When the First World War broke out, Joseph Stalin was as far from the corridors of power as it was possible to be. Exiled in Siberia, this penniless middle-aged Marxist with a flair for bank heists and political assassinations was a failure and he knew it. Likewise, in Germany, another nondescript and undistinguished misanthrope was scraping a living together as an artist. Adolf Hitler greeted the eruption of war with ecstasy, exploiting the chaos to transfer his allegiance from Austria-Hungary to Germany and marching off to the front. In Italy, an enigmatic socialist editor also used the outbreak of war to switch identities. After initially fulminating against the fighting, Benito Mussolini quickly flipped, emerging as an impassioned cheerleader for Italian intervention. When Italy joined the fray, Mussolini was enlisted and witnessed first-hand the catastrophic conflict that he had helped embroil his country in.
The First World War transformed all their fortunes. Out of it came the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War that turned Stalin into one of his country’s most powerful figures and ultimately its leader, the rise of Mussolini’s Italian Fascist regime, and the seizure of power in Germany by Hitler’s Nazi party. Yet the war did not merely enable the ascent of these ignoble ideologues. As Phillips Payson O’Brien demonstrates in his richly detailed and highly readable study, it also had an indelible intellectual influence on their ideas of war and strategy in ways that would help determine the next global war as well.
The Strategists considers these three dictators alongside the two principal democratic leaders of World War II, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, both of whom were also profoundly impacted by their experience of the century’s first global crisis. By embedding the education of these five strategists in their earlier experiences of war, O’Brien helps us better understand not only history’s most destructive conflict but also the men who shaped it.
Even as Hitler rose to power, his mind remained in the trenches. His strategic outlook was stamped by his experiences, principally as a dispatch runner, on the Western Front. The infantry soldier obsessed by firepower and bulky weapons retained those prejudices as Führer. Scarred by Germany’s defeat, he emerged determined to forestall another two-front war, especially one involving Britain. Yet the limited lessons that he took from that first conflict led to history repeating itself, according to O’Brien.
After failing to neutralize Britain while he established his European dominion, he was determined to crush it in 1940. Yet having prioritized land power, his forces lacked the air and naval resources necessary to cross the English Channel. Boxed in by his inability to beat Britain, he then attacked the Soviets, hoping their rapid defeat would deprive Churchill of a continental ally. But Hitler’s fixation with heavy artillery left his army short of trucks. Dependent on horse and cart, lacking mobility and supplies, the Germans became bogged down in the harsh Russian winter. Hitler’s flawed strategy left Germany stuck in the past and again embroiled in a two-front war.
Hitler’s fellow fascist, Mussolini, was a Bourbon who learned nothing and forgot nothing from the last war. He was ideally placed as a front-line soldier in World War I, largely removed from danger, to study the methods of mechanized warfare. Yet it did nothing to dampen his belief that will and spirit trumped materiel. This proved little protection for the hundreds of thousands of ill-equipped Italian soldiers who suffered for his vain attempt to turn Italy into a great power.
O’Brien, the author of a popular Substack, “Boring War,” which brings insights from military history to bear on contemporary conflicts, is particularly enlightening on the economics of grand strategy. While The Strategists emphasizes resource prioritization and production over pitched battles in warfare, this is anything but dull.
We see Churchill, for example, after reveling in his youthful forays into colonial conflicts, brought down by the Dardanelles debacle and forced to confront the horrors of total war as a volunteer on the Western Front. Repulsed by the slaughter, a chastened Churchill returned to front-line politics in 1917 a different strategist. He was more cautious and conversant with the logistics of war, even while retaining more than a dash of his old derring-do and romantic imperialism.
According to O’Brien, it was as minister of munitions, one of the less studied periods of his much-celebrated career, that Churchill first developed the blueprint that underpinned British strategy during its Finest Hour. Having witnessed the limits of manpower, Churchill put his faith in machinery. Unlike Hitler, what Churchill took from the Western Front was that “moving power” was more crucial than firepower. On becoming prime minister in 1940, Churchill immediately ramped up aircraft production to such an extent that Britain’s factories were soon producing more than double those of Germany.
O’Brien is perhaps at his most insightful when discussing the formative political years of that most elusive figure, Franklin Roosevelt. As a bellicose assistant secretary of the Navy, when war broke out in 1914, Roosevelt was determined to get the fleet into fighting shape. Following U.S. intervention, he was eager to leave behind his desk job in Washington and get to the front. Yet when that request was finally granted in August 1918, Roosevelt was repelled by the squalid conditions in the trenches. He fell back on his faith in naval power and belief that controlling communications, whether on the seas or in the air, would determine the outcome of modern wars.
His commitment to a navy “second to none” and conviction that U.S. security required international engagement was checked by painful political defeats in the 1914 New York Democratic Senate primary and as vice presidential candidate in 1920 when these messages failed to resonate. By the time the next war came around, Roosevelt was far more adept at combining politics with strategy. Recognizing that no democratic statesman could craft a successful strategy without public support, he was far more cautious in his crusading. O’Brien has no doubt that Roosevelt was determined to get the United States directly into the war against Hitler from an early stage but knew that a “catalyst” was necessary to overcome domestic political resistance. Even before that came with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, however, O’Brien credits Roosevelt with amassing the air-sea power necessary to triumph in a global conflict.
O’Brien’s emphasis on how U.S.-U.K. air-sea power chiefly destroyed Axis productive capacity and equipment provides a compelling corrective to the more orthodox argument that German power was principally destroyed by battles on the Eastern Front. For O’Brien, Stalin was both the “worst and best grand strategist” of World War II. The paranoia that was given free rein when he unleashed terror during the Russian Civil War continued to wreak havoc on his own regime and undermine his nation’s defenses. Ironically, though, Stalin was so willing to suspend his paranoia when it came to Hitler that he was still supplying him with raw materials right up to the eve of his invasion.
But when forced to adapt, Stalin, unlike Hitler, did. Above all, O’Brien suggests he demonstrated his mastery of manipulating “other powers to serve his needs,” drawing on massive Lend-Lease aid to force the Germans back and establish his own dominance over Eastern Europe. In doing so, Stalin demonstrated the limits of Roosevelt’s grand strategy. While the president might have been the greatest grand strategist “in the ways and means of modern war,” these ultimately proved “disconnected from the ends” due to his failure to communicate a clear postwar vision. In fairness, O’Brien points out, the collapse of the British Empire and the coming of the Cold War, which ultimately precipitated the downfall of Stalin’s own empire, meant neither of the other victorious grand strategists ultimately achieved their principal postwar ends either.
O’Brien makes a powerful case for the ways in which their personal histories profoundly shaped all the strategists. He pays less attention to how they were influenced by their study of history. We do get a clear sense of how Roosevelt imbibed Alfred Mahan’s historically informed naval theories. But other than brief allusions to Churchill devouring Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire while stationed in India, and glancing references to Stalin reading Das Kapital and how Hitler’s insights on America were taken from The Grapes of Wrath, there is little on the books that shaped their strategic outlooks. Yet we know that each of these figures read widely, if somewhat eclectically, and possessed large personal libraries. In particular, it would have been illuminating to learn the strategic lessons that Stalin took from his 20,000-volume library, which as the historian Geoffrey Roberts recently revealed contained many well-thumbed and annotated texts on Russian history and statecraft. Or how Churchill’s own voracious reading and prolific writing shaped a “historical imagination” that, as Isaiah Berlin put it, was “the single, central, organizing principle of his moral and intellectual universe” in 1940.
Of course, that would have led to a very different book. What O’Brien has produced is a vivid account of how some of the most consequential strategists of the 20th century drew on their wartime historical memories and experiences for practical purposes.
It was the French First World War leader, Georges Clemenceau, who supposedly coined the famous aphorism that military leaders “always fight the last war over again.” With regard to the Second World War strategists, as O’Brien shows us, the last war was never far from their minds.
The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler—How War Made Them and How They Made War
by Phillips Payson O’Brien
Dutton, 544 pp., $35
Charlie Laderman is a senior lecturer in international history in the War Studies Department at King’s College (London) and author, most recently, of Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War (Basic).
