My father had risen in the British Army under the revolutionary aegis of General Montgomery, who was mad about training for battle, not muddling into disaster.

For all the failures of naval, air and army defense, the men who died at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines would not die in vain.

My father had left school at 18, without enough money to go to college - and, with four sons after the war, said he could still not afford to do so.

It must have been the fall of 1952 when my father returned to London sporting a neck tie emblazoned with the words 'I Like Ike.'

The story of FDR as U.S. Commander in Chief is a heroic war story of a president who had already overcome great adversity in facing polio but who went on to take the reins of our armed forces in the greatest conflagration in human history - on our behalf.

Our only president who has died as U.S. commander in chief in war is Franklin Delano Roosevelt - who died of a cerebral hemorrhage or massive stroke on April 12, 1945, only three weeks before the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces he had laid down as implacable Allied policy two years before.