What British diplomat earned his place in history by penning a note to his superior in London commenting mischievously on the name of his Turkish counterpart, Mustapha Kunt? You’ve guessed it: precisely the same man that doesn’t fit one’s usual picture of a British diplomat, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, GCMG, His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Kremlin. Giles Milton’s latest and eminently readable book is full of a cast of sometimes larger-than-life characters that you’d expect to see in a sexed-up account the war presented by Hollywood. It is one of the many things that makes the story he tells so fascinating.
It’s one we think we know well. Bad guy (Hitler) seals pact with another bad guy (Stalin) to divide up Europe. Bad guy turns on the other, just as gangsters always do. All of a sudden the enemy of our enemy becomes our friend and we have to decide what to do about it. By humanising this great reversal by describing the interactions of East and West via the primary interlocuters we get a bottom-up or person-to-person view of the weird alignment of East and West in the fight against the Nazi enemy. Winston Churchill, British prime minister since the dark days on May 1940, had been a vociferous anti-communist all his political life, yet immediately determined on hearing of the German onslaught against the USSR that an alliance between Britain and the USSR (the USA was not to join the war until the end of the year) was essential – despite the starkness of their different politics – to defeat the Nazi monster. It was certainly a marriage of convenience but shows Churchill at his most strategic, and his most brilliant.
Milton’s genius is to explain how Churchill and Stalin, despite their distaste for each other, created a personal modus vivendi that allowed the common cause – the destruction of Nazi Germany- to become a joint crusade, at least until the war ended and mutual animosities could be resumed.
This brilliant book uncovers the intimate story of the Western Allies relationship with Stalin and his General Staff. It demonstrates that the USSR understood clearly the extraordinary power the alliance brought to the war. We can safely ignore those today who claim that it was the Soviet Union which won the war on its own. The Soviets knew that this was a partnership.
Milton records how both Stalin and his General Staff were astonished at the scale and brilliance of the five-beach assault on Normandy on 6 June 1944, congratulating the Allies on an event that Stalin described as superlative, ‘unparalleled in history.’ Stalin viewed D-Day as one of the greatest military endeavours of all time. He also acknowledged that the USSR wouldn’t have won the war without US and British muscle, Who can recall that between June 1941 and spring 1944 the UK had shipped more than a million tons to the Soviet Union, including 5,800 planes and 4,300 tanks? Milton does.
Robert Lyman is a historian and the author, with Richard Dannatt, of Victory to Defeat: The BritishArmy 1918-40.
