Description:

A dramatic, eye-opening account of how FDR took personal charge of the military direction of World War II.Based on years of archival research and interviews with the last surviving Roosevelt aides and family members, The Mantle of Command offers a radical new perspective on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s masterful—and underappreciated—leadership of the Allied war effort. After the disaster of Pearl Harbor, we see Roosevelt devising a global strategy that will defeat Hitler and the Japanese, rescue Churchill and the British people, and quell a near insurrection of his own American generals and War Department. All the while, Hamilton’s account drives toward Operation Torch—the invasion of French Northwest Africa—and the outcome of the war hangs in the balance. The Mantle of Command is an intimate, sweeping look at a great president in history’s greatest conflict.“This bold argument . . . will undoubtedly change the way we see Franklin Roosevelt.”— Christian Science Monitor “Masterly.”— Wall Street Journal

Based on years of archival research and interviews with the last surviving aides and Roosevelt family members, Nigel Hamilton offers a definitive account of FDR's masterful--and underappreciated--command of the Allied war effort. Hamilton takes readers inside FDR's White House Oval Study--his personal command center--and into the meetings where he battled with Churchill about strategy and tactics and overrode the near mutinies of his own generals and secretary of war.

Time and again, FDR was proven right and his allies and generals were wrong. When the generals wanted to attack the Nazi-fortified coast of France, FDR knew the Allied forces weren't ready. When Churchill insisted his Far East colonies were loyal and would resist the Japanese, Roosevelt knew it was a fantasy. As Hamilton's account reaches its climax with the Torch landings in North Africa in late 1942, the tide of war turns in the Allies' favor and FDR's genius for psychology and military affairs is clear. This intimate, sweeping look at a great president in history's greatest conflict is must reading.