At a dinner attended by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the Russian embassy in Tehran in late November 1943, the first time the “Big Three” leaders of the Grand Alliance had met, the Soviet dictator proposed that “50,000, perhaps 100,000” German officers should be shot at the end of the war. Churchill was outraged. “I would rather be taken out into the garden here and now and be shot myself than sully my own and my country’s honour by such infamy,” he replied.
In a clumsy attempt to relieve the tension, but also to curry favour with Stalin, Roosevelt suggested a compromise figure of 49,000. When the president’s tactless son Elliott rose to endorse Stalin’s proposal, Churchill left the room and returned only when the Soviet dictator convinced him he was joking.
Churchill later brushed off the incident as lighthearted teasing. But it was emblematic of a shift in American diplomacy — “a recognition that the future peace of the world would depend far more on the United States and the Soviet Union than Britain and her dilapidated empire”, as Tim Bouverie puts it. This shift would have serious consequences for the postwar settlement in Europe and Asia.
Bouverie’s first book, Appeasing Hitler (2019), was a compelling study of the disastrous British diplomacy of the 1930s that failed to prevent war. This ambitious follow-up dissects the “improbable and incongruous Alliance” that defeated Hitler and differs from previous studies by including not only the British-Soviet-American bloc, but also Britain’s relationship with France (before and after its defeat in 1940), nationalist China, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece. It touches on British colonial policy in southeast Asia, but the full story of how the Allies plotted Japan’s defeat may have to wait for a third volume.
By concentrating on the diplomatic and political angle — at the expense of the military — Bouverie gives a fresh gloss to a familiar narrative. The disastrous Allied intervention in Norway in April 1940, for example, is typically blamed on Churchill. But in Bouverie’s retelling it was as much the responsibility of the French prime minister Édouard Daladier, who had been convinced by Fritz Thyssen, a German émigré industrialist, that the side that controlled access to the Swedish ore fields would win the war.
The ruthless sinking of French warships by their former British allies at Mers-el-Kebir, off Algeria, in July 1940 — to prevent them falling into the hands of the Germans — was both justified and a useful indicator to the world in general, and the Americans in particular, that Britain was determined to fight on. Yet the tragedy could have been avoided, Bouverie writes, had the French admiral accepted any one of four alternatives: join the British, sail to a British port, sail to the French West Indies, or scuttle his ships. By preferring blind subservience to his orders, he “showed neither initiative nor moral courage”, and thus condemned 1,290 French sailors to a watery grave.
The author provides pithy pen-portraits of the key characters. Charles de Gaulle, the prickly and inflexible leader of the Free French, was like a “rough and unfinished” Rodin, “at over 6ft 4in with hooded eyes, a long beak and an indomitable expression”; Joe Kennedy, the Anglophobic US ambassador in London, was a “bumptious, ignorant Irish-Bostonian”; and Roosevelt, the wheelchair-using US president who had been in office since 1932, was “ostensibly warm and straightforward”, but could also be “cold and manipulative”.
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He also includes — how could he not? — the hilarious letter from Archie Clark Kerr, the raffish British ambassador in Moscow, to a friend at the Foreign Office: “God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustapha Kunt. We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when spring is upon us, but few of us would care to put it on our cards. It takes a Turk to do that.”
The key diplomatic relationship — at least until the winter of 1942/43 — and one that kept Britain in the war, was between Churchill and Roosevelt. They had first met in London in 1918 when Churchill, the minister of munitions, had “acted like a stinker” towards Roosevelt, at the time the assistant secretary of the US navy.
Their next encounter, off the coast of Newfoundland in August 1941, was a much warmer affair as they dined on each other’s ships, agreed on the terms of the Atlantic charter — a joint declaration to respect “sovereign rights and self-government”, the freedom of the seas, international labour, economic and welfare standards, and to set up what became the UN — and discussed America’s entry into the war when conditions permitted.
The sticking point, as it had been since Churchill made his first appeal for American support in May 1940, was that Roosevelt, who saw the danger of German control over the Atlantic, was “hampered by the neutrality acts, Congress and US public opinion”. Roosevelt got around these by selling weapons to the Allies on a “cash and carry” basis, donating old destroyers (in return for US bases in the West Indies and Canada) and, when British funds ran dry, by introducing lend-lease in early 1941. “Neither an act of unalloyed altruism,” Bouverie writes, “nor a plot to strip Britain of her resources, lend-lease would make an inestimable contribution to Allied victory.”
It was, in effect, a declaration of economic war by the world’s foremost industrial power that would lead, many believed, to a declaration of actual war. That, however, was not inevitable, even after Japan’s sneak attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. There was no public appetite for conflict with Germany until Hitler — convinced of an “Anglo-Saxon-Jewish-capitalist” world conspiracy — declared war on America on December 11.
Six months earlier Hitler had turned on his erstwhile ally Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, thus ensuring a war on two fronts. Now, having failed to capture Moscow, he had three powerful opponents: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Their Grand Alliance — a combination of British strategic insight, Soviet blood and, above all, American industrial might — would ensure Hitler’s defeat.
The final meeting of the “Big Three” at Yalta in early 1945 resulted in concessions to the Soviets — notably reparations from Germany, territory in the Far East and a failure to ensure “free and fair” elections in Poland — that facilitated the postwar spread of communism in Europe and Asia, and ushered in the Cold War.
Historians have blamed Roosevelt’s failing health (he died two months later). In fact, the American president’s actions at Yalta were a quid pro quo for Stalin agreeing to enter the war against Japan and support his world peace organisation, and consistent with his policies since 1942. “Convinced of the need for Great Power co-operation in the postwar world,” Bouverie writes, “he sought to build a US-Soviet alliance that would survive the demise of Nazi Germany.”
Others saw this policy as hopelessly naive. “What frightens me,” wrote Averell Harriman, the US envoy in Moscow in 1944, “is that when a country begins to extend its influence by strong-arm methods beyond its borders under the guise of security it is difficult to see how a line can be drawn.” For Stalin’s Soviet Union read Putin’s Russia today.
Allies at War is not perfect: Germany sent ten Panzer divisions, not 44, through the impenetrable Ardennes in 1940; the Soviet casualties at Stalingrad (one million) are not comparable to the Anglo-American death toll for the whole war (c 800,000) because the former figure includes dead, wounded and missing; and the author downplays the significance of Roosevelt’s “Stab in the Back” speech on June 10, 1940, which, by offering “to extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation”, was a decisive turning point in American policy.
These minor quibbles aside, Bouverie has produced a fine reassessment of Allied politics and diplomacy during the Second World War: impeccably researched, elegantly written and compellingly argued.
Saul David’s most recent book is Sky Warriors: British Airborne Forces in the Second World War (William Collins)
Allies at War by Tim Bouverie (Bodley Head £25 pp688). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
