WW2 Leadership lecture

[Affentitten]

So I have to give a lecture to undergrads on "Leadership in WW2".

For the sake of time and clarity I will only be able to cover the main 4: Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and FDR. I want to compare/contrast the four in terms of leadership style, realtionship with the military, relationship with "the Establishment" of their country, personal military experience, details man / big picture, complete bat**** insanity etc.

I'm looking for any tips or input. Not because I'm ignorant, but because I know that the people on this forum will make my lecture better than it would be solo.

Also if anyone can come up with some interesting or funny quotes on these men, particualrly from their military subordinates, it would be a nice touch for the slides.

[costard]

Good luck Aff. Four different cultures throwing up four variants of leadership...

personal relationships and the individual valuing trust worth a look at?

grofaz - I'm fairly sure none of the others had a similar tag applied by their own populace during the conflict

Great thread topic.

[Pak_43]

For Churchill you could make the case he was a major hypocrite when it came to defence spending in the early 30's? Not a popular view but Corrigan's "Blood, sweat and arrogance" has some fairly compelling evidence (which isn't to say I agree with everything Corrigan says by a long shot..)

He was basically part of the government, and voted for, the extension for several years of the 10 year rule (that defence spending was predicated on the fact that Britain would not go to war in the next ten years.)

The major politician who opposed this approach and was responsible for the turnaround in defence spending in the mid to late 30's? Chamberlain....

If you have time, read at least some of Field Marshal's Alanbrookes diary, it's a day to day primary source account of dealing with Churchill, which drove Alanbrooke to the brink of despair at times...

(I'll make the point here that I am a huge admirer of Churchill and what he did during the war, but Churchill is often portrayed as the saviour of Britain and an opponent of appeasment, the reason appeasement was the only viable strategy was because the government he was in had reduced defence spending to such a low ebb it was impossible to go to war)

[Affentitten]

Very interesting. I did not know that about Churchill in the 1930s. Exactly why this was the place to post!

Does anyone know if besides Churchill, any of the other leaders pulled a trigger in WW2? I know that Winnie made a couple of trips to the very front of the line to squeeze a few symbolic shots off. Obviously FDR didn;t. but what about Hitler and Stalin?

[Affentitten]

personal relationships and the individual valuing trust worth a look at?

Definitely. Interesting that Hitler was so paranoid but totally blind when it came to his old Munich cronies like Goering, Himmler etc.

[Merkin Muffley]

Although its not the main thrust of your lecture, I would be inclined to at least mention the larger scope of decisions that Churchill had to deal with - more numerous areas of operations (truly global), more allies to liaise with (and both as senior partner and junior partner), all armed forces involved in major operations, crucial economic decisions, etc. The other leaders shared some of these, but not all (FDR at least being able to rely on a robust economy).

[Other Means]

You might add the ability to delegate and the ability to set the operational tempo from strategic resources in

there.

Hitler liked to stand round the map table and had his resource strategy going one way and his operations

the other.

Stalin let them get on with it - apart from shooting the ones who failed. However the communist system was

ideal for wartime mobilitation due to the utter ruthlesness of the state in moving people around. But hey,

what choice did they have.

Churchill who liked to dabble - sometimes very badly - but at least let the resource strategy set the tempo.

FDR was completely hands off but started the workshop of demo

[Pak_43]

Churchill was renowned for not trusting his military experts and backing his own judgements, he was also inherently a gambler when it came to strategy. He distrusted intellectuals (which was why he got on so badly with Wavell) The 2 battleships sent to the Far East without any air support was basically done on his say so, and a rude awakening for him of how naval warfare had changed.

OTOH he could galvanise people like nobody else, and his vision in backing Bletchley Park with everything he could showed a remarkable foresight about the benefits it could bring, the success in keeping it a secret throughout the war showed Churchill at his best, being prepared to sacrifice short term success for the long term gains of keeping their codebreaking secret...

[Sergei]

For Churchill you could make the case he was a major hypocrite when it came to defence spending in the early 30's?

That's misleading unless you put it into the correct context. Or don't you think that defence spending was the smallest of problems for United Kingdom, or any other nation, in the years of Great Depression? The alternative could very well have been a communist revolution.

[hoolaman]

So I have to give a lecture to undergrads on "Leadership in WW2".

For the sake of time and clarity I will only be able to cover the main 4: Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and FDR. I want to compare/contrast the four in terms of leadership style, realtionship with the military, relationship with "the Establishment" of their country, personal military experience, details man / big picture, complete bat**** insanity etc.

I'm looking for any tips or input. Not because I'm ignorant, but because I know that the people on this forum will make my lecture better than it would be solo.

Also if anyone can come up with some interesting or funny quotes on these men, particualrly from their military subordinates, it would be a nice touch for the slides.

For an Aussie slant I'd suggest Curtin too. The negotiations between Australia Britain and the US are a pretty interesting story. Curtin by all accounts worried himself to death.

[Silvio Manuel]

To me it has always been glaring that (post- the German invasion of Russia), Hitler increasing micromanaged the war (down to the tactical level, even) and distrusted his Generals (esp. the non-SS ones). Stalin did the same early in the war, but increasingly listened to and deferred to his generals, and their warcraft improved while Germany's warcraft, manpower, and relative industrial production declined.

[Pak_43]

That's misleading unless you put it into the correct context. Or don't you think that defence spending was the smallest of problems for United Kingdom, or any other nation, in the years of Great Depression? The alternative could very well have been a communist revolution.

That's not my point, my point was to criticise the governments policy of appeasement when it really was the only viable strategy and yet he was part of the government that ran down defence spending is (imho) hypocrisy, but your absolutely right, the UK government had many other challenges at the time not least the populations wish to avoid war at all costs..

[Rob Ross]

There has been a feeble attempt at revisionism by British right-wing historians in the last ten years or so on Churchill, and Corrigan is one of the worst. Their thinly veiled beef is that Churchill reduced his country into a second rate power in an all-out attempt to break Nazism. They miss their godforsaken Empire, and probably can't forgive him for being a political loose cannon and crossing the floor. I've even seen a couple of them advocate that he should have made peace in 1940. Of course the irony is that Churchill was in many ways more right wing than most.

In reality Churchill was indeed a 'dabbler' in military affairs, but almost never maintained his ideas against any reasoned rebbutal. To say he hated intellectuals is utter codswallop, as is his supposed 'lack of trust' in his military leaders. He gave them all a chance and his support, let them get on with it if his ideas didn't fit, and only dismissed them after they had had a fair crack of the whip.

He was an ideas man, almost a force of nature. Some of his ideas were nonsense but that's what the professionals were there for. I could not imagine how many times Alanbrooke shot Churchill down, but he was never sacked because of it. Churchill was quite prepared to be shown to be wrong.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

I think the thing that's a must to touch upon is how much power they had and how secure their grip on it was and how much they managed to do with it. For the Big Four at least, it seems that their leadership qualities was inversely proportional to their power.

Churchill was on paper the weakest of the four, with a coalition government that could force him out of office at any moment they wished. Yet he somehow managed to exert more effective control over his nations war effort then any other. FDR OTOH was a weak leader (not ineffectual) very weary of doing anything that might be unpopular. He lead by laying a trail of breadcrums on the desired path.

Stalin was probably the least limited in his power but was at his most effective as a leader when he loosened his control in order to recover from the early war disasters.

Hitler had only one threat to his power, and that was the Wehrmacht. This resulted in him being very distrustful of his generals, stiffling them.

[JonS]

Agree with Rob (about Churchill) and he touches on an important aspect of leadership also bought up by Costard, that being the kinds of leaders these national leaders surrounded themselves with.

Churchill and FDR both kept the best they could find right next to themselves. Both Marshall and Alanbrooke (was he a peer by then?) wanted a BIG piece of the OVERLORD action, but both C and FDR knew better than to let them go. In a similar vein, C's battles with Brooke are legendary - I don't know how FDR got on with Marshall. Both also established joint (or combined, depending on the terminology of the day) heads of staff (army, navy, air force) and usually ran things through those guys, while limiting themselves to national politics, diplomacy, and general direction of the war. The directive given to Eisenhower with regards to OVERLORD is an absolute classic in that regard - you really should look it up, if you haven't already, and ponder it's sparse yet elegant simplicity.

They both tolerated a LOT of dissent from subordinates during discussions, although, of course, once the decision had been made it was expected to be adhered to.

Both also looked out for their own national interests, while subordinating a total "fvk you, I'm in this for me" approach. The effort and risks FDR took to keep Britain going are well known, and while C did manage to get the US more deeply involved in the Med than perhaps they wanted to (although, at the time, there weren't a lot of options) when push came to shove he put the UK fully in behind Allied efforts.

I don't know much about their respective styles of leadership at the national level, but Churchill's speeches are well enough known, and both seemed to have been strongly liked by their respective populations ... although of course C got the boot pretty swiftly at the end of the war.

Fill in the blanks above for respective comments on Stalin and Hitler. The comment above about Stalin trying to run everything himself initially, continually fvking it up, and learning by 1942? that he needed to wind his neck in and let the professionals get on with it was a very good one. And opposite trend to that observed in Hitler. Also Stalin, like C and FDR, kept one of his best commanders (Zhukov?) very close at hand in a manner similar to Alanbrooke and Marshall, but Stalin's man was allowed to go off and command on occasion.

[Dietrich]

the communist system was ideal for wartime mobilitation due to the utter ruthlesness of the state in moving people around.

According to Len Deighton (in his book Blood, Tears, And Folly), just days after the German invasion on June 22, 1941, Stalin signed an order mobilizing 15 million men. By contrast, the entire German invading force was 3.5 million.

their warcraft improved while Germany's warcraft, manpower, and relative industrial production declined.

Partly true, partly not. Soviet equipment, tactics, and industrial capability did improve over the course of the war. Thanks to a two-front (some would say three-front) war by 1944, Germany's manpower capacity suffered steady attrition. What's remarkable is the despite being steamrollered by the Soviets in the east and barely managing to hold back the Allies in the west (only 1/8 of the Wehrmacht was ever deployed against the Western Allies from D-Day on) and being bombed day and night (literally), Germany was producing more guns, tanks, ammo, etc., later in the war. (This was largely because German war manufacturing was not up to full speed until c.1942.)

Obviously, the USSR had much more industrial capability than Germany. But the United States had much more industrial capability than the USSR -- about 40% of the world's total manufacturing capability.

[Sgt Joch]

Very interesting. I did not know that about Churchill in the 1930s. Exactly why this was the place to post!

Does anyone know if besides Churchill, any of the other leaders pulled a trigger in WW2? I know that Winnie made a couple of trips to the very front of the line to squeeze a few symbolic shots off. Obviously FDR didn;t. but what about Hitler and Stalin?

Stalin visited the front once in early 42, but never got closer than 30-40 miles, personally bravery was not his strong suit. There is a story that on the way, he felt the call of nature and the motorcade stopped, but no one on board knew if the sides of the road were clear of mines, so Stalin took a crap in the middle of the road in front of his entourage. They went back to moscow shortly after...

This is apparently a true story, but I don't think it ever appeared in Pravda....

[Michael Emrys]

FDR was completely hands off...

Not quite completely. He generally let his military advisors run the show, but he did on occasion intervene, and usually correctly. One example of the latter was to go into North Africa, which he did over the objection of Marshall and Arnold, among others.

Less fortunate interventions was his insistence on building subchasers that were of no use in the North Atlantic where ASW was most needed. His support of MacArthur also strikes me as regrettable if perhaps inevitable.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

He distrusted intellectuals...

But not universally. For instance, he was very impressed with R. V. Jones.

...(which was why he got on so badly with Wavell)

I think it's true that he didn't trust intellectuals who were generals. But there were other problems with Wavell. For one thing, Wavell bore him some animosity dating back to the Irish Mutiny, as it has been called. Plus, when they met, Wavell was phlegmatic and uncommunicative instead of his usual articulate and incisive self. Wavell was one of the best generals that the British had in the war, but he didn't present himself as such to Churchill. Then one has to add in Churchill's almost complete incomprehension of what modern armies needed in order to wage war and his impatience to quickly win a great victory in North Africa, and you have a sure formula for trouble.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

Churchill...was also inherently a gambler when it came to strategy.

Wellll, yes...but...he tried to win big stakes on the cheap. To some extent this was forced on him by the size and limitations of the British armed forces. But he was like the guy who is always buying one lottery ticket a week in hopes of striking it rich instead of investing the money in an interest bearing account. This led him to gamble on excursions that were too weak to achieve much of anything. Examples are the expedition to Greece in 1941 and to the Greek isles two years later. Yes, bringing Turkey into the war on the Allied side would have been nice, but probably not pivotal, and the Germans were just too strong in that area. He ignored the principle of economy of force and got his head handed to him.

Michael

[Affentitten]

For an Aussie slant I'd suggest Curtin too. The negotiations between Australia Britain and the US are a pretty interesting story. Curtin by all accounts worried himself to death.

Curtin, Menzies etc are covered in different lectures, not given by myself. It's an undergrad unit on "Political Leadership", so WW2 is just one week of the semester.

There is some great material coming out here and some viewpoints I hadn't considered before.

My favourite aspect of Churchill is in all those memos and stuff that fill the appendices of his The Second World War volumes. How, whilst grappling with major strategic and economic policy decisions he still found time to send correspondence about whether troops in Italy were getting supplies of beer or how many fishing trawlers were operting in the Irish Sea. And all beautifully phrased.

[dieseltaylor]

The pin-pricking of the enemy flanks with expeditions in the Med is almost historic British action. Whether it was correct to use sea-power with the advent of planes is moot militarily. One wonders how far it was seen as politically useful to stir the pot for those anti-Facists in the Balkans and give them encouragement.

[Affentitten]

The pin-pricking of the enemy flanks with expeditions in the Med is almost historic British action. Whether it was correct to use sea-power with the advent of planes is moot militarily. One wonders how far it was seen as politically useful to stir the pot for those anti-Facists in the Balkans and give them encouragement.

Not to mention the home audience.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

It was almost wholly political. Greece was an ally an in 1941 those were pretty thin on the ground and helping them out was seen as giving a positive impulse to those on the fence. At this point, most of the Balkans was still up for grabs. Politically it was not just desirable but necessary. Besides, bagging the Italians in Albania was rather tempting and would've seriously undermined Mussolini.

The Dodecanese islands were also very political. Capturing was thought to bring the Turks closer to war. Though I doubt they would have, not acting would have seen them back off. Then again, the ultimate failure put the Turkish DoW even further in to the future. But the big prize was access to the Black Sea. Considering the trouble of the Artic convoys it was a worthwhile attempt.

And keep in mind that when Churchill suggested it the Dodecanese were low hanging fruits and had it been acted on promptly and in force, as suggested by Churchill, it could've been a great success. The biggest blame that can be attributed to Churchill was that he didn't call the whole thing off when the operation was being actively undermined.

Yes, I'm a bit of a Churchill fanboi.

[Sgt Joch]

Stalin had a fairly hands on style. He chose competent people and let them do their job, but he kept a close eye on their performance and intervened when he deemed it necessary.

With the military, he initially tried to take direct control which led to some disastrous mistakes in the summer of 41, the winter offensive of 41-42 and Kharkov in may 42. However, he was smart enough to realize his limitations and for the rest of the war was content to leave his generals in charge. He still took an active role in all discussions, but accepted their decisions even when he disagreed with them, as with the retreat to stalingrad in the summer of 42 and the defensive strategy at Kursk in 43.

He would often also bypass the chain of command and directly call battlefield commanders sometimes down to the regimental level (as he did during Kursk) to find out first hand what was going on and impress on that particular officer how important his mission was, although he never issued direct orders.

He was very smart about managing people and encouraging discussions and not letting his ego get in the way. One good example is his relationship with Zhukov who was brilliant but short tempered. Stalin relied on him and worked him mercilessly to the point where Zhukov would periodically blow up and chew out Stalin for his impossible demands. Stalin's usual response was to calm him down, tell him how valuable he was, take the pressure off for a few days...and then go back to piling on as much work and pressure as before.

He also took a very hands on role in managing the war effort and making sure everything worked as it should. Part of it was placing competent people in charge. For example, Beria, who is best remembered for his role as head of the NKVD, but who was also one of the most brillant and ruthless member of the Poliburo was put in charge of armaments which was one of the most important job.

But he also intervened in much smaller issues. Early in the war, a group of pilots wrote to Comrade Stalin about the quality of paint on their aircraft, which peeled off at high speed. Stalin summoned the plant manager to his office and met him with the sample the pilots had sent him. The plant manager was understandibly nervous, but explained that the plant could not get all the chemicals required to produce quality paints. The Plant manager kept his job and the plant's supply problems were resoved in a few days.

Stalin was also a notoriously hard worker who would often hold meetings in his office as late as 2 or 3 a.m. and would often even sleep in his office at the Kremlin, although he started to ease up towards the end of the war after it was clear the Allies were winning.