionally humorous, often acrimonious, always fascinating interactions between the four principals most responsible to for guiding WWII: Generals Alan Brook (CIGS) and George Marshall (US Army Chief of Staff), and British PM Winston Churchill and US Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Historian Andrew Roberts does a masterful job of telling a very complex tale, relying heavily on the personal diaries on the men directly involved with determining Allied strategy for WWII, not just for Europe but ultimately across the entire conflict. Anyone with an interest in how a small group of extraordinary men arrived at the most momentous decisions yet taken by the human race, literally concerning the life and death for 10s of millions and with consequences affecting every person alive, then and now, will want to read this book.

Roberts is British and while his sympathies are obvious, his writing is fair and he is unsparingly in pointing out the flaws in his principals and their arguments and positions, whether they are British or American. His praise for their good -- often great -- points is likewise fair, genuine and unforced.

So why the "but"?

I think for all its merits, Roberts introduced a structural flaw into his book by virtue of the sources he relies on; the very thing that makes his book unique. Unavoidably, his main protagonist is Gen. Sir Alan Brook -- unavoidable because this is the man with whom Roberts' sympathies most clearly lie and because Brook left a detailed, day-by-day diary of the events narrated. Brook's diary is the thread that holds the narrative together.

Other diarists are also prominently used, but in the main they were members of Brook's staff and reinforce his opinions. (Churchill's doctor is one of the few British voices presented who was not a protégé of Brook's.)

The problem is that Brook's diary casts him in a very unflattering light. He comes across as arrogant, obstructionist, hidebound, narrow-mined, petulant, trapped in the past, and at times even defeatist. He is adamant in his drumbeat that he -- and only he -- has the vaguest notion of what strategy is, both in the abstract and with respect to the war; only his ideas have any value and everyone else is ignorant, foolish, hopelessly incompetent as strategists whatever other virtues they may have, and sometimes even dangerous and mad.

Brook writes this way about everyone from Churchill to Marshall to Roosevelt to the members of the US Joint Chiefs and even to other British officers (though not his personal staff officers). He despairs of the state of the British officer corps, impugns the British fighting man, and is dismissive of Americans.

In fact the only two people who do not raise his ire to near fever pitch are Gen. Douglass Macarthur, the most arrogant and divisive of US generals and -- incredibly -- Stalin; this last despite the fact that Brook was a staunch anti-Bolshevik. This does not inspire confidence in his judgment.

The problem here is that Alan Brook was indeed a great man and excellent general with a impressive strategic grasp (although I cannot say that this book convinced me he was the brilliant strategist he is usually made out to be). He was fair-minded, gracious, firm, determined, humane, had an extraordinary grasp of detail, was an excellent administrator and an inspiring leader. His actions on the battlefield just before and during the Dunkirk evacuation were exemplary. The high degree of admiration he inspired in everyone he worked with, British and American and Russian, was almost universal, even among those -- or especially among those -- with whom he had the most bitter disagreements (which seemed to be almost everyone at some point or another) and yet remained on good terms with. There can be no doubt that Brook's contribution to winning WWII was enormous.

Roberts makes all of this clear and shows Brook's pleasant human side as well, so what is the problem?

The problem is that Brook's diary was his safety valve -- the necessary outlet of a humane man with strong emotions who had been through WWI, the death of his adored young wife in an auto accident that happened while he was driving, and who then, because of his superior abilities, was given the job managing the largest conflict in history. So yes, in his off-hours he got a little cranky.

But this has unfortunate ramifications for the portrayal of Brook. No matter how hard Roberts tries to add balance to the free-flowing invective of Brook's diary, it is quoted at such length in this long book that in the end balance just can't be satisfactorily achieved. We are left wondering which is the real Brook -- the firm and seemingly brilliant leader who is the lynchpin of victory or the small-minded dyspeptic crank who disparages anyone and everyone in his diary? In the end, it seems impossible to say.

The matter is not helped by quoting so extensively from the diaries of those closest to Brook, who often echo not only his conclusions but his emotional views as well. This reinforces the negative view of Brook and seems to suggest that he surrounded himself with people as bitter and flawed as he appears in his entries. Yet, these men too were officers of extraordinary competence and ability and the cattiness, blatantly biased judgments, and intemperate opinions of their private diaries seems never to have manifested itself in pubic or unduly effected their work.

Of course this is probably an unavoidable problem when trying delve into the minds of great men operating under pressures exceeding that anyone else has ever experienced. It is literally mind-boggling. Brook and his officers are not just extremely smart and dedicated, they are complex human beings. We cannot know how much of what they privately wrote was just hyperbole and to what extent it reflected their actually beliefs. Of course, to adequately convey this complexity in a book is a daunting prospect, and Roberts deserves just praise for doing as well as he does.

But there is a larger problem here: Brook is juxtaposed most directly with the two other leaders with whom he worked most closely: Churchill and Marshall.

Churchill is character of Jovian stature -- a vastly large-than-life genius who seemed to eclipse almost everyone and everything around him. Churchill's talents are the stuff of legend, seemingly uncontainable and uncontrollable. Brook found himself chained as it were to this colossus, constantly battling Churchill's wilder flights, boundless ideas, expansive vision for the war (Churchill was himself -- and knew himself be -- no mean strategist) and bombastic temper. Brook considered the hardest part of his extraordinarily hard job to be "keeping Winston on the rails," (something he did very well).

If Churchill comes across as incredibly charming, engaging, infuriating; a titanic intellect with an ego to match, equally capable of the most dismissive cruelty and the most beguiling grace and boundless affection, Gen. George Marshall is something of a different order altogether: the only General Churchill was ever afraid of.

Marshall seems to be the undoubted hero of the piece: the omni-competent, eternally gracious, unshakeable and unflappable leader, seeing farther and deeper and more incisively than anyone else into the prodigious morass that was the problem of WWII. It was Marshall, not just more than anyone else but almost uniquely, who was thinking and planning for the aftermath of WWII while he still fighting it. After the Allied victory, it was Marshall who, as Secretary of State, put his plans into effect and literally remade a shattered world.

Against Brook's private rages is set Marshall's phenomenal strength and calm: perfectly modest, completely selfless, unfailingly gracious, guiding but never bullying, rarely raising his voice and never losing his temper; seemingly unaffected by stress or the incredible rigors of his job, moving through the cataclysmic events of WWII with a natural ease and overriding command that are seemingly Not Of This Earth.

So what's wrong with this picture? Only this: Churchill wrote volumes, all of the highest literary quality, unmatched as a wartime memoir by anything except perhaps Caesar's Commentaries, and (like Caesar's Commentaries) essentially political documents that tell us nothing the author does not wish us to know (and fudging a few things along the way, as Caesar did.)

On the other hand, Marshall wrote nothing at all (he was offered $1 million for his memoirs but turned it down). We have no window into his soul as we do with Brook; we do not know how he dealt with the enormous pressures he was under, by what private means he maintained his Olympian calm and perfect focus.

( As an aside, it also does not help us see Marshall the man that he is so often and unavoidably juxtaposed with Adm. King, CNO USN, who was nominally his equal on the Joint Chiefs, and who was described by his daughter as the "most even tempered man in the Navy -- he is always in a rage". Moreover, set against Marshall's manifest virtues are King's well-known vices: intolerance, liquor, and seducing other men's wives. But King was also brilliant strategist and a fighting admiral with few equals in WWII or any other war. )

Had Marshall kept a dairy, we might see him revealed as being as human and fallible as we see Brook. If Brook had not, we might see him as a man of the same stature as Marshall (as in fact many did at the time). So the narrative is inherently unbalanced. No matter how the author plays up Brook's virtues, which were many, and points out Marshall's shortcomings and mistakes (which are debatable) it never quite convinces and is all too easily forgotten in the dense wealth of details.

Thus, Roberts's sources and his desire to extract and assess the maximum amount of data from them, which he does masterfully, drive his narrative and in the end -- and I think quite inadvertently -- make his protagonist look small; a mere mortal trying desperately to deal with titans.

Perhaps there is something of an old heroic romance in that, but I do not think it was what Roberts intended. Even if he did, these men were peers and while as a group they were peerless, I would have preferred to see them considered more on the same plane.

I also have minor technical quibbles with a couple of the author's assertions, but all the same, Masters & Commanders is a very good book.

Andrew Roberts was always just ahead of me as I wrote my own book (WINSTON CHURCHILL: THE FLAWED GENIUS OF WORLD WAR II). The great team at the George C Marshall Archive that I met were people who looked after him just as well and gave him a great Virginian Thanksgiving Dinner. While I don't always agree with Roberts book - I think more highly of the fighting prowess of the average American soldier, like my wife's uncle who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, nevertheless it is vital to understand that two of the most important people in World War II were the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir Alan Brooke and the American Chief of Army Staff General George C Marshall, someone whom even Churchill recognized as the man who organized victory. Roberts' book and mind complement each other, as his is more from a British angle whereas mine tends to be more pro-American, even though I am British myself! Enjoy both our books and decide for yourself whether Brooke or Marshall was more important. Dr Christopher Catherwood, Marshall Lecturer at the George C Marshall Foundation of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington VA in 2009 (online at the Marshall Foundation: http://www.marshallfoundation.org/ChurchillLecture2009.htm) and author of WINSTON CHURCHILL: THE FLAWED GENIUS OF WORLD WAR II, available on Amazon (Berkley Caliber imprint of Penguin 2009)

A book for those with a serious interest in the formation of the grand military strategy that eventually led to victory in Western Europe during World War II.

Andrew Roberts focuses on the battles fought, not in the field, but in the war planning rooms and wartime conferences between the U.S and U.K. sides, with the major focus being placed on Generals Marshall and Brooke and political leaders FDR and Churchill. Mr. Roberts profitably makes use of contemporary diaries of various direct participants to weave his interesting history.

This is not a book for readers seeking a general history of World War II: Combat generals rarely are mentioned; the war with Japan is only brought up when it might have affected resource allocations for the European theatre; Russian and German fighting is in the background.

Again, quite a very good book for the reader seeking to understand how the two great English-speaking allies worked--and often disputed--at the pinnacle over the greatest of political and military stakes.

(One question: Who wrote the caption for picture 13, which specifically points out General Patton's "pearl-handled revolver"? I have always understood the general's hand weapon to be ivory-handled since "only a New Orleans pimp would carry a pearl-handled gun.")

This is not a book for readers who do not have a basic mastery of the essential facts of WW II. The chronology and the main issues must be familiar to you or you will get lost. But any WW II history buff should be delighted by Andrew Roberts' crisp and interesting writing, the new materials and sources he resorted to and above all, the skill with which he tells the astonishing story of what went on behind the scenes. Of course, one knew that Marshall was less than keen on a campaign in Italy and that Roosevelt was sincere when he said "of one thing I am certain, Stalin is not an imperialist" ( ! ! ! !) but getting into the details of the often stormy relationship between Alan Brooke and Churchill, for instance, is fascinating. Brooke's contempt for anyone else's strategic ability - all idiots except himself according to his diary - is equally surprising. Churchill's dream of a "soft underbelly" of Europe, or the "Lubjlana gap" and other such military nonsense will lead many a reader to tone down somewhat one's admiration for the great man. At the end of the day, Marshall and the (U.S) Joint Chiefs were right to want to concentrate on Overlord but Brooke and the (British) Chiefs of Staff accurately predicted that Italy would draw resources from Hitler's Wehrmacht. I did not know that FDR agreed to the Italian campaign in large part because the alternative would have been to leave the army idle until Overlord, which was several months away and he couldn't afford that because the 1944 election was looming..... One cannot help thinking what a pity it is that so many soldiers had to die whilst the "allied" gentlemen in the Combined Chiefs of Staff were squabbling. An amazing book. Don't miss it !

This fascinating book, thick with historical data and insights, makes a riveting read. Whilst having no wish to quarrel with previous reviewers, for this reviewer, the book's strength is to be found within the all too rare combination of the elucidation of pertinent details and the subsequent compilation and marshaling of this data in order to reach coherent conclusions. The hi-lighting of detailed minutiae is only of secondary value, it would appear, if any historical advances are unable to be procured from it. Fortunately, this fastidiously researched volume abounds in both.

It is a lengthy read, at round 670 pages, and is at times dense in the chronicled information it conveys. It is an honest read, too, and this reviewer profferes that an alternative title could well have been formed along the lines of 'How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke very nearly didn't Win the War in the West'! Indeed, some readers - especially those none too conversant with the internecine bickering that went on in and around the corridors of power prior to the D-Day Landings, for example - might be quite take aback at the apparent abrasiveness and the various fractious dealings which formed part of the staple diet of 'Allied' conferences, rhetoric and debate.

This reviewer would want to take issue with one or two points in previous press reviews which have suggested that, whilst Andrew Roberts' book remains a immense achievement, it establishes and thus contributes only slight, minor historical detail to the ongoing research into the WWII fray. Surely this is both to ignore key passages and sections of the book and to miss the point. Firstly, from an historical perspective, Roberts has successfully revealed a number of new 'primary' sources (in the forms of 'oral' reports and written chronicles, diaries et al) and, secondly, this information helps us to somewhat 'recalibrate' certainly, and possibly even to reassess the methods and the roles of a number of key policymakers. Again, this would appear to illustrate the author's successful achievement in having interpreted the mass of available data and having translated this into 'applied history'.

There is plenty of historical meat within this work and it should appeal to the interested/well-informed general reader on the one hand and the historian (and possibly even the military tactician) on the other. IThis reviewer found the sections relating to the Allies' 'sweep' across Europe especially interesting and I must congratulate Andrew Roberts on handling the material (which remains a sensitive substance within certain quarters and factions) very well, with confidence and authority. Narratives pertaining to the reticence with which Brooke approached the invasion of France, the mood swings and what amounted to the basic pessimism of Churchill et al will never sit easily with some, yet to gloss over delicate topics such as these would be to gloss over history and to, ultimately misrepresent it. As Quiller-Couch put it, we sometimes have to be prepared 'to murder our darlings' ... occasionally these need to be historical or conceptual little treasures, too!

In a nutshell, this volume accomplishes a great deal, to the mind of this reviewer, at least. It is eminently readable, dense with data, and offers measurable and definite conclusions based on the material within. As ever, this work, too, will now be subject to the rigours of historic analysis itself. This reviewer suspects that it will fair pretty well.

Michael Calum Jacques (author of '1st Century Radical: the shadowy origins of the man who became known as Jesus Christ')

This is a brilliant study of the wartime cooperation between Prime Minister Churchill, President Roosevelt, and their military commanders, General George C. Marshall and General Sir Alan Brooke. Roberts makes good use of the previously unused verbatim notes of War Cabinet meetings taken by Lawrence Burgis (assistant secretary to the Cabinet office) and the reports of Cabinet meetings made by deputy Cabinet secretary Norman Brooke, released in 2007. Roberts also uses the diaries of 27 senior figures and the unpublished papers of another 60.

After the battle of Britain, the USA and Britain had the luxuries of time and space. With Britain no longer under threat of imminent invasion, they could choose when and where to deploy their forces. The Soviet Union had no such freedom. The US and British governments were relying on the Soviets to win the war for them, or at least to weaken the German army enough to make D-Day possible.

Marshall and the US Chiefs of Staff wanted to concentrate the entire US-British war effort on the key point of the battlefield, Northwest Europe, as soon as possible, that is, in 1942 or 1943. But Churchill and Brooke saw a premature landing in France as the greatest danger.

So Churchill said that he agreed, writing to Roosevelt in April 1942 of a Second Front in September 1942 or even `before then'. Instead though, he continually proposed other operations, in North Africa, Italy, the Balkans, Norway ...

Marshall said that Torch, the North African campaign of 1942-43, `represented an abandonment of the strategy agreed in April'. Roberts adds, "and of course he was right." Roberts writes, "Churchill and Brooke had deliberately misled Roosevelt and Marshall into thinking that if the United States poured troops into the United Kingdom in 1942 they might be used to attack France that year, when in fact they had no intention of allowing that to happen."

In June 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt promised Molotov, in writing, the Second Front: "we expect the formation of a Second Front this year." After his meeting with Molotov, Roosevelt issued a communiqué: "Full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent task of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942." On 3 February 1943, Churchill said to Stalin, "We are aiming at August [1943] for a heavy operation across the Channel."

Yet there was no D-Day until 6 June 1944. But there were plenty of diversions. As Roberts points out, the Italian campaign of 1943-44 was `largely a waste of effort after Rome'. Operation Anvil, the invasion in the south of France in June 1944 was also a waste of time - the Allies should have focused on freeing Antwerp, not Marseilles.

Roberts sums up the Soviet Union's decisive role, "it was the Eastern Front that annihilated the Nazi dream of Lebensraum (`living space') for the `master race'. Four in every five German soldiers killed in the Second World War died on the Eastern Front, an inconvenient fact for any historian who wishes to make too much of the Western Allies' contribution to the victory."

Masters and Commanders

It is commonly asserted that about two-thirds of business mergers ultimately fail, usually because of an inability to mesh the cultures of the new partners. True in business, that seems also true in politics, especially when several nations, each with its own interests, attempt to work together in war to defeat a common enemy. Thus it was no easy task for the British and Americans to merge their forces in order to defeat their deadly foes in the Second World War. In this meticulously documented, but engagingly written book, Andrew Roberts explains how the two heads of state, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and their two senior military advisers, Generals George Marshall and Alan Brooke, charmed and debated and disparaged each other, but ultimately arrived at a consensus that allowed them to set out consistent policies and, ultimately, to win the war.

Roberts is British, and his account has a British perspective perhaps, but that is understandable since the two democracies began their alliance before America had been attacked, and when the immediate threat came from Nazi Germany, which had almost effortlessly gobbled up western Europe and was preparing to swallow the "sceptred isle" as well. Much emphasis is given to the development of the "Germany first" policy, which was a tough sell to America after the assault on Pearl Harbor.

Roberts does a good job of describing the character and traits of his four protagonists, none of them a shrinking violet. They emerge from his pages as powerful personalities who did not submerge their own ideas readily, but could eventually put the broad interests of their military enterprise ahead of personal pride. Their German opponent, Adolf Hitler, considered himself omniscient and never had to defend his ideas against the differing opinion of a subordinate. He ruled supreme, commanded without regard for his generals' apprehensions and concerns, and...lost.

The author has recently published (in Britain, not yet in America) The Storm of War, a one-volume account of the Second World War. Masters and Commanders makes an excellent prelude to the new book. For those who enjoy the first book as much as this reviewer, it will be pleasing to know there will be another, for dessert.

I read Masters and Commanders a year ago, together with The Storm of War; a year later I sent M&C to my son, the other book being at the moment not available by Amazon.com.

M&C is an unbelievably perfect book. It deals with the story of the big 4, Churchill, Roosevelt, Brooke and Marshall. It tells how at the start it was Churchill to dominate and how slowly the Americans grew in and overcame their allies. All was done sometimes in bitter opposition, sometimes in good friendship, but always knowing that the two sides were part of a single - double struggle: against Germany and Japan (Italy surrendered on Sep 8, 1943). And, as we know, sometimes Churchill was put in minority, more than once by his own military assistant Brooke, but never he deduced to start up his own conduct of war, in spite of his fellow men's (and his Commander's, sometimes) differences. And the same story repeats about Franklin D. Roosevelt and George C. Marshall. This sounds as a totally independent thought on the part of each of the 4 men.

I would advise this book to all people, both young and old, to be read attentively.