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John M. Schuessler, Deceit on the road to war: Presidents, politics, and American democracy

counterpart (pp. 196–8). Later, following the inauspicious results of the mixing up of British and US regiments in the 1942 ‘run for Tunis’, the Allies took the decision to maintain rather than blur national lines below the operational level (pp. 231–2). The first-class desk-work preparing Operation Overlord under the Briton Frederick Edgworth Morgan in 1943 was done with a fully integrated staff, organised along functional, not national lines. It could not, however, prevent overall command in Western Europe from becoming a divisive issue between the Allies later on (pp. 348–52). Barr’s examination of the nuts and bolts of coalition warfare points to an account of the wartime alliance profoundly different from the standard one. Rather than focusing on personalities and national differences, it foregrounds organisational practice, expertise and institution-building. Barr himself complains about the literature’s ‘almost exclusively Anglo-American’ focus and preoccupation with ‘personalities rather than broader issues’ (p. 463), even though the alliance was ‘far greater than the relations between a few men’ (p. 467). Yet, unfortunately, he does not build on this important insight. The second half of his book is largely the story of Eisenhower in Europe, navigating the personal animosities of generals like Montgomery and Patton. Thus, Barr ends up adopting rather than amending the literature’s preference for ‘great man’ histories (in fact, its US title is Eisenhower’s Armies). This is unfortunate, for the book throws up compelling questions that go unanswered. What was the role of other sources of military expertise, like the navy and air force, in the alliance? From the 1942–1943 strategic debates over the US Navy’s pushing of the ‘Pacific first’ to the Mediterranean theatre, we know inter-service dynamics mattered greatly. This leaves one wondering further how British–US cooperation in Europe fit into the global war. It is clear that an institutional angle on the Allies’ war would produce an innovative picture of the conflict as a whole. It is therefore doubly lamentable that Barr did not carry it through.