During the war, Winston Churchill liked to remark that “there is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them”. As extraordinary as it may seem, this is the scenario European states are now being forced to contemplate: holding the line against a revanchist Russia without the assistance of their principal ally and traditional shield, the United States.
Even more unsettling, western democracies are being compelled — albeit rightly — to assume greater responsibility for their own defence while being attacked, verbally and economically, by the White House. If anyone doubts just how far “through the looking glass” we are, they should contemplate the events of February 24, when the United States sided with Russia, Belarus and North Korea to oppose a draft European resolution in the United Nations condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I have spent the last five years researching and writing about the alliances that, through blood, toil, tears and sweat — as well as myriad disagreements — succeeded in ridding the world of Nazism. When I began this project, it was a purely historical exercise. But in recent months, I have become alarmed by some of the parallels, as well as the contrasts, between the 1940s and the present. As we approach the 80th anniversary of VE Day, it seems more important than ever to learn the lessons of 1939-1945, and the coalition that triumphed over fascism.
As Churchill knew, Britain could not have won the Second World War without allies. Although the British, supported by their empire, were able to “hold the fort” during the critical year 1940–1941, thus denying Hitler victory, they lacked the manpower and resources to roll back the Nazi tide. “The British”, commented the US military attaché in London, “may be able to hold the Germans off but they can’t beat the Germans without an ally. It must be either God Almighty … or it must be the United States.”
Strange as it may appear in retrospect, the British had not sought US belligerence from the outset of war. Confident in its ability to strangle the German economy by naval blockade, and protected by the French army, the Chamberlain government felt that US involvement, unlikely in any case, would come at too high a price. “Heaven knows I don’t want the Americans to fight for us”, wrote a cantankerous Chamberlain in January 1940. “We should have to pay too dearly for that if they had a right to be in on the peace terms.”
The fall of France changed everything. As the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, noted, the “one firm rock” on which British strategy had been anchored was gone. Britain’s ability to continue the war, the chiefs of staff wrote in a May 1940 memorandum, depended on “the full economic and financial support of the United States … possibly extending to active participation on our side”.
This was easier acknowledged than achieved. The campaign to bring America into the war was long, arduous and, in and of itself, unsuccessful. “These people are disgusting,” raged a young British diplomat stationed in Washington during the Battle of Britain. “The extent of US help to us so far has been limited to allowing us to buy what we could pay for and take away ourselves.”
Slowly, as the Roosevelt administration became convinced of Britain’s determination and ability to survive, the quantity of US aid crossing the Atlantic increased. But it came at a price. To obtain 50 antiquated destroyers, the British had to grant the Americans 99-year leases for air and naval bases on British possessions in the Caribbean and north Atlantic.
Until March 1941, when Congress agreed to “lend” the beleaguered empire the tools, if not to “finish the job” then at least to remain in the war, the British were forced to pay in dollars or gold for all their war purchases. On January 10, 1941, a US cruiser arrived off South Africa to carry away £42m worth of Britain’s last remaining gold reserves. “I am afraid they may misuse their strength”, wrote the British diplomat Roger Makins, lamenting the “dangerous” American tendency to “strip us to the bone.”
When it did finally emerge, following the Japanese attack upon the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, the Anglo-American alliance was the most sophisticated, integrated and successful military alliance in history. Between November 1942 and May 1945, it cleared the Axis powers from the waters of the Atlantic, the sands of north Africa and the cities of western Europe. From Churchill and Roosevelt downwards, genuine comradeship — affection, even — was experienced by all but the most encrusted cynics.
Eighty per cent of Americans questioned in May 1943 supported the extension of the US-UK alliance into the postwar world, while newspapers extolled the “insoluble bonds of language, creed and goal”, that existed between Britain and the US. “If I were to lay down the cardinal principle of our foreign policy”, wrote Roosevelt’s roving emissary, Harry Hopkins, in words that now seem quaint, ‘it would be to make absolutely sure that now and forever the United States and Great Britain are going to see eye to eye on major matters of world policy.’
There were, of course, serious differences between the British and the Americans over a range of issues, including grand strategy (most notably the timing of the cross-Channel invasion); imperialism (specifically the American desire to liquidate the British Empire); and, increasingly, how to handle Stalin and the Soviet Union.
Despite Stalin’s 1939 pact with Hitler, Churchill welcomed the USSR as an ally in the fight against Nazism with enthusiasm. Although some hoped that the democracies would treat the western-Soviet alliance as no more than a “temporary confluence of interest”, the realities of global war afforded the Allies little choice. As a British diplomat noted in November 1942, it was only after the Russians had fulfilled their “allotted role of killing Germans” that the Allied chiefs of staff believed they could “stage a general onslaught on the exhausted animal”. Seventy-five per cent of all German combat fatalities occurred on the Eastern Front.
But from the start of the western-Soviet alliance, there were portents of future strife. As early as December 1941, with the Wehrmacht only a few miles from Moscow, Stalin had demanded that the British recognise the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States and, in time, eastern Poland.
Yet while Churchill oscillated between extreme pessimism and rarely justified optimism, Roosevelt exuded breezy confidence. Convinced that he could “handle” the Soviet despot, he had “just a hunch”, he told the former ambassador to Moscow, William C Bullitt, that “Stalin … doesn’t want anything but security for his country”. Bullitt responded that Stalin was “a Caucasian bandit whose only thought when he got something for nothing was that the other fellow was an ass”.
Bullitt then sent the president a memorandum, repudiating the notion that Stalin had become a Russian nationalist and, therefore, nothing to worry about. “The wishful thinkers,” he wrote, “forget conveniently that the Russian nationalist state was never pacific. Tsarist Russia was, and the Soviet Union today is, an agglomeration of conquered peoples. Since the time of Peter the Great, the Russians have extended their rule ruthlessly over one people after another … Even if Stalin had become a mere Russian nationalist … that would be no guarantee of pacific behaviour; indeed, it would be a guarantee of aggressive imperialism.” As with Stalin then, so with Putin now.
Roosevelt noted the Bullitt thesis but dismissed it. At the first meeting of the “big three”, in Tehran in November 1943, he evaded Churchill’s attempts to concert strategy and sided with Stalin to force the prime minister to agree to a spring date for the cross-Channel invasion. Delighted at the split in the Anglo-American front, Stalin chuckled as Roosevelt teased Churchill about his idiosyncrasies and his imperialism. Back at the White House, Roosevelt described Stalin as “like me … a realist” and mused privately that the US would have “more trouble in the postwar world with the English than with the Russians”.
This trajectory continued, albeit with fluctuations, until the end of the war. Although the western allies co-operated to an unprecedented degree in battle, storming the Normandy beaches in June 1944, they were at odds over Lend-Lease (which the Americans expected the British, though not the Soviets, to repay), the postwar economic order (specifically the American desire to abolish tariffs) and the best way to deal with their Soviet ally, whose plans to subjugate his western neighbours were advancing rapidly.
By February 1945, when the big three met at Yalta in Crimea, there was little the western powers could actually do to prevent Stalin from dominating eastern Europe. The Red Army was already in possession of the Baltic States, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, and the British and the Americans, despite Churchillian fantasies to the contrary, were not going to turn them out.
Today, the situation is quite different. Putin’s military cannot even defeat a former Soviet satellite state, albeit one supported by western funds and materiel. Relative to Russia, the West is far stronger in 2025 than in 1945 and yet it is the West that is fracturing and Putin that is gaining by Trump’s inversion of US foreign policy. “The only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them” is a verity that even the American government may come to appreciate one day.
Tim Bouverie’s Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler is published by Bodley Head, £25
