How to Win a World War
A review of "The Strategists" by Phillips Payson O'Brien
Why did the Allies win World War II?
As the military historian Phillips Payson O’Brien argues in his engaging and stimulating new book, The Strategists, the Allies triumphed in no small part because its supreme political leaders—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin—were simply better strategists than their fascist enemies Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The formative political and military experiences of the Allied triumvirate allowed each leader to grasp the essential nature of the industrial, global war they were fighting, while the two Axis warlords remained imprisoned by intellectual, moral, and political pathologies forged by their own early life experiences. O’Brien makes a compelling case, albeit one unnecessarily complicated by a bifurcated narrative that makes The Strategists as a whole read like two slightly different books spliced together—the first of them excellent, the second merely quite good.
The first half of The Strategists is structured around the early lives of the five supreme leaders in the European and Atlantic theaters of World War II: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. Through chapter-by-chapter portraits of each individual, O’Brien vividly illustrates how life experiences up to the end of World War I shaped and molded the strategic outlooks of these leaders in ways that determined the outcome of the next great global conflagration. He pulls no punches in his descriptions of the already-visible depravities of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini; as a young man, O’Brien notes, the future Nazi despot had already “revealed many of the traits he would later bring to his dictatorship and war leadership.”
While O’Brien sets up clear narrative and intellectual throughlines in the first half of his book, the second half shifts in structure to an episodic treatment that treads over the well-worn ground of World War II grand strategy. It’s a missed opportunity to make an already strong argument even more persuasive; certain threads brought to the fore book’s first half fade into the background of the episodic narrative of the back end. Had O’Brien kept a similar structure throughout The Strategists, with later chapters dwelling on individual leaders instead of critical episodes and decision-points during the war, it likely would have reinforced his overall narrative. Still, it’s a minor complaint that makes the back half of the book simply great rather than outstanding.
But The Strategists doesn’t just explain that the Allies won the war because they had the best strategists—it explains why those strategists were, in fact, the best.
And of the five wartime leaders O’Brien profiles, Franklin D. Roosevelt emerges as the preeminent strategist; Roosevelt perceived the fundamental nature of the titanic worldwide struggle he and his nation were involved in better than any of his peers. As O’Brien’s vignettes make clear, Roosevelt’s lifelong fascination with the sea and his later professional interest in aviation—as assistant secretary of the navy under President Woodrow Wilson, he took an interest in new technology—gave him the understanding that industrial production, technological advancement, and control of the air and sea lanes would decide the fate of nations moving forward. He preferred to fight what O’Brien calls an “air-sea war,” a strategy focused not on massive ground battles but on the air and naval campaigns that would “weaken enemy resistance before using land power as selectively as possible to bring any war to a close.”
It's true, as O’Brien contends, that Roosevelt had no specific or detailed plans for postwar Europe or Germany—but he did have a good sense of his postwar political and diplomatic aspirations for the world, aspirations that would not accommodate the sort of power politicking over spheres of influence that Churchill and Stalin evidently preferred. Indeed, Roosevelt’s strategic aims beyond the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan may not have been quite so amorphous as O’Brien asserts; indeed, he even acknowledges that a private agreement between Churchill and Stalin to divvy up Eastern Europe amounted to nothing less than “a political and personal pipe dream.” No matter how hazy or gauzy they may have been, Roosevelt’s notions about postwar relations among nations had to be factored into the calculations of even the most ruthless of realists.
For his part, Churchill proved less effective as a grand strategist due in no small part to his own formative experiences. Obsessed with the British Empire from a young age, the preservation of the empire to which he had devoted—and risked—his life remained Churchill’s strategic lodestar throughout the Second World War. His time in the trenches during the First World War also gave Churchill a healthy respect for industrial warfare and the gruesome toll it inflicted on British troops; back in government as World War I drew to a close, he would embrace “an equipment-centric, technologically advanced and industrial produced armed forces” that could defeat the enemy without too many British dead. His devotion to empire and desire to keep British casualties as low as possible conspired to make Churchill a cautious strategist in World War II, proposing diversionary campaigns in the Mediterranean and worrying about the potential toll of a cross-channel invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe—strategic debates, O’Brien observes, Churchill lost definitively by 1943.
Stalin, on the other hand, was a strategic survivalist: intrinsically paranoid, intensely ideological, and exceptionally brutal—but not above ruthless pragmatism when his back was against the wall. As O’Brien puts it, the Soviet dictator “would go to great, even self-destructive lengths to purge anyone he viewed as a threat to himself or Bolshevism (which, in his mind, were basically identical).” Paranoia was Stalin’s default mode; ideology clouded his strategic vision and led him to strike a fateful alliance with Hitler in August 1939. After that deal went disastrously wrong nearly two years later, Stalin found himself relying on the dread capitalist powers of Great Britain and especially the United States to save the Soviet Union. But this pragmatism only lasted so long: as the war in Europe drew to an end, Stalin returned to his paranoid, ideological baseline and began to alienate the wartime allies whose material support proved crucial to his own survival. “Once the crisis passed and he felt more secure,” O’Brien writes, “[Stalin] dropped his cooperative restraint and took policy stances that drove an increasing wedge between himself and Roosevelt, and then Truman.”
But it’s O’Brien’s treatment of the two Axis dictators and their irrational—if not outright delusional—strategic thinking that may have the most relevance for us. Indeed, it’s hard to read O’Brien’s account and not see parallels between the past and present-day dictators, whether real like Vladimir Putin or aspirational like Donald Trump. Both Hitler and Mussolini fixated on appearances and aesthetics over effectiveness, held themselves in extraordinarily high regard despite their evident mediocrity, obsessed over perceived personal and national slights, and ultimately held the nations they led in fierce contempt. In their twisted minds, they had not failed their nations—their nations had proven unworthy of their genius and failed them.
As O’Brien points out, these pathologies were visible early on. Mussolini routinely raped women and attacked those he felt had affronted him, while the young Hitler “was lazy but demanded to be the centre of attention” and “found it impossible to take into account the feelings of other people.” When he plunged Europe into war in 1939, Hitler refused to believe that Britain would actually fight over Poland; the Nazi dictator saw Britain as he imagined it to be, not as it actually was. “It was a tendency he would show time and time again,” O’Brien remarks. “[Hitler] had created a system around himself that reinforced his ego, and he found it impossible to reckon with being wrong.” Nor could the dictators accept any responsibility for leading their nations to catastrophic defeats; Mussolini claimed his only error involved creating an Italian empire decades too soon, while Hitler proved all too willing to “sacrifice his people for his own vision of national greatness”
The Strategists is a must read for anyone interested or involved in foreign policy and national security today. Strategy, O’Brien reminds us, is not the result of pre-thought, top-down plans and schemes; it emerges from the personalities and experiences of leaders as well as their interactions with their own societies and the rest of the world. Leaders matter, both for good and for ill—something that ought to be obvious to us today, but too often is not.
Ultimately, The Strategists also serves as an admonition to those of us still in the fortunate position to choose our leaders to do so wisely—and a warning about the disasters and tragedies that invariably ensue when we don’t.