Leadership in War: Essential Lessons from Those Who Made History

by Andrew Roberts

Overview

A comparison of nine leaders who led their nations through the greatest wars the world has ever seen and whose unique strengths—and weaknesses—shaped the course of human history, from the bestselling, award-winning author of Churchill, Napoleon, and The Last King of America

“Has the enjoyable feel of a lively dinner table conversation with an opinionated guest.” —The New York Times Book Review

Taking us from the French Revolution to the Cold War, Andrew Roberts presents a bracingly honest and deeply insightful look at nine major figures in modern history: Napoleon Bonaparte, Horatio Nelson, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, George C. Marshall, Charles de Gaulle, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Margaret Thatcher.

Each of these leaders fundamentally shaped the outcome of the war in which their nation was embroiled. Is war leadership unique, or did these leaders have something in common, traits and techniques that transcend time and place and can be applied to the essential nature of conflict?

Meticulously researched and compellingly written, Leadership in War presents readers with fresh, complex portraits of leaders who approached war with different tactics and weapons, but with the common goal of success in the face of battle. Both inspiring and cautionary, these portraits offer important lessons on leadership in times of struggle, unease, and discord. With his trademark verve and incisive observation, Roberts reveals the qualities that doom even the most promising leaders to failure, as well as the traits that lead to victory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525522409
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/27/2020
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	164,601
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 5.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Andrew Roberts is the bestselling author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny, winner of the the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award; The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War; Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945; Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Gamble; and Napoleon: A Life, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography. He has won many other prizes, including the Wolfson History Prize and the British Army Military Book of the Year. He is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Fellow at the New-York Historical Society, and a visiting professor in the Department of War Studies at King's College London.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Leadership Conundrum xi

Chapter 1 Napoleon Bonaparte 1

Chapter 2 Horatio Nelson 27

Chapter 3 Winston Churchill 51

Chapter 4 Adolf Hitler 67

Chapter 5 Joseph Stalin 93

Chapter 6 George C. Marshall 119

Chapter 7 Charles De Gaulle 139

Chapter 8 Dwight D. Eisenhower 157

Chapter 9 Margaret Thatcher 179

Conclusion The Leadership Paradigm 199

Acknowledgments 223

Notes 225

Editorial Reviews

“An understated treasure . . . [that] distills some of the insights Roberts has developed in more than a dozen classic works of history and biography, all in a slim volume that might be read over an afternoon. . . . Roberts’s chapter on Hitler is a tour de force of historical portraiture.” 
—The National Review

“Roberts is superbly well-qualified to write about these extraordinary leaders. . . . Roberts’s description offers vivid detail, spare prose, immortal rhetoric, and a touch of humor. His chapters offer masterly, magnificent portraits of what it takes to steer an army or a nation through a crisis. . . . Every reader can be grateful for such a thrilling and succinct account of leadership.”
—The New Criterion

“Andrew Roberts provides lovely overviews of the careers of both Marshall and Eisenhower, among others. . . . [Leadership in War] has the enjoyable feel of a lively dinner table conversation with an opinionated guest.” 
—The New York Times Book Review

“Andrew Roberts is a remarkably gifted writer of vivid narrative prose, and a talented, popular historian. . . . Reading his work is always a pleasure and often a source of fresh insights.”
—The Washington Times

“Roberts delves into the experiences of wartime leaders to produce lessons for heads of business. . . . illuminating . . . These portrayals were originally delivered as lectures by Roberts, a prolific historian of World War II and biographer of Napoleon and Churchill. The profiles of Napoleon and Dwight D. Eisenhower are the most salient for business readers, but it is not difficult to find insight in nearly all of them.”
—Strategy+Business

“Meticulously researched and full of revelations, this is a fascinating read.”
—The Sun (Pick of the Week)

“Roberts has a gift for finding the anecdote or quotation which reveals an essential truth about his subject.”
—History Today

“Roberts provides many valuable insights into the nature of high command in war.”
—Military History Matters
 
“Roberts has written acclaimed biographies of several of his chosen leaders and is a master of his material. Future generations of military leaders will have cause to be grateful to Andrew Roberts for distilling the findings of his meticulous research into such an accessible and engaging analysis.”
—The House Magazine

“[Roberts] is a master storyteller. It is impossible to get bored reading him.”
—Law & Liberty

From the Publisher

…Roberts provides lovely overviews of the careers of both Marshall and Eisenhower, among others…[Leadership in War] has the enjoyable feel of a lively dinner table conversation with an opinionated guest.

The New York Times Book Review - Thomas E. Ricks

08/26/2019

This underdeveloped history by Roberts (Churchill: Walking with Destiny) adapts a series of lectures in which he examined the lives of nine wartime leaders: Napoleon Bonaparte, Horatio Nelson, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Charles DeGaulle, George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and Margaret Thatcher. Roberts believes “there are certain definable principles and leadership techniques that are eternal,” but the short biographical sketches don’t convincingly support that conclusion. The chapter on Horatio Nelson, for example, details his early years rising through the naval ranks, his infamous extramarital romantic escapades with Emma Hamilton, and his daring, and fatal, heroism at the Battle of Trafalgar; then it closes with a laundry list of leadership assets (including “have a treasury back home prepared to finance the organization of the fantastically expensive operations”) without providing strong connections between them and the preceding narrative. The book closes with a synthesizing chapter that presents wide-ranging conclusions about qualities important for leadership, ranging from the typical (a strong memory) to the odd (the “overlap between successful war leadership and literary ability”). This survey is probably too cursory and superficial to reward readers who want to know more about these leaders. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

2019-07-28
Evaluations of the performances of nine leaders, from Napoleon to Margaret Thatcher, who commanded their nations' military forces.

Veteran historian Roberts (Churchill: Walking With Destiny, 2018, etc.) is no stranger to many of his subjects—he's written multiple books about both Napoleon and Churchill—and holds strong opinions on all, although there are few surprises. All nine of the leaders he examines were blessed with supreme confidence and "an absolute faith in their tribes being superior to their antagonists….They believed in what is now called national exceptionalism, as tribal leaders throughout history have." Napoleon, Churchill, Hitler, de Gaulle, and Thatcher took for granted that they were destined for great things. Three career military officers—Horatio Nelson, George Marshall, and Eisenhower—never gave the impression that personal ambition, in itself entirely acceptable, trumped an obsession with smiting the enemy. All of the author's subjects were ruthless; Hitler and Stalin may stand out, but Roberts delivers unnerving examples from others, Churchill in particular. All were compulsive workaholics except Hitler, who was oddly lazy and the least intelligent. Since war, as Carl von Clausewitz put it, is the continuation of politics by other means, it's essential to possess a sixth sense for politics, which turns out to require the same talent for timing, observation, and ability to predict an opponent's behavior as a battlefield commander. However, many successful military leaders who flopped on politics (Pompey, Erich Ludendorff, Philippe Pétain, Douglas MacArthur) don't make Roberts' list—or anyone else's. Many evaluations once universally accepted are now controversial. Thus, Roberts writes that Marshall's chilly reserve won Franklin Roosevelt's deepest respect, but other historians point out that Roosevelt did business with a breezy informality and preferred the advice of men he could schmooze with.

Brief, painless biographies and reasonable, if traditional, appraisals of the qualities required to make war.

Kirkus Reviews