Masters and Commanders: the title itself has an intrepid feel to it, a nod to Patrick O’Brian, to tales of swashbuckling and derring-do. The principals are: Franklin D. Roosevelt, insouciant, unreadable, the artful dodger, operator and arbiter; Winston Churchill, indomitable, ungovernable, the old man-of-war, incontinent orator and spoiled child; George Marshall, unimpeachable, immovable, the rock, the President’s military conscience; and Alan Brooke, inquisitorial, magisterial, the Prime Minister’s foil, dogmatic strategist and closet diarist.

All four were big men, in Lord Alanbrooke’s characteristic moral sizing, with a common predicament. They had to make common cause, to find ways to get on terms with each other. In their different pairings, each met his match. Their quarrels were exhaustive yet creative. The alliance shook, and held, and prospered. Its fissile potential was contained. What it cost them is plain to see, etched on the faces in the photographs.

Andrew Roberts wants to recreate the drama of that story. In a certain sense his purpose is not only historic but also histrionic. The scenario is tightly focused. It centres on the vicissitudes of the big four, four characters in search of an author, allowing them their calculations, their altercations and their sometimes grubby reconciliations. Further unruly characters threaten to overturn the schema – Stalin beckons ambiguously from the wings – but the author is not to be outmanoeuvred. Roberts is a skilful prestidigitator and an expert scene-shifter. On this showing, he is nothing less than the Pirandello of military history.

The work is dedicated to his wife, equally intrepid, “who in the course of my researches accompanied me to many of the places that appear in the book, including Marrakesh, the Mena House in Giza, the Château Frontenac in Quebec, Bletchley Park, Stalingrad (now Volgograd), the Oval Office of the White House and the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the battlefields of Kursk, Moscow, Anzio, Rome and Monte Cassino, Mussolini’s execution spot above Lake Como, the Hadtörténeti Museum and the Holocaust Museum in the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest, the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna and, on our honeymoon last year, the Kanchanaburi death camp on the River Kwai”. (As one whose honeymoon took in Auschwitz-Birkenau, I must confess to a certain fellow feeling.) The emphasis is revealing: much is made of the author’s researches. Indeed, the researches figure larger than the places. Roberts is acutely conscious that he is venturing on well-trodden ground. The grand strategy of the Second World War, “the War in the West” in particular, has been minutely examined from that day to this, and is now the subject of an impressive historical literature. In order to avoid merely retreading that ground, or retelling the same old story, he has tried to defamiliarize it, and give it a flavour of his own.

In part this comes from seeing for himself. Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted, according to the old military adage, and so it proves here. Roberts is one of the few historians to take the full measure of the role played by Field Marshal Sir John Dill as Head of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington in the inner counsels of the war, as friend and confessor to Alanbrooke and Marshall, both of whom trusted him implicitly. Dill was not one of the principals; but he dealt directly with Marshall, week in week out, he tutored the refractory Alanbrooke in the art of compromise, and he brokered the strategic deals at the key mid-war conferences at Casablanca, Washington and Tehran. Dill’s early death, in November 1944, was a grievous blow to both men, and a tragedy for the alliance. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, the only non-American to have been given that honour, and the only one with such a spectacular memorial. “There is a very fine equestrian statue of him there”, notes Roberts, “cast with such attention to detail that it is even possible to make out the rosettes on three of his campaign medals.”

Occasionally the observation seems less telling, or perhaps more calculated to appeal to American readers accustomed to gorging on submarine-size biographies stuffed with descriptions of everything from the furniture to the weather, and seasoned, ketchup-like, with dollops of data on health and wealth and personal tailoring. Masters and Commanders opens with a classic scene in the Oval Office, where Churchill and Alanbrooke (ill at ease in an old suit) find Roosevelt, “who had been afflicted with poliomyelitis since 1921, seated behind the large desk that had been given to his predecessor Herbert Hoover by the Grand Rapids Furniture Manufacturers Association. The desk itself was cluttered with knick-knacks and mementoes, many of which can still be seen at Hyde Park today. There was a half-dollar commemorative coin in its box, a Lions Club International lapel pin, a stuffed elephant toy and carved wooden donkey . . .”. Mercifully, Tobruk soon falls, and Roberts hits his stride.

His account of the making of grand strategy lays claim to a kind of novelty in source material – material overlooked, or underexploited, or simply unavailable to earlier authors – another aspect of the de-familiarization programme. The headline claim relates to “verbatim notes” taken at War Cabinet meetings by an assistant secretary in the Cabinet Office, Lawrence Burgis, together with “verbatim reports” written by the Deputy Secretary, Norman Brook. Brook’s reports were released only last year.

Burgis’s notes have been available to scholars for some time; Roberts is the first to try to make something of them. It is not a simple matter. An intelligible text must be “reconstructed”, as he puts it, from Burgis’s idiosyncratic shorthand. For those who wish to see how he has gone about it, he refers readers to his website (www.andrew-roberts.net), to no avail: the Burgis material is “to arrive shortly”. Meanwhile, we can compare the notes with the minutes of the meetings. They appear to yield rather less than meets the eye. Most of the material is already familiar; and insofar as the focus of interest is Churchill himself, the idiom seems suspect. If this is Churchill unmediated (but reconstructed), it is flatter, less orotund, more colloquial – less Churchillian – than we have come to expect. Did he really report to the Cabinet, in precisely these words, “The first day I arrived FDR came in and I had time to grab a towel . . .”? Moreover, the Burgis version may or may not be the authentic version. Did Roosevelt really say to Churchill, “To the bitter end, trust me”, rather than “Trust me to the bitter end”?

Roberts appears to make less use of Norman Brook’s reports of Cabinet meetings. Verbatim they may be, but they have the effect of turning Churchill’s rodomontade into telegraphese – a disquieting translation. They may yield the occasional morsel, but they also neuter. They bear the same relationship to the original as an inferior copy; in art historians’ terms, they are “after” Churchill. And they too require heavy editorial interpolation. Here is Churchill, according to Brook, as presented by Roberts, the morning after receiving the news of Roosevelt’s death: “Profound shock. Leap into the unknown. Truman’s statement [said he] will keep present Cabinet and prosecute the war to the utmost against Germany and Japan. Truman will be [a] well man: FDR has been a sick man for months . . . . Had thought of going today to funeral. But v private: in room at White House. Interment at Hyde Park. Relatives . . . only. Suggest A[nthony] E[den] shd be present”.

Whether these sources offer any significant new insight seems a moot point. Given Churchill’s command of language, and habitual grandiloquence, he is the very last person to be summarized, much less skewered, in shorthand. To make the pitch, perhaps, Roberts is tempted to exaggerate the novelty of the sources he deploys. Throughout the book, there is a tendency almost to fetishize diaries. Certainly he makes good use of them – the unexpurgated Alanbrooke diaries, in particular, but also the unpublished diaries of Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, Chief of the Naval Staff for the latter part of the war, a fighting Admiral not given to making speeches or mincing words; and the unpublished diaries of Major General Sir John Kennedy, Director of Military Operations at the War Office, one of Alanbrooke’s few familiars (a fellow birdwatcher, a crucial element in the military sodality).

Stripped of the dramaturgy, Masters and Commanders is an exemplary account of grand strategy. The fundamental issue of the war in the West was the so-called Second Front: the operation known to history as Overlord, launched in June 1944 with the Normandy landings. The how, where and when of such an operation took the big four and their coadjutors more than two years to hammer out. Politically, and no doubt psychologically, the critical question was when – not least because there was on the American side a primitive belief that, for the British, above all for Churchill, and possibly also for Alanbrooke, it was not when but if. The equal and opposite belief on the British side was that the Americans either could not or would not see the virtue of flexibility, adaptability and multiplicity, instead of being in thrall to the fixed (and misguided) idea that the way to win the war was to drive to Berlin by the shortest route at the earliest possible opportunity. To caricature the respective national positions, the British were devious and deceptive, while the Americans were blinkered and boneheaded.

Through this thicket of personal, professional and national prejudices, Andrew Roberts charts a course at once judicious and convincing. On the vexed question of the timing of the Second Front he is crystal-clear: a “sacrificial” operation in north-west France in 1942 would have been just that, while the largest conceivable operation in 1943 would have been entirely inadequate to the task. The brute fact is that a Second Front worthy of the name was impossible to execute before 1944, and even then was little more than a sideshow in Soviet terms. Pirandello, con brio, with a dash of humility, is a tall order, but Andrew Roberts pulls it off.

Andrew Roberts
MASTERS AND COMMANDERS
How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke won the war in the West
674pp. Allen Lane. £25.
978 0 7139 9969 3

Alex Danchev is Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham. His latest book is Picasso Furioso, 2008.

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