f reedom of a ction 191have kept his nation afl oat in summer 1940 after the defeat of France
and the Dunkirk evacuation. Apart from his contribution to British
morale over the following months, his single greatest contribution to
ultimate British success may have been his ability to convince Roosevelt
that Great Britain would not succumb to Hitler if the United States
came to its aid. Churchill’s engaged style of directing the British war
eff ort also appeals to some astute students of wartime political lead-
ership. Eliot Cohen, for one, regards the prime minister as an archetype
of the hands-on leader who regards any and all aspects of his nation’s
war eff ort as his legitimate domain.
And accounts of Churchill certainly bear out this image: the prime
minister insisting that a reluctant General Archibald Wavell launch an
early off ensive to relieve Tobruk from a German siege in summer 1941,
holding court with Brooke and others late into the night, scribbling
“action this day” in the margins of yet another report, encouraging the
development of specialized tanks to crack open German defenses during
the cross-Channel invasion, urging British landings in the Aegean in
1944 to gain control of Greece and induce Turkey to enter the war on
the Allied side, and on and on. By contrast, Roosevelt plays a back-
ground role in many accounts of the American war eff ort, especially
after 1942.
But high energy and enthusiasm do not themselves win wars. If we
focus instead on Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s conception of their
respective national war objectives and their ability to pursue a military
strategy that would achieve those objectives, the president emerges
clearly as the more eff ective leader. Both men had ambitious war aims
beyond the defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan, some of which exceeded
their own or their nation’s capabilities. I have touched upon Roosevelt’s
quixotic aspirations, including his belief that colonialism could be elim-
inated quickly after the war, his expectation that China might replace
Japan as the major power to stabilize Asia, and his hope that the Soviet
Union might be induced to act as a responsible member of the postwar
Big Four if the Anglo-Americans acquiesced in Stalin’s brutal solution
to Soviet security concerns. To his credit, the president realized that the
prewar international order with its white-dominated empires was gone
for good, destined to be swept aside by surging demands for indepen-
dence among colonial peoples. He was mistaken in his belief that he