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New Statesman
01-05-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
How the world stopped Hitler
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. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 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 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops 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
The Independent
09-04-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Tim Bouverie's Allies at War recounts the fall-outs and reconciliations of The Big Three with sensitivity and wit
A new star is born. The British firmament of modern political and military history is already a glittering one, but established names must now make way for a new companion, Timothy Pleydell-Bouverie. His first book, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War, was a deserved success. His second, Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler, proves that his debut was no flash in the pan. Bouverie's scope is wide, taking in the history of those relationships, which lay behind the creation and maintenance (just) of the greatest military alliance the world has ever seen: the British Empire, the United States, and the Soviet Union. We start with British policy based on the presumed rock of the French army; with Stalin supporting the German economy and war machine after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact; and with western outrage at Russia's invasion of Finland in 1939. In London sits the unpleasant figure of Joseph Kennedy Sr, the US ambassador, delighting in what he foresaw as the inevitable defeat of Britain. We end with the total victory of the Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, the last now our beloved Uncle Joe. And Poland, for whom we first went to war, betrayed. Churchill understood that winning would be, for the democracies, a matter of maintaining public support. He often drove the chiefs of staff mad with schemes that made no sense at all in military terms, but were designed to build pride in the honour of the cause for which free people were fighting. Churchill's ludicrous plot for a second British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to return to France after Dunkirk; his insistence on the doomed defence of Greece and his unswerving defence of France (in spite of all Charles de Gaulle's insults) – all these derived partly from his sense of chivalry but also partly from his understanding that people had to believe in what they were fighting for: survival, yes, but honour, too. In the period when the British Empire was fighting alone, it was vital to show the likes of doubting US ambassador Kennedy that we would fight, and would not be defeated. We were not the lost cause that the isolationists claimed. A good many desperate enterprises were undertaken to demonstrate that we were serious, including the partial destruction of the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir – allies who were friends only weeks before. In what is news to this reviewer at least, Bouverie shows that Churchill had cleared this with Roosevelt in advance. After Hitler's invasion of Russia, and then following Pearl Harbour, the great alliance – which in the end would defeat the Axis forces, was formed. In his book, Bouverie lays clear both its strengths and its weaknesses. Its strength was their common enemy; its weakness was their irreconcilable post-war aims. Roosevelt passionately believed in the construction of a new world order, safe for the world and also for the almighty dollar. He was wholly unsentimental about his British ally's future. Very hard bargains were driven in return for the supply of armaments – including forced sales to US interests of British overseas assets. Britain had rebuilt her net overseas assets after the First World War; all those and more were effectively sold cheap for dollars in the Second. Unlike the Soviet Union, who likewise received massive US (and very considerable British) aid, we went on paying for all this to the US until the first decade of the 21st century. All our military secrets, Bouverie shows, were given to America, up to and including the atom bomb research. Bouverie could have mentioned penicillin, too. Nothing came the other way. But it was necessary: we had nothing else to trade. The Red Army drove west in Michigan-made Chevrolet trucks, but Stalin obliterated any memory of the Western help without which Russian heroism might well not have been enough. The unity of the Big Three was often fractious and worse: Roosevelt could humiliate Churchill in front of Stalin every bit as much as Trump humiliated Zelensky in the White House. Bouverie charts the personal fallings-out and the reconciliations with great sensitivity and sometimes humour. Dreadful and dangerous beliefs in personal relationships often had terrible consequences. Poland was ultimately sacrificed at least partly because Roosevelt, and for a time Churchill too, genuinely trusted Stalin. Horrible things were agreed at Yalta and before involving the repatriation of people to their deaths in the Soviet Union – Uncle Joe was, after all, such a good chap. Reading this powerful and well-researched book left this reviewer with one very uncomfortable feeling. Read from the point of view of an isolationist, right-wing American political adviser of today, you could find precedent in what the sainted Roosevelt's did to the British for just about everything President Trump's administration is currently doing to Ukraine. 'Take their assets to pay for any help we give! Settle the boundaries of Europe in a way that satisfies Uncle Joe/my friend Putin! Russia's interests do not really diverge from America's! Good old Vlad just wants safe borders. Britain/Ukraine/Europe is on the way out anyway. And I have looked into Uncle Joe's/my friend Putin's eyes and I know I can trust him!' But Roosevelt had another, very different side to him that ensured his legacy. He was determined 'not to do a Woodrow Wilson' by letting the US scuttle home after the war to leave the world brewing up its next one. He believed profoundly in the values of liberal democracy and wanted his legacy to be a framework for peace, which would have the power and the prestige to prevent war. He left the embryonic UN and the Bretton Woods structures to try to ensure it. Roosevelt understood that the interests of the US and the almighty dollar depended on worldwide order. His safe place in history derives not least from his recognition that American power was the power of a law-based nation, and that spreading a law-based order was not only in the interest of his own people, but of the world as a whole. President Trump is said to admire FDR: he gets the ruthlessness, but does not seem to understand the greatness.
Telegraph
04-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Britain, the US and Russia, all friends? Those were the days
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?
