My Review of Tim Bouverie's "Allies at War"

 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.