The Generals: Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, and the Winning of World War II

Furnishing much more than the World War II experiences of three consequential American military commanders, notable writer Groom (Shiloh, 1862; Forrest Gump) has written an accessible, honest, largely laudatory contextualized narrative of the intertwined careers of George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, and George Marshall. The men excelled as strategists and managers of war, with Marshall successfully adapting his talents as a peace-seeking secretary of state; the European Recovery Plan (Marshall Plan) bore his name and earned him a Nobel Prize. Blunt-speaking Patton, a promoter of armored warfare, overcame dyslexia to become an avid writer of poetry. Equally swashbuckling and contradictory, MacArthur imagined that people conspired against him but often offered wise counsel. Their commonalities are striking—all had Episcopalian and at least partially Southern family backgrounds and consequential life-shaping experiences in World War I. Groom explains terms and synthesizes secondary sources such as published papers and diaries (notably of Patton). The larger-than-life personas of these legends arguably helped shape the world's view of immediate postwar America, yet so did Dwight Eisenhower, who appears here throughout all of their sagas.