School of War - Ep 179: Phillips O’Brien on Grand Strategy in WW2

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Phillips O’Brien, chair of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews and author of The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler--How War Made Them and How They Made War, joins the show to discuss the nature of strategic decision making in World War II and beyond. ▪️ Times      •      01:50 Introduction     •      02:48 Germany 1st debunked     •     06:50 A matter of choices       •      08:20 Management styles       •     11:23 FDR the navalist        •      14:42 Strategic balance     •      16:52 The British Empire       •      18:58 Churchill the shapeshifter          •      26:42 Britain’s place     •      29:22 Casablanca      •      33:54 Making Hitler     •      38:43 Firepower + racial superiority      •      42:41 Delaying defeat     •      44:55 A childish view of war      •      46:50 Human decisions     •      48:28 Stalin the survivor     •      51:30 “Not nice people” Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

There's not much going on in the news these days, so we're going to stick with military history this week. I kid, I kid, of course. And in fact, this coming Tuesday, we are welcoming the great Stephen Kotkin back to the show to discuss current events with regard to Ukraine. So stand by for that. But today we are indeed sticking with the history of grand strategy, and in particular how the idiosyncratic personalities and judgments of the major political leaders in World War II actually drove strategic decision-making and how everything else, all the processes, all the theory, was pretty much just noise. Evergreen stuff, that observation. Let's get into it. It is a description for war.

This is to lock the invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in him. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, Phillips O'Brien, who is the chair of Strategic Studies and the head of the School of International Relations. at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of several books, numerous writings on strategy, the Second World War, Contemporary Strategic Concerns. He's William Lehi, he's biographer.

He is the author most recently of the strategists, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler, how war made them and how they made war. Phil, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks for having me here. So I thought we would start with just kind of unpacking your main, what I take.

to be your main contention. And let me do my layman's attempt at quickly stating it here and then invite you to either correct me or just elaborate. Namely, that when we try to understand how great powers make strategy, we tend to think sort of clinically in terms of means and ways and ends. We look at the documents that bureaucracies produce. We assume a certain degree of rationality. and your basic argument in this book is in this series of case studies of the principal strategist of World War II is none of that really holds up to careful scrutiny or even just general scrutiny of the historical record, that there are personal attributes, prejudices, drives, ambitions, concentrated in the actual leaders that, if anything, are much more determinative than those other factors. Is that fair?

Yeah, I mean, basically it's an unstable, partly chaotic process as well. well and a dynamic process, you know, that wars evolve and strategies change as wars evolve. If I'm going to say what it really came down to was when I found out my assumptions on the U.S. strategy, which we might call Germany first or Europe first, actually turned out not to be true. I assume the United States fought a Europe first strategy, Germany first, in the Second World War, because that's what the books say. That's what the strategy documents say.

strategy documents. U.S. has got a Germany first strategy, and that's a very rational strategy. What is it? It says, okay, Germany is a greater threat than Japan. German-dominated continent is really a dangerous thing. Japan can never be enough, a sort of direct rival for the United States. Therefore, when it comes to the Second World War, what the U.S. needs to do is to fight Germany first.

It needs to make sure Germany is defeated, and then it can turn on Japan and overwhelm Japan. And that that was sort of the rational stated strategy that the United States followed. Well, how the war was won, which was a book that wrote back in 2015 when it was published, was based on actually charting equipment. It's quite a long, sort of boring book maybe, but it was fun for me to write because I was able to look at what was made and where it was set. And what came through? If you look at how the United States fights the war in terms of equipment allocation,

there is not a Germany first. At no point do they fight a Germany first. In fact, in 1942, they probably send more equipment to fight the Japanese. You could say they're fighting a Japan first strategy in 1942. And then in 43 and 44, it gets a little funky. Basically, the army fights Germany first, but the Navy fights Japan first. And the Air Force gets to via the B-17s and B-24's mostly fight Germany. But the B-29. fight Japan. So it sort of was a very diffuse process. Why are they doing this? What if you look at the war in terms of this, and what turns on is that Roosevelt's happy to have that happen, that Roosevelt might say publicly over fighting Germany first, but he makes no attempt to fight a

Germany first. He doesn't say to the armed forces, I want you, updates, I want to make sure that through two-thirds of our forces fighting Germany till it's defeated, it's more like, okay, I'll make this decision. Should we do Guadalcanal? Okay, let's do Guadalcanal. So we'll send the force to do that. Okay, you know, I don't want to invite France in 43, so I'm not going to send the equipment to Europe. I'm going to send it to these places. And it was far more of an ad hoc process of how the strategy, overall strategic direction of the work came, and it was very much Roosevelt. Right. But the other thing, if someone has to write a document, what was interesting to me was a sign they didn't have access to the president. If I have

write it down, that means Roosevelt, I'm not meeting with Roosevelt. That means that someone has to hand it to the president, or even not even to get it to Roosevelt. Someone needs to hand it to Bill Leahy or George Marshall. So we look at those documents and think, that's strategy, but actually it's not because what is the strategy is what Roosevelt decided. So you might say that was the genesis of it, was looking at the fact that the Germany First was never actually followed, even though book after book after book will say this was U.S. strategy in the Second World War. Yeah. And so in this book and in your others, the Leahy biography, for example, you're kind of a chronicler and analyst of power as it actually functions.

Because everything you laid out for anyone who has spent time, whether it's with the President of the United States or just any powerful person, everything you say, you know, sounds very commonsensical. You lay it out very well, probably better than most people who are in those positions of proximity to power could lay it out themselves. analytically, but they would all, I think, sort of intuit. In some ways, literature is better at this than history. You know, Wolf Hall. Well, it's also because I think a lot of history in the last previous decades has tended to not stress the leader idea. You know, we don't want to do the great man.

That's old-fashioned great man history. So therefore, we discuss bureaucracies or we discuss larger impersonal factors, production, which does absolutely matter. But there's almost an impetus not to study the individual because having really individuals shouldn't matter in history. But when it comes to making grand strategy, my feeling looking at the Second World War is it was individual. If you look at it, Hitler, Germany doesn't have to go to war in 1939. That is a choice. That is a strategic choice of Adolf Hitler.

Britain could make peace in 1940, but Winston Churchill doesn't want to make peace. So these are choices. Let's stick with Roosevelt because you, in this question of Germany first, because that's where you open. I mean, a specific question, and then I want to get to the general question of Roosevelt's mindset, which you spend a fair amount of time in the book outlining and sketching its formation. The specific question is, so this is an ad hoc process, a sort of decision after decision, we kind of, you know, there's one way to interpret what you just said as, well, Roosevelt is almost a kind of weakness there. He sort of lapses into something. but I take it to be important to your argument that if there's a lap scene, there's a kind of intentional laugh scene. He has the power to go the other direction. He's at other times shown he can go the

other direction. So it is actually a sign of intent here. Is that accurate? Well, yeah, Roosevelt say a very different war leader from Hitler in the sense that he doesn't really follow, you know, or order around individual units and theaters. I mean, you can be a different kind of war leader. Roosevelt is what he might say, making the upper echelon decisions. So, you know, you know, His decision is when do we invade Europe? And he's very much involved in that. We will invade France in 44. He makes that decision late 42, early 43, and he just sticks to it.

And that's his very much a personal one. And so he tends not to be like, Hitler actually is moving around troops at the front. And Roosevelt is more detached on that, as long as he knows two things, one that his general strategic vision is being. realized that the war is being fought to the principles that he wants in terms of where we should fight in what theaters at what time. And secondly, as long as he thinks the war is also politically popular, Roosevelt is always thinking about re-election in 1944. He's always, he's one of the greatest domestic politicians in U.S. history. He's arguably the greatest domestic politician in U.S. history. He wins four presidential elections. So he also wants to fight the war in such a way that it will be

politically acceptable, palatable to the U.S. people, and that influences a few things. One, he knows he can't just turn his back on the Pacific. He can't fight a Germany first on political rounds. You just can't let the Japanese have their say in the Pacific till he defeats Germany. So he is a driving factor in things like supporting the eventual decision to attack Guadalcanal, which is really one of the most important strategic decisions of 42. And that means they really are going to commit a lot of force to the people. Pacific, and Roosevelt's supportive of that. And then he's very supportive about making sure Guadal

Canal is a success. So he makes sure, you know, that Guadalcanal works, and that's a political decision as much as anything else. And he also makes sure that Europe doesn't get everything in 43 because he doesn't want to invade France at that point. He wants to invade France in 44. So there's a lot of personal things going on in U.S. strategy. And as long as Roosevelt feels his desires are being met, then I think he's quite content not to be a micromanager in the way that say a Hitler or a Stalin or early Stalin. Stalin sort of backs off a bit. But an early Stalin and a Hitler were micromanagers, that was never Roosevelt's natural forte. I want to ask you to draw lines between Roosevelt's formation or his formative period as a strategic thinker, which you spend

some time for all five of these guys outlining these formative periods in the book. And his encounters with Mahan, both the thought of Mahan, but then the literal encounters later in life. And, you know, maybe it's Mahan's interest in the Pacific. You know, what, what is it, you know, in Roosevelt's navalism and everything else that you identify as being important in his formative period that leads to in 1942, okay, fine, do Guadalcanal, you have my support. Well, I mean, I mean, let's start with that. The fundamental difference is Roosevelt is a navalist.

He's not an army, army guy. From the high school, even probably pre-high school, when he first reads Mahan, I don't know the first moment he discovers Mahat, it's probably a groton maybe a little bit earlier, you know, his prep school time. And he basically accepts Mahan's theories. And Mahon's theories are if you control the worldwide sort of sea routes, if you control worldwide communications, you will win a war. even if you lose battles to begin with or things don't seem to be going well, as long as you maintain naval dominance, you are going to win. And Roosevelt really internalizes this message as a young man. He internally, when he actually looks at American history, I don't want to get too back in history, but when he looks at something like the French and Indian wars or the Seven Years Wars, which he actually

is fascinated by, as someone who lives in New York State, he's quite interested in these early colonial the worst. He believes that what happens is the British end up winning because they control the Atlantic. You know, they cut the French off of Canada and that this to him is a really salient lesson on the power of naval control. And so he comes to his life early on to this belief in naval power, this Mahani vision, which then becomes supercharged, I would say when he is, goes into politics and his first substantive job on the national stage is as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. This is formative to him, that he's really just an up-and-coming person. He's got a great last name because of his cousin Theodore,

but he himself is not a great figure, but he's known in the Democratic Party, and in 1912, Woodrow Wilson becomes president, and Wilson names Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, as his assistant secretary of the Navy. And that means for a very, the longest job he would have in his life, other than president, was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He would be Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1913 until 1920. You know, really a long period. And what he does on that period is help build up the Navy before the First World War.

He plays a very active role in what happens to the U.S. Navy in the war and then starts looking at the post-war world. And you can see a lot of his vision. He's far more, you might say, a source. by the way, than the Secretary of the Navy at the time, a man called Joseph S. Daniels, who really doesn't understand naval power and isn't terribly interested in it. He's in North Carolina, so the Democratic, old-style politician. So Roosevelt has this deep indoctrination and fascination with sea power. He can act on it as assistant secretary of the Navy, and that's

why the First World War experiences of his are really formative. That he leaves the First World War with a basic view on how wars are won that he brings to the second. He doesn't. He doesn't doesn't change, I mean, the technology changes. He integrates aircraft into it, but the basic view of how it was one from, it was the same in 1941 for him as it was, I would argue, in 1918. And so how does that, just to connect the very end of the argument, how does then that lead to what appears to be a rhetorical commitment to Germany first, but a commitment in practice to a much more evenly balanced strategy? Yeah, well, there's a few things. One, there's control of sea lines and communications. So that is absolutely to Roosevelt, the foundation of

victory. So when Roosevelt looks at the war when the United States gets in in 42, during the First World War, when the United States is in 1917, the big worry to Roosevelt is German submarines. And he spends a huge amount of his time thinking about how do we keep German submarines out of the Atlantic? How do we keep trade flowing from the U.S. to Europe? Because he's absolutely convinced as long as we keep the Atlantic open, the United States is going to be on the winning side in the First World War. Germany has no chance if we can keep the Atlantic open. And in his mind, that is confirmed to be right. Germany is just crushed in the First World War because the United States can ship everything across the Atlantic that it needs. It adds to British and French

power, and then the Germans have no hope. So when the United States joins the Second World War, when the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, that is, first of all, the fundamental. thing for Roosevelt. You have to start by winning the Battle of the Atlantic. That's the number one thing. And then secondly, you have to also make sure you maintain sea communications from the Pacific to protect yourself enough. You can't allow Pearl Harbor to fall. You have to send enough force to protect sea communications there. So he starts right away doing a sea communication battle on both sides. Now, what happens is his Navy with the U.S. Navy actually is far more interested in the Pacific is the British are doing the dominant role in the Atlantic. And so the U.S. Navy itself is like,

well, the British are doing much more of the heavy lifting here. We want to be a senior partner in an area. And Roosevelt understands the need for the Navy to be a senior partner. I think that's one of the reasons he's quite happy to allow the Navy to deploy most of its force to the Pacific. And it really does. You know, just from late 1941 onwards, United States Navy is emotionally in the Pacific. And that's because he is trying to have sea power control in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. He believes that we have both, then the war will go our way eventually. And to what extent is he thinking long-term about the competition with the British Empire? Because there's an obvious consequence for the British Empire from this kind of thinking. This is really, I mean, I think Roosevelt believes

the British Empire is doomed. He doesn't say that, well, he almost does say that outright to Churchill. He hints it a few times that he is not fighting this war for the British Empire. Empire, I don't think he sees Britain as a rival to the United States. It's more that he sees one of his jobs is easing the process of the United States passing Britain. So he doesn't want to, he doesn't think the United States and Britain will have a war. He believes they're actually going to be on friendly terms, but he certainly doesn't want the United States to be the guaranteeer of the British Empire. That's not Roosevelt's mindset. He, in fact, you could argue he becomes more anti-imperialist as he gets older. And his experience,

of Empire during the Second World War is not positive. He makes one of the most important trips of his life in the Second World War, where he makes a trip all the way from Washington to Casablanca, but he does it by going on this really long circuitous route. He goes to Florida, then he goes to the Caribbean, and he actually flies across the Atlantic to Africa and then flies up to Casablanca in Morocco. And while he's there, he stops in a British colony called Gambia. Again, there's sort of an airfield there. And what he sees, in his mind, is appalling. He sees poverty.

He sees the local population being forced to work for peanuts, the British in control of everything. And in his mind, it just confirms that empire is a terrible thing. It's an exploited sort of thing. And then it should end. Now, he's not going to actually force it to end, but he believes it is coming to an end. And the U.S.'s role is partly to ease that process. Well, let's switch to Churchill that. I don't know if we're going to have time to do all five, but we'll do our best.

Another navalist in a way. No, not to be in with. But not to be. I would like to ask you to outline that. Let me here. I'll stop talking. You outline that and then I'll keep going. Yeah, I mean, Churchill's one of those.

He becomes a navalist sort of in the mid-career, that Churchill, is a bit of a bad student. He's lazy. He wants to have a career, but he doesn't do terribly well at school. He certainly doesn't do well enough to go to university, and he decides to join the military. And even then, he doesn't do well on the entrance examination. So he can't get into Sandhurst as an infantry officer. He can only get in as cavalry officer. Now, you might think cavalry sounds grander. The problem with, if you were a cavalry officer, you had to have money to spend to upkeep your horses. So actually, it was easier to get in the cavalry because you had to, you could be rich and stupid and get into the cavalry. And the smarter you were, you didn't have to pay for your

horses, so you'd go in the infantry. So he basically gets in the army in almost the lowest possible role, you know, as a cavalry officer, which is not actually a highly sort of competitive environment. And the first part of his career is as an army man. So he fights, and he fights and actually many of the continents of the world. He fights in India, he fights in Africa. He witnesses war in Cuba as an observer of the Spanish who are fighting a colonial war in Cuba. But he sort of witnesses imperial land wars.

That is how he rises up. And he's a huge believer in empire. He comes out of this experience as a massive believer in the future of the British Empire and its importance. And then he goes into politics. and he's elected first as a conservative member of the parliament, but then Shakur, he changes parties, which is really, in some ways, some people ever forgive him for this, that he,

he switches parties from the conservative to the liberals, and that's which is considered a coup for the liberals because he's the son of a very well-known conservative politician, Randolph Churchill, who had died by this point, but he was a big name. Churchill is not some humble person. He is the grandson of the Duke of Marlborough. The Churchill's are a big family in Britain. So he comes from the Crem de la Crem, even if he personally doesn't have a lot of money. He's got a lot of social prestige, social capital.

And he joins the Liberal Party, and they actually start rising him up in the ranks to take advantage of his name and his evident energy. And then he becomes, very importantly, first Lord of the Admiralty. Now, first Lord of the Admiralty is really the key civilian role for the British fleet. You might say if you had one Secretary of the Navy, which the United States used to have, that was his job. So he was the civilian politician in charge of the fleet. This is just in the four years before the First World War. So he takes over, I think it's 1910, he takes over as the First Lord of the Admiralty.

And from that point, he's responsible for the great big buildup, the British undergo going into the First World War. So he's the person making sure of those ships are built, that the British maintain their naval dominance over the Germans. You might say that really makes him a navalist in outlook. He starts understanding how important control of sea lanes are. In some ways, he never goes back to being a land guy, even though that is his back. The other thing that I think translates for really making him skeptical of the land war is that he ends up going to the Western Front in the First World War, which is sometimes people don't know that. He is the head of the Navy when the war starts, and actually he ends up with a big political problem, which is he is the person who is responsible for the famous Gallipoli campaign in Turkey. This is something he pushes as First Lord of the Admiralty.

He's the one who really brings the Gallipoli campaign about. When the Gallipoli campaign turns into a fiasco, and it does, it has to be understood. This is a fiasco. Churchill is forced from the cabinet. And in some ways, his political career looks over. You would say Churchill in late 1950, it's not looking good for his political career. But partly to try and reestablish himself, he decides, okay, I'm going to reinvigorate my army career. and he rejoins the army, you would say, or reactivates the army, and he goes to France,

where he is given a regiment to command. Now, what happens is that what he sees in France is utterly different than the kind of war he had seen earlier in his career. When he had seen earlier war, Sudan, South Africa, India, it had been imperial war, small unit wars, on the whole, and the British always won. you know, the British had the technological advantage and the military training advantage. And so you had these wars which the British won after some glorious battles. And he really looked at war, I would say, in a rather boyish way.

He's going to describe his emotional reaction. In the First World War, he sees the trenches. He sees death. He sees, you know, no. In fact, he doesn't actually see what we'd call a battle at any time. Because he's at the front at a very peculiar. your time. He's at the front from December 1915 until May, June, 1916, which is one of the quietest periods on the war. He didn't choose that. He just sort of got lucky. So he doesn't see a

big battle at any time, but what he sees is the drip, drip, drip of everyday attritional death. So you could have a lose an officer here or a few men here, a shell might hit a dugout. You know, even soldiers might die of sepsis from a wound or a cut. It's just the constant, constant strain of death that he sees in the trenches. And this really depresses him, not just because it's death, because he believes this is devastating for Britain. That Britain cannot suffer these kind of casualties than a modern land war will take on them. So when he leaves the Western Front and the summer of 1916, by the way, right before the Battle of the Somme, and he's very lucky. So he leaves right before the Battle of the Somme breaks out, what he tries to do for the rest of the war is keep the British from attacking.

That he doesn't want to do the main offenses of 197, Dane, Passiondale. He just says, look, what we have to do is build up, build up, mass army, get the Americans over. he's delighted when the Americans joined the war in 1917. And we will only attack when we have overwhelming force because otherwise it's going to simply be too bloody. So it's this one on the one hand, the foundational belief in naval power, second hand fear of the land war. That translates exactly to the Second World War. And is there a way in which, I mean, simply coming to greater and greater prominence and power in Britain of all places, I mean, you're describing it in terms of his very personal experiences and very compelling

account. But there's a way in which how can one be a prominent leader in Britain and not sort of encounter, as it were, the almost structural necessity of a maritime strategy? And he sort of comes to understand Britain's place in things and there's the tools available to it. And then the tools that don't work so well in a democracy and these maritime societies tend to be democracies. You know, mass attritional battles just tend not to wars, wars that don't seem to be going well year after year, on land don't seem to don't seem to play out well but i mean it's very interesting i mean in 1917 if you can really see where he's the more extreme in 1917 the british government approves the passion dale offensive when he just doesn't want to do it he's like this is this is going to be a

disaster don't approve this don't do this and he's delighted when it's called off and his view view by the way that war wasn't going to end until nineteen nineteen or even 1920 he doesn't want to do any attacking in 1918 as well. He just wants to hold and build off. So you might say he shares the national consensus on the importance of naval power, but he's more extreme in the anti-land war. He brings that to the Second World War. Yeah. Because he is the last holdout against D-Day. You know, often Churchill is considered you one of the great victors of D-Day. He doesn't want to do it. He indeed fights against invading France almost until the moment. those troops are ashore. So he spends most of 1943 fighting against the invasion of France in 44.

It's only when Stalin and Roosevelt gang up on him in Tehran that he is stuck. You know, when Stalin and Roosevelt, so I do him, look, we are invading France, May of 1944, or Northwest Europe, they said, could have been Holland. But we're going to invade Northwest Europe in 1944 May, and you're going to commit to it, that he finally gives in. And it's so traumatic for him, he has a bit of a breakdown. Well, let's talk about this dispute and the way in which operations in the Mediterranean figure into it. You talk about it at some length in the book.

And it's, we can work Stalin into it, too, but I'm interested in the sort of Roosevelt-Churchal debate over this. And because you have, by this point, as it were, two navalists, two people who have an correct intuition about maritime strategy and its capacities, but you have somebody who's fighting for the survival of the British Empire. on Churchill's front and who's horrified by, you know, the possibility of attritional warfare in France, also on Churchill's front. You have an American who definitely doesn't care about the British Empire.

And the American experience of World War I is certainly bloody, but, you know, we show up and it sort of seems like we show up and we win. I was just at the Marine Corps Museum here in the Washington, D.C. area over the weekend. I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure, but if you go to the Marine Corps' World War I exhibit in the museum, it turns out, Phil, that we won the war at the Battle of Bellowood, so good on us. It basically was all over. It was just details after that point.

Roosevelt might have believed that, by the way. He was a big fan of the Marines. Well, I'm not going to say anything to detract from that. It seems true to me. So please, this dispute over the med and the invasion. Say more. I mean, it's a great one because 1943 is the year that shows, you know, where they're profoundly different,

even though they argue for the same thing in the first part of the year. In January 43, they agree at Casablanca not to invade France in 43. They're not going to invade France. So unless there's some talk that the Soviet Union is collapsing, well, it's why maybe to do an emergency invasion of Brittany. But really what happens is both Roosevelt and Churchill are skeptical about invasion of France in 43. It's just they're skeptical. And therefore, they decide to focus on the Mediterranean. So they agree that in 43, the fighting of the Germans will take place mostly in the Mediterranean,

except for, by the way, always the big battle is the Battle of the Atlantic. So they are going to agree to fight in the Mediterranean. But the big thing is the Battle of the Atlantic and also the growing air war over Germany, the strategic bombing survey. But when it comes to using the army of both sides, it's not going to be to invade France in 43. it'll be to finish up the fighting in North Africa, which is ongoing at the time. And then they agreed to invade an island, a major island. It's assumed to be Sicily.

It could have been Sardinia. But in January 43, they agree that would be the major operation is to seize at least a major island in the Mediterranean and see what happens. Roosevelt's doing it because he wants to save up force to invade France in 44. Because that's his view. 43 would be too much. of a risk, potentially high casualties. The election of 44 is looming in his mind. He doesn't want to have a disastrous deed day too early and have it go wrong and have that lead to high casualties.

So he says, okay, what we're going to do is make sure we win the Battle of Atlantic, start bombing Germany, and start doing a landing in the Mediterranean, and that will keep the war going until we're ready to invade France in 44. So that's why he supports the Mediterranean in 43. Churchill is supporting the Mediterranean in 43 because he never wants to invade France and he wants to protect the British Empire. So the Mediterranean is, of course, the key to get to the Suez Canal. It's always been the key. I mean, people don't always think about it that way, but the Mediterranean is the key British waterway. It has been the key British waterway since they gained control of the Suez Canal because that's the quickest way to India. And the

Asian Empire. So that to Churchill, it's key absolutely to assert themselves in the Mediterranean. And in his mind, actually, what it should lead to is an invasion of Italy because that way you can prevent an invasion of France. We can fight in Italy or we can fight in the Balkans. You can't put that many troops there. We won't have massive casualties. We'll just delay D-Day, delay it, delay it, and let the Russians do the land war and we'll do this. So they agree in 43 to both focus on the Mediterranean, but for very, very different reasons. I think that's the difference. Now, why they end up invading Italy is also a bit haphazard.

They weren't originally supposed to invade Italy. It's just when they evade Sicily in the summer of 43, that the Italian response is collapsed and Mussolini is overthrown. And so they get in their own minds that Italy is about to fall. The new Italian government reaches out to them. They think, aha, we can actually. make Italy switch sides. This will be very easy to switch Italy over. So let's move an invasion of Italy up to try and get all of Italy. Of course, it ends up not being that because the Germans

end up getting troops there more quickly than the Americans and British expect. And they hold Italy and make it a very bloody event. But that's why they end up invading Italy. It's not supposed to have it. It's not a guarantee in January, 1943, that they will invade Italy. It's just as sort of how it happens. So I want to start working the bad guys into this. Yeah. Maybe Hitler is the just in the flow of the story, Hitler is the right place to start. And you have this harrowing sort of portrait of him and his formative period as well as a man

obsessed with firepower and technology on the one hand and on the other hand persuaded that Germany, when it fails, is fails because it's betrayed, betrayed by the enemies within. Say a bit about that formation, which, which I mean, World War I is, if anything more central to Hitler, right, than to the others, even to Churchill. The World War I takes a pretty bad artist and makes Hitler into a historical political figure. None of this would have happened without his experiences of the First World War and also what the First World War does to Europe. So the First World War absolutely creates Hitler.

If there's no First World War, Hitler is not even a footnote in history. He's just a nobody who no one would pay you, a bad painter. on the streets of Vienna and Munich is who Hitler would have ended up being. But the First World War does two things, which are the key things for making Hitler Hitler in the way. The first is it puts him in the German army. Or the Bavaria, theoretically, of course, it's the Bavarian army, because he joins a Bavarian regiment, and that was at one point actually independent of the German army or separate from the Prussian army, even though it is sort of one unit. But he joins a Bavarian regiment. And of all the war leaders, he spends the most time at the front. So he spends a lot of

time from the end of 1914 until 1918 in the German army in the front. Now, for his own safety, he's lucky. His regiment's not very good, so it avoids a lot of the big battles. It's not considered a very combat efficient regiment. So often it's not there in the key parts of the line, but he does see the First World War. He sees it very upfront and personal. He is a messenger. So his job is to take messages from headquarters and run them to the forward units and back. And that sort of is a job. It's a dangerous job. On the one hand, on the other hand, it's much nicer than being in the trenches all the time because he's usually living back at headquarters. And living back at headquarters was a bit nicer than living in the trenches. But his view is of an infantry

soldier. That is how he sees the First World War. He sees it from the minuscule level, the real micro level of war. And what he believes is the war will be decided by firepower. The First World War is about blowing up the other side. Who has more guns, the heavier guns, who will actually be able to blast the other side out? And that is how you're going to win a war. And he comes out of the First World War from his First World War trench experiences. That's what he sees as crucial. The other thing that, of course, the First World War does is it destroys the old order, which allows for someone like Hitler to establish themselves as a political figure.

Again, he would have never done that had he not had the First World War destroying the old Germany and giving him, on the other hand, the political wherewith all of being an ex-soldier being able to take advantage of it. So, in many ways, he changes the least. The Adolf Hitler of Mein Kampf, which is written in the early 20s right after the war, and a lot of it details his first World War experiences. That is the person who leads Germany in the Second World War.

So let me ask you a sort of simplistic question in response to all that we've discussed so far. So, you know, I wouldn't go as far as say that your portrayal of Churchill or even to an extent of Roosevelt is sympathetic exactly. But, you know, everything we've just discussed, we have two men, we have pretty plausible theories of the case of the strategy their countries ought to pursue. Roosevelt comes out one of the two real victors of the war, and Churchill gets some kind of, you know, meritorious achievement badge for surviving in some pretty tough circumstances. And their disagreements, my characterization of their disagreements is sort of within the 40-yard lines of reasonable disagreements.

What you just outline with Hitler that, you know, firepower plus racial superiority equals victory, I would not characterize as a wholly rational sounding likely to succeed theory of the case, far less sophisticated as a military theory than either of the other two we've just outlined. But like I guess this actually was like a dilemma for people living in 41, 42 before the tables really turn or start to turn Hitler. You know, he gets pretty far. He gets pretty far with that theory. Talk a bit about that. I mean, you know, we could sit there in 1942 and theoretically come to the same conclusion.

Like we have United States, we have Britain, we'll set aside the Soviet Union for a second, preparing to fight a war that, you know, it seems like they're pursuing a rational strategy and they've got real resources. And yet here we have the Germans sort of standing astride, a pretty significant swath of the world, having made a lot of progress. Was it just Hitler's daring? I mean, even, you know, Westerners at the time would attribute, or Westerners, you know, non-Germans would attribute at the time to him and there's a kind of political genius. It's his political genius that's got these gains. What is it that gets him so far?

And is it all just kind of a house of cards that, you know, someone's going to blow hard. Remember, if you're a Mahanite, he doesn't have a lot of victories. So if you're Roosevelt or Churchill, you don't actually see the Germans having war-defining victories in 1939. You see Germany taking over much of Europe, the continent of Europe. It loses the Battle of Britain. It's losing the Battle of the Atlantic.

So it's not the case that actually Germany is winning all these great struggles. It's winning the land war, which by the way, the Germans did for much of the Second and the First World. They won until 1917, 18. They actually won a lot of the Land War. So Hitler has a very successful battle of France that, that's admitted, but it's not like actually the world balance of production is changed decisively in Germany's favor, that the U.S. and Britain together are still far larger economically than Germany. They can produce far more force.

The problem for Britain is the U.S. isn't in the war yet. But if you're looking at from their point, whereas Hitler believes the battle is determined, he seems to think once he beats France, he's got to win the war. He makes that sort of meant, I can't lose at that point. And that's why he launches the Battle of Britain in a disastrous way. The Germans don't have enough equipment. The Germans are actually defeated very easily in the Battle of Britain. I always think this is one of the poorly described battles, which make it look like a close one thing.

It's not. And he's beaten so quickly, he actually is left with only in his mind the alternative of attacking the Soviet Union because he can't damage Britain. He decides to attack the Soviet Union because he can't. damage Britain, and he's so convinced of his own racial superiority and genius, he really believes the Soviet Union won't last more than a few weeks. They'll knock it down and we'll be there by the October. I think 16 weeks was sort of the original plan of the campaign that was going to start in June, which is bonkers when you consider the size of the Soviet Union. And it is based on his view of German superiority. And it's also, by the way, a sign of how poorly he prepared his army.

He prepared his army to win certain battles, but it didn't have nearly enough trucks. It couldn't carry the supplies. So the German army in Barbarossa in 1941 is left fighting this very weird campaign. It advances for a few hundred miles. There's a great blitzry. And then it has to stop. It has to stop for weeks on end as they build the rail lines and get the supplies up because they don't have the trucks and that ability to move things forward. So when you look at it from that point of view, what he's done is actually prepared a really deficient force.

And it doesn't get to Moscow. It doesn't get to Leningrad. You know, it can't take these cities. It doesn't get all of the Ukraine. So it's a failure in 1941, I would say brought on a lot by his own choices. And then by the end of 41, he's going to lose the war because the U.S. The Soviet Union survives and the U.S. gets in. War's over.

He's not going to win it. from the end of 41. It's basically turned against him. It's a question of how long the war lasts at that point. So it's a sign I think where he's gone terribly wrong in a good way. I'm glad he did, but he goes terribly wrong strategically in a very short period of time. And I guess his theory of the case for overall victory is this geopolitical, sort of bad geopolitical, monstrous geopolitical notion that in the east, the production figures will turn in his favor eventually. He'll build a slave empire in the east and in time that will give him the warmaking capacity

to polish off the Anglo-Americans. But the problem among the many problems with that, just sticking with strategy, is that would take time, if nothing else, that's going to take a lot of time. And he doesn't have the time. I mean, this is where Hitler doesn't make a lot of, I mean, I think basically Hitler can believe two different things at the same time. And that's where we talk about policy being erratic and chaotic and unstable. Hitler, on the one hand, I think, is terribly worried by the end of 41.

There's a rational part of him that knows, sorry, I don't mean to, he's screwed, that he's really in a bad situation when the United States is in. And yet he can't admit that publicly or to other people. So he starts talking about all these great plans. We're going to do this. We're going to do that. We're going to have wonder weapons. we're going to raise production.

But there's never, I would argue, from the end of 41, a coherent way that he can win the war. It's really more trying to delay the inevitable about what's going to happen. I mean, what he tries in 42 is never going to, by the way, knock the Soviet Union out of the war. He launches a summer offensive and he takes Stalingrad and the Caucasus. But even if he takes Stalingrad and the Caucasus and holds it, there's a lot of the Soviet Union left that he's not going to to be able to take in 42, and then by 43, the U.S. and Britain are going to be gearing up and coming at him. So I don't think he has an actual coherent view of victory. He keeps, go well that the Anglo-Americans will split from the Soviets. He makes up fanciful things.

But what I see from that point on is Hitler more just trying to survive as long as possible and hoping something happens. We had the very talented Charlie Laterman on the show, a Eurocote. I know Charlie very well. Yeah, he's great. And his book on Hitler's Declaration of War was great. And it's, you know, you're talking about impulsivity and, you know, irrationality. That seems to me, and Charlie sort of argues, that's really up there in the annals. Maybe you, I mean, is what, what rational basis was there?

I have it on good authority, by the way. I wrote a review of John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosado's book, How States Think. And I have it on their authority that actually Phillips, the decision of Hitler to declare war in United States was highly rational as a state decision. They argue that in their book. So, you know, Mirr Shimer on the one side, laterman. It's not rational or right on the other. I mean, this is barking. He declares war because his view is that he will be able to knock the Soviet Union out of the war before American power can get there. That's the entire basis of the decision, and it's not true. So, I mean, only if you have a childish high school boy view of,

of war, do you believe he can knock the Soviet Union out of the war without before the U.S. can apply force? There's no evidence that he can not. I mean, when he makes that decision, the Russian, the German army is ground to a halt outside of Moscow. It's freezing. So it is not rational. It actually is based on a calculation that has proven to be completely wrong.

What he can't do, what he believes and why he does it is because he can't. believe the U.S. won't declare war on him. So I think, I mean, he's gotten to himself into a real pickle by the end of 1941, where he believes whatever is going to happen, Roosevelt will eventually declare war on him. So he says, okay, I might as well declare war on the United States, and that way I could launch my submarines of the Atlantic, and I can try to knock out the Soviet Union. It's rational for a crazy person, you might say. Yeah. But it is not a rational calculation, because it instantly has proven wrong. He can't win the battle of the Atlantic

and he can't knock the Soviet Union out. So no, it's not rational. I take this to be, not to try to start fights here, but an important upshot of your book, really kind of the teaching of your book in an abstract way is strategic decisions are made by humans. Powerful humans, small groups,

maybe individual powerful humans, formed by their life experiences. And those life experiences, to an extent determine it, there are other factors. But you can't predict every step. People make mistakes. People get things wrong.

Some people are more likely to get things wrong than others. It's human. It's human. I mean, look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's Vladimir Putin's decision. Russian state didn't have to do this. All right. In fact, if you look at Putin with his advisors,

in that televised scenario in February 22, he basically berates his advisors to support it. Most of these decisions are made by individuals, but a very small group around them. That's what they do. They often dress it up by a national decision, but it's an individual small group choice. Not to end on a grim note,

but we're not going to get to Mussolini, which is too bad. Or Stalin, actually. Well, no, I wanted this way. I was going to ask you just quickly on Stalin before we wrap. But mostly, I never forget Dave Barry, the great humorist, American humorist of my youth, at least had a great line about Italy in World War II, where he describes the Italian entrance into the war,

and he said they make it, you know, five miles into France. The Italian army makes it five miles into France before their truck breaks down. It's not entirely fair, but a little bit fair. Well, it is a big logistic shortcoming. They never do logistics properly in the second model. So I want to ask you about Stalin before we close.

And I want to ask you about Stalin getting his lunch eaten by Hitler with Barbarossa, at least initially, because that's for a man is paranoid and obsessive regarding his enemies as Stalin. It's a striking failure. And Stalin for being, you know, the second great monster that we're talking about today after Hitler is the second victor of the war after Roosevelt. So just a bit about Stalin and how he makes that mistake with Hitler and what drives him.

Well, basically, I call Stalin the worst and best grand strategist of the war because he almost destroys himself and he almost destroys the Soviet Union early in the war because of his own choices. And they're given, I think, because of two things. one is he's utterly confident in his own vision. The Stalin believes he understands things and that his vision will definitely work out. And the other is his general view of capitalist powers. So what he says is capitalist powers are going to fight or compare your capitalists to do that.

So what we want to do is let the capitalists fight and we're going to stay out of it. And the way we'll stay out of it and this time is I'll cut a deal with Hitler. I'll get half of Poland, I'll get the Baltics, and Britain and France will fight Germany and will let them fight each other and exhaust themselves. That's sort of Stalin's view. So for the first few months, after the Second World War breaks out, he's absolutely confident he's made the right choice. Yeah, that basically Britain and France are on one side, Germany's on the other.

It's happening the way he wants. What he doesn't calculate on, and by the way, this is not something a lot of people calculated on, is the fall of France. and the fall of France destroys his entire calculation. But at that point, he can't adjust. So the fall of France means that Hitler is now basically dominant for all of Western and Central Europe. And it's got a very powerful army and that Stalin is going to have problems going forward.

Hitler is not someone who's probably going to be good to. But what he does in some sense is desperately try to keep Hitler close by giving him. giving Hitler a lot of raw materials by not preparing for an adjourn attack. So what Stalin is trying to do is he's almost willfully ignoring the signs that Hitler is preparing an attack in late 1940 and early 1941 because it means that he's miscalculated if Hitler's doing that because he assured everyone that wasn't going to happen, but his strategic genius would happen. And this is why you're in this bizarre situation in 1941 where he leaves the Red Army

unprepared. It's not in its proper defensive position. It's in a very vulnerable sort of forward positioning. He keeps supplying the Germans with everything he possibly can to in his mind keep the Germans happy. He strengthens Hitler until the moment Hitler crosses the border. He ends up almost leading his country to destruction. He's just saved partly because Hitler has not prepared the right army, I would argue. I don't quite know how to formulate this final question. I'll do my best. and we'll see how it goes. You know, we've just been talking about Stalin. We've been talking to Hitler before him.

These are two, you know, monsters on an epic scale, deserving of universal contempt. If the contempt isn't universal, it ought to be. But I sort of alluded to this earlier. It's not exactly like the O'Brien Churchill or the O'Brien Roosevelt or exactly cuddly figures. No. A reader who encounters them for the first time in your pages will not come away necessarily a...

Political leaders are not nice people. Right. Okay. So this is where I'm driving towards. Yeah, I mean, this, I mean, Democratic leaders are no nicer, I mean, they're nicer because they don't tend to be psychopaths often compared to dictators. But they tend to be people who are highly competitive, highly egocentric, and driven far beyond a normal human being. Because to succeed in a democratic

world, you have to be really competitive and being willing to devote your life to it. So they are not nice. Churchill's not a nice person. Roosevelt's not a nice person. But they tend to be as manipulative of people. Right. And so I think what I was what I'm trying to get to or ask is as an analyst of all this, as a historian who is who is pulling this apart to apply which you're seeing to meaningful concerns today. You know, how do you how do you think about that? I could imagine a scenario, not you, but I can imagine, you know, one's kind of, the better you get to know these people, the more can kind of contempt you feel, one feels. And how does that affect the analysis? And do, How do you think about, is this an issue? How do you think about this side of things?

No, I think it allows you to understand them better by not having them on pedestals. You know, to look at them as human beings with deep flaws. And then you can actually see the real differences between the Hitler's and the Roosevelt. That the real differences is when you don't make Roosevelt into this unimpeachable vision of goodness. It's when, you know, Roosevelt's a very flawed human being and a deeply political in many ways of very unhapal. happy man, but he has a fundamental humanness about him that Adolf Hitler doesn't have. So I think Banchi being more realistic about their characters highlights the really important differences, not the fake books.

Phillips O'Brien, author most recently of The Strategists. This has been a really fascinating conversation. We've only really scratched the surface of the arguments that you make in the book. I really do recommend it to listeners. And I very much appreciate you making the time. Thank you very much. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.