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Five-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower was arguably the single most important military figure of World War II. For many historians, his memoirs of this eventful period of U.S. history have become the single most important record of the war. Crusade in Europe tells the complete story of the war as Eisenhower planned and lived it. Through his eyes, the enormous scope and drama of the war -- strategy, battles, moments of fateful decision -- become fully illuminated in all their fateful glory.

Yet this is also a warm and richly human account. Ike recalls the long months of waiting, planning, and working toward victory in Europe. His personal record of the tense first hours after he had issued the order to attack -- and there was no turning back -- leaves no doubt of Eisenhower's travail and reveals this great man in ways that no biographer has ever surpassed.

• ISBN13: 9780805069075
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Drawing on the wide range of works published within the past decade, Pach expands Elmo Richardson's 1979 study by nearly one third. In addition to new material on national security policy, Pach deepens the analysis of Eisenhower's leadership and managerial style and explores the significance of the decisions Eisenhower made on a whole range of critical issues, from civil rights to atomic testing.

By emphasizing the fundamental failings of Eisenhower's presidency, Pach swims against the stream of recent scholarship. He concludes, for example, that Eisenhower's commitment to support South Vietnam in 1954, with its attendant responsibilities and consequences, was far more important--and ultimately disastrous--than his refusal to intervene with military force in support of the French in 1954. Eisenhower's unleashing of the CIA (in Iran, Guatemala, and elsewhere) also draws sharp criticism, as does his timid and ineffective handling of McCarthy.

This book is part of the American Presidency Series.

In North Africa, on the beaches at Normandy, and in the Battle of the Bulge, Dwight David Eisenhower proved himself as one of the world's greatest military leaders. Faced with conciliating or disagreeing with such stormy figures as Churchill, Roosevelt, and DeGaulle, and generals like Montgomery and Patton, General Eisenhower showed himself to be as skillful a diplomat as he was a strategist.

Stephen E. Ambrose, associate editor of the General's official papers, analyzes his subject's decisions in The Supreme Commander, which Doubleday first published in 1970. Throughout the book Ambrose traces the steady development of Eisenhower's generalcy--from its dramatic beginnings through his time at the top post of Allied command.

The New York Times Book Review said of The Supreme Commander, "It is Mr. Ambrose's special triumph that he has been able to fight through the memoranda, the directives, plans, reports, and official self-serving pieties of the World War II establishment to uncover the idiosyncratic people at its center. ... General Dwight Eisenhower comes remarkably alive. ...[Ambrose's] angle of sight is so fresh and lively that one reads as if one did not know what was coming next. It is better than that: One does know what's coming next--not only the winning of a war but the making of a general--but the interest is in seeing how."

This study of Eisenhower's role in the world's biggest war is absorbing as reading and invaluable as a reference.

Stephen E. Ambrose was Director Emeritus of the Eisenhower Center, Boyd Professor of History at the University of New Orleans, and president of the National D- Day Museum. He was the author of many books, most recently The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisana Purchase to Today. His compilation of 1,400 oral histories from American veterans and authorship of over 20 books established him as one of the foremost historians of the Second World War in Europe. He died October 13, 2002, in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.