'History at its finest': Lord Black reviews 'Allies at War'

Tehran, 1943: Joseph Stalin, Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill: like attending a ‘lunatic asylum or nursing home’ | Image by: Alamy / Associated Press

Lord Black

At the end of this work of extraordinary power and scholarship, Tim Bouverie notes how he laboured over it for longer than the events it describes – the Second World War.

Starting back in 2019, he must therefore have had a very effective crystal ball – because he could not possibly have known then how vitally important a book like this would be today.

With the West fractured by Brexit and Donald Trump, appeasement seemingly the order of the day, the world struggling to tame an odious dictator and the US President tearing up the rules of statecraft, we desperately need reminding of the importance of diplomacy, unity among freedom-loving peoples and – above all – coherent, calm-headed strategy. This book provides that with exceptional clarity and authority.

Eschewing military history, which usually dominates books about the war, Bouverie concentrates on diplomacy and high politics.

Yet this is no dry text – “the record of what one clerk said to another”, as historian GM Young described diplomatic history – but full of colour and detail, effortlessly transporting the reader back to the rooms where key decisions were made and the people in them. It’s quite an historical Tardis – taking us in glorious technicolour from the last Supreme War Council, before France fell in a “monstrous” house of “red lobster-colour brick and stone the hue of unripe Camembert”, to the horrendous conditions at Yalta (Winston Churchill’s “Riviera of Hades”).

It should be essential reading in No 10 and, above all, the White House

The sweep of the book is global, ranging over areas customarily ignored. There are inevitably impossible struggles with the French; but it also covers in fascinating detail Allied relations with Spain where Sir Samuel Hoare “worked magic” to keep Spain neutral, Russia where Sir Stafford Cripps in Moscow (“a lunatic in a country of lunatics”, Churchill spluttered) buttered up Joseph Stalin, and Ireland, Greece, Iraq, China and Turkey.

Much of the book concerns relations between the “Big Three” – Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. It charts how, from the early days of what we would now call their “bromance”, relations between Churchill and FDR soured progressively from the Tehran Conference (like being in a “lunatic asylum or nursing home” according to Sir Alan Brooke) to the failure of Yalta where the UK (too emotional) and USA (too vague) were spectacularly outwitted by Stalin – leading to the iron curtain and the appalling betrayal of the Polish people.

Despite the curdling in relations, in the end it was the unshakeable alliance – faultlessly dissected by Bouverie – between the USA and UK that rid the world of Nazism and established a new world order. Regrettably, that unity of purpose no longer stands true and Bouverie is right to say of the “special relationship” that “its most frequent appearance [now] is an empty political cliché”.

It is usually said there can’t be anything new to say about the Second World War. This enthralling book proves that wrong. As we again face grave international dangers, this rich, meticulously researched chronicle – history at its finest – underlines the power of personal relationships and deft diplomacy. It should be essential reading in No 10 and, above all, the White House.

Lord Black of Brentwood is a Conservative peer

Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler
By: Tim Bouverie
Publisher: Bodley Head

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