A Menage of Convenience
Historian Tim Bouverie
has written a follow-on to his “Appeasement…” (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2019/07/my-amazon-review-of-tim-boveries.html
) with an exhaustive history of the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin alliance of
World War II. After Stalin’s dalliance with Hitler fell apart in June 1941 he
joined up with Churchill. Although Roosevelt supplied Britain with lend-lease
aid, he didn’t become a full partner until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Bouverie recounts in great detail the diplomacy involved in keeping the
alliance together where, to say the least, the war aims of the three parties
differed.
I will not recount
here what has already been written about the big wartime conferences in
Casablanca, Tehran, and Yalta. What I found most interesting was how Churchill’s
dealings with Vichy France, Spain, and Iraq in 1940 and 1941 was of great
strategic import. To back up a bit in 1936 British Foreign Secretary Samuel
Hoare teamed up with French Prime Minister Pierre Laval in a failed scheme to
appease Mussolini in Ethiopia. Moving ahead to 1940 we found Hoare working
brilliantly as ambassador to Spain to keep Spain out of Axis hands while Laval
worked for the Nazi’s has a high official in Vichy France.
In response to Vichy,
Churchill acted boldly in sinking a good portion of the French fleet off the
coast of Algeria to keep it out of the hands of Germany. The U.S. policy
towards Vichy was far more muddled. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2021/12/my-amazon-review-of-michael-neibergs.html
)
Simultaneously
Churchill had big troubles in the middle east where a pro-axis coup in Iraq threatened
its oil supplies. Churchill deployed his over-stretched army in Egypt and Palestine
to over-turn the coup and remove Vichy authorities from Syria. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2019/06/my-amazon-review-of-john-broichs-blood.html
) All the while London was being blitzed and Britain’s position in Egypt was
under threat.
As the war was
winding down the early fissures of the Cold War came to the fore. Although
Bouverie does not think the Cold War was inevitable, I would tend to disagree.
He doesn’t give much weight to the removal of the more pro-Western Maxim
Litvinov from his ambassadorial post in Washington and similarly the removal of
Ivan Maisky from London in 1943 with more hardline officials. To me that was a major
tell. Once Stalin achieved the initiative on ground in 1942 his war aim was to seize
eastern Europe to establish a buffer from Germany. Bouverie is correct in
stating that Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta could do little to alter the
facts on ground. The combination of the
Soviet army along with the success of its spy services made the Soviet Union a
clear winner at enormous cost of World War II. ( See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2021/06/my-amazon-review-of-sean-mckeekins.html
) That in turn set the stage for the
Cold War.
Tim Bouverie has
written an important book about diplomatic history. There is much here to study,
and he demonstrated that although the parties had different war aims they
succeeded in destroying the Hitlerite regime.