James B. Conroy, JD
The Devils Will Get No Rest: FDR, Churchill, and the Plan That Won the War
For the first time, a full account in fascinating detail of the secret ten-day parlay in Morocco where FDR, Churchill, and their divided Anglo-American high command hammered out a winning strategy at the tipping point of World War II.
In January 1943 Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and their military high commands met in secret in Morocco to plan the defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan. A character-driven story never fully told before, The Devils Will Get No Rest recounts the Casablanca Conference and its colorful participants’ fraught debates and personal interactions as the Allies planned their pivot from a defensive to an offensive war.
For ten grueling days in recently bombed, spy-ridden Casablanca, Roosevelt, Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton Jr., Mark Clark, other leading American officers, and the highest- ranking British commanders questioned each other’s competence, doubted each other’s vision, and argued their way through choices that could win or lose the war. Many historians have called the Casablanca Conference the most important Allied conclave of the war.
The Devils Will Get No Rest is a master class in military strategy and high stakes negotiation. Amid the impending doom of colonial empires, it is also an absorbing story of big personalities at odds who turned an alliance of necessity into a bond. James B. Conroy draws on fresh research and neglected reminiscences to tell the first full scale, behind-the-scenes story of how the Allies came together at Casablanca to stare into the face of evil and forge a winning plan to defeat it.
[Added September 14, 2023]
James B. Conroy, JD, is an award winning author and an Honorary Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society. A former Senate press secretary and speechwriter, Conroy graduated magna cum laude from the Georgetown University Law Center and practiced law in Boston until 2020. His first book, Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865, was a finalist for the prestigious Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. His second book, Lincoln’s White House: The People’s House in Wartime, shared the Lincoln Prize and won the Abraham Lincoln Institute’s annual book award. He and his wife, Lynn, divide their time between Hingham, Massachusetts, and Martha’s Vineyard.
