Naturally, the image of successful cooperation between Britain and the United States is not dispelled by Bouverie’s account—how could it be! But he reminds his readers that, even with a shared and overriding objective, collaboration between nations is rarely easy. Not for nothing does he begin his book with Churchill’s quip: “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”
Anglo-American relations, though difficult, were, at least, cordial. Western relations with the Soviet Union were also difficult and often lacked even basic cordiality. After the German invasion of Russia in 1941, the Kremlin remained intensely suspicious of its new Western allies. British military officials who visited Moscow for talks left having spent as much time sitting in waiting rooms as they had in actual discussions with their Russian counterparts.
During one early meeting, Churchill was taken aback to receive a tongue-lashing from Stalin, and other Western emissaries were confused by the Soviet stonewalling of requests for basic information. In some respects, Bouverie writes, Russian dissatisfaction with London and Washington was justified. From the moment German troops surged across the Soviet border in 1941, the Kremlin wanted nothing so much as for the Western Allies to launch an invasion of occupied Europe, thereby opening a “Second Front.” Western promises to do this were broken, as 1942 turned into 1943, and 1943 into 1944. There was an overwhelming military logic to these delays—the Nazi defences were formidable, and the armada and army necessary to overcome them were colossal. But the Russians, who were desperately fighting to decimate the Germans, were unsympathetic to these explanations. Rather than being driven by legitimate military considerations, the Kremlin regarded Western delays as deliberate, and it was resolute in its suspicion that Britain and the United States were waiting on the sidelines, for Russians to do the dying, and would only sweep in once both Germany and the Soviet Union had been bled dry.
Stalin’s suspicions did not stop him from benefiting from the credulity of his new allies. Both Churchill and Roosevelt, so perceptive in other respects, were naïve when it came to the moustachioed dictator. “I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department,” Roosevelt airily assured Churchill in March 1942. Indeed, so confident was the president of his close relations with Stalin—and so nervous was he of undermining them by seeming to be in cahoots with the British—that Roosevelt rejected Churchill’s attempts to establish a unified negotiating position before the Yalta Conference. Thus the British and Americans arrived well-prepared but only hazily aware of the other’s objectives. Stalin arrived well-prepared and well-aware of the others’ objectives. His spies in London and Washington had seen to that. The Cold War, when it comes in Bouverie’s narrative, does not come as a surprise.