Britain’s declaration of war against Finland on December 5, 1941, was a typically humiliating moment of allied warfare. Invaded in November 1939 by Soviet forces, Finland fought tenaciously against overwhelming odds through a brutal winter. In a 1940 broadcast, Winston Churchill declared “Only Finland—superb, nay, sublime—in the jaws of peril—Finland shows what free men can do.” Yet without aid, Finnish defeat was as inevitable as the harsh treaty Stalin imposed after his hefty losses. Was anyone surprised the Finns took the opportunity of Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941 to regain the territory it ceded and more? Yet this aligned Finland with Nazi Germany, a country that ironically had aided the original Soviet invasion. And, more irony, Soviet and British interests were suddenly aligned, with Churchill deciding Britain would do all it could to keep the Russians fighting. Among Stalin’s many demands was a declaration of war on Finland. The British government duly obliged.
Churchill, an old friend of Finland’s commander in chief, wrote him a private note about how “deeply grieved” he was and hoping the Finns could pull their troops back. He added that it “would be most painful to the many friends of your country in England if Finland found herself in the dock with the guilty and defeated Nazis.” Finland avoided that fate but would be bound in the Soviet sphere of influence until 1989.
As Churchill famously remarked after the Yalta conference in 1945, “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies and that is fighting without allies.” He was well placed to make the remark. The British government spent the six years of World War II seeking, badgering, and pleading with allied governments. Military expediency was at times sacrificed to diplomatic sensitivity, essential as Britain could not defeat Germany on its own. At the war’s start, she was relying on the vast French Army, as later she relied on the Soviet. In between, Britain was reduced to begging the United States for aid and hoping against hope the country could be drawn into the fight. That Nazi Germany was defeated was due to what the young British historian Tim Bouverie calls, “the largest, most integrated, most collegiate politico-military alliance in history.”
Allies at War is a diplomatic history of how Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States succeeded, “despite a multitude of disagreements and strategic errors—in ridding the Axis from North Africa, the Mediterranean, and western Europe, while simultaneously laying the foundations for the post-war order.” It’s a narrow and brilliant account of a vast conflict: one that asks the reader to constantly reevaluate long-held views. Bouverie divides the war into four phases fixed on who was fighting Germany (and helping remind us that for the first 22 months of World War II, the “allies” were not on the same side): the Anglo-French alliance of 1939-40, Britain’s desperate search for help in 1940-41; the birth of the grand alliance in 1942-43; and its march to victory in 1944-45. If Britain’s experience guides the structure, it’s because she was the only nation to fight from first day to last.
In Bouverie’s telling, each of the “Big Three” played an essential and complementary role. It was Britain (principally Churchill) that kept the allied cause going in 1940 and 1941 when Hitler was everywhere victorious. Churchill’s actions in sinking a French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir and sending troops to help Greece showed the world courage and national resilience. But his cultivation of America was more important. For it would be the United States (thanks mostly to Franklin Roosevelt’s political mastery) that sustained Britain and the Soviet Union in their darkest hours. FDR performed the feat of turning U.S. public opinion toward support for Britain and preparing for war long before Pearl Harbor. What Stalin did was what he did so well: the killing. Germany lost more than five million men in the war, and 75 percent of them were killed by the Red Army. But Russia paid a terrifying price to defeat Hitler: Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens lost their lives between Barbarossa and VE-Day. As Bouverie notes, “More people died during the siege of Leningrad than the total number of British and American casualties for the entire war.”
The book is dominated by the Big Three and the great set-pieces of the Allied conferences—Riviera, Arcadia, Argonaut, Casablanca, Tehran, Bretton Woods, Yalta—where strategy was decided and the postwar world planned. Yet interspersed are chapters on lesser-known events that spiced allied relations: the Free French attack on Dakar; attempts to keep Spain neutral; the invasions of Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq; the Quit India movement; U.S. hopes to stand-up China as the world’s “Fourth Policeman”; the partisan battles across Europe; and the tragedy of Poland. These are well-narrated essays, though they can seem a distraction from the main issue of the love-hate triangle of Anglo-Soviet-American relations.
While the fighting grew ever easier after the victories at Alamein and Stalingrad and the invasion of Italy, the alliance grew more difficult. With victory certain, agendas changed. By the Tehran conference in late 1943, the United States had moved to conciliating the USSR in hopes of postwar amity, and declining Britain began to seek backdoor deals. (Churchill traded Stalin any influence over the future governments of Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria for a free hand in Greece.) Bouverie has no time for Cold War-era complaints that Eastern Europe was betrayed by Britain and the United States at Yalta—it was at Casablanca in January 1943, when Britain still held sway in the alliance, that the key decision was made. There would be no invasion of France in 1943 as the Americans and Soviets wanted. If this was wise in that such an operation was then but a throw of the dice, it meant that Soviet forces would liberate and occupy Eastern Europe from Lubeck all the way down the Elbe to Linz and the Adriatic. The USSR paid for victory in blood; Britain and the United States with the futures of Eastern Europeans.
Tim Bouverie’s first book, Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War (2019) was a virtuoso reappraisal of Munich. It was the best such performance since Ernest May’s Strange Victory. Allies at War isn’t quite so good with a subject more diffuse and difficult to present. Yet it sparkles thanks to Bouverie’s gifts for the deft quotation and the charming detail. His account of the bathroom arrangements at Yalta, for instance, is laugh-aloud funny, and his footnotes show shades of Gibbon:
Certainly, [Anthony Eden] had a good time, repairing, at Saracoğlu’s insistence, on the second night of his visit to the nightclub beneath the Ankara Hotel. The cabaret girls (who had gone to bed) were recalled and Eden, who had taken a First in Oriental languages at Oxford, amused himself by reciting Persian poetry. On the following evening, Saracoğlu coaxed him onto the dance floor, leading to what [the deputy director of military operations] described as the “best sight” of the visit: “two Foreign Secretaires, doing the Palais Glade at 4 a.m. on a very small floor.”
Readers who know this material will marvel at Bouverie’s wide reading and confident judgments (he punctures many reputations). Those who don’t will gain an understanding of a key facet of the key event of the 20th century. With Allies at War, Tim Bouverie has established himself as among our finest young historians, and it’s best to give him the final word: “Diplomatic history is unfashionable at present. Even more so are the deeds of ‘great men.’ Yet the history of the Second World War indisputably shows the importance of both. With war raging once more in Europe, and with the West struggling to act strategically or in concert, it seems timely to re-examine these events.”
Allies at War: How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World
by Tim Bouverie
Crown, 654 pp., $38
Robert Messenger has been books editor of the Wall Street Journal, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, and vice-president and executive editor of Simon & Schuster.
