'Entirely fresh brilliantly insightful and utterly compelling ' James Holland Churchill.
Hitler. Stalin. Mussolini. Roosevelt. Five of the most impactful leaders of WW2 each with
their own individualistic and idiosyncratic approach to warfare. But if we want to understand
their military strategy we must first understand the strategist. In THE STRATEGISTS
Professor Phillips Payson O'Brien shows how the views these five leaders forged in WW1 are
crucial to understanding how they fought WW2. For example Churchill's experiences of facing
the German Army in France in 1916 made him unwilling to send masses of British soldiers back
there in the 1940s while Hitler's mistakes on the Eastern Front were influenced by his
reluctance to accept that conditions had changed since his own time fighting. The implications
of the power of leaders remain with us to this day: to truly understand what is happening in
Ukraine for example requires us to know what has influenced the leaders involved. This is a
history in which leaders - and their choices - matter. For better or worse.
