‘Allies,’ declared Stalin on 8 February 1945, the fifth day of the Yalta Conference, ‘should not deceive one another.’ In order to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese, the British, Americans, Soviets, French and Chinese had indeed all worked closely together. But in his meticulous, scholarly and highly enjoyable history of the second world war, Tim Bouverie makes plain just what this entailed: a collaboration that was both deep and rivalrous, riven by secret deals, prejudice, changing loyalties and betrayals, conducted by people who at different times admired, feared and despised one another, while in public most often remaining models of civility.
All the great set pieces are here – Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Normandy landings – as Bouverie traces the twists and turns of a war that lasted five years and nine months, moving from theatre to theatre, dying down in one place only to ignite in another, turning friends into enemies and enemies into friends. But no less interesting are the many sideshows: the disastrous attempt to take Trondheim in April 1940, when Allied soldiers ‘looking like paralysed bears’ floundered in snow drifts; the lengths to which the British went to keep Spain neutral; or the Iraqi revolt of May 1941.
Bouverie was unable to consult the Russian archives, but he has delved deep into the collections available to him throughout the rest of the world, along with the diaries, notes, memoirs and dispatches of an enormous cast of characters, many of whom were shrewd observers, excellent writers and very witty. He is particularly good at bringing them to life with well chosen quotations and pen portraits.
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