Britain, the US and Russia, all friends? Those were the days

Telegraph

04-04-2025

In Allies at War, the historian Tim Bouverie, author of a well-received history of appeasement six years ago, has produced an ambitiously all-encompassing study of the diplomatic relations between the United States, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, the Free French and Nationalist China during the Second World War. 'Their collaboration was sophisticated, diverse, mighty and conquering,' he writes. 'Yet it was also fractious, suspicious, duplicitous and rivalrous.'
It was certainly mighty. In 1943 alone, the Allies produced no fewer than 2,891 ships, 60,720 tanks and 147,161 warplanes, against the Axis's 540 ships, 12,825 tanks and 43,524 warplanes. The way this overwhelming amount of weaponry was ultimately deployed was agreed upon between the Allies despite what Bouverie calls 'profound differences in ideology, ethics, personality, political systems and post-war aims, as well as disagreements over strategy, diplomacy, finance, imperialism, the allocation of resources and the future peace'.
Although Allies in War rightly concentrates on the decision-making of the 'Big Three' – Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin – that story has been told well and often. Where Bouverie is especially strong is in describing the much less familiar struggles going on elsewhere, which constantly feed back into the narrative of the Big Three's interaction.
For example, bar the works of Rana Mitter and a few other scholars, the influence of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist China on the outcome of the war has been consistently under-represented; yet around 15 million Chinese people died in it. Similarly, Colin Smith is one of the few historians to have investigated the conflict between Britain and Vichy France from June 1940 until November 1942, which, although war was never officially declared, saw action on land, at sea and in the air. The British-Free French campaign to oust the Vichy French from the Middle East tends to rate no more than a paragraph or two in most histories of the war, yet it threw up a series of complex issues at the time.
Bouverie commendably covers China and Vichy and all the profound diplomatic consequences they entailed for the Alliance, as well as important areas such as Allied relations with Franco's Spain and neutral Ireland, the Iraqi revolt of May–June 1941, how to deal with liberated Italy and Yugoslavia, the problems thrown up by sphinx-like Turkey, and the short but decisive British intervention in the Greek civil war. All of these issues needed to be discussed between the Allies, and some led to strains and stresses that were hammered out in very different ways, especially once the centre of power began inexorably to move away from Britain and her empire and towards the two superpowers that were to emerge after the war: the Soviet Union and the United States.
Bouverie has not only been diligent in covering all the publicly available sources concerning the major players, but he has also worked in the papers from 100 private collections, those of foreign ministers, ambassadors, civil servants, emissaries, translators and observers. These may not have been principal figures, but he argues, wisely, that 'the opinions of those beneath and around the wielders of power are critical, since they reveal the context in which decisions were made; the nexus of attitudes, prejudices, knowledge, advice and assumptions from which political action derives.'
That said, there are problems associated with relying on the recollections of members of entourages, particularly on the Soviet side. ' Stalin forbade his associates from taking notes during meetings (the exception being translators),' Bouverie records, 'while apparatchiks found it safer to repeat party prejudices than speak truth to power.' Speaking truth to power was never very good for your health in the Soviet Union; thankfully, the recently-published diaries of Ivan Maisky, the Russian ambassador to London from 1932 to 1943, have proved an invaluable source.
Bouverie presents his new evidence from these fresh sources in an agreeably witty style, with vivid pen-portraits of the various eccentric figures that diplomacy tends to throw up, especially in wartime. One such was Archie Clark Kerr, later Lord Inverchapel, the British ambassador to Moscow from 1942 to 1946, whom Bouverie describes as 'a raffish and eccentric Scot' who wrote his despatches with a quill pen and had, during the First World War, disguised himself as a Cossack in order to take part in a Russian cavalry raid. As ambassador to Baghdad in the 1930s, Clark Kerr had 'delighted in and despaired of the antics of the 23-year-old King Ghazi, whose fondness for 'pillow fights' was curtailed only after an especially vigorous bout with his Hejazi servants landed him (and subsequently the Queen) with syphilis'.
Forced to take refuge in a Kremlin air-raid shelter during his first meeting with Stalin, Clark Kerr bonded with his host by telling dirty stories and discussing pipe-smoking. It was, as he reported to the foreign secretary Anthony Eden, a case of 'two old rogues, each one seeing the roguery in the other and finding comfort and harmony in it'. Later, during a banquet in honour of the American vice-president Wendell Willkie, 'he demonstrated the correct way to use a Tommy gun by pretending to rake the bellies of Stalin, Molotov and [Willkie] with the weapon.'
Yet politicians and diplomats, however charming and raffish, could only achieve so much. 'Only Hitler could have brought them together,' is Bouverie's conclusion about the Allies in the Second World War. Anything less than the simultaneous threat that Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and (to a much lesser extent) Fascist Italy posed to the rest of the world could not have kept the fissiparous alliance in one piece.
An obvious question raised by this extremely timely book must be this: at a time when Donald Trump and JD Vance seem actively to be encouraging the fracturing of the assumptions that have kept the peace between the Great Powers for 80 years, can even today's threat, posed by communist China, imperialist Russia, theocratic Iran and neo-feudal North Korea, keep the Western alliance together?