Here are the true stories of the thirty people who shaped, conducted, won, and lost the biggest, most complex, and most destructive armed conflict the world has ever known.

General Patton said, “The soldier is the army.” This book says, “People are the war.” And even World War II – a conflict of unprecedented scope, magnitude, complexity, and devastation – was the work of individual political leaders, commanders, heroes, and villains. Here are the 30 people who were at the very heart of the world’s deadliest and most consequential war, exposed, studied, and ranked according to influence by an author praised as “one of America’s great military historians.”