Finding the Best Plan to Win the "Good War"

Mark A. Stoler. Allies and Adversaries: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance, and U.S. Strategy in World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xxii + 380 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $37.50

The 1990s and early 2000s have witnessed an outpouring of interest in the history of the Second World War. Veterans long silent have increasingly shared their wartime experiences through memoirs and oral histories. The public has an insatiable appetite for books on the Second World War and only the Civil War rivals it for space in the history sections of most bookstores. Much of the programming on the History Channel is devoted to documentaries and movies dealing with World War II. In Hollywood, filmmakers, most notably, Steven Spielberg, have received critical acclaim and box office success with such films as Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan.

What accounts for this renewed interest in the Second World War? No doubt, it can be traced to the growing recognition by the Second World War generation of their own mortality and a desire to tell their story before it is too late. But it also represents a growing interest by their children and grandchildren to listen to them and even canonize them. Would Tom Brokaw have entitled his book the Greatest Generation (1998) during the Vietnam War? In many ways, the end of the Cold War has had a profound impact on the way the public, and even historians, view the Second World War and the military. In the acknowledgments to Allies and Adversaries, Mark Stoler notes, as a member of "1960s generation," how his thinking about the military has changed since the Vietnam War. Initially, he noted how his "scholarly interest in the wartime Joint Chiefs" arose from his desire to understand what he believed would be their "extremely dangerous military influence and views" in shaping American foreign policy. In retrospect, Stoler reflects on his past ignorance of "military modes of thinking" and "simplistic stereotypes" of the officer corps. Far from dangerous, Stoler believes senior military leadership has not been given due credit for developing a strategy during the Second World War which defeated the Axis powers, preserved the Grand Alliance, and minimized U.S. casualties.

Mark Stoler has written an important book that grapples with some of the central questions of America's involvement in the Second World War. It deserves to be read both inside and outside of academia. Cogent, erudite, and solidly grounded in an exemplary range of archival sources and informed by the existing scholarly literature, Stoler examines how the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) shaped U.S. grand strategy in the Second World War and definitively changed civil-military relations. Historians and political scientists seeking to understand America's entrance in the Second World War, the workings of the Grand Alliance, and the origins of the Cold War would be remiss not to draw upon this rich resource. Both scholars and policymakers will gain invaluable insights into the creation of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs and how this body formulated strategy and foreign policy objectives during the Second World War, often at the expense of the State Department. Stoler dispassionately narrates internal battles that took place between the Chiefs, the White House, the State Department, and the Allies.

We have a number of excellent biographies of Roosevelt and his senior military leadership during the Second World War and Stoler only offers brief biographical vignettes of the key policymakers and military leaders. ¹ He wisely draws from the official histories on the Second World War commissioned by the army, navy, and air force after 1945 and builds around them. Written by first-rate scholars, these judicious, balanced, and extensively annotated studies remain an invaluable starting place for historians on a variety of topics. But these monographs, especially those written in the late 1940s and early 1950s, remained quite circumspect on questions of...