Critical Review of Lions and Foxes: The Commanders Who Shaped the Second World War

By Quentin Drummond Anderson

Ludo Stuart-Douglas The Writers Collective London November 2025

Quentin Drummond Anderson’s Lions and Foxes is an extraordinary synthesis of military biography, cultural analysis, and moral philosophy — a panoramic study of twenty-five commanders who shaped the course, conduct, and character of the Second World War. Written with the forensic precision of a historian and the narrative pulse of a novelist, it stands among the most ambitious reassessments of wartime leadership since Beevor’s The Second World War or Hastings’ Armageddon.

Structure and Approach

The book is elegantly structured by nation — Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and Japan — allowing the reader to trace not just individual careers but the contrasting moral and cultural ecosystems that produced them. This framework transforms Lions and Foxes from a series of biographical sketches into a comparative anatomy of leadership itself. Each chapter balances operational detail with moral inquiry, asking not simply what these men achieved, but at what cost and for whom.

The prologue immediately establishes Anderson’s unique perspective — part personal memoir, part historiographical manifesto. His recollection of Sunday lunches with a relative from the Gordon Highlanders humanises what could otherwise have been a purely academic study. It also frames the book’s central thesis: that military leadership cannot be divorced from the cultural, moral, and class frameworks that produced it.

Scholarship and Narrative Tone

Anderson’s scholarship is formidable. His portrayal of figures such as Manstein, Rommel, and Zhukov is grounded in exhaustive research yet animated by moral clarity. He avoids the lazy binaries of “good” and “bad” generals, showing instead how intelligence, courage, and charisma could coexist with moral blindness and political complicity. His analysis of Erich von Manstein’s “brilliance in service of evil” is particularly masterful — a nuanced dismantling of the “apolitical professional” myth that still pervades military historiography.

Stylistically, Anderson writes with a distinctive cadence: precise yet cinematic, academic yet emotive. His prose is closer to Beevor or Shirer than to J.F.C. Fuller — a historian with the sensibility of a storyteller. The opening chapters on Nazi Germany read almost like moral case studies, while the later sections on the British commanders — Alexander, Slim, Montgomery, and Brooke — achieve an understated elegance that captures the peculiar fusion of stoicism, class, and improvisation that defined British command.

Moral and Philosophical Depth

What elevates Lions and Foxes above conventional military history is its ethical dimension. Anderson refuses to treat war as a chessboard of manoeuvres and casualty figures. Instead, he dissects the fatal delusion of professionalism — the belief that duty can exist independently of morality. Manstein’s and Rommel’s brilliance, he argues, becomes meaningless when divorced from the monstrous regimes they served. Conversely, commanders like Slim and Brooke embody the rare alignment of strategic intelligence with human decency.

This moral through-line reaches its philosophical apex in the Soviet and Japanese sections, where Anderson navigates the collision between ideology, necessity, and survival. Zhukov’s “brutal mathematics of victory” and Yamamoto’s “fatal miscalculation” are presented not as opposites but as reflections of national character and political constraint.

Critique

If the book has a weakness, it lies in its density. Anderson’s commitment to precision occasionally overwhelms the reader; paragraphs bristle with operational detail that may daunt those unfamiliar with military terminology. At times, the moral commentary risks repetition — the theme of “professionalism without conscience” recurs so often that it slightly dulls its impact. Yet these are minor flaws in an otherwise commanding work.

Some readers might also wish for more on the cultural aftermath — how these commanders’ legacies shaped post-war military doctrine and national memory. Given Anderson’s background in leadership theory and organisational analysis, a concluding section bridging wartime command with modern institutional ethics would have been a natural and fascinating extension.

About the Author

Quentin Drummond Anderson is the acclaimed author of The Few Against the Many (Volumes I & II), The Fearless Fifteen, and Righteous Renegades. His body of work has established him as one of Britain’s leading contemporary military historians — a writer whose meticulous research and moral insight illuminate both the heroism and the hubris of command.

Availability

Lions and Foxes: The Commanders Who Shaped the Second World War is available for pre-order now on Amazon in Kindle, hardcover, and paperback editions, with publication on Armistice Day (11 November).

Overall Assessment

Lions and Foxes is not merely a book about generals — it is a meditation on leadership, morality, and the human capacity for rationalised evil. It dismantles comforting myths about the “clean Wehrmacht,” the “good German,” and even the self-congratulatory narratives of Allied command. Anderson writes with a historian’s discipline, a soldier’s empathy, and a moral philosopher’s conscience.

It deserves to be read alongside the great modern works of World War II historiography — Beevor, Hastings, Kershaw, and Snyder — and perhaps above them in its integration of narrative power, historical rigour, and moral inquiry.

Verdict:
★★★★★ (5/5)
A profound, unsettling, and magnificently written reassessment of the men who commanded the world’s most terrible war — and of the cultures that created them.