Ambrose made his reputation on Eisenhower. This hagiography reveals the paradoxes of supreme command. While Eisenhower was vital to victory, he never commanded troops in battle. Nominally an apolitical soldier, his main task was maintaining the alliance against Nazi Germany, charting a middle course between domineering personalities like Montgomery, Patton, de Gaulle, and Churchill. The role of the supreme commander involved deciding when and where the battle should be fought, not when, and preparing the logistics, intelligence, and command structure necessary to win.

In one sense, Eisenhower's ultimate triumph is assured by history. He conquered. The road there was far from smooth. Eisenhower's first subcommander in North Africa, General Fredendall, proved incompetent. The Italian campaign turned into a grinding attritional slog that missed opportunities for comprehensive victory. Even in Western Europe, the final lines could have been drawn to better favor the Americans.

As a commander, Eisenhower's greatest virtues were his optimism and his universalism. The one thing he would not stand were subordinates who acted in national interest, rather than the interests of the alliance. Yet a good manager is self-effacing, and this book is best when it draws from British Chief of Staff General Alan Brooke' memoirs, which salaciously depicted Brooke's personal assessment of key figures.

50 years on, Ambrose's early work has become the core conventional wisdom of Eisenhower's historical legacy. You probably should read them.

The Good Shepherd is an incredibly taut novella about an anti-submarine action in the North Atlantic during World War 2. Lieutenant Commander Krause is in command of a small flotilla, guarding 37 small merchantmen against a Nazi U-boat wolfpack. Over the course of 48 hours, he must defend his command against slash attacks from a deceptive and elusive foe. The book is tightly focused on Krause, on the responsibility of command and the need to make instant decisions with poor information in the strange game of cat-and-mouse. One of Forester's best books, this is well worth a read.

American Warlords is an attempt at a World War II version of the classic Team of Rivals, focusing on the work of FDR, Secretary of War Stimson, Army Chief of Staff Marshall, and Chief of Naval Operations King. It's an engaging enough story, but Jordan gets caught in the details and fails to come to a truly important understanding of American strategy.


B-24's under construction at Willow Run

By far the most important person was President Roosevelt. Roosevelt was the consummate politician, a man adept at finding consensus among the most ardent foes. This skill would be sorely tested, balancing the interests of Churchill and Stalin, the American homefront, and his senior commanders. Roosevelt gets a lot of pages, but we don't much insight into his thinking. It's somewhat counter-intuitive that a man allergic to clear lines of command and Clausewitzian concentration would preside over the greatest American victory.

Of the other three men, King is drawn the most clearly. A staunch naval chauvinist, and advocate of offensives against Japan when the stated policy was 'Germany first', he fought for his vision of the war. Some wag (elsewhere, not in this book), said that "Admiral King was the most even-tempered man in high command. He was always furious." Marshall is a self-effacing, trying to reign in Churchillian sideshows, while letting Eisenhower serve as the liberator of Europe. Stimson disappears almost entirely.

The focus on strategy and personalities is reasonable enough, but what I find most interesting about America in World War II was that it fought a New Deal War. America in 1940, as the clouds of war loomed, was at best a second rate power. Even before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt and Marshall turned millions of civilians into soldiers, sailors, and airmen. They set factories churning out weapons, a tide of material warfare that buried the Axis power under tens of thousands of warplanes per year, M1 rifles, carbines, and tanks, dozens of aircraft carriers, and 2710 Liberty ships to bring the war to Europe and Japan. They harnessed science and technology to create advanced wonder weapons, including the B-29, the proximity fuse, the ULTRA codebreaking program, and above all else, the atomic bomb. This transformation of America into the arsenal of democracy was the real battle of the war, and Jordan only discusses it in passing.

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is a tightly focused yarn about Ted Lawson's participation in the Doolittle Raid. In the darkest days of 1942, with fascism on the march everywhere, a handful of pilots flying B-25s from the USS Hornet made a bee-sting raid on Japan. The raid had negligible material impact, but was an import moral boost.

Lawson's memoir moves swiftly through pilot training, to the raid itself, and then the meat of the book, the long journey home. Severely wounded while ditching his bomber, Lawson's leg was amputated in China, and he was carried to safety on vehicles ranging from stretchers to trucks.

This book was written for a popular audience, and published in the middle of the war. So it's limited in scope, but it's fun and its quick.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos lab, chief designer of the atomic bomb, and a polymath with mystic and leftist inclinations, had the perfect quote for the first artificial dawn of an atomic explosion. There are many ways in which we die: disease, age, accident, violence. And many ways in which we might all die; suddenly in the wake of some cosmological catastrophe or slowly starving on a dying planet. With the atom bomb, it was now possible for a single individual, at the top of a chain of technological and political commitments, to kill almost everyone in the space of an afternoon. The bombs were only used in anger twice, punctuation to end the global slaughter of the Second World War. Since then, history has existed under the shadow of a potential mushroom cloud. This book is the story of how we got there.

Rhodes takes almost the first half of the book to establish the basic science and personalities of the atomic bomb. The first half of the 20th century was a golden age for physics which will likely never be equaled, as imaginative theorists and skilled experimenters probed the basic building blocks of the universe. Rutherford and Bohr nailed down, for the first time in evidence rather than speculation, the basic building blocks of matter. Atoms had most of their mass in a small nucleus, and owed their chemical properties to the quantum behavior of electron shells. The neutron was added to the list of fundamental particles. New elements were created by neutron bombardment, and by the late 1930s it was widely known that uranium would fission on bombardment, splitting into two lighter elements, and releasing a large deal of energy. There positive glee of work in this field, at this time, comes through in Rhodes' able biographical sketches of the scientists involved, particularly Bohr, Fermi, and Szilard.

Szilard was the first to think of the potential of a fission chain reaction. If some substance, on absorbing a neutron split and released two or more neutrons, could produce a great deal of energy in millionths of a second. It would be a bomb of stupendous power, a city-smasher. Politically perceptive, Szilard had been helping Jewish physicists flee the Nazis for years. He had hoped for an H.G. Wells inspired international coalition to peacefully control this new power, but in 1939 if the bomb was too be invented, best by the Americans or British rather than Hitler.

The next section, building the bomb, is less fun. Bohr predicted that you would need to turn all of America into a factory to build a bomb, and that is what the Manhattan project did, mobilizing thousands of scientists, $2 billion, and massive plants to do the hard work of separating fissile U-235 and Plutonium from natural uranium. Bureaucratic confusion and balky precision engineering made the task anything but easy. The other powers pursued the bomb. The British sent over their best to help with the Manhattan project. Germany's team, lead by Heisenberg, never had the necessary priority in the Reich, and were stalled by clever British-Norwegian sabotage directed at a heavy water production facility required for the Nazi reactor design. Japan never had access to the raw material to move beyond theory.

The last section is grimmer yet. The design of the bomb was an exercise in precision, in delicately engineered explosive lenses to make the implosion to critical mass happen smoothly in nanoseconds. Tibbetts' B-29 bomber group trained to a razor's edge to accomplish the mission of deploying the 'gadget'. Roosevelt, on approving the Manhattan project, had instinctively reserved the bomb to himself as President. In 1945, Vice President Truman had not been read into the project until he succeeded to the presidency. The bomb was used on Hiroshima because it could be, because the Japanese still resisted, and because something had to be shown for the effort invested. It was a crime, a mass-murder in an instant. Rhodes does not flinch from the horror of Hiroshima.

Personally, I think we need to distinguish between the bomb's use at the end of the Second World War, where it seems a matter of degree compared to area bombing rather than kind, and its use now, where that would signal breaking the nuclear taboo. This does not absolve the scientists who built the bomb of their responsibility. Nature's secrets were all around, and once fission had been theorized it was probably only a matter of time before someone figured out how to make it work, but these people made a choice to build Death a supersonic jet bomber to replicate his tired old horse.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a penetrating look at the most consequential scientific and political moment of the 20th century. I'd give it six stars, if I could. It is also my 1000th review on Goodreads!

Masters of the Air is an well-deserved classic of military history, focusing on the Eighth Air Force, the United States strategic bomber arm that was the first American unit to bring the war to Nazi Germany, and which pioneered the tactics and techniques of strategic bombing.

By all reason, the strategic air campaign should not have worked. Army Air Corps doctrine in the late 30s was built around three major pillars: the heavily armed B-17 Flying Fortress was 'self-escorting' and could fend off hostile fighters; the gyroscopic Norden bombsite could hit pinpoint targets with accuracy; and precision attacks on 'vital centers' of industry could cripple an enemy military without the need for battles of attrition. All three of these assumptions would be proven wrong in the skies over German, with deadly consequences for the men who had been trained and equipped on them.

The cloudless skies of test ranges over the American southwest were nothing like the weather over England and Germany. Men froze in the stratospheric slipstream, and bombers were lost in rapidly changing weather conditions. Flak and fighters ripped through the B-17 and B-24s, inflicting proportional casualties as high as any duty in the war, matched only by submarine crews. Nazi industry proved surprisingly resilient. Yet even if every specific of pre-war doctrine was wrong, the bombers succeeded in their most important tasks. Defense against bombers escorted by P-51s in the months leading up to Overlord deciminated the Luftwaffe, and the landings were unopposed from the air. The transport and oil campaigns feel short of paralyzing the Nazi war machine, but delay and friction impeded the panzers, and gave the Normandy beachhead time to stabilize and expand. And the thousands of heavy guns shooting at the sky, and not T-34s on the steppes, had some helpful effect on the Eastern Front.

Miller was inspired to write this book in part by his friendship with Lt. Col. Robert "Rosie" Rosenthal of the "Bloody 100th" Bombardment Wing, and this book shines in depicting the human side of the Eighth. It was a whole new kind of warfare. Crews would take off in English fog, endure hours of torment over Europe, return, and potentially be in London with a pretty girl by evening. War at the limits of technology was intensely dangerous. The first teams, dispatched in 1943, had a one in five chance of completing the required 25 missions. Frostbite, flak, and fighters were the three terrors of this aerial front. Showcase raids, like Schweinfurt–Regensburg and Ploesti, caused terrible losses for temporary results. The courage that it took to fly straight and level, holding formation through the worst, was like something out of Napoleonic warfare, standing in ranks to take fire. Bomber crews were teams as tightly knit as any on Earth. Along with the flying, there are stories about leaves around England, the traditions of the bases, and the devotion of the men to each other.

But the mission was murder. Thousands of the bomber boys died in combat, and many more were grievously wounded, or held captive in Nazi POW camps (this book does not neglect the POW perspective). And point military targets soon shifted to area targets like railyards and factories in German cities, and in the last months of the war 'morale bombings' to break the will of the German people, a campaign of terror through mass civilian death. Miller tries to draw a distinction between the goals of the Eight Air Force and the RAF's city-busting campaigns under "Bomber" Harris, but I'm not sure the Brits deserve that characterization. Area bombing against civilians is a war crime, and we can recognize that without the slide into the fallacy that there's no difference between the air campaign and the Holocaust.

In the end, strategic bombing failed in its goal of shorter, cleaner wars. Attrition moved from the trenches to the skies. But the men who flew those missions were a rare breed. There are damn few of them left. Both my grandfathers served in WW2, one in the Pacific, and one was never deployed. I'm a member of the Commemorative Air Force, which keeps a B-17, Sentimental Journey, flying. This book has deepened my appreciation of airpower, the mission, and especially the men.

Ship of Ghosts is both smaller and bigger than Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. Hornfisher focuses on the men of the USS Houston, a heavy cruiser assigned to the Asiatic Fleet at the start of the Second World War. Previously President Roosevelt's favorite cruiser, in the dark days of the initial Japanese assaults, the Houston was the lynchpin of the defense of the island of Java.

Part of an ad hoc American-Dutch-British-Australian command, the Houston and the other defenders of Java faced terrible odds against an enemy with absolute air superiority. The Houston dodged bombs and fought a single significant engagement at the Battle of the Java Sea. The Allies didn't have the strength to resist a multipronged Japanese invasion, and in retreating the USS Houston and HMAS Perth sailed right into one of the landing fleets. Houston and Perth gave their best before sinking, but the long ordeal of the survivors had only just begun.

Captured by the Japanese along with the 131st Field Artillery (the Lost Battalion) and the other defenders of Java, the crew of the Houston were shipped to Singapore and an archipelago of Japanese POW camps. The worst of these were along the Railway of Death, a roughly 200 km cut through untracked jungle between Thailand and Burma that would be immortalized (and thoroughly fictionalized) as The Bridge Over The River Kwai. Roughly 20% of the men died of starvation, disease, beatings administered by their captors, and simple hopelessness. Perhaps 200,000 people in total died, mostly native laborers without military discipline to help them maintain field sanitation. Other survivors were dispatched to Japan, and some suffered the supreme misfortune of being killed by Allied bombs and torpedoes, as Japan did not mark their POW transports, one final mark in a litany of Geneva Code violations.

Hornfischer gives his all in commemorating these old veterans, in the years when the WW2 generation passed out of life and into memory. The prose gets a little purple at times, but serves to convey the pride of the pre-War Houston, the desperation of its last battle, and the endurance of its crew in captivity.

Official histories are frequently that. Official, bureaucratic, and basically tedious. Bulkley's account of PT boats, prepared for the US Navy in 1946 and released for a mass publication in 1962 after a PT boat skipper became President of the United States, is a decent example of the type. It's a comprehensive list of campaigns that the PTs were involved in across the world, from the Pacific to the Mediterranean to the Aleutian (and early model boats lacked heaters). Actions get a few paragraphs: boat number, skipper, any crew injured or killed, targets likely destroyed. It gets repetitive fast. A few sections quoting the men involved on their narrative of the action liven up the book, but those are few and far between.

This is a shame, because the PT boats deserve a book as thrilling as their actions. Nothing embodies the words of US Navy legend John Paul Jones, "I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast for I intend to go in harms way" than the PTs. A handful of men, under the command of at most a lieutenant, the PTs bristled with automatic weapons which they used in slashing attacks against enemy barges, lighters, planes, and destroyers, and used stealth and subterfuge to survive against far superior naval and air force. A routine patrol could turn into disaster in seconds in so many ways, from grounding on a coral reef under a shore battery, to friendly fire, to stumbling into an enemy convoy and having to escape under a hastily laid shore barrage. PT boats were based out of temporary facilities, constantly moving up support the frontline, with bases offering a respite from combat along with attempts to keep the high-performance boats and torpedoes running on shoestring logistics. Despite the fact that Bulkley served as a PT commander, this official history is almost free of color or excitement. It feels like government-issued metal desks, not a life at sea.

There are at least two Britains. One is cricket and public schools and the old boys network. The other are hard bastards who ruled the world through merciless force applied to vulnerable places: knives in kidneys, windpipe strikes, kicking them while they're down. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is about the latter Britain, an oddly balanced account of the Special Operations Executive during World War 2.

Milton makes his protagonists come alive, particularly Colin Gubbins, with his faith that a good saboteur could do more destruction in a single strike than a fortnight of bombing raids. Gubbins organized a secret army that blended the bored children of the nobility with street toughs and patriotic exiles from occupied Europe. They truly did set Europe ablaze!

Milton has a breezy and delightful narrative style, which comes through strongest on the accounts of the great raids: destroying the docks at St. Nazaire, the attack on the Norwegian heavy water plant vital to the Nazi A-bomb, and my new favorite, Operation Postmaster, a piratical cutting-out operation against a spy ship near the African Island of Fernando Po. Milton also has a love of the back office, and the madcap inventors who designed limpet mines, sticky bombs, precision time fuses, and all sorts of specialized Q-branch sabotage devices. I have to give credit to a ploy to replace the lubricant on an SS division's tank transporter rail cars with carborundum right before D-Day as an exceptional use of applied science.

This is a popular history, not a comprehensive work, but it's delightfully written and a worthy addition to anyone's library of dirty tricks. And for disclosure, I won this book in a Goodreads contest.

Orde Wingate: A Man of Genius quotes Churchill in the subtitle to guide a biography of an expert in unconventional warfare, cut down before his time in a plane crash in 1944. This book is best when it describes the conformist weirdness of the interwar British Army, and Wingate's quixotic crusade to be an Individual in this environment. His early career, in the regiment, in Sudan, and in Mandatory Palestine, are lovingly detailed. The picture that emerges is of an iconoclastic and deeply moral soldier, who's immense (indeed, maniac) energy drives his men to accomplish great things. This came to a peak in with the campaign to liberate Ethiopia from the Italians with Gideon Force, a small patriotic band that outfought larger Italian units to restore Emperor Haile Selassie to the throne. Next, Wingate was assigned to the Burma theater, but the Chindit deep penetration units have a more mixed record, suffering heavy casualties for unclear results.

Wingate clearly was a man of great vision, but it's unclear if that vision actually matched up to reality. His talent for finding highly placed patrons was undercut by fighting against his immediate superiors, equals, and subordinate officers. His career might be encapsulated in miniature in one incident in Palestine. More or less on his own authority, Wingate had created a group of Jewish Special Night Squads to fight Arab gangs through night ambush. This went great, until a combined operation wound up with Wingate ambushing himself and getting shot five times with a Bren gun.

This is a strong biography, but a weak military history. As an aside, my favorite "wtf moment" was apparently a weekly ritual in British Artillery Officer school was a Friday night dance, where the Seniors wore full dress, the first years wore pajamas, and then the first years were beaten. Did the whole British army run on weird sadomasochism?