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Nigel Hamilton

From Nigel Hamilton's acclaimed World War II saga, the astonishing story of FDR's yearlong, defining battle with Churchill in 1943, as the war raged in Africa and Italy.

1943 was the year of Allied military counteroffensives, beating back the forces of the Axis powers in North Africa and the Pacific—the “Hinge of Fate,” as Winston Churchill called it. In Commander in Chief, Nigel Hamilton reveals FDR’s true role in this saga: overruling his own Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordering American airmen on an ambush of the Japanese navy’s Admiral Yamamoto, facing down Churchill when he attempted to abandon Allied D-day strategy (twice). This FDR is profoundly different from the one Churchill later painted. President Roosevelt’s patience was tested to the limit quelling the prime minister’s “revolt,” as Churchill pressured Congress and senior American leaders to focus Allied energy on disastrous fighting in Italy and the Aegean instead of landings in Normandy. Finally, in a dramatic showdown at Hyde Park, FDR had to stop Churchill from losing the war by making the ultimate threat, setting the Allies on their course to final victory. 

In Commander in Chief, Hamilton masterfully chronicles the clash of nations—and of two titanic personalities—at a crucial moment in modern history.

Mariner Books

FDR at War

Commander In Chief: FDR's Battle with Churchill, 1943

The “gripping and powerfully argued” final volume in the acclaimed 3-part biography of FDR at war—proving that he was the key strategist of WWII (New York Times Book Review).

Nigel Hamilton’s celebrated trilogy culminates with a story of triumph and tragedy. In the spring of 1944, FDR oversaw the historic success of the D-day landings he had championed, just as he was found to be mortally ill. Yet even in the face of his own mortality, Roosevelt was the architect of a victorious peace that he would not live to witness.

Using hitherto unpublished documents and interviews, Hamilton rewrites the famous account of World War II strategy given by Winston Churchill in his memoirs. Seventy-five years after the D-day landings we finally get to see, close-up and in dramatic detail, who was responsible for rescuing, and insisting upon, the great American-led invasion of France in June 1944, and why the invasion was led by Eisenhower. 

As FDR’s D-day triumph turns to personal tragedy, we watch the course of the disease, and how the dying president attempted—at Hawaii, Quebec, and Yalta—to prepare the United Nations for an American-backed postwar world order. Now we know: even on his deathbed, FDR was the war’s great visionary.

“A first-class, lens-changing work.” —James N. Mattis, former US secretary of defense

War and Peace: FDR's Final Odyssey: D-Day to Yalta, 1943–1945

Based on years of archival research and interviews with the last surviving aides and Roosevelt family members, Nigel Hamilton offers a definitive account of FDR’s masterful—and underappreciated—command of the Allied war effort. Hamilton takes readers inside FDR’s White House Oval Study—his personal command center—and into the meetings where he battled with Churchill about strategy and tactics and overrode the near mutinies of his own generals and secretary of war. 

Time and again, FDR was proven right and his allies and generals were wrong. When the generals wanted to attack the Nazi-fortified coast of France, FDR knew the Allied forces weren’t ready. When Churchill insisted his Far East colonies were loyal and would resist the Japanese, Roosevelt knew it was a fantasy. As Hamilton’s account reaches its climax with the Torch landings in North Africa in late 1942, the tide of war turns in the Allies’ favor and FDR’s genius for psychology and military affairs is clear. This intimate, sweeping look at a great president in history’s greatest conflict is must reading.

Brad Sanders

HarperAudio

The Mantle Of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942