Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another
Jonathan Fenby
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 1596922532
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The history of the Second World War is usually told through its decisive battles and campaigns. But behind the front lines, behind even the command centers of Allied generals and military planners, a different level of strategic thinking was going on. Throughout the war the 'Big Three' - Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin - met in various permutations and locations to thrash out ways to defeat Nazi Germany - and, just as importantly, to decide the way Europe would look after the war. This was the political rather than military struggle: a battle of wills and diplomacy between three men with vastly differing backgrounds, characters - and agendas. Focusing on the riveting interplay between these three extraordinary personalities, Jonathan Fenby re-creates the major Allied conferences including Casablanca, Potsdam and Yalta to show exactly who bullied whom, who was really in control, and how the key decisions were taken. With his customary flair for narrative, character and telling detail, Fenby's account reveals what really went on in those smoke-filled rooms and shows how "jaw-jaw" as well as "war-war" led to Hitler's defeat and the shape of the post-war world
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Separated the thinking of a Bolshevik from a non-Bolshevik and particularly from an American,’ the diplomat Charles Bohlen wrote. Though he could get carried away by euphoria after a late-night conversation with Stalin, Churchill always had the need for a post-war balance of power in mind. So much so that he would reflect on how a defeated Germany might be needed as a counterweight in Europe. For Roosevelt, on the other hand, zones of influence were part of the old system that had caused wars and.
Of the Conservative Party. Following seven years in government, he walked out of the Foreign Office in 1938 after clashing repeatedly with Neville Chamberlain, particularly over policy towards Eden’s bête noire, Mussolini. Though not the firmest opponent of the Axis dictators, his resignation set him apart from the appeasers. In 1940, Churchill named him Secretary of State for War, a post he held till he became Foreign Secretary when Halifax went to the embassy in Washington early in 1941.
Was the only one of the Big Three to have gone to university, a man who escaped definition, a supreme egoist, who trusted only himself. He could be without scruple when it served his purpose, dropping longtime associates and switching tack with no compunction. ‘Roosevelt’s objectives were almost always benign, but his techniques, while bloodless, were not always much less ruthless, devious, and cynical than Hitler’s or Stalin’s,’ according to Conrad Black, his generally admiring biographer. The.
Them. Stalin gestured to Churchill to sit to his right, Harriman to his left. The chairs were hard and uncomfortable, with white covers on the backs. The curtains on the windows were heavy. The dictator began in a sombre mood, saying news from the front was ‘not encouraging’. He had been surprised by the quantity of troops and tanks the Germans had thrown at the Soviet Union. He thought the Führer had ‘pumped all he can out of Europe’ to turn against the USSR. The message was plain—what was the.
Worship’. For the West, he became ‘Uncle Joe’. The 9 million casualties suffered by the Red Army gave him a moral advantage over the Western Allies, particularly before they launched the second front in France in the summer of 1944. Though Churchill resented being lectured by a man who had signed the 1939 pact with Hitler and stood by as Britain fought alone, Stalin could count on plenty of support from public opinion in the West. When it came to evaluating his Western Allies, Stalin was haunted.