Sublime

The legacy of this quintessential man-behind-the-scenes indeed endures. As Black Jack Pershing’s chief of operations and Dwight Eisenhower’s mentor, Fox Conner left an unmistakable imprint upon his nation’s military history. Were they alive today, Pershing and Eisenhower, as well as George Marshall and George Patton—all titans of 20th-century Ameri

As a former supreme commander, Eisenhower had the confidence to do so, where other presidents might not have. And by rejecting the use of the bomb, there is no question that Eisenhower raised the threshold at which atomic weaponry could be employed—a legacy we continue to enjoy.

Total United States war losses were 418,500, slightly fewer than those of the United Kingdom, of which the U.S. Army lost 143,000 in Europe and the Mediterranean and 55,145 in the Pacific.

The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn’t look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. War was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple—hate your enemy, know nothing of him. It was, he claimed, the most un-American of wars, no idealism behind it, only about defeat.

Beyond the great captains of irregular warfare, a few key supporting characters make recurring guest appearances in the pages that follow. The most frequent is Winston Churchill, who appears on the scene at the outset of the Boer War in 1899, returns to support T. E. Lawrence’s pan-Arab policy goals after World War I, develops a friendship with Tit

Louis Botha,

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,” said Eisenhower, “signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” “Is there no other way the world may live?” he asked. The new Soviet leadership “has a precious opportunity … to help turn the tide of history.