TAKING COMMAND: TAMI DAVIS BIDDLE
(ON WRITING)

It’s time for another episode of On Writing. A BETTER PEACE welcomes Tami Biddle to the studio to discuss her newest history project, Taking Command: The United States at War 1941-1945. Tami sits down with host Michael Neiberg for a conversation about capturing this very large and complicated topic. Tami shares her processes for organization, content selection, and how she has gone about creating and contributing something new on a topic that has been so thoroughly discussed. Their conversation provides a glimpse inside the historian’s mind in the opening stages of a new, and very ambitious, project.

For me it’s sort of like a thriller…everything is important, everything is hanging on contingencies, everything is difficult, there are setbacks everywhere and yet we keep going and we keep pushing and finally we come to victory in both theaters. And I just want to realize what was the human effort involved, what was the drama, who were the drivers, how did we do this in such a short time and how did it change us as a nation and as a people?

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Tami Davis Biddle taught from 2001-2021 at the U.S. Army War College. She served as head of the “Theory of War and Strategy” curriculum, was chair of the Faculty Council from 2014-2016 and retired as the Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies. She is the author of Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, Air Power and Warfare: A Century of Theory and History, and Strategy and Grand Strategy: What Students and Practitioners Need to Know, and many articles and book chapters about aspects of World War II.

Michael Neiberg is the Chair of War Studies at the U.S. Army War College.

The views expressed in this presentation are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, U.S. Army, or Department of Defense.

Photo Description: Background Photo- President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his advisors at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. Standing, left to right: Harry Hopkins, Lieutenant General Henry H. Arnold, Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell, W. Averell Harriman. Seated: General George C. Marshall, President Roosevelt, Admiral Ernest King. Inset Photos – Top Left: Walter Lippman, American writer, reporter and political commentator; Top Right: Dorothy Thompson,  American journalist and radio broadcaster. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934; Bottom Right: Hanson W. Baldwin, American journalist who was the long-time military editor of The New York Times; Bottom Left: Anne O’Hare McCormick, English-American journalist who worked as a foreign news correspondent for The New York Times

Photo Credit: Background Photo – Herbert Mason, photograph A 14047 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums. Inset Photos – Top Left & Top Right: Harris & Ewing, Library of Congress; Bottom Right: U.S. Naval Institute; Bottom Left: Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.