Recent BooksSeptember/October 2019 227Roosevelt’s last ailing months, when
Leahy was virtually the acting president.
Although Leahy got on well with
Truman, the ¿eld o policymaking
became more crowded after Roosevelt’s
death, and Leahy’s inÇuence declined.
Nagorski focuses on the war’s big
decisions, especially those taken during- The book begins with Hitler in
control o much o Europe but frus-
trated by the British refusal to agree to
a negotiated peace. He decides to get
on with his main project—defeating the
Bolsheviks to the east, assuming that
once the Soviet Union collapses, the
British will come to their senses. Thanks
to Stalin’s refusal to heed repeated
warnings about Germany’s plans, Hitler
almost got away with his boldest
gamble, but his troops failed to make
enough progress before winter set in.
When the German invasion o the
Soviet Union began, British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill at once put
aside his deep hostility to the Soviet
regime and accepted Stalin as an ally.
When another surprise attack, this time
from Japan, brought the United States
into the war, Churchill knew that the
tide had turned. Germany had simply
too many enemies to win. This is an old
tale, but Nagorski tells it well.
The War for Gaul: A New Translation
BY JULIUS CAESAR. TRANSLATED
BY JAMES J. O’DONNELL. Princeton
University Press, 2019, 324 pp.Julius Caesar’s war stories are so associ-
ated with Latin textbooks that they tend
to get forgotten as contributions to
military history. Originally dispatches
sent back to the Senate in Rome, they
explained how well Caesar was doing ininto hostile territory, resistance ¿ghters
sabotaging German communications,
exhausted pilots Çying sortie after
sortie with little expectation that they
would survive much longer, infantry-
men scouring the roads and ¿elds for
ambushes, a nurse coping with the
wounded. The sheer weight o the
Allies’ ¿repower and their command o
the air (the Allies Çew 14,674 sorties on
D-Day; the Luftwae Çew 80) might
make the result seem inevitable in
retrospect, but amphibious landings had
failed before, and Holland brings to
life what a grueling, vicious, and
terrifying battle this was.
In contrast to Holland, O’Brien tells
his story very much from the top down.
Admiral William Leahy was U.S.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s closest
adviser on military aairs from early
1942 until Roosevelt’s death, in 1945.
(Leahy stayed on to advise President
Harry Truman until the end o 1948.)
During and after the war, Leahy deliber-
ately kept out o the limelight, content
to be known for ensuring smooth
processes rather than deep thinking on
policy. A dull autobiography, published in
1950, revealed little about his life and
work. O’Brien makes a compelling case
that this reticence has led historians to
miss Leahy’s vital role in shaping U.S.
grand strategy during the war and to
exaggerate General George Marshall’s
part in consequence. The son o a Civil
War veteran, Leahy attended the U.S.
Naval Academy and rose to the rank o
admiral through his professionalism and
good judgment, seizing the chance to
forge a warm relationship with Roose-
velt when the latter was assistant
secretary o the navy, from 1913 to 1920.
Leahy’s peak inÇuence came during