Allies at War

About Allies at War

A fascinating look at the complex relationships between the Allied powers—far more fraught than we understood– that defined the course of World War II and the world beyond, from critically acclaimed author of Appeasement

Tim Bouverie’s Winning the War offers a ground-breaking exploration of the complex relations between the Allied powers during World War II. Far from the lockstep agreement depicted in popular culture or the cozy “special relationship” of the United States and Britain today, Bouverie shows how the wartime alliance was at every turn threatened by mistrust, rivalry, hypocrisy, and deceit, as well as how all the allies, from the very start of the war, were intensely focused on the world that would emerge once hostilities had ceased.

At the center of the book is the relationship between the three principal Allies—the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States. Beginning with the brief Anglo-French Alliance of 1939-1940 and the tragic consequences of its disintegration, Bouverie follows Britain’s desperate quest to acquire allies following the fall of France, and then the functioning of the Grand Alliance after the United States and the Soviet Union joined in 1941. Though the alliance was dominated by the major powers, Bouverie also shows the powerful impact of smaller countries on the course of the war—of the twenty neutral European states at the outbreak of fighting, only six managed to stay out of the war. Featuring a remarkable cast of characters that goes beyond the so-called “Big Three”—Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin—to the lieutenants and diplomats whose advice was at turns welcomed and rejected, Winning the War offers a remarkable 360 degree view of this tumultuous period.  

Drawing on sixty-five private archives in Britain and the United States—several of which have never before been accessed by historians—, Bouverie reveals an untold story at the heart of World War II, one that had a profound shape on the world to come.