FDR & Stalin: The Strategists
Stalin as the Worst Strategist
Why I argue Stalin is both the Worst and Best war leader is because you need to start with the worst before you get to the best. Stalin, in opting to ally with Hitler in 1939 and sign the Nazi-Soviet Pact, deliberately set in motion a series of event that almost destroyed his entire country. In signing the pact, Stalin was making a catastrophic miscalculation. He believed he could somehow sit aside from the conflict for a while, providing massive amounts of aid to Hitler and the Nazis, while his new friend basically fought the British and French in a war that would exhaust all the capitalist powers. His plan would be that he would then swoop in and pick up the pieces.
He thus deliberately decided to strengthen a power, Nazi Germany, which was his greatest enemy. While Britain and France viewed the USSR with suspicion, neither had the intention or resources to try and destroy the Soviet Union.
Hitler did want to destroy the USSR and seize much of its territory for a German empire however. In signing the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin helped Hitler get to the point that he could attempt to do just that—sooner than expected. Stalin provided Hitler with the safety of a one-front war and poured raw materials into the German war machine (raw materials that were crossing the border in very large quantities until the very moment that Hitler’s army invaded the USSR).
Moreover, Stalin deliberately set about destroying the buffer states between Hitler and himself (Poland and the Baltics) easing the process of a direct German invasion. He basically tipped the military balance towards Germany and eased the process of a German invasion.
Finally, not only did Stalin make Hitler much stronger, and ease the process of a German attack, he then chose not to prepare his country for an upcoming invasion in 1941, even when he was inundated with reports that Hitler was planning on invading.
This is a truly bewildering moment. Stalin was getting numerous reports from a variety of sources—all saying the same thing. These reports came from what should have been seen as trusty sources around the world, from diplomats, spies and even from sources in Moscow itself. The sheer regularity of these reports should have set off alarm bells in Stalin—but he could not bring himself to believe them. My own guess is that it would have exposed him as being the bungler that he had been until that time. So instead of facing facts, Stalin rubbished the reports, even accusing some as being deliberate misinformation. This meant that he left the Soviet armed forces unprepared for the German attack. He did not have them on the right defensive footing and had too many units pushed forward where they were easy prey for the German invaders.
Stalin Becomes the Best Strategist
Having bungled the opening of the war so spectacularly, Stalin pivoted almost immediately and did what he needed to do to rectify the situation. This he did impressively and effectively. In particular he put away his innate suspicion of the US and UK (powers he viewed in some ways more suspiciously than Nazi Germany) and convinced both Churchill and Roosevelt that he would be a good and useful ally. He was particularly successful with the Americans.
Only a few weeks after the German invasion, Roosevelt’s trusted emissary, Harry Hopkins, showed up in Moscow, where Stalin charmed and impressed the eager American. From that point until the end of the war, Stalin basically convinced the USA to provide him a truly stupendous amount of military aid at no cost to himself or his country. This was both finished material (most of the best trucks in the Soviet Army were US-made) and masses amounts of raw materials. For instance, the United States sent the USSR more bauxite (the crucial ore for aluminum without which aircraft construction would be impossible) than it devoted to the entire US Navy. The US was what made Soviet aircraft production possible in the numbers that it was.
Moreover, Stalin grew as a commander in chief after June 1941. Having earlier been a disaster in killing many of his senior commanders in purges and basically infantilizing many of his generals in the late 1930s, Stalin learned to delegate to a few excellent commanders such as General Zhukov. It took a while—at least until the Stalingrad campaign, but Stalin learned something that Hitler never did—that having supreme command does not mean you have to exercise it.
As such Stalin took the USSR, which was not the most powerful state in the Allies and allowed it to create an employ a larger war machine than it would ever have been able to create itself. It put Stalin in a position where he actually could have provided for a better long-term future for the USSR, if he were sensible enough to really care for that.
The Bad Stalin Returns
I don’t believe it was somehow a good thing for the USSR to have seized and enslaved the states of Eastern and Central Europe—from the Baltics which he took in 1939-1940, to Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria which he took in 1945.
Yes he seized and controlled this territory, but in doing so he set the seeds for the collapse of the USSR. He immediately established these states as imperial Soviet possessions, ruled with brutal force by minority governments. It was the worst paradigm of a bad paradigm to begin with. Stalin’s empire meant that the USSR had a constantly militarized relationship with its “Allies” (who were not really its allies) and it became a major drain on the USSR itself.
This is one of the things that I don’t get about those who praise Stalin. They seem to think the creation of this weak and militarized Soviet empire was a good thing for the USSR, as if bloody and dictatorial control was a sign of success. To me it is a failure.
Moreover, he had a chance to do something otherwise, but by the end of the war his old, bad ways of doing things reasserted himself. What he didn’t understand was that Roosevelt, for one, would have been happy to keep working with the USSR on a cooperative relationship after the war. However, Stalin never seemed to understand that and helped precipitate a Cold War.
That is why I look at Yalta Conference in February 1945 (the last time Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met together) as to a certain degree a great failure for Stalin. While others praise him for getting what he wanted at the meeting, supposedly, I dont see what he receive that he didn’t already have (military predominance in Poland for instance). However in getting nothing, he seemed to go out of his way to embarras Franklin Roosevelt and set the stage for a US government to become very anti-Soviet and anti-Stalin after the war.
What people don’t always understand was how disillusioned Roosevelt was with Stalin in the last few weeks of the latter’s life, and how this made the transition to the Cold War (which the USSR was bound to lose because of the societal weakness that Stalin exacerbated) all but inevitable.
Yes, Stalin set up a large but actually structurally weak and detrimental empire in Eastern Europe—and in exchange he lost the ability to actually help his people and his country. This is not a strategic success and I don’t see how people praise him as a strategic genius for doing so
So when it comes to Stalin, I’m happy to see him as the Worst-Best of the Grand Strategists of the war. He was a disaster at first and almost destroyed his country, then he pivoted very successfully and built his country and his military up. Then he ends up being a destructive imperialist that lays the seeds for his country’s collapse.
Franklin D Roosevelt as a Grand Strategist: His View of the Nation
On Stalin I tried to argue against simply seizing territory and conquering people as the key variable for evaluating grand strategy. Too often (as in the case of Stalin) such conquests end up being ephemeral, even counterproductive. In conquering much of Central/Eastern Europe, Stalin actually end up weakening the USSR and hastening its demise.
To be a great grand strategist more needs to be happening—you need to win a war while strengthening your nation and setting in place as firm foundations as possible for its future success. This was not something Stalin did.
Roosevelt, however, did not see victory in the war as leading to the establishment of empire and did actually strengthen his country. His behaviour during the New Deal before World War II showed that he had a very different conception of strengthening his nation than Stalin. While Stalin was plunging his country into the Great Terror of the 1930s, and purging his army of phantom enemies, Roosevelt was trying to improve the social condition of the USA and provide economic relief for his people. Im not writing this to say that the New Deal was automatically a great success—its something that still gets debated—but to say his instincts were fundamentally different from Stalin’s. Roosevelt honestly cared for his fellow citizens, and was willing to try radical things to help them—Stalin honestly feared and suspected his fellow citizens and was willing to try radical things to control and even kill them.
This fundamental difference was something that they brought to grand strategy, and in the case of FDR led to one element that remains one of the most important examples of his success as a war leader.
416,800
Why this number? Well it was the number of military deaths that the USA suffered in World War II. It might seem large—but in historic terms its shockingly small—and it is small to a large degree because of the war leadership of FDR.
To see just how small this number is—Japan suffered more than 2 million military deaths, the Germans between 5-6 million and the Soviets somewhere between 8-11 million. Indeed, US deaths were closer to that of Yugoslavia—than a large country—and considering the size of the US population, it had one the lowest death rate of any of the major combatant.
And it had this death rate while fighting the vast majority of Japanese military resources and more German production than the USSR.
US deaths were so low because of how Franklin Roosevelt conceived of modern war. Having visited the Western Front in World War I, Roosevelt, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy at the time, came away convinced that the land war was to be minimized as a rule. He hated the smells, sounds and sights of the land war—was repulsed by the odors of death and garbage, hated sleeping in close quarters in fortresses (he spent the night in Verdun) and viewed much of the slaughter he witnessed as unnecessary.
Roosevelt wanted machines to do most of the heavy lifting in war—not human beings. He believed that the industrial/technological capabilities of the United States should foremost be used to gain sea (and later air) dominance over key supply routes, and using that the US should grind their enemies into dust.
These perceptions played a great role in determining how the US fought World War I. Both in how he constructed US armed forces, and where and when they were used, you can see the imprint of Roosevelt. In the first case, the US constructed an extremely small land army—in relative terms. Not wanting to try and match the Germans and Japanese soldier for soldier, Roosevelt kept the army as small as possible—and de-emphasized the construction of land munitions in favor of air and sea weapons. In the end, the US army was forced to get by with what was called the “90 Division Gamble” precisely because Roosevelt strictly limited its size.
Roosevelt also wanted to take no risks that would lead to unnecessarily high land casualties. It was one of the reasons that he opposed George Marshall’s proposal to invade France in 1943. Roosevelt believed it was too early, his forces would not be ready, and it would significantly inflate US casualty roles. Far better, in his mind, to wait until 1944 when the US, the UK and the USSR together would be able to confront the German Army with unmatchable resources.
In the Pacific, Roosevelt was also happy to confront the Japanese with an island-hopping campaign, which avoided landing in too many places but instead made major air-sea leaps towards Japan.
I think in the end, this point is never given the importance it deserves. Roosevelt wanted his fellow citizens to live, and fought a war with that in mind. It is arguably one of the reasons the US came out of the war as strong and unified as it was.
What was the War for? Where Roosevelt Fell Short
As the book tries to make clear in the last chapters, the greatest question about Roosevelt remains his plans for the post-war world (what the war was being fought for) and how the US government was going to achieve his vision. He was usually quite vague about his post-war vision. He spoke hopefully about a world of “Four Policemen” (the USA, UK, USSR and China) and supported the creation of the United Nations, but was not clear how it was all to work. I was struck when reading the papers of William Leahy, his chief of staff and the person closest to him from 1943-1945, that no one in the US government really knew what Roosevelt’s plans were.
Moreover, Roosevelt made no effort to prepare the USA to carry on with his plans after his presidency would be over. My personal feeling on this is that Roosevelt actually believed that he was too important to the post-war world, and that no one else but him could really lead the US into this new world. It was why he both ran for re-election in 1944 when he clearly should not have, and why he had a successor in place (Harry Truman) whom he neither particularly liked and with whom he shared none of his ideas.
Roosevelt at this point seem to confuse the national interest with his own personal interest, with what could have been catastrophic results. He was weakening noticeably in 1944 (see picture below) had no chance of ever serving out another term—and yet refused to prepare for a succession.
Roosevelt in the summer of 1944, meeting MacArthur and Nimitz in Pearl Harbor. He had aged and weakened notably from Tehran only a few months earlier.
That the USA navigated his death as well as it did (though arguably the end of the war and post-war world were very different than they would have been had he lived) was down to Truman and a small group of advisers more than anything else.
So Roosevelt in many ways came up short in one of the most important elements of grand-strategy making. He did not have a clearly articulated set of war aims that he had prepared the USA to achieve whether he lived or not. Amongst many of his strengths—that is a noticeable weakness and it is amiss not to see it for what it is.
Phillips Payson O’Brien is Professor of Strategic Studies at St. Andrews and the author of The Strategists.
