October 14, 2008

Reviewed by Warren Kimball

On Specialness: Essays in Anglo-American Relations, by Alex Danchev. London: Macmillan, 200 pages.

For Alex Danchev, the Anglo-American Special Relationship in World War II was created for the occasion. Winston Churchill tried to guard Britain’s interests by cultivating what Hitler had made necessary–an embrace from the Americans that threatened to become a choke-hold. But Britain’s decline in military and economic power forced Churchill to move “from conjurer to palterer,” from someone who could transform the Dunkirk retreat at into a victory, to someone who could only pretend to play the role of leader of a great power. So convincingly could Churchill declaim that the arch Anglophobe, U.S. Admiral Ernie King, remarked that he “kept his hand on his watch” when the Prime Minister spoke.

Field Marshal Sir John Dill, Churchill’s reluctant selection as his key military representative in Washington, had to become “a guarantor of Churchill himself, against the fatal lullaby of his imperial pretensions and eccentric strategies.” (86) An epigram from Ogden Nash, which precedes a chapter on the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff, that most unique of wartime institutions, sets the tone:

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Oh I’ll be friends if you’ll be friends, The foreigner tells the native, And we’ll work together for our common ends Like a preposition and a dative. If our common ends seem mostly mine, Why not, you ignorant foreigner? And the native replies contrariwise, And hence, my dears, the coroner.

With Churchill in charge, Britain’s contrariwise reply never came. This is not some flamboyant counterfactual argument that snuggling up to the United States was the wrong move, or that a Soviet-German war would have conveniently eliminated the bad guys and left Britain in charge. It is, rather, the acerbic observation of a realist observer who finds that the real lullaby for Britain was the euphoria of feeling equal. In a book full of lovely literary quotes, Danchev’s plaint is best summed up by one from Noel Annan: “Led by a master of rhetoric, Britain..fondly imagined she had won the war. She had not. America and Russia had won the war. Britain had in her finest hour not lost it.” (65)

Make no mistake. This delightful book is far from an endless whine.  Danchev’s discussions of civil-military relations and the work of Field Marshal Dill are must-reading for any Second World War historian who hopes to understand the complex workings yet simple nature of history’s most successful wartime alliance. A chapter on working with Churchill slides away from the Special Relationship to provide the single best portrait available of life at the top with the man who was, by far, the 20th century’s most effective war leader.

But Danchev remains dysphoric. Even if the main legacy of the Second World War for Britain was defense cooperation with the Americans, the quality of that cooperation is far from “special.” The United Kingdom, besieged by doubts about its role in the postwar world, sought a “special,” “exclusive,” and “avowed” relationship with the United States. “The British interest [regarding nuclear weapons] was unpalatably plain: no annihilation without representation.” (102) What Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson labeled “the imperialism of decolonization” found Britain following, not co-directing, Cold War policy. That cold douche began during the Second World War but, implies Danchev, did not shock the UK into recognizing that its more circumscribed postwar “interests” lay elsewhere, outside some romanticized, historicized, mythologized Special Relationship. Europe perhaps? There is another word missing from Danchev’s list: “equality.” But then that is an oxymoron in relations between nation states. Alex Danchev’s closing combines prediction with prayer: “Requiescat in pace, Anglo-America.”

Readers’ choice.