War History is not solely made on the battlefields. The meetings that lay the plans for victory are as much a part of the story as the shot and shell. Allied plans for World War II and its sequalae were formulated in a series of conferences involving some or all of President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Marshall Joseph Stalin. “Three Days At The Brink” is an account of the lead-up to the Teheran Conference in 1943, the Conference itself and its aftermath, with the emphasis on Roosevelt.
This work is divided into four parts: The Making of FDR, from childhood to inauguration as President; Seeking Greatness, the Presidency to Tehran; Three Days At The Brink, the conference itself; The End Game, the execution of the Overlord invasion to FDR’s death and legacy.
The narrative is largely biographical and does introduce details, such the time Roosevelt met Grover Cleveland as a boy and not consulting his family about running for president that are not found in all tellings. Author Bret Baier inserts some of his own opinions, such as that the interment of West Coast Nisei is “a permanent stain on FDR’s war record. It seems unlikely that he thought there was a real threat…why not intern German Americans or Italian Americans” and characterizing the act as driven by domestic political pressure. While accurately reporting the vice-presidential change in 1944, he adds that “Truman might not have bene the best choice” without identifying an alternative.
Stalin’s refusal to travel far from Russia raised the dangers of travel for his fellow conferees, as illustrated by the failure of engines in FDR’s plane while crossing the Atlas Mountains, the accidental launching of a torpedo at the Iowa on which he was sailing and the Prime Minister’s various illnesses and the President’s physical decline.
The overriding issue in the conferences was commitment to Overlord, the Allied invasion into Northern France. Allied unity was fractured. Stalin employed every pressure, insult and card in his deck to bring the Western Allies into combat in Europe to ease pressure on the Soviets. Churchill lobbied for action in the Mediterranean directed to limit Soviet post war influence. Roosevelt saw himself as the moderator and mediator striving to manage expectations to the achievable and most effective.
This work is an easy to read chronical of the preparation of Franklin Roosevelt for the supreme test of World War II and the intricate relationships between FDR, Churchill and Stalin. Franklin and Winston were friends who sometimes mistrusted and tried to manipulate each other. Roosevelt needled and joked Churchill to use humor to build his relationship with Stalin. The Final Word’s comparisons between Roosevelt’s World War II diplomacy with later ones of Dewight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Donald Trump are thought provoking. War History Network members will find this to be a worthwhile and informative aid to understanding the complex relationships that guided the Allies through the end of World War II.
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