Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another
by Jonathan Fenby
Simon & Schuster £25

“Christ, I miss the cold war,” Judi Dench’s M memorably tells Bond in Casino Royale. We know what she means. The standoff between the Soviet Union and the West was characterised by a certain stability and predictability. There were hotlines through which both sides could communicate in a hurry, and red lines that everybody knew or intuited should not be crossed. The cold war had its own painfully acquired language and rhythm. When the Wall came down, the world became a much better place, but also a far more unpredictable one.

Against this background, it is salutary to be reminded that the beginning of the cold war was defined by uncertainty. As Jonathan Fenby shows in his highly readable book, the protagonists, or at least some of them, were not even aware they were stumbling into a war at all. Roosevelt, for one, remained resolutely in denial about Soviet intentions until his sudden death shortly before the end of the second world war. Some of the American president’s entourage were far more obsessed with ending the British empire than containing Stalin’s expansionist plans in eastern Europe. Their attempts to put Stalin at ease and find a common language often morphed into abject ingratiation at British expense. Roosevelt’s repeated bypassing and humiliation of Churchill, sometimes accompanied by overt winks and nudges to the dictator, must have been particularly excruciating for the prime minister. These gambits were also pointless, as Fenby points out, because the Soviet leader automatically assumed that the Anglo-Americans were trying to stitch him up, and regarded any sign to the contrary as an elaborate deception.

Underlying Roosevelt’s reserve towards Britain, until DDay at least, was the belief that the Russians were right on the question of grand strategy. Churchill favoured attacking Hitler through his “soft underbelly” in the Mediterranean, rather than risking a full-scale cross-channel assault before the allies were absolutely ready. Stalin, who had taken the brunt of the German onslaught since 1941, constantly demanded a “second front” to relieve the pressure. The Americans, keen to deliver a “knockout blow” as soon as possible, agreed with him, and bitterly resisted British attempts to fritter away allied resources in “side-shows”.

Alliance tells this familiar tale well, and is particularly strong on the human side of the story. It is often forgotten that the decisions of the Big Three were frequently made by men who were physically and emotionally at the end of their tether. Roosevelt was in a wheelchair and in constant pain. Churchill had at least one heart attack, popped pills constantly, was racked by his famous “black dog” depressions, and consumed vast quantities of alcohol, even over breakfast. Only Stalin, who was not much younger, appeared reasonably robust, though he also suffered a heart attack. In these circumstances, moments of levity, irreverence and gallows humour are more easily understood. There were, as the author shows, plenty of these, including a particularly chilling exchange in which the protagonists bantered about how many tens of thousands of German officers should be shot out of hand at the end of the war.

Fenby has set out to write not merely another history of the alliance, but also “an object lesson in international politics at the highest level”. The parallels are clear. His description of the unequal relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt is surely meant to evoke the controversial pairing of George W Bush and Tony Blair. The forgeries of British covert propaganda in America, designed to lure the United States into the war on the British side, are no doubt meant to remind us of the “dodgy dossier”. Fenby’s tetchy, proud, grandiloquent and antiAmerican Charles de Gaulle bears more than a passing resemblance to the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, who tried to sabotage the removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The author even manages to mention Guantanamo, albeit in a different context.

The lesson of Alliance is clear enough. Churchill’s warnings about Stalin were vindicated. The portrayal of Roosevelt as a preaching and rather gullible prig, easily duped by Stalin, corresponds to a common British stereotype of American leaders, but seems justified in this case. Fenby’s point that the Americans need help to implement their vision of the world is also well taken. If there is a moral, it lies perhaps in the sense that a sober and illusionless response to a mortal threat may be better than tactile “engagement”. Here the right note was hit by George Kennan, the American diplomat and strategic thinker, just after thewar. He famously suggested to Washington that the best way to deal with the Russians was not to “act chummy with them”, and to beware of assuming “a community of interests which does not exist”.

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