The military style of Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini is deftly analysed in The Strategists, while Robert Schmuhl provides colourful insight into the British and American leaders’ ‘bromance’ Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images Winston Churchill was convinced that World War I taught him the best way to crush Irish republicanism. As First Lord of the Admiralty and then Minister for Munitions during what was then dubbed “the war to end all wars”, Britain’s future prime minister learned a great deal about the latest cutting-edge military equipment.
By late 1917, he was urging his cabinet colleagues to send more armoured cars, machine-gun cyclists, aircraft and even tanks across the Irish Sea. “As it was, Germany would be easier to defeat than Ireland,” Phillips Payson O’Brien writes in his sprawling but lively study of the five men who shaped World War II. Join the Irish Independent WhatsApp channel Stay up to date with all the latest news.
