Allies in War: Britain and America Against the Axis Powers, 1940-1945 (review)

This new volume on World War II is a decided tour de force. Within less than three hundred pages, Stoler provides an excellent and readable overview on a global scale of the interrelated wartime military, strategic, and diplomatic decisions and contributions of the United States and Great Britain. A companion volume by Evan Mawdsley covers the Soviet war against Germany, but Stoler does not forget that, from June 1941 onward, Anglo-American policies—whether designed to keep Russia in the war or to minimize Stalin's subsequent territorial gains in Europe—were invariably crafted with their impact upon the Soviet wartime position much in mind. More than once, Stoler emphasizes that throughout the war the Russian armies and people bore by far the heaviest brunt of the war against Hitler, and were responsible for the great bulk of German combat casualties.

While he draws heavily on his past research on top-level Anglo-American wartime strategic dealings—this study's one real shortcoming is perhaps that it neglects the actual wartime experience and texture of life ordinary men and women knew—Stoler's forte is elegantly concise syntheses of massive outpourings of scholarship in both military and diplomatic history and judicious, balanced, and stimulating assessments of often controversial issues. Stoler does not romanticize—à la Winston Churchill—the Anglo-American "special relationship," a bond he considers the product of mutual World War II and Cold War necessity. Nor does he minimize the two allies' sometimes bitter disputes over strategy, international economic policies, anticolonialism, and dealings with Russia, or an absence of practical coordination on occasion so pronounced that, for example, in late 1942, despite a stated Europe-first strategy, "more US combat forces were deployed against Japan than against Germany" (p. 85). Even so, in Stoler's view, by 1942 there existed "a very special Anglo-American alliance within the larger and now-formal Grand Alliance," its enduring success, then and later, "primarily due to the military and political leadership in both countries" (pp. 50–51). Rather than ranking the Grand Alliance itself against some ideal model of collaboration, Stoler states: "On a relative basis . . . and in comparison with the Axis, the Allied coalition was superb . . . [and] a model of successful coalition warmaking while the Axis alliance is a classic case study of how not to conduct a coalition war" (p. 53).

Winning the "battle of the Atlantic" to command the sealanes was, Stoler convincingly argues, crucial to Allied success, yet it was for many months jeopardized by the reluctance of top air force planners to divert limited long-range airpower from attacks on German industry. Allied strategic bombing of Germany, Stoler concludes, destroyed neither German industrial capacity nor civilian morale but, by forcing scarce German fighter pilots into a war of attrition through repeated attacks on Allied bombers, effectively eliminated the Luftwaffe as a fighting force before D-Day, indirectly contributing substantially to the 1944 Normandy invasion's success. Many decisions taken at the much maligned February 1945 Yalta meeting merely ratified agreements from earlier conferences and, in any case, Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt obtained the best bargains then available to them, given existing Soviet military dominance over most of Eastern Europe and their desire to secure Soviet entry into the war against Japan. Anglo-American policymakers had always assumed that, once developed, atomic weapons would be used and, given their past endorsement of massive bombing of German and Japanese civilians, most felt no particular qualms in employing these against Japan. Even so, Russian intervention against Japan in northeast China was an additional major factor in persuading the Japanese government to contemplate surrender. Lucid, balanced, nuanced, and acute, giving equal space to the wars in both Europe and Asia, Stoler's interpretive overview is a valuable and welcome addition to its field.