Churchill. Hitler. Stalin. Mussolini. Roosevelt. Five of the most impactful leaders of WW2, each with their own individualistic and idiosyncratic approach to warfare. But if we want to understand their military strategy, we must first understand the strategist.

In THE STRATEGISTS, Professor Phillips Payson O'Brien shows how the views these five leaders forged in WW1 are crucial to understanding how they fought WW2. For example, Churchill's experiences of facing the German Army in France in 1916 made him unwilling to send masses of British soldiers back there in the 1940s, while Hitler's mistakes on the Eastern Front were influenced by his reluctance to accept that conditions had changed since his own time fighting.

The implications of the power of leaders remain with us to this day: to truly understand what is happening in Ukraine, for example, requires us to know what has influenced the leaders involved.

This is a history in which leaders – and their choices – matter. For better or worse.

This work examines how the navies of Great Britain, the USA, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, France and Italy confronted the various technological changes posed during different periods in the 20th century.

This work examines how the navies of Great Britain, the USA, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, France and Italy confronted the various technological changes posed during different periods in the 20th century. The 20th century was the technologically most dynamic period in naval history. Changes ranging from submarines and airpower to space platforms, dramatically altered assumptions about the future of naval warfare. The different sections in this volume, which cover the years before World War I, before World War II, during the Cold War, and even into the medium-term future, discuss how the great naval powers integrated these different changes into their warship building and war planning. It is without doubt one of the crucial issues that has confronted and will continue to confront naval planners. The proper integration of technological advances has been perhaps the most important element in determining the course of naval power over the past 100 years.

World War II is usually seen as a titanic land battle, decided by mass armies, most importantly those on the Eastern Front. Phillips Payson O'Brien shows us the war in a completely different light. In this compelling new history of the Allied path to victory, he argues that in terms of production, technology and economic power, the war was far more a contest of air and sea than of land supremacy. He shows how the Allies developed a predominance of air and sea power which put unbearable pressure on Germany and Japan's entire war-fighting machine from Europe and the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Air and sea power dramatically expanded the area of battle and allowed the Allies to destroy over half of the Axis' equipment before it had even reached the traditional 'battlefield'. Battles such as El Alamein, Stalingrad and Kursk did not win World War II; air and sea power did.