International: Defeat Through Victory

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Wilmot pays handsome tributes to Eisenhower's genius as an Allied coordinator, but in his opinion, Ike frittered away his strength, failed to control Bradley and Patton when they were wrong, and above all lost the chance to win the war in 1944.

Writing of Yalta with the perspective of the past half-dozen years, Wilmot tries hard to be fair to Roosevelt, but is distressed by F.D.R.'s naive belief that "Uncle Joe" would keep his promises. Shrewdly, he points out that the meeting took place after Hitler had shaken up the Allies in the Ardennes and when the Russian armies had the Germans on the run in the East. Through Yalta, Unconditional Surrender, and the green light to Stalin in Central Europe, thinks Wilmot, the West gave Stalin what it had denied to Hitler. The Struggle for Europe will convince a lot of readers that Hitler's blunders contributed as much as Allied generalship did to the winning of the war; it is almost equally persuasive in its argument that the Allied leaders were the unwitting architects of Stalin's postwar world.