front cover of The Dying President
The Dying President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1944-1945
Robert H. Ferrell
University of Missouri Press, 1998

In this authoritative account, Robert H. Ferrell shows how the treatment of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's illness in 1944- 1945 was managed by none other than the president himself. Although this powerful American president knew that he suffered from cardiovascular disease, he went to great lengths to hide that fact—both from his physician and from the public. Why Roosevelt disguised the nature of his illness may be impossible to discern fully. He was a secretive man who liked to assign only parts of tasks to his assistants so that he, the president, would be the only one who knew the whole story. The presidency was his life, and he did not wish to give it up.

The president's duplicity, though not easily measurable, had a critical effect on his performance. Placed on a four-hour-a-day schedule by his physicians, Roosevelt could apply very little time to his presidential duties. He took long vacations in South Carolina, Warm Springs, the Catoctin Mountains, and Hyde Park, as well as lengthy journeys to Hawaii, Canada, and Yalta. Important decisions were delayed or poorly made. America's policy toward Germany was temporarily abandoned in favor of the so-called Morgenthau Plan, which proposed the "pastoralization" of Germany, turning the industrial heart of Europe into farmland. Roosevelt nearly ruined the choice of Senator Harry S. Truman as his running mate in 1944 by wavering in the days prior to the party's national convention. He negotiated an agreement with Winston Churchill on sharing postwar development of nuclear weapons but failed to let the State Department know. And, in perhaps the most profoundly unwise decision, Roosevelt accepted a fourth term when he could not possibly survive it.

In his final year, a year in which he faced crucial responsibility regarding World War II and American foreign policy, Franklin D. Roosevelt failed to serve the nation as a healthy president would have. Reading like a mystery story, The Dying President clears up many of the myths and misunderstandings that have surrounded Roosevelt's last year, finally revealing the truth about this missing chapter in FDR's life.

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front cover of G Company's War
G Company's War
Two Personal Accounts of the Campaigns in Europe, 1944-1945
Bruce E. Egger and Lee McMillian Otts, edited and with commentary by Paul Roley
University of Alabama Press, 1999

A unique account of combat in World War II provides parallel day-to-day records of the same events as seen by two men in the same company, one an enlisted man, one an officer
 

G Company’s War is the story of a World War II rifle company in Patton’s Third Army as detailed in the journals of S/Sgt. Bruce Egger and Lt. Lee M. Otts, both of G Company, 328th Regiment, 26th infantry Division.
 
Bruce Egger arrived in France in October 1944, and Lee Otts arrived in November. Both fought for G Company through the remainder of the war. Otts was wounded seriously in March 1945 and experienced an extended hospitalization in England and the United States. Both men kept diaries during the time they were in the service, and both expanded the diaries into full-fledged journals shortly after the war. 
 
These are the voices of ordinary soldiers—the men who did the fighting—not the generals and statesmen who viewed events from a distance. Most striking is how the two distinctly different personalities recorded the combat experience. For the serious-minded Egger, the war was a grim ordeal; for Otts, with his sunny disposition, the war was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, sometimes even fun. Each account is accurate in its own right, but the combination of the two into a single, interwoven story provides a broader understanding of war and the men caught up in it.
 
Historian Paul Roley has interspersed throughout the text helpful overviews and summaries that place G Company's activities in the larger context of overall military operations in Europe. In addition, Roley notes what happened to each soldier mentioned as wounded in action or otherwise removed from the company and provides an appendix summarizing the losses suffered by G Company. The total impact of the work is to describe the reality of war in a frontline infantry company. 
 
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