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SUPREME COMMAND
Grand Strategy in the Second World War
This series of four lectures considers the Second World War from the point of view of four national leaders whose character and decision-making defined its course: Adolph Hitler, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt. Its theme is “grand strategy,” which considers the conduct of war from its political and economic as well as its military dimensions. It is in this realm that these four bore unique responsibility. It is also from their perspectives that the war’s global character is most clearly revealed.
PART 3: Joseph Stalin. In contrast to Hitler, who regarded war as necessary, Stalin regarded it as inevitable. His determination to prepare for it, and to wage it regardless of the cost, were ultimately rewarded with a victory that elevated the Soviet Union to a position of global power and legitimized the atavistic brutality by which it was governed.
Daniel J. Moran is Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He was educated at Yale and Stanford universities and has also been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Dr. Moran teaches courses and supervises doctoral research in strategic theory, American foreign relations, and the history of war and international relations since the end of the 19th century.
