World War II's Team of Rivals

Keystone / Getty Images If you want to learn how the Allies really won the war, Andrew Roberts’ impeccable new history retraces the secret meetings between FDR and Churchill.

Of course everybody envies the job of book reviewer—the glamour, the fame, the parties, the lavish presents, beautiful women throwing themselves at him in the hope of kind words about their latest bodice ripper.... Well, but it also has its downside. First of all, one has to read the books, in an age when everybody’s ambition is to avoid reading altogether, and receive all information on the screen of one’s cellphone; and second, unless one has led the life of a hermit, half the books one has to read are written by old friends, or people with whom one has some connection.

Churchill is infinitely more human, lovable and infuriating than FDR, who made something of a fetish at hiding (or faking) his emotions.

Best, therefore, to be frank at the beginning—I am a huge admirer of Andrew Roberts, and think he is one of the best of the younger British historians (by which I mean, I suppose, a generation or two younger than my own). That he writes well almost goes without saying—unlike American academic historians, British historians do write well, and with a certain felicitous wit and a gift for the human anecdote. The huge, turgid work of history, sinking under the weight of its own “politically correct” thesis and its foot- and source notes, is not the British way of writing history, and never has been. Even bona fide academics like the late Sir John Wheeler-Bennett and Lord Dacre (formerly Hugh Trevor-Roper) wrote with dash and style, and out of much experience with the great and the famous in the real world, and Andrew Roberts is no exception to this happy rule. He not only writes about the high and mighty, he sits on numerous committees with them, comments about the royal family on television, and gave a lecture in the White House to an audience which included former President Bush (who did not seem to have learned anything from it, however). And I must confess further that his biographies of the Marquess of Salisbury and Lord Halifax are models of political biography (particularly the former, which I have read many times over), and that I published two of his books, one, Eminent Churchillians, which opened up, at last, a whole new dimension to writing about Churchill; and the other, Napoleon and Wellington, a brilliant and concise account of Waterloo. As if all that were not enough, we share the same American publisher, and I once recommended him to Henry Kissinger to be his “authorized” biographer. Perhaps only thing we do not share is that he is a Cantabrian, whereas I am an Oxonian, but nobody is perfect.

Masters and Commanders. By Andrew Roberts. 720 pages. Harper. $35. Let it be said at once that Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945, is an enormously ambitious book, which sets out to describe and analyze the conduct of the war in the West on the part of the Allies by retracing the important high-level meetings (the phrase “summit conference” did not then exist) between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and their respective service chiefs and principal military advisers. This is already a huge task, because the total record of those conferences would produce enough paper to sink a battleship, but it also means that Roberts has had to weave together biography, history, the (now) public record, and a large amount of previously unknown or unpublished new material into a coherent whole, and produce out of it all a readable story (which is not always the case with ambitious works of history, in which the story is subsumed by vast amounts of undigested information, charts, numbers and graphs that are not integrated into the narrative, and in fact stop it dead before it can get moving). Roberts has managed to bring this off brilliantly, and I speak as the author of a 778-page biography of Dwight David Eisenhower.

Like a good novelist, he never introduces a character without giving the reader a concise biography of him, and he manages to maintain the flow of his narrative so that one is kept reading by the sheer force of events, while keeping him or her awake when discussions of policy become heavy going by glimpses of the real man behind the words. (He is wonderful at this with Stalin and British Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, who is, in fact, the “hero” of the book, very good with Churchill, and less successful with FDR and Gen. George C. Marshall). Still, all in all, if you wanted to know how “the Grand Alliance” worked, and how the decisions were made that eventually led to the Allied victory in World War Two, this would be the book to read, unless you are prepared to read Churchill’s six volumes, Sir Arthur Bryant’s two volumes based on Brooke’s diaries, the 1,400 letters between FDR and Churchill (gathered in three weighty volumes), plus the standard biography of Marshall, Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe, the memoirs of innumerable generals, air marshals and admirals, etc. In short, Roberts has taken all the material and condensed it down into one very readable and notably fair-minded volume.