Some criticize FDR for being so political. You don’t?
He was quite right. This isn’t an anti-Roosevelt book in any sense. It argues that even though he wasn’t a policy-wonk pointy-head obsessed with strategy, even though he was the least qualified and the least interested, Roosevelt was the man whose strategy was actually adopted by the western Allies. It’s an astonishing story.
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You write, “Too much has been made of the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship.”
It’s an obsessive thing. The stories are so good; they were both aristocrats and wonderful phrasemakers. But to understand why men attacked in the places they did, you’ve got to go beyond that and look at the relationships between the political masters and the military commanders. Here the very fraught relationship between Marshall and Brooke comes to center stage.
How would you describe it?
Brooke liked and admired Marshall as a man and a gentleman, as he put it, but not as a strategist. Then again, Brooke didn’t admire anyone as a strategist. He liked [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur, because MacArthur and he never overlapped. He loved Stalin, even though Stalin completely disagreed with his central strategic thesis. And he loved Gen. [Jan] Smuts. Most of the British high command admired Smuts because he’d fought against us in the Boer War, and we have this thing about admiring our former foes as soldiers—after they’ve lost. Zulus, even the Taliban today: you’ll hear, “They’re monstrous but fine fighting men!”
But didn’t Americans feel the British looked down on them?
Well, of course, you won the Revolution. But seriously, this feeling came to the worst possible head with [Field Marshal Bernard] Montgomery’s press conference at Zonhoven. He praised the American fighting man, but didn’t mention Patton or Bradley or any American over the rank of captain. Understandably, the Americans took that sort of thing very seriously.
So FDR deflected all that for strategic reasons?
Adm. [Ernest] King, of course, wanted a Pacific war all along. But when Marshall wanted, in June 1942, to at least threaten a Pacific war to get the British onto an early cross-Channel attack, FDR said, “You’re being childish.” It takes fantastic self-confidence for a man like FDR, with no strategic background, to tell his Joint Chiefs, who’ve spent their lives studying precisely this, that they’re talking rubbish over a matter of grand strategy. It’s fabulously admirable in a way, but it’s also…well, mind-boggling.
Because?
He was right, and they were wrong. It would have been a terrible error to cross the Channel before June 1944; it was lucky enough we got away with it then. To try it, as Marshall wanted, in the fall of 1942, when the Battle of the Atlantic was still lost, when we didn’t have the pipeline or Mulberry harbors, when the Luftwaffe had command of the skies—it would have been a disaster.
What about the role of luck?
It’s vital. Look at Ultra. When the Germans introduced the fourth rotor to the Enigma machine in February 1942, it suddenly plunged our convoy system into darkness. The luck was that we happened to have the necessary Cambridge dons, eccentric to a man—Alan Turing wore a gas mask while cycling and tied his teacup to a radiator—who created the machine that broke the codes. What the hell would we have done without them? What would we have done if U-boat wolf packs operated into 1943 and 1944? When would we have ever crossed the Channel? Any historian writing of the Second World War without acknowledging the role of luck would be foolhardy.
You think democracies work better than autocracies in war. Why?
My next book looks at Hitler and his generals. There you see again and again that what they need is not necessarily democracy in the sense of one man, one vote, but a culture whereby you could look the top man in the eye and tell him he’s wrong without worrying your wife would be sent to a concentration camp or you’d be forced to take cyanide. Without that fear, there was much better and objective advice.
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