War And Peace: FDR's Final Odyssey: D-Day to Yalta, 1943-1945

by Nigel Hamilton

Overview

To mark the 75th Anniversary of D-Day, the stirring climax to Nigel Hamilton’s three-part saga of FDR at war—proof that he was WWII’s key strategist, even on his deathbed.

“A first-class, lens-changing work.” —James N. Mattis, former United States Secretary of Defense

Nigel Hamilton's celebrated trilogy culminates with a story of triumph and tragedy. Just as FDR was proven right by the D-day landings he had championed, so was he found to be mortally ill in the spring of 1944. He was the architect of a victorious peace that he would not live to witness.

Using hitherto unpublished documents and interviews, Hamilton rewrites the famous account of World War II strategy given by Winston Churchill in his memoirs. Seventy-five years after the D-day landings we finally get to see, close-up and in dramatic detail, who was responsible for rescuing, and insisting upon, the great American-led invasion of France in June 1944, and why the invasion was led by Eisenhower. As FDR's D-day triumph turns to personal tragedy, we watch with heartbreaking compassion the course of the disease, and how, in the months left him as US commander in chief, the dying president attempted at Hawaii, Quebec, and Yalta to prepare the United Nations for an American-backed postwar world order. Now we know: even on his deathbed, FDR was the war's great visionary.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544876804
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/07/2019
Series:	FDR at War , #3
Pages:	592
Sales rank:	1,140,628
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

NIGEL HAMILTON is a best-selling and award-winning biographer of President John F. Kennedy, General Bernard “Monty” Montgomery, and President Bill Clinton, among other subjects. His most recent book, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942, was long-listed for the National Book Award. He is a senior fellow at the McCormack Graduate School, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and splits his time between Boston, Massachusetts, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

Editorial Reviews

War and Peace is the third and final volume in Hamilton's "F.D.R. at War" trilogy and certainly as gripping and powerfully argued as the first two…Hamilton's case for Roosevelt is a compelling one. Even in decline, the president had a vision that eluded others, including his closest partner…To Hamilton, Churchill's inspiration was no match for Roosevelt's sagacity, his stirring speeches no substitute for the American's strategic brilliance. Roosevelt was the architect and engineer who translated Churchill's grandiloquence into a plan for victory. The Allies did fight on the beaches, as Churchill once memorably vowed, but it fell to Franklin Roosevelt to make sure they were the right beaches.

The New York Times Book Review - Peter Baker

04/08/2019

Hamilton (Commander in Chief: FDR’s Battle with Churchill) closes out his trilogy focusing on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s role in WWII with this thorough and deliberate recounting of the final months of Roosevelt’s life, during which he suffered through increasingly poor health while leading the U.S. toward the end of the war. Hamilton aims “not only to chart with fresh clarity how dire was his affliction, but how exactly it affected his decisions and once masterly performance as commander in chief of the Western Allies.” Hamilton shows how Roosevelt “held the feet of the British to the D-Day fire” during the 1943 Tehran meetings, when Churchill began to doubt the war strategy prior to meeting with Stalin. Returning from that success, Roosevelt’s health took a turn for the worse; what first seemed to be a bout of flu was more serious cardiac complications. While ill, he won an unprecedented fourth term as president, rekindled an affair with Lucy Rutherfurd, and met again with Stalin and Churchill in Yalta to plan for a postwar world order, including the founding of the United Nations. The depth of coverage of these 17 months may be more than some readers desire, but it vividly recreates FDR’s decline and makes his accomplishments all the more impressive. Like its predecessors in the trilogy, this volume will reward readers of WWII and presidential history. Illus. (May)

Publishers Weekly

A first-class, lens-changing work.” — James N. Mattis, former US secretary of defense "If history belongs to the best and latest writer, Nigel Hamilton has won the war for Roosevelt’s legacy from Churchill."— Wall Street Journal "Compelling...as gripping and powerfully argued as the first two." — New York Times Book Review “Thorough and deliberate . . . Vividly recreates FDR’s decline and makes his accomplishments all the more impressive. Like its predecessors in the trilogy, this volume will reward readers of World War II and presidential history.” — Publishers Weekly “Significant study . . . of considerable interest to students of presidential and American military history.” — Kirkus Reviews “With deft storytelling and impeccable scholarship, Nigel Hamilton completes his essential trilogy of FDR and World War II with a bang. War and Peace is a masterful reevaluation of D-day, Hitler’s demise, and the Yalta Conference. A stunning achievement!” — Douglas Brinkley, author of Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America   “On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of D-day, War and Peace is the dramatic culmination of Nigel Hamilton’s magnificent trilogy of FDR’s wartime leadership as commander in chief. It is also a vivid example of the critical importance of presidential leadership in times of national crisis. This sweeping narrative of Roosevelt’s triumphs and the tragedy of his untimely death in 1945 is history and biography at its very finest.” — Carlo D’Este, author of Patton: A Genius for War and Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874–1945 PRAISE FOR COMMANDER IN CHIEF “Ably dramatizes Roosevelt’s wranglings with Churchill during World War II . . . Provocative . . . It is stimulating to follow Hamilton as he lays out his argument.” — Thomas E. Ricks, New York Times Book Review “Superb.” — Fareed Zakaria “A detailed look at Franklin Roosevelt’s role in the Allied strategy midway through World War II, with an emphasis on his relations with Winston Churchill. Hamilton shows Roosevelt’s clear vision of how to win the war and how to create a postwar society that would prevent such wars from recurring . . . [Commander in Chief] presents a convincing portrait of its main subject, strengthening readers’ confidence in the author’s conclusions. The book is strongly pro-Roosevelt, but Hamilton gives a solid inside view of the strategic thinking that went into the campaign against Hitler as America laid the groundwork for the D-day invasion the following year.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review PRAISE FOR MANTLE OF COMMAND “The Mantle of Command is splendid: It’s the memoir Roosevelt didn’t get to write.” — New York Times Book Review “Masterly.” — Wall Street Journal “FDR has frequently been underestimated as a military leader, yielding, in the historical imagination, to George Marshall and Winston Churchill, among others. Nigel Hamilton attacks this view with his characteristic verve, portraying a president with the reins of war fully, if often subtly, in his hands. The conventional wisdom will never —

From the Publisher

2019-03-17
The final installment of the biographer's significant study of Franklin Roosevelt's sine qua non leadership in World War II.

It seems safe to say that, following his Commander in Chief: FDR'S Battle with Churchill, 1943 (2016), Hamilton is not Winston Churchill's greatest admirer. As this volume recounts frequently and at length, Churchill often attempted to assert British leadership of the tripartite alliance with the United States and the Soviet Union, especially by pressing not for a cross-Channel invasion of Europe but instead for a push up through Italy, "an alternative Mediterranean strategy" that had the virtue, for Churchill, of taking place in a theater that was largely in the British sphere to begin with. Churchill's strategy endangered one of D-Day's lesser-known effects: The Western Allies' pledge to open a second front in continental Europe would in turn produce a deepening of the war in the East—so Stalin promised, at any rate, while nursing a private bitterness that the Soviet Union had borne the brunt of the fight. Meanwhile, Germany exploited the weaknesses that emerged by floating hints of making a separate peace, with Joseph Goebbels noting in his diary that "Americans have only a secondary interest in the war in Europe and are only inspired by the war against Japan." Even so, and against the odds, the Allies held together, an achievement that Hamilton credits to FDR's unwavering leadership even in the face of Churchill's maneuvering—and even though FDR, by the author's account, knew that he was dying and still pressed on. The fact that those German offers were floated in March 1945, however—no secret from Hitler but a deliberate strategy—increased the Soviet mistrust of the Western powers and, Hamilton suggests, may have "presaged the Cold War" that followed the defeat of the Axis powers.

Of considerable interest to students of presidential and American military history, though likely to court criticism from the Churchill camp.

Kirkus Reviews