May 31, 2025

Tim Bouverie, Allies at War, Crown (US) / Bodley Head (UK), 672 pages, 2025, $38 / £25. ISBN 978–0593138366

Review by Alastair Stewart

It becomes increasingly difficult to begin a review of what Winston Churchill called the “Grand Alliance” without addressing the perennial question of whether there is anything new to say about the Second World War. Many, including this reviewer, feared that the West had entered a half-remembered, pastiche phase, marked by cigars, Spitfires, and “Keep Calm and Carry On” posters. Real-world events, however, have intervened to demand a greater understanding of how the Allies won the war on a practical level.

Historian Tim Bouverie’s splendid new book presents a seasoned and blissfully unromantic account of the victorious alliance and exposes two fundamental misconceptions. The first is that the terms “Allies” and “The Big Three” have been used interchangeably to create a hierarchy that presents victory as belonging only to Great Britain, Russia, and the United States. One is reminded here that in a dance hall of Nazi-hating go-getters, the Allies had quite a few more dance partners than simply Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin.

The second revelation is the book’s greatest strength: the overemphasis on Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin has created a Mandela Effect. One assumes that all the important decisions were made by the men who posed for the cameras at Tehran and Yalta when in fact it was an army of diplomats, ambassadors, semi-discreet diarists, civil servants, clerks, and combined army staff who were decisive in formulating and implementing operational policy and decisions. The leaders were simply in the foreground.

2025 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 42nd International Churchill Conference. Washington, DC | October 9-11, 2025

2025 International Churchill Conference

Bouverie tells the story of how despite itself the greatest military alliance in history came into being, operated, and succeeded in destroying Nazi rule. Whether describing anti-American, anti-French, anti-British, or anti-Russian sentiments, the logistics of war, or the weight of much historical bad blood, Bouverie has clearly articulated in 500 pages the forgotten practicalities of how the whole enterprise synergised.

“Only Hitler could have brought them together,” Bouverie opines. Anything less than the simultaneous threat that Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy posed to the world would not have kept the disparate forces united in a collective alliance. Churchill famously observed that “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.” This, as Bouverie shows, was an understatement. In Allies at War, he 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. “Their collaboration was sophisticated, diverse, mighty and conquering,” he writes. “Yet it was also fractious, suspicious, duplicitous and rivalrous.” Bouverie dispels the fantastical and hopelessly childish illusion that countries came together overnight to topple Hitler’s tyrannical regime. This book tells the story of how leaders concerned with their own national interests prioritized moral authority a distant fourth behind survival, practical alliances, and post-war visions.

One famous example is Churchill’s painful decision to attack the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in 1940, rather than allow the possibility of the warships falling into German hands. The move also demonstrated the sincerity of Britain’s determination to continue the fight. Interestingly, though, Bouverie shows that Churchill had cleared this move with Roosevelt in advance. Nevertheless, Bouverie also points out that Roosevelt did as much to hinder as to help Britain. Lend-Lease may have been, as Churchill said in the House of Commons “the most unsordid act,” but history largely forgets that the US government continued to demand cash for existing and future orders for British materiel.

After the German invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Grand Alliance, which ultimately defeated the Axis forces, required a feat of mental gymnastics by Churchill and Roosevelt to overlook that Stalin’s decades of oppression in Russia were as gruesome as Hitler’s tyranny. Thus, Bouverie lays out both the strengths and weaknesses of the burgeoning Alliance. Its strength was its common enemy. Its weakness was the irreconcilable post-war aims of the capitalist, communist, and imperial powers.

The brilliance of this book lies in how clearly Bouverie understands how each player grasped what would later be called the “vision thing.” Post-war aims began from day one: the most telling and exhausting complaint of each of the major powers was that they were fighting not just Hitler but also each other over how a post-war world would be organised. Prestige, power, and politics were the defining conditions of decision-making.

Consider the distillation of the Second World War into the Big Three. That is a revisionist consequence, not the cause, of the victory. The influence of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China on the war’s outcome has been consistently underrepresented; yet around fifteen million Chinese people died in it. Very few historians have charted the complete 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 Grand Alliance also faced profound diplomatic consequences in such important areas as their relations with Franco’s Spain and Ireland (both neutrals), the Iraqi revolt of 1941, the challenges of liberated Italy and Yugoslavia, the realities of Turkey’s economic relationships with the Axis, and the British intervention in the Greek Civil War. Military decision-making, the personalities involved, and the unwritten rules of spheres of influence added just another headache to overall grand strategy for these warrior kings and their staff. All these issues required discussion among the Allies, and some led to strains and stresses that were resolved in very different ways, especially as the centre of power began to shift inexorably from Britain and her empire towards the Soviet Union and the United States.

By the Tehran Conference in 1943, Roosevelt’s snubbing of Churchill was less a new development and more of the same calculated self-interest that Bouverie clearly shows was behind every major decision on all sides. Churchill’s feeling of exclusion is a tragedy of erroneous self-delusion, given that US isolationism was the reason Roosevelt had to be wooed in the first place. Although Churchill praised Roosevelt as “the truest friend…[and] the greatest man I have ever known,” sharp differences remained between the two, including their contrasting attitudes toward French power and prestige.

Roosevelt’s raison d’être was constructing a new world order that placed primacy through international organisations, such as the United Nations, with America as a key world nightwatchman. The President shared little of Churchill’s sentimentality about the restoration of France. FDR drove brutal bargains for the return of the supply of armaments, including forced sales to US interests of British overseas assets. All UK military secrets, Bouverie shows, were given to America, up to and including the atomic bomb research. With no less calculation, Stalin took advantage of Western divisions to consolidate his own post-war gains.

For all that, the Alliance did achieve the practically impossible. In 1943 alone, the Allies produced at least 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 “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.”

Bouverie has not only been extraordinarily diligent in covering all publicly available sources concerning the major players, but he has also worked with papers from 100 private collections, including those of foreign ministers, ambassadors, civil servants, emissaries, translators, and observers, to paint a complete picture of the apprehensions and to-ing and fro-ing over decisions we now take as a historic given. The great omission obviously is people around Stalin, who decreed no notes except for translators. Special exceptions include the published diaries of Ivan Maisky, the Russian ambassador to London from 1932 to 1943. These players may not have been principal figures, Bouverie accepts while correctly noting 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.”

It is a pleasure to be surprised by a new book on the totality of the Second World War. Here we have one of the finest, most judicious, and authoritative takes on the Allied relationship—neither salacious, cruel, rose-tinted, nor saturated by the weight of assessing personalities, decisions, and war itself. Bouverie writes crisply and adorns his story with captivating vignettes. The splendid result richly deserves addition to the pantheon of books on the Grand Alliance.

Alastair Stewart is chair of ICS Scotland.