The Art of Manliness - #582： Essential Lessons From Great Wartime Leaders

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast war puts leadership

00:00:11.760 to the ultimate test during a war leader must make life or death decisions and be held accountable

00:00:16.200 for the decisions while grappling not only with military strategy but also political economic and

00:00:20.720 domestic dynamics my guest explored the lives of nine wartime leaders and what we can learn from

00:00:25.020 them in his latest book leadership and war essential lessons from those who made history

00:00:28.640 his name is andrew roberts we last had on the show to talk about his biography of winston

00:00:32.440 churchill we begin today's conversation discussing how andrew decide on the leaders to highlight in

00:00:36.520 his book how he defines a great leader and how that definition includes nefarious dictators like

00:00:41.040 hitler and stalin we then take a look at the leadership style of napoleon as well as that of

00:00:44.880 world war ii leaders like churchill eisenhower and marshall we also unpack how hitler and stalin

00:00:49.000 gained power despite having serious character defects we enter conversation with the qualities

00:00:53.300 of this varied set of leaders held in common out the show's over check out our show notes at

00:00:57.220 aom.is leaders in war andrew roberts welcome back to the show thank you very much it's great to be

00:01:14.340 on the show again so we had you on the show a few months ago to talk about your winston

00:01:17.300 churchill biography you've got a new book out leadership and war essential lessons from those

00:01:21.860 who made history it's where you've highlighted nine wartime leaders and the lessons on leadership

00:01:27.060 we can extract from them there's been a lot of wars in the 19th century the 20th century how did you

00:01:33.280 decide on which nine leaders you were going to focus on i really just decided to write about the

00:01:39.280 ones that i knew about and i thought i had something interesting and important to say rather than the

00:01:44.920 people who best exemplify leadership in war it's very much a a series of it's really serendipity it's

00:01:51.960 my own interests well that's that that makes sense and you also talk about you you wanted to focus on

00:01:57.860 great leaders but as we'll see you we'll talk about you highlight hitler and stalin and when people

00:02:03.580 think great leader they typically don't think of hitler and stalin so how do you how are you defining

00:02:07.280 great in your book well great clearly is defined completely without the moral aspect and so the use of

00:02:15.760 both of those men really is to underline that evil people can be great leaders too in fact you don't

00:02:22.940 have to at all be a a good person to be a great leader and that's slightly controversial you've

00:02:29.860 picked up on it so have other people in the reviews but luckily nobody's implied that i think that adolf

00:02:35.380 hitler was great well this is sort of the thomas carlisle definition of great of a great man someone

00:02:41.060 who has a lot of impact and influence on the on world events precisely exactly and thomas carlisle

00:02:46.660 i think really would have appreciated all of my of my nine people his his stance on leadership as you

00:02:53.640 mentioned is devoid of the moral one but however said having said that actually the democratic leaders

00:03:00.740 tend to be better leaders i mean stalin was a vicious leader at a time when viciousness was needed

00:03:06.780 but he wasn't as successful a strategist and certainly not a diplomat as the democratic leaders

00:03:13.880 and hitler of course although he was very successful in the early part of the war

00:03:17.460 up until april may 1941 up until the fall of yugoslavia and greece he was undefeated but then after that he

00:03:25.360 made a series of catastrophic strategic and political errors not least of course declaring war against you

00:03:33.400 an uninvadaable country and so that would be the critique that would maybe knock him off the list

00:03:39.960 of great leaders so in your book you start off with napoleon for those who aren't familiar with him can

00:03:44.960 you kind of give us a brief summary of how he rose to power i mean was it did he get there by chance was

00:03:49.720 it sheer force of will what happened there well it was a coup d'etat in november 1799 he was the most

00:03:57.000 successful general of the french revolution at that time and and by far in fact especially as the full

00:04:03.540 news of the disaster in egypt that he was responsible for hadn't percolated back to the

00:04:09.680 to the french people and so he chose his moment and overthrew the government which was a weak and

00:04:16.660 corrupt government which nobody had any time for which led to hyperinflation and defeat in

00:04:22.620 the continent so there was a very much a sense that napoleon was going to be the the new broom

00:04:31.340 who was going to really change french society and its military situation for the better and i mean

00:04:39.480 one thing you talk about in the book he had an enormous amount of charisma his soldiers would follow

00:04:44.100 him to the ends of the earth i mean what did he do to develop that devotion from his men but also from

00:04:49.840 citizens he had lots of techniques for this actually he wasn't much of a public speaker

00:04:54.880 interestingly and neither was stalin you would have thought that oratory is an essential prerequisite

00:05:00.380 for a great leader it's not in either of their cases however he was very good as a writer he

00:05:07.720 actually was a novelist earlier on in his career although the novels weren't published he had a sense of

00:05:14.660 writing style which he used for his orders and proclamations orders of the day and some of them

00:05:20.240 are highly quotable that marvelous moment before the battle of the pyramids in 1798 when he said 40

00:05:25.660 centuries are looking down upon you to his men and so he was able to uh to put his struggles and those

00:05:32.900 of france into the white a wider context where people actually were willing as you say to follow him

00:05:38.600 anywhere across the snows of russia later on but before that across the deserts of egypt and then

00:05:45.100 through every major european capital so there was very much a sense that you know he had this charisma

00:05:52.600 but one of the points that i try to make in the book is that actually charisma is an artificial

00:05:58.040 construct no one's born charismatic if you have in the case of adolf hitler uh but spare organizing

00:06:04.540 or alice lenny riefenstahl organizing the movies joseph goebbels organizing all the propaganda you

00:06:10.840 can appear charismatic even if you aren't personally and another thing you talk about and sort of

00:06:17.020 with napoleon's wartime leadership is that he understood the french notion of honor and so he was

00:06:24.000 really adamant about bestowing awards on soldiers frequently absolutely uh yes the legend of no was

00:06:30.860 something that he set up it still exists today of course he set it up in 1804 and he would do

00:06:36.920 things like on a battlefield he would actually if he saw some person regardless of rank doing something

00:06:44.120 immensely brave he would right up to them take off his legend of no his own one and pin it on the man's

00:06:52.240 breast and of course that also had a financial implications in that you've got a pension which

00:06:56.780 would take care of your family for for life and that was a wonderfully inspiring thing to the men

00:07:05.380 to the idea that if they were brave enough and the emperor saw them that they would be immediately

00:07:10.380 rewarded but he did lots of other things like whenever they struck camp he would make sure that

00:07:15.680 his sentries outside his tent got wine first he would make sure that the drummer boys were allowed to

00:07:21.680 sit around the campfire even if amongst they were amongst marshals and generals he would make a great

00:07:28.840 thing of ensuring that the uniforms and the shoes and and so on were as good as they possibly could be

00:07:37.120 that he was taking care of the creature comforts of the men and that is something that that they

00:07:42.180 responded to and admired and quickly appreciated was something that made them want to follow him

00:07:48.360 i know a lot of wartime leaders that followed napoleon they they actually they have followed

00:07:53.140 napoleon that idea of taking care of the men like the on the ground what we call grunts making sure

00:07:57.700 they're taken care of very well i know a lot of leaders in world war ii they they did that and

00:08:02.920 they always quoted napoleon as like that's where i got that idea from that's right yes and in this book

00:08:07.800 i i concentrate on george marshall and dwight heisenhower as people who whilst at the same time

00:08:14.520 obviously having huge massive things to to think about dwight house and how with the invasion of

00:08:20.220 europe and and general marshall increasing the size of the u.s army by 80 times from the beginning of

00:08:27.120 the second world war through to the end of it and they also very much worried about the creature comforts

00:08:32.800 about whether the men were getting their beer whether they were getting postage to um keep in touch with

00:08:38.900 their families whether or not they were having meals on time that were that were edible these kind

00:08:45.360 of things were a uh a constant sources of worry really to giants like marshall and ike but but

00:08:54.240 rightly so and one last thing about napoleon that i didn't know about him but you know despite being

00:08:59.540 emperor of france he was actually he still tried to embody that democratic ethos that he felt he was

00:09:05.600 fighting for and you talk about how officers were able to disagree with him in front of others and

00:09:10.840 he was okay with that yes he wasn't a dictator in in the military sphere because he recognized although

00:09:17.360 he was of course a dictator in the political one in the military sphere a lot depends on having the best

00:09:22.860 points of view put forward regardless of who they came from so he would listen to um relatively junior

00:09:29.140 officers and not just his his marshals and in order to get a flow of information through to him and

00:09:36.680 and opinion through to him he might not otherwise get if he stuck to strict seniority which is something

00:09:42.820 that frankly a lot of the generals he was fighting even the duke of wellington who defeated him at the battle

00:09:47.540 of waterloo were much more interested in the hierarchy than in the quality of the advice and opinions he was

00:09:55.800 getting so that was a very important aspect of napoleon it didn't mean of course that he would

00:10:01.080 necessarily take the opinion but he just wanted it to come from every angle and the men also appreciated

00:10:08.040 that as well sometimes they would shout as they were marching by they'd they'd shout things out to him

00:10:12.580 and he'd shout back and there was a kind of even though of course it was a dictatorship a kind of

00:10:17.540 democratic interaction that he had with the men which they uh hugely admired what were his weaknesses you

00:10:24.820 think well i mean the one that's usually held against him of course is invading russia but i

00:10:31.920 think it's important to remember that he had an army twice the size of russia's he only intended to

00:10:36.340 go inside russia for 20 days up to a distance of 50 miles he had defeated the russians twice before

00:10:42.620 he was invading with the with a force the same size as paris at the time which was the largest city in

00:10:48.260 europe by far and so i don't think it was hubristic to invade russia what went wrong was that he was

00:10:55.460 drawn further and further into russia and decided of course ultimately to go to moscow but even then

00:11:01.980 he had set aside for himself more time to come back from moscow to smolence than it had taken

00:11:08.880 from him to go from smolence to moscow what was the problem was the the route that he took and it was

00:11:16.460 after a particular battle called maloyaroslavets on the 24th of october 1812 he took the wrong

00:11:22.600 journey home the wrong way big dog led and he thought he had to because he thought the russian army

00:11:28.680 were in a place where in fact they weren't and so that was what went wrong really of one of many

00:11:34.040 thousands of decisions that he took in russia went wrong and that was the key thing that brought him

00:11:38.540 down so we've talked about churchill on our episode that we just did a few months ago we'll have our

00:11:43.740 listeners listen to that talk in depth but you know big leadership lessons you took away from

00:11:47.680 churchill's experience as a wartime leader what were his strengths and his weaknesses

00:11:50.880 well the moral clarity that he showed when he refused to enter into peace negotiations

00:11:57.960 with adolf hitler between the 25th and the 28th of may 1940 at the time of the beginning of the retreat

00:12:06.360 from dunkirk that was absolutely essential that was something that i think in many ways saved the

00:12:13.160 modern world because if we had been knocked out of the war because the british expeditionary force

00:12:18.000 had been captured or if we'd made peace some kind of ignoble peace that we'd patched together with

00:12:23.100 hitler then it would have been impossible for the americans to have used southern england as the

00:12:28.280 unsinkable aircraft carrier from which to liberate the continent and so that was a key moment in history

00:12:35.260 and he did that because he was churchill because he'd been warning about hitler and the nazis for 10

00:12:41.600 years nobody listened to him but finally they did when he became prime minister and he refused to

00:12:47.540 make peace and then another of his great leadership qualities was his eloquence of course and the way

00:12:52.700 in which the speeches that he was able to make the morale boosting speeches during the second world war

00:12:57.620 especially the beginning of it in that 1940 and 41 period were a tangible means by which the british

00:13:05.460 people decided that they would fight on you have a tremendous sense of foresight he was of course in his

00:13:11.900 great iron curtain speech in fulton missouri on the 5th of march 1946 was able to put stalin and the soviets

00:13:21.660 and the threat to eastern europe from them not just eastern europe into its proper context and was brave enough

00:13:28.760 to warn about that he was the first major politician in the west to do that he had a capacity to learn

00:13:35.900 from his mistakes which is not always evident in all politicians and so when throughout his life when

00:13:42.900 he made blunder off to blunder frankly and indeed several in the second world war as well he learned

00:13:49.560 from each of them and his worst blunder of course was the dardanelles catastrophe of 1915 and from that he

00:13:57.580 learned never to overrule the chiefs of staff in the second world war i think that's also a very

00:14:03.740 apposite decision to have taken and any his weaknesses you think that he displayed maybe during his times

00:14:09.600 of being a leader during war yes there were a few he was he could be extremely short-tempered short-tempered

00:14:15.940 with his uh his secretaries and his staff and those around him when the pressure built up he was usually

00:14:20.680 extremely calm and cool but on occasion he would be snappish towards them he was too naive i think is

00:14:29.660 probably the only way of putting it or explaining it about believing the promises that stalin made at

00:14:36.000 yalta the yalta conference in february 1945 over the integrity and independence of poland but there was no

00:14:43.380 possibility of the allied armies forcing the russians out of poland at that stage in the war

00:14:49.400 and so there was no real alternative to believing the promises that stalin was making even though all

00:14:57.080 of them were terrible lies so let's move on to hitler and you start off your chapter about hitler

00:15:03.460 you kind of befuddled why hitler even rose to power in the first place because you argued just wasn't a

00:15:08.900 very interesting person at all and in fact you call him a nullity as a human being walk us through

00:15:13.980 the character of hitler before he became the leader of the nazi party and how did this guy who didn't

00:15:18.560 was pretty much boring didn't have a lot of natural charisma managed to become like this cult-like figure

00:15:24.040 in germany yes well a weird little obsessive frankly a leader of a joke party um and pretty much a joke

00:15:32.640 leader up until 1923 when he by the way only got 2.3 percent of the vote in that in that

00:15:38.820 election he was a real fringe fringe candidate but then of course because after the great crash and

00:15:45.780 the wall street crash and the great depression he was able to play on the on the fears and resentments

00:15:52.040 of the german people resentment of course from the defeat of the first world war and personified the

00:15:58.520 revanchism that that ultimately was to sweep through germany and he of course also used a anti-semitic

00:16:05.960 series of anti-semitic tropes which had been around since uh in germany since the middle ages

00:16:11.960 also to concentrate on them as a scapegoat but actually personally as well as playing on the

00:16:19.940 politics of fear and hatred and resentment but he himself apart from his capacity for rabble-rousing

00:16:27.800 speeches was a individual so lacking in any of the other great capacities for leadership some reason

00:16:36.880 he's mistaken or at least napoleon is mistaken for him this is an absurdity napoleon had a great sense

00:16:42.520 of humor it had none whatsoever had a a personal charm and a capacity to make people think of him as a

00:16:52.340 charming good-natured person that wasn't true of hitler in the slightest apart from of course his

00:16:57.460 closest acolytes but he did have as i mentioned earlier with lenny riefenstahl albert spayer and

00:17:03.560 joseph star and joseph goebbels a complete control over his own propaganda and if you have for the 13

00:17:13.800 years of the nazi state sorry the 12 years of the nazi state total 100 control over every aspect of radio

00:17:21.440 and newspapers and so on you can create a propaganda so that a young boy who is six years old

00:17:30.560 in 1933 will be 18 um by the time of the end of the third reich and will have heard nothing in his

00:17:38.080 whole life apart from praise of the fuhrer and so uh would go off to um to fight for him and as you

00:17:45.440 mentioned earlier hitler actually had a lot of success as a wartime leader at the very beginning

00:17:49.860 what accounted for that success and why did things going started going off the rails for him

00:17:54.720 well the the great sickle cut maneuver of um may 1940 with which he destroyed the french army and the

00:18:02.280 british expeditionary force and cut through to the sea through the ardennes was the idea of eric von

00:18:08.600 manstein gerd von runstedt was the field marshal who gave him the the plans really for the invasion of

00:18:17.040 poland he had superb generals in heinz guderian and in kleist and others who were able to um to win

00:18:26.980 in in europe and so you have this uh series of rather brilliant staff officers who had been planning

00:18:35.060 this war for 20 years and were and were in a superb position to execute it and the fuhrer listened to

00:18:41.720 them the problem came and he also listened to them obviously in the ugoslavian campaign in which

00:18:46.980 he knocked out yugoslava in three weeks and the greek campaign in which he knocked it out and

00:18:51.760 knocked the greeks out of the war in six weeks and so you have this extraordinary series of victories

00:18:57.980 early on and unfortunately he started to believe his own propaganda and was suffering from terrible

00:19:05.180 hubris by the time he unleashed operation barbarossa on the 22nd of june 1941 and of course at the very

00:19:11.760 beginning of that it was a huge success they captured three and a half million russians in

00:19:16.420 the first 22 days they managed to get to the subway stations of moscow they subjected leningrad in the

00:19:24.820 north to a thousand day siege they captured stalingrad down in the south and so it seemed as

00:19:30.740 though that that he was going to get that right too at which point he really was wildly hubristic and

00:19:36.900 filled with a sense that goebbels was right when he called him the supreme warlord of all time we're

00:19:43.320 going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors and now back to the show well so that's

00:19:48.440 a lesson you can contrast with churchill so churchill throughout all of his time as a wartime leader he

00:19:53.920 continued to listen to his generals even to the very end and hitler didn't and and didn't overrule

00:20:00.020 them which hitler what hitler used to do was to listen at the wolf shantzer in eastern um eastern

00:20:07.260 poland and he would east bruscia as was now in poland and but then at the end of listening for well

00:20:14.800 over an hour to other generals would go back to doing exactly what he said he was going to do at

00:20:19.480 the beginning of the meeting churchill's not like that and one has to remember that churchill couldn't

00:20:24.100 have got that hubristic because he had a parliament that would occasionally have votes of no confidence

00:20:30.700 which he would have to win in the house of commons he had a a muzzled press but nonetheless in some

00:20:37.340 papers like the daily herald and the daily worker a highly critical press he had the king who he had to

00:20:44.720 explain his his actions to every tuesday at lunchtime he had a cabinet which would sometimes vote him down

00:20:52.140 he had a uh a wife who would criticize him and uh and wrote him letters about how uh how bad tempered

00:20:59.680 he'd become you know he was fighting and of course most important of all really uh he had an ally in

00:21:05.760 franklin roosevelt and he had to try to persuade roosevelt and marshall of every maneuver that he

00:21:12.100 wanted undertaken so there was this constant set of people and institutions who were looking over

00:21:21.800 winston churchill's shoulder all the time this was clearly not the case with adolf hitler or

00:21:25.980 or joseph starlin another way you contrast hitler and roosevelt and churchill talk about how during

00:21:33.500 during the war hitler never never visited bombing sites or what talked to the citizens but you see

00:21:40.340 churchill soon during the blitz he was there we wanted to go see the damage he wanted to go talk to

00:21:44.920 people roosevelt he was talking to people on a weekly basis with his fireside chats hitler kind of

00:21:50.620 just locked himself up that's right and when he drove through uh bombed out areas of berlin in his

00:21:56.480 mercedes-benz he had little curtains that would close in his car so he wouldn't be able to see the

00:22:03.900 bombing and the ordinary people wouldn't be able to see him and that was and he never gave broadcasts

00:22:09.260 in 1944 for example he only broadcasted once on german radio and that was after he'd survived the

00:22:17.500 assassination attempts on him of the bomb plot of the 20th of july and so these are two hugely

00:22:23.600 contrasting elements churchill used to go to the bomb sites and sometimes people would shout at him

00:22:28.920 you know you know on occasion there would be people saying uh well it's all right for you because you

00:22:35.400 can go back to downing street tonight and some and others would say well you've got you've got more

00:22:40.620 than one home this is the only one i've got and it's just been flattened so that it wasn't all 100

00:22:45.880 you know good old winnie and and give it back to them and all of that but the huge majority of people

00:22:53.000 were thankful that he'd come to visit work did appreciate that and did show both defiance and

00:23:00.940 also a desire a straightforward and wholly rational and tangible desire for revenge so that's another

00:23:08.500 leader that leadership lesson from napoleon you got to stay connected to the people you lead and don't

00:23:13.000 cloister yourself yourself off precisely exactly you see that again and again in the more successful of

00:23:18.700 these leaders that uh you make them you know access is important the the process of listening to what

00:23:25.100 they're saying is important and if you just um do what hitler did for over two-thirds of the war which

00:23:31.500 was to was to live in his in his headquarters at the wolf schancer you are not visible and and

00:23:38.260 therefore not in any kind of position to get a sense of what the german people were saying but

00:23:43.120 ultimately you remember he he despised the german people in the right at the end with the nero order

00:23:49.000 he wanted the infrastructure of germany to be destroyed and for it to be sort of sent back to being a

00:23:55.380 pretty much a rural country and so it was for him always the nazi ideal and ideas that mattered more than

00:24:03.100 the people and that's not true of the democrats so let's talk about stalin another great leader and

00:24:08.660 he's great because like you the number whenever you look at the numbers of deaths that are associated

00:24:13.300 with stalin you realize yeah he had a huge huge impact on world events how did stalin rise to power

00:24:20.660 and what was he like as a as a leader well he actually rose to power through the bureaucracy even

00:24:26.380 though he started off as a very uh exciting romantic figure he was a bank robber on one occasion he when

00:24:33.180 he was 28 he robbed the tiflis state bank of what the american modern american equivalent would be of

00:24:39.620 eight million dollars he was a nonetheless for all of that background it was actually through the

00:24:45.720 bureaucracy that he he uh of the communist party of the soviet union that he got to the position that he

00:24:51.260 was and uh it really his um his defining leadership um thing up until technique up until 1939 when the

00:25:03.340 war broke out was the very negative one that he made his alliance with hitler in august 1939 which

00:25:11.060 turned out to be an absolute disaster for the soviet union because it allowed hitler to take out the

00:25:16.620 western powers and then concentrate entirely or at a time of his own choosing to destroy

00:25:22.520 the soviet union which although of course hitler didn't succeed in that it did ultimately cost the

00:25:28.440 lives of 27 million or so uh russian citizens and i mean what was interesting too you talk about even

00:25:34.740 after hitler had betrayed him basically like stalin continued to be like well no we're still going to

00:25:41.420 hold our end of the bargain we're going to see what's going on here he just for some reason he just

00:25:45.320 couldn't catch it yeah yes even though he was given 80 warnings that operation barbarossa was going

00:25:50.740 to take place including from one of his best spies richard sauger the exact day on which it was going

00:25:56.620 to be unleashed 22nd of june 1941 he still kept believing that this was just english provocation and it

00:26:03.760 wasn't true and then he had a kind of mental breakdown on the day itself and retreated back to his dacha

00:26:10.260 and when the politburo came to visit him at his dacha to ask him to become the supreme war leader

00:26:16.860 he thought that they had come to arrest and and execute him so it was a and then the following

00:26:23.340 weeks of course as i mentioned earlier were utterly disastrous 40 percent of the soviet bomber force was

00:26:28.780 destroyed on the ground in the first few hours of operation barbarossa so you have this um this

00:26:35.740 dictator who somehow has to try to decide how he's going to um organize the fight back and the

00:26:44.060 fascinating thing about stalin is that he decided not to go down the hitler route of listening to his

00:26:50.680 generals but then doing what he'd originally wanted what he actually did was to give enormous amount of

00:26:55.820 autonomy to his generals marshals who had been at staff college and had fought in earlier wars

00:27:03.340 really hugely impressive figures like uh georgie zhakov and rokozovsky and konyev and so on and what

00:27:12.720 he did with these people was to allow them to take part in what was much more sort of western style

00:27:18.840 interaction between politicians and soldiers and at the stavka the high command stalin stopped and

00:27:27.360 listened to what these great soldiers were saying and it was ultimately a far more effective way of

00:27:35.240 running a war than the um the way that the nazis were doing it and i mean his main leadership tactic

00:27:41.500 to get people to do what he wanted just like well if you don't succeed i'm going to kill you

00:27:44.980 yes he on on on several occasions and i i mentioned two or three of them in my book

00:27:51.280 and you remember when i mentioned that 40 percent of the soviet bomber force was was destroyed on

00:27:57.240 the ground well its commander lieutenant general ivan kopetz that afternoon committed suicide which i like

00:28:04.160 to say in stalin's russia was a sensible career move he was constant i have other examples in the book

00:28:12.740 various things that that he would threat that he would make which make your blood run cold you know the

00:28:19.240 idea of your boss making it quite clear down the telephone that you're going to be shot unless you

00:28:23.960 do x y and z but nonetheless um it it did work and of course the people did do what they were told as a

00:28:29.980 result and i think it's interesting too you talk about this is sort of similar to churchill and his

00:28:34.640 moral clarity about what was right and stalin in sort of an inverse way had his own moral clarity

00:28:40.400 because he had this like unshakable faith in marxism like that that drove every decision he made

00:28:46.200 his personality it was all it all went back to communism yes and it uh was a disaster for the

00:28:52.920 soviet union that that was the case so he did genuinely believed at the time of the nazi soviet

00:28:58.820 pact that uh it would mean that russia would be left as the third man in a fight the laughing third man

00:29:06.820 in a fight watching his two enemies destroy one another as as he stood back as the laughing third man

00:29:13.100 whereas of course as i mentioned it was absolutely disastrous he would put soviet ideology and marxism

00:29:21.220 leninism above the best interests of the soviet union again and again and you found that also of

00:29:27.640 course with uh with hitler and the nazi ideology that it was a it was regularly regularly allowed to

00:29:35.620 overcome what were the best interests of the german people the various attacks that he

00:29:42.840 undertook the one against the bolsheviks of course which he'd always been promising but also there was

00:29:48.260 no great advantage in the second world war to annihilating the jews none at all in fact in many

00:29:54.600 ways it was appallingly self-harming but nonetheless he he followed that labans round this idea of turning

00:30:04.300 the large parts of eastern europe into a sort of slave state where the slavs were treated as slaves

00:30:11.120 came straight from nazi ideology it didn't help him in the slightest in his war against russia

00:30:16.040 let's move over to american leaders during world war ii and you start off with george marshall and when

00:30:22.320 george marshall got into his position there's a lot of people in amongst the allies who didn't really

00:30:27.940 they kind of had doubts about him what were those doubts that they had about marshall and how did he

00:30:33.580 prove them wrong in a way well he was a relatively junior figure for starters he was the 16th

00:30:39.120 most senior general in the u.s army at the time of his appointment to become the first most important

00:30:45.940 and so there are a lot in the high command who thought that he was just simply too junior to take

00:30:50.820 on a massive role like u.s army chief of staff which had been held by douglas mcarthur for example

00:30:57.620 he was also considered to be a courtly pennsylvanian which he was but not of the hardened stuff necessary

00:31:06.500 for such a serious post and he soon proved them wrong about that as well he was not thought of

00:31:15.560 when he came to office as being a fighting general because he hadn't been in any frontline actual

00:31:22.620 fighting himself but that turned out not to matter in the slightest when he was trying to create an army

00:31:28.480 which in september 1939 was about 200 000 strong so it was the 16th largest army in the world and he

00:31:36.160 was it's the same size as the army of rumania and by the end of the second world war the united states

00:31:42.580 had 16 million men and women in uniform so he created this extraordinary explosion which required

00:31:49.980 any number of great capacities intellectual and moral capacities and for me general marshall really

00:31:59.500 did have all of them he was able to deal with the president deal with the press deal with congress

00:32:05.000 deal with his own staff in a really exemplary manner amazing man yeah and he also had an amazing amount of

00:32:13.260 humility yes exactly i mean not not so much that it uh it damaged him ever um and if a senator phoned up

00:32:21.120 and asked for a position military position for his son or his nephew or so on or his or his friends or his

00:32:29.340 supporters marshall was never so uh humble as not to be able to tell him to exactly where to get off

00:32:35.420 um he was believed would be extremely tough like that um he also had a very interesting um and very

00:32:44.560 sensible ultimately relationship with president roosevelt because in many ways roosevelt liked

00:32:50.700 surrounded himself with yes men and and acolytes and marshall never ever allowed that to happen to him

00:32:58.600 the first time he ever visited hyde park and roosevelt's house in new york state was for roosevelt's funeral

00:33:06.160 in fact and he would be able to say no to to roosevelt in a way that a more emollient general wouldn't have

00:33:15.580 been able to so it's important to take the humility side of his personality to the right level but not

00:33:22.220 too much and another skill he had as a leader is he knew how to pick men for the job

00:33:27.820 a vital prerequisite which we see again and again in my essays i think how important it is to make

00:33:34.400 sure that you get the right people working for you delegation is an absolutely essential feature

00:33:39.480 of great leadership uh he sacked a lot of generals during the second world war something i think it's

00:33:45.200 64 generals he you know forced to retire either because they hadn't done the job and been defeated

00:33:53.180 militarily or simply because he didn't think they were up to it and so that's a very important but

00:33:58.740 at the same time he brought on people like generals patten and bradley and so on and great list of

00:34:06.200 these of these highly impressive staff officers as well who he appointed and primarily of course

00:34:12.020 general eisenhower who i suspect we're coming on to yeah we are so i think a big takeaway from marshall

00:34:17.060 that he got is he was in a fantastic administrator i think that often gets overlooked as a leader

00:34:21.340 because the administration is what allows things to happen and he was able to see big picture and

00:34:26.800 as you talk about his sort of strategic point of view you know he understood the importance of

00:34:30.960 fighting europe first for the americans that helped out a lot so his idea looking big picture

00:34:36.480 was also an important skill that he had oh yes i pick up on that you're absolutely right because

00:34:41.200 the germany first policy and by which germany even though it had been attacked by the japanese in

00:34:47.080 the pacific responded first by attacking the germans in northwest africa which might seem pretty

00:34:54.740 counterintuitive geographically but actually turned out to be exactly the right strategy he'd read

00:35:00.460 marshall had read his his carl von clausowitz and knew that when faced with a coalition you have to

00:35:06.620 attack the strongest one of the coalition first and i think that the roosevelt administration

00:35:12.660 and george marshall's cleaving to the germany first policy was in fact the most statesman-like

00:35:21.200 decision political decision ever taken in the 20th century well let's talk about eisenhower like

00:35:26.720 marshall when eisenhower was put into his position people had doubts about him they didn't think he was

00:35:32.040 experienced well again yes like like marshall he he had never seen a shot fired in anger either

00:35:36.880 and i mean marshall had been a staff officer on pershing's staff but he had never served in the

00:35:42.800 front line and neither had eisenhower and that was held against him not least actually by george

00:35:47.600 pattern himself but it was something that he very quickly got over once he had organized operation torch

00:35:56.400 from gibraltar which was the attack i mentioned on uh on northwest africa and it had gone well by

00:36:03.500 november 1942 it was clear that there was a new power in the land as far as strategic thinking was

00:36:10.180 concerned it seemed like as you write about eisenhower his big leadership skill that he brought

00:36:15.700 to world war ii and even in his career as a president in the united states he had just fantastic people

00:36:21.620 skills he knew how to build coalitions amongst people who had disparate points of view and interest

00:36:26.880 not just disparate points of view but actually hated one another i mean the uh what was going on

00:36:32.360 between general montgomery um general pattern general bradley and others was a full-scale

00:36:38.820 sort of best way to put it um fest they all hated one another and they all were incredibly ill-tempered

00:36:48.040 behind each other's backs and they got their staffs to attack each other and they leaked the press i

00:36:55.660 mean it was it was a it was a terrible it could indeed have been a sort of dangerously bad situation

00:37:01.620 and yet you had at the top the chairman of the board who was general eisenhower who constantly

00:37:07.300 banged their heads together put them in the right directions and and made sure that he could draw out

00:37:14.180 the best from each of them it was it was fabulous leadership at the same time of course and we

00:37:19.640 mentioned earlier about marshall and organization you know he had 1.2 million men who he was in charge of

00:37:27.480 incredible numbers you know 91 divisions 28 000 aircraft tens of millions of square ton of square feet

00:37:37.560 of equipment thousands upon thousands of trucks and so on that he had to make sure we're all in the

00:37:44.580 right place at the right time and and he uh he made a very very great success of that and i think

00:37:50.280 when you think that he was suffering at the time from stage two hypertension smoking four packs of

00:37:56.260 cigarettes a day had an incredibly high heart beat i think as like 176 over 110 pulse rate it's a very

00:38:08.200 um very serious capacities that he showed with all these leaders that you've written about do you

00:38:15.120 think they all have something in common do you think they were they've molded themselves in leaders

00:38:19.340 were they born that way what's your takeaway after writing about these guys they certainly weren't born

00:38:23.140 that way no it's you know they learned often by reading actually almost all of them were huge

00:38:30.140 history buffs huge biography readers they you know use the lessons of the past there was a ruthlessness

00:38:36.440 to all of them undoubtedly there were moments that uh that they did pretty dreadful things some of

00:38:43.060 them um admiral melson who i go into in some detail handed over 300 neapolitan jacobins to be shot

00:38:51.200 by the and executed in various ways by the neapolitan bourbons uh which today i think would be seen as a

00:38:57.980 war crime but you saw that also with with what napoleon did executing 3 000 turkish artillerymen

00:39:04.740 in jaffa on the beach outside jaffa they'd given their parole not to fight against the french republic

00:39:11.660 and then they broke that six weeks later and in the middle east in the 18th century you didn't get a

00:39:16.400 second chance frankly but nonetheless if there's a there's an element of ruthlessness to all of them

00:39:21.680 and uh and various other more positive things as well speak to the men speak to the souls napoleon

00:39:28.140 said it's the only way to electrify the men i think each of these people were able to speak to the to

00:39:34.920 the souls of their uh followers even it has to be said um adolf hitler well andrew where can people go

00:39:40.760 to learn more about the book in your work oh well that's kind of you my website is www.andrew-roberts.net

00:39:49.200 but the great thing about this book leadership in war is it is indeed available in all good bookstores

00:39:54.380 well andrew roberts thanks for your time it's been a pleasure you are kind thanks very much indeed

00:39:59.400 my guest it was andrew roberts he's the author of the book leadership in war it's available on amazon.com

00:40:04.660 and bookstores everywhere you find out more information about his work at his website andrew-roberts.net

00:40:09.500 also check out our show notes at aom.is slash leaders in war we find links to resources we

00:40:13.940 can delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out

00:40:25.360 our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands

00:40:28.980 of articles we've written over the years we've got a series about winston churchill dwight eisenhower

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The Art of Manliness - February 05, 2020

#582： Essential Lessons From Great Wartime Leaders

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