A case of anecdotes without analysis

There is a kind of narrative and popular history writing that is best described as ‘fly on the wall’. The narrator tries to convey the impression that he was actually present when a conversation or discussion took place. The most convenient tool deployed for this is the use of direct speech and the most often source used for this kind of history writing is the diary or memoirs of an individual who was a part of the conversation or discussion or was present. The advantage of this is that it brings to the narrative a superficial immediacy. The disadvantage is that it leads to a heavy and almost overwhelming dependence on one kind of source.

Giles Milton’s fly-on-the-wall is Averell Harriman whose papers are Milton’s gold mine. Ave, as he was known, in the corridors of power and among the glitterati in DC and the Big Apple was a flamboyant, good-looking multimillionaire who was a confidante of President Roosevelt. In the course of events, he would come to charm Churchill; and bed during World War 2, and much later, marry Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Pamela, whose first husband had been that cad Randolph Churchill. Harriman, his dalliances aside, played the role of an intermediary between the big three — Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt.

Hitler’s declaration of war on Soviet Russia on June 22, 1941 — Operation Barbarossa as the Nazis called it — dramatically altered the course of the war. For one thing, it broke the Nazi-Soviet pact and thus caught Stalin completely unawares. The Soviet dictator at first did not believe that Hitler had attacked and then when reports came pouring in, he retired to his dacha in a deep sulk. Second, it made the British, especially Churchill, realise that if Russia fell under the Nazi war machine, Britain’s position in Europe would be precarious. This was the premise for Churchill — the arch communist hater — to extend a helping hand to Stalin’s war effort and to bring the US into a tripartite alliance. This entailed a major turnaround in British policy.

A necessary pact

Jonathan Haslam in his book The Spectre of War has shown that after the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, in the chanceries of Europe, especially among the British upper classes, there was a growing fear of communism as an international threat to the existing socio-politico-economic order. In the 1930s, post the 1929 crash, this fear peaked. In this context, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi ideology was welcomed as a challenge and a buffer to the rising tide of communism. Kazuo Ishiguro in his novel The Remains of the Day captured this pro-Nazi ambience in the upper echelons of the British social ladder. For the British upper classes, Hitler was preferable to communism. The almost solitary exception to this line of thought was Churchill who despite his visceral hatred of communism, understood that it was Hitler who was the real threat and was someone who could not be trusted. The breakdown of the Nazi-Soviet pact and Operation Barbarossa confirmed Churchill’s worst fears. There was an almost immediate recognition on the part of Churchill and Roosevelt that it was imperative to help Stalin and the Soviet Union as Stalin prepared for the uphill task of defending his country against the onslaught of an erstwhile ally.

No wider context

The forging of the alliance between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin is Milton’s story. He proceeds to tell the story not through any analysis but by narrating a series of events, meetings and conversations. There is no attempt made to place these in any kind of wider historical context. Milton evidently believes that history can be understood through a mere narration of anecdotes without any interpretation. The narrative is spiced up by descriptions of socialising by Harriman and his ilk. All this makes Milton’s book very superficial.

To illustrate the point: there is no analysis of how disingenuous the alliance was on both sides of the ideological divide. The British prime ministers (first Churchill and then Attlee) and the US presidents (first Roosevelt and then Truman) never revealed to Stalin that they were in the process of preparing an atomic bomb — Operation Manhattan, the project was codenamed — ostensibly to be used against Nazi Germany. Stalin, on his part, did not disclose that he had an agent in place right at the heart of Operation Manhattan — the nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs.

As a result, when Stalin, Truman and Churchill (to be replaced by Attlee) met at Potsdam the day after the bomb had been tested in Los Alamos and Truman dangled the new weapon before Stalin, the latter pretended not to know anything despite being fully briefed about the bomb. Allies were obviously not sharing vital information and intelligence. So what kind of an alliance was it?

To call it “the impossible alliance’’ is more than a trifle misleading. An enemy of my enemy is a friend is an old principle of real politick. In fact, there was nothing impossible about it. It was entirely plausible under the circumstances. What is worth noting however is that Hitler and Stalin were allies till Hitler turned against the Soviet Union. Britain, the US and the Soviet Union were allies in the war to defeat Hitler. In the immediate aftermath of the defeat of Hitler, the alliance broke and the threat of a different kind of war loomed over Europe and the world. Such developments cannot be comprehended through history by anecdotes.

Milton’s book is history lost.

The reviewer is the Chancellor and Professor of History at Ashoka University. Views are personal.