How the world stopped Hitler

New Statesman​

01-05-2025

Photo by Alexander Nemenov / AFP via Getty Images
On 5 November 1930, just over two years before he was appointed head of the German government, the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler told a closed meeting of his followers that Germany had an inborn right to rule the world. In the 1880s, he said, the European great powers had divided the world between them in the 'Scramble for Africa', bringing large parts of the globe into their colonial empires. Germany had largely missed out. Next time, however, in the coming war, he would ensure that Germany came out on top, exercising what he called Weltherrschaft, 'rule over the world'.
After he came to power, he cloaked this ambition in the rhetoric of moderation, frequently claiming that all he wanted to do was to revise the Treaty of Versailles, which had treated Germany unfairly by denying German speakers the self-determination promised to other national groups. The scales fell from the eyes of those statesmen and politicians in Europe who had tried to 'appease' him by granting his territorial demands, when he marched into Prague in the spring of 1939, conquering a large population of non-German speakers. When he attacked Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared war.
During the following years, a shifting and evolving collection of major world powers combined their forces in order to defeat the Third Reich and its fellow dictatorships, which included fascist Italy (from June 1940 to September 1943), and military-ruled Japan (from December 1941), as well as a number of smaller European states such as Hungary and Romania. The 'Big Three' powers – the British empire, the Russian-led Soviet Union (from June 1941) and the US (from December 1941) – all recognised the threat posed to them by Hitler's global ambitions and buried their existing differences to defeat the Nazi menace. In his new book Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler, Tim Bouverie, a former political journalist at Channel 4 News and the author of the bestselling and widely praised Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War, published in 2019, has set himself the task of charting their relationships with one another from the start of the war to its finish.
This would be a formidable challenge for any historian, let alone one still in his thirties. But Bouverie rises to it with aplomb. He has trawled through more than a hundred archives and researched great masses of diaries, memoirs, biographies and monographs. He writes gracefully and engagingly, and brings his subject to life with innumerable anecdotes and quotations. His judgement is level-headed, and he knows how to tell a good story. He has produced a major work of original history that is a pleasure to read.
Bouverie begins with the French, whose alliance with the UK fell apart when German armies invaded their country and forced them to concede defeat in June 1940. From this point onwards, the independent French state, now confined to the unoccupied part of the country administered from the spa town of Vichy, was effectively in alliance with Nazi Germany, a state of affairs that led the British to destroy France's battle fleet, anchored in the North African naval base of Mers-el-Kébir, in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Germans. Ordered by Winston Churchill, who had become prime minister in May 1940, the action demonstrated to the world the determination of the British to resist Hitler, the scale of whose global ambitions Churchill had been one of the few politicians to realise before the war.
Bouverie recounts with a wealth of colourful detail the emergence of General Charles de Gaulle, who had escaped into British exile and led the 'Free French' against the anti-Semitic, quasi-fascist Vichy regime. Prickly, difficult and endowed with what many thought was an exaggerated conception of his own importance, De Gaulle was taken seriously enough in the end for the Free French to be included in the alliance. It was not least De Gaulle who Churchill was thinking of when he remarked: 'There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies and that is fighting without them.' As one exasperated British official commented, the French general 'gave the impression of having studied diplomacy at the court of Cesare Borgia'.
Overall, however, it was the Big Three who dominated, unsurprisingly in view of the huge superiority of their resources over those of others, including Nazi Germany. Despite their in some respects radical divergences in 'ideology, ethics, personality, political systems and postwar aims, as well as disagreements over strategy, diplomacy, finance, imperialism, the allocation of resources and the future peace', they stuck together and triumphed in the end, pooling their economic and strategic power and cooperating on a more or less continual basis. 'Only Hitler could have brought them together,' as Bouverie notes, and it is important to remember just how radical the Nazi dictator's war aims were, virtually without limit of time or space. Germany was never going to stop until it had achieved the 'world domination' he had promised his followers in 1930.
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Churchill was aware from the outset that the British empire, vast and far-flung though it was, would need an alliance with the United States if it was to defeat the Nazis. As he said in his 'We shall fight on the beaches' speech on 4 June 1940, it would carry on fighting until 'the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old'. Bouverie charts in engrossing detail the slow conversion of the Americans to the realisation that Hitler posed a threat to them, too – not helped by the defeatism of the US ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy (a 'bumptious, ignorant Irish-Bostonian') – but boosted by the British ambassador in Washington, Philip Kerr (or Lord Lothian, dubbed 'Lord Loathsome' by hostile Foreign Office mandarins), until his death at the end of 1940, and by radio broadcasts from the Blitz by the American newsman Edward R Murrow. Churchill's personal relationship with the US president, Franklin D Roosevelt, warmed into genuine admiration on the president's side. But this could not conceal the fact that the balance of power was tilting towards the Americans, whose hostility to British colonialism Churchill was unable to mitigate.
The ruthless and paranoid Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin emerges from this book as a skilled and cunning negotiator, who could use charm and even humour to forge good personal relationships with Churchill and Roosevelt. By contrast, the Chinese nationalist leader received widespread contempt at the time, fuelled by barely concealed racism. Still, it is good to see the Second World War treated as a genuinely global conflict for once. Indeed, it is one of the many virtues of this book that it covers so many seemingly marginal aspects of the war, from Spain to Ireland, Greece to Iraq.
The apparently neutral country of Francisco Franco's Spain is the source of many entertaining details. Bouverie recounts how the nervous British ambassador to Spain placed a ladder against the embassy garden wall every night before going to bed in case he was arrested and handed over to the Germans. He need not have worried: the British government spent an astonishing £3.5m in the first year of the war alone bribing Spanish politicians not to intervene in the conflict. Bouverie perhaps puts it too strongly when he says that the Spanish dictator Franco was firmly in the German camp; in fact he was led by his low cunning to temporise and vacillate since he was unclear whether the Germans would win the war or not. After meeting with Franco to negotiate an alliance in October 1940, Hitler told his staff he would rather have several teeth pulled than go through the frustrating ordeal again.
Despite its many virtues, the broad sweep of Tim Bouverie's splendid book is compromised by the virtual absence of the Germans. Time and again one wants to be told what were the actions of Hitler and the Nazis to which the Allies were reacting. Bouverie didn't need to write a comprehensive history of the war, but he did need to provide more information about the military and political context provided by the Germans and, for that matter, the Italians and the Japanese. Bouverie champions the 'unfashionable' subdiscipline of diplomatic history, but his conception of it is a very narrow one, involving mostly a handful of national leaders and their staffs, and one would have liked to have seen a broader conception of international relations here, such as one finds in the late historian Zara Steiner's classic volumes on the interwar period.
A strange and wholly unnecessary distraction from the smooth flow of the narrative is provided by the frequent footnotes – some 126 of them, one every four pages or so, which provide additional comments and snippets of extra information, entirely separately from the endnotes, which provide the references. If it's not worth saying in the text, as I was taught as a graduate student, it's not worth saying at all.
Such problems aside, however, this is a compelling and highly readable book that provides a mass of new and fascinating detail about the Allies in the Second World War. Tim Bouverie has produced a masterpiece. I recommend it to anyone with a serious interest in its subject.
Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler
Tom Bouverie
Bodley Head, 688pp, £25
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Richard J Evans's 'Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich' is published by Allen Lane
Related
This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall