A Team of Rivals for World War II--the inside story of how FDR and
the towering personalities around him waged war in the corridors of
Washington, D.C., to secure ultimate victory on the battlefields of
Europe and the Pacific.
The Washington War is the story of how the Second World War was fought
and won in the capital's halls of power--and how the United States,
which in December 1941 had a nominal army and a decimated naval fleet,
was able in only thirty months to fling huge forces onto the European
continent and shortly thereafter shatter Imperial Japan's Pacific
strongholds.
Three quarters of a century after the overwhelming defeat of the
totalitarian Axis forces, the terrifying, razor-thin calculus on which
so many critical decisions turned has been forgotten--but had any of
these debates gone the other way, the outcome of the war could have been
far different: The army in August 1941, about to be disbanded, saved by
a single vote. Production plans that would have delayed adequate war
matériel for years after Pearl Harbor, circumvented by one
uncompromising man's courage and drive. The delicate ballet that
precluded a separate peace between Stalin and Hitler. The almost-adopted
strategy to stage D-Day at a fatally different time and place. It was
all a breathtakingly close-run thing, again and again.
Renowned historian James Lacey takes readers behind the scenes in the
cabinet rooms, the Pentagon, the Oval Office, and Hyde Park, and at the
pivotal conferences--Campobello Island, Casablanca, Tehran--as these
disputes raged. Here are colorful portraits of the great figures--and
forgotten geniuses--of the day: New Dealers versus industrialists,
political power brokers versus the generals, Churchill and the British
high command versus the U.S. chiefs of staff, innovators versus
entrenched bureaucrats . . . with the master manipulator, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, at the center, setting his brawling patriots one
against the other and promoting and capitalizing on the furious turf
wars.
Based on years of research and extensive, previously untapped archival
resources, The Washington War is the first integrated, comprehensive
chronicle of how all these elements--and towering personalities--clashed
and ultimately coalesced at each vital turning point, the definitive
account of Washington at real war and the titanic political and
bureaucratic infighting that miraculously led to final victory.
