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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining but nothing new., September 19, 2007
This review is from: Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (Hardcover)
Partners in Command fits into the somewhat recent trend in history books of focusing in on an historical specific - a battle, a speech, a pivotal month or as in this case, the relationship between two men, George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, during a pivotal time in history - and filling in a narrative - with anecdotes, flashbacks, etc - around it. (I don't view this as an inherently bad thing - different readers have different interests). First the good news, in this reader's humble opinion any continued investigation or chronicle of the challenges these two men faced either together or separately and their successes, (and failures), in meeting them is valuable. For whatever reason George Marshall is not only underappreciated today, he seems to have been forgotten. And in hindsight it's very difficult to imagine anyone else on either side of the Atlantic assuming the role Eisenhower did as capably as he did. (This is something FDR intuitively understood.) This book does a very good job in detailing the difficulties faced and the decisions made by these two generals during WWII, often while they were thousands of miles apart with few face to face meetings and under extreme pressure to win the war in Europe.
Which brings me to the down side - the author may have bit off more than he could chew in a book of this type, and it might have been a better idea to conclude with the success of D-Day. (Although selling a publisher at this time on "yet another" D-Day book is probably a difficult task.) Many important topics - build-up of the pre-WWII US military into a fighting force, NATO, the Cold War, the Marshall Plan & post WWII Europe - and individuals - Churchill, FDR, Truman among others - are given, at best, cursory treatment. (The post WWII "peace" part of this book is minimal.) This is understandable in keeping the book to a "readable" length but comes up short of its billing (War & Peace). There are also some unforgivable errors in this book with two whoppers contained within the first 20 pages - the dates of the Battle of Stalingrad and Germany's declaration of war on the US. Hard to comprehend how these slipped through any editing process.
If you are looking for a starting point in understanding these two men and the US High Command/military management of the European theater in WWII, you've found it. This book is entertaining and very readable. If you are familiar with this period of history and the players, there is really nothing new here.
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
American Military History at Its Very Best!, June 11, 2007
This review is from: Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (Hardcover)
"Partners in Command" is the story of the two most important American military commanders of World War II - George Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
It was Marshall, the powerful Chief of Staff of the United States military, that groomed Eisenhower for his role as the American Army's senior leader in Europe in World War II. And it was Eisenhower who devised the global strategy the United States would follow throughout the war. That strategy focused on defeating Germany first.
Marshall and Eisenhower agreed early in the war that, once committed to fighting, the United States should fight as part of a grand coalition and avoid, to the greatest extent possible, peripheral operations to focus on striking the German heartland as soon as possible.
"Partners in Command" is the brilliantly told story of two men and their seminal contribution in directing America's military machine in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Their path was not an easy one. Marshall, who detested the British, frequently had his strategic aims dislocated by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, while Eisenhower was responsible for keeping the Allied coalition working together effectively toward a single aim.
In the end, however, both Marshall and Eisenhower succeeded in directing the Allied war effort toward an invasion of France in 1944, despite attempts by Churchill and the British to focus the Allied main effort in Italy and the Balkans.
Author Mark Perry dispels a number of myths about Americans at war throughout this book. He discusses, for example, the huge numbers of deserters in Europe by the end of the war and the concern they caused Eisenhower, contradicting George Patton's claim that Americans love war.
This is American military history at its very best!
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22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Errors shake the reader's confidence, July 30, 2007
This review is from: Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (Hardcover)
On page 14 of this ambitious dual biography, Mark Perry writes ". . . the Red Army was fighting for its life amid the ruins of Stalingrad." Unfortunately the passage is referring to mid-December 1941. The Battle of Stalingrad started on August 21, 1942, some nine months later. This kind of error is lamentable. It indicates sloppy or worse research by the author and poor fact-checking by the editor(s). It's a red-flag for the reader, of course: how many other errors are lurking in the remaining 385 pages or so?
Happily not many. But the book is a bit of a slog and slow reading.
Most of the details will be familiar to any student of WWII. Some of Perry's comments are grating in a way that I can't quite put a name to, such as "Eisenhower was pleased and extolled Patton's successes, though he knew that sooner or later, his best tank commander's profane personality would lead to problems." There is no footnorte, no source for this and it strikes me as gratuitous.
I'm not sure either that Perry really adds anything to our knowledge of the relationship between Eisenhower and Marshall. All the way through, I had a feeling of "been there, done that".
On the whole, not a bad book, but not one that I found compellingly interesting. A better choice, I think, is 15 Stars: Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall: Three Generals Who Saved the American Century which is even more expansive in its subject matter, covering Eisenhower, Marshall and MacArthur. I must add a caveat: I have been a student of WWII for decades. The newcomer to the study of this conflict may indeed find much more of value in this volume than I.
Jerry
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