Andidora tells the story of four men who successfully commanded battlefleets in the 20th century: Japan's Heihachiro Togo, England's John Jellicoe, and America's William Halsey and Raymond Spruance. This study provides personality profiles and detailed accounts of their major battles. Analyzing their command decisions based on what each commander knew or could have reasonably inferred at the time decisions were made, Andidora compares their accomplishments to those of Horatio Nelson, who delivered stunning naval victories for England during the Napoleonic Wars. However, he concludes that the Nelsonian standard is inappropriate in the modern naval environment due to the increased size and technological complexity of modern fleets and the political imperative to preserve costly and strategically significant naval assets. Trained in England and acquiring the skill and spirit of Nelson's heirs, Togo annihilated his Russian opponents at the Battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War and, therefore, produced the 20th century's only facsimile of Nelson's Trafalgar. Despite heavy losses against a numerically inferior German Navy at Jutland, Jellicoe's single-minded adherence to an unpopular strategy would prove instrumental in achieving final victory in the First World War. Although strikingly different in personality and leadership style, Halsey and Spruance would both do their part in the naval battles of the Second World War. In the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Spruance would deal Japanese naval aviation a blow from which it would never recover; while at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Halsey would essentially eliminate the Japanese navy as an effective fighting force.

By September 1944, Allied forces had broken out from the Normandy beachheads, liberated Paris, and found themselves poised on the German border. As this offensive gained momentum, Patton and Montgomery, hoping to exploit the enemy's temporary weakness in the West, concocted their own alternatives to Eisenhower's broad front strategy. Each proposed a single thrust aimed directly into the German heartland, designed to bring the troops home by Christmas. This study examines this so-called broad front-single thrust controversy and concludes that the idea of early victory was wishful thinking--a product of the erroneous and dangerous assumption that the Nazi regime was already tottering on the brink of collapse.

Precisely because of its lightning pace, the Allied advance resulted in severe logistical problems, limiting Patton's proposed operation to only ten combat divisions, while Montgomery's closer proximity to the coast might have allowed for as many as sixteen. But it should have been obvious that either thrust faced certain destruction against the 250 divisions still fielded by the Wehrmacht on all fronts in September. In light of this substantial German military capacity, despite serious losses and strategic setbacks, the single thrust could not have been a decisive war-ending maneuver. In fact, Andidora argues, it could not even have provided for its own security against the forces that would have coalesced against it. Rather than unnecessarily prolonging the war, as some have argued, Eisenhower's decision to stay the strategic course probably averted a military disaster.