The Grand Alliance

10 Key excerpts on "The Grand Alliance"

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  Cold War

  An International History

  • Carole K. Fink(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 The Grand Alliance, 1941–1945

  DOI: 10.4324/9780429356681-3

  The war you are waging is a war of liberation, a just war.

  Joseph Stalin, Speech at the Red Army Parade, November 7, 1941

  Never before have the major Allies been more closely united – not only in their war aims but also in their peace aims. And they are determined to continue to be united with each other – and with all peace-loving Nations – so that the ideal of lasting peace will become a reality.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address to Congress on the Yalta Conference, March 1, 1945

  World War II created powerful patriotic myths among the three victors of the Battles of Britain, Stalingrad, and Iwo Jima, but there is no shared public remembrance of the coalition that finally, and at very great cost, defeated the Axis powers in 1945. What Winston Churchill grandiosely dubbed The Grand Alliance was in fact a coalition of three highly disparate partners that dissolved almost immediately when the fighting was over. Even in wartime, the alliance was unstable, often lacking cohesion and mutual confidence and buffeted by alarming intelligence reports and bad news from the battlefield. A reexamination of The Grand Alliance thus requires us to peel away more than a half century of Cold War memoirs and accounts, amalgamate three separate national narratives – of America’s “Good War,” the Soviet Union’s “Great Patriotic War,” and Great Britain’s heroic defense of its homeland and empire – and reappraise this brittle, ephemeral, but also indispensable partnership.

  Disparate Partners

  There were, of course, considerable differences among the three. The Soviet Union, extending 8.6 million square miles between the Baltic and the Pacific, was the world’s largest country, with nearly 200 million people, vast mineral deposits, and an economy that had made spectacular gains in heavy industry during the three Five-Year Plans between 1928 and 1941.1

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  A Companion to International History 1900 - 2001

  • Gordon Martel(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Part IV From Grand Alliance to Cold War C HAPTER T WENTY -T WO The Grand Alliance, 1941–1945 W ARREN F. K IMBALL The Grand Alliance was never formal. But its basic principles of a joint struggle and a commit-ment to “complete victory over their enemies” were set out in January 1942 by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in what FDR labeled the “Declaration by United Nations.” Save for the name, the Declaration had nothing to do with the later United Nations Organization; rather, it was a statement of allied unity for those nations signing on to use their “full resources, military or economic,” against the Tripartite Pact (Septem-ber 1940) of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The Dec-laration also referred to the “common program of purposes and principles” that had been set out in the Atlantic Charter, agreed to by Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941. Eventually, some forty-five governments (including, to Churchill’s discomfort, India) signed on. Whatever the length of that list, The Grand Alliance – Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States – together led the struggle against the enemies of all. As a statement of the war aims for The Grand Alliance, the Atlantic Charter was intended as merely a set of guidelines – Churchill called it “not a law, but a star.” 3 Both Britain and the Soviet Union had express reservations about promising to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” After all, each had an empire to hold on to. The Russians also insisted on maintain-ing their neutrality regarding Japan, a sensible The Grand Alliance is, fi rst and foremost, the story of one of history’s most successful wartime alliances – and rumors of its death are exagger-ated, for it never quite died. The Grand Alliance did not survive the Second World War, at least not in the same form, yet it was at the core of the continuance of the Anglo-American special rela-tionship.

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  World War Two

  Crucible of the Contemporary World - Commentary and Readings

  • Lily Xiao Hong Lee(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part VI How Grand Was The Grand Alliance?

  • Introduction
  • 13. The Economics of Partnership
    Robert M. Hathaway
  • 14. Adherence to Agreements: Yalta and the Experiences of the Early Cold War
    Melvyn P. Leffler
  • Further Reading for Part VI

  The term “The Grand Alliance,” the title of the third volume of Winston Churchill’s monumental history of the Second World War, helped mold all subsequent thinking about wartime diplomacy and coalition fighting among the Big Three: Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. In emphasizing a “special relationship” between himself and American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, and between their respective “Anglo-Saxon” peoples, the prime minister launched a second theme with great appeal to Anglo-American public opinion during the early years of the cold war. Both ideas contain kernels of historical truth, but both also disguise deeply rooted differences in interests and goals within the alliance. Realistically, this should be expected for great nations respond to their own peculiar historic developments; each has its own perceptions and requirements.

  Given Hitler’s reckless determination to have a war, his strategic miscalculations, and his underestimation of his opponents’ will to survive, the combination of powers arrayed against Germany after 1941 seems inevitable. The coalition of the United States of America, the British Empire and Commonwealth, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and their dozens of allies, however, was not inevitable. Though the troubled times of the late thirties led many to believe that war was very likely, nothing would have struck even well-informed people as more improbable than The Grand Alliance. Their conflicting interests drove them apart. Hitler was not alone in ruling out their international cooperation. But he was nearly alone in making the impossible happen (see Part I above).

  What brought the alliance together was not resistance to aggression and tyranny. Of the Big Three, only the United Kingdom (the accurate, though less-often used name, since it includes both Great Britain and Northern Ireland), along with France and some members of the Commonwealth, came to Poland’s defense in early September 1939. Stalin, in fact, invaded Poland shortly after the Germans in order to claim the eastern half of the country promised in the Nonaggression Pact the month before. Roosevelt, as he had so often done in the years before, offered only words. Congress did amend the neutrality acts to permit France and Britain to buy war materials, but still required them to pay in cash and to carry their purchases away in non-American ships.

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  From War To Cold War

  The Education Of Harry S. Truman

  • Robert James Maddox(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introduction: The Grand Alliance

  The United States and the Soviet Union became allies when Adolf Hitler declared war against the United States four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As allies, they dominated the anti-German coalition, along with Great Britain, and later bludgeoned Japan into surrender. The Grand Alliance was a strange partnership because the two Western nations had little in common with the Soviet Union beyond the necessity to defeat their enemies, and many Soviet wartime aims conflicted with those of its allies. That strains should have developed within such a relationship was inevitable; they existed already between the United States and Great Britain. That these strains led to the condition known as the Cold War was the result of personal characteristics of the leaders of the three nations as well as of historical and ideological forces.

  Past U.S. relations with the Soviet Union provided an inauspicious foundation for collaboration. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson had refused to recognize the revolutionary Bolshevik government on the grounds that it had seized power illegally and did not represent the will of the Russian people. In the early summer of 1918, he authorized a military intervention in Siberia through which he hoped to unseat the Bolsheviks. He did not intend the operation to accomplish this task directly. Rather, he wanted to secure the trans-Siberian railway for use as a pipeline to supply and equip anti-Bolshevik groups in the interior. He hoped that, nourished and trained, they would become strong enough to overthrow the radicals and establish a "responsible" government. His primary motive was to reopen the Eastern front, deactivated by the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in March 1918, but his dislike of bolshevism caused him to continue the operation for more than a year after the armistice of November 1918. Josef Stalin alluded to the intervention several times during World War II conferences; it no doubt strengthened the suspicions of a naturally suspicious man.1

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  The War Years

  A Global History of the Second World War

  • Loyd E. Lee(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Grand Alliance through 1943

  Introduction

  Nothing would have seemed more improbable to an observer in 1939 than the idea that within three years Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union would form a grand alliance against Germany and Italy. Their interests and policies all told against it. It was the monomania of Hitler, the fragility of the west European empires and a Japanese penchant for risktaking that brought on this diplomatic revolution. The Grand Alliance of the Big Three, knitted from the loose ends of shifting global power, held together less by what it stood for than by what it stood against. Certainly the requirements of domestic public opinion, especially among the democracies, required a proclamation of high ideals, but the defense of principles did not create the alliance. And it did not sustain it.

  This is not to say that ideas did not inspire citizens of the wartime coalition against Axis countries and their leaders. They did. And their antifascist principles had important consequences that often helped shape the course of the struggle and its outcome. However, history combines grand ideals with the pursuit of self-interest and even folly into an amalgam in which each intertwines with the other so closely that refinement into what is interest and what is not can easily elude us. Nonetheless, the effort is more than an intellectual challenge. It informs us about our world as it really is and how it became that way.

  British strategy while fighting alone

  It may be that British policy expressed higher ideals than that of other major belligerents in the second world war. Churchill had a propensity for identifying British interests with the cause of freedom. Who else, except France and part of the Commonwealth, declared war in defense of a third country that was attacked without provocation? Of course, they had earlier found no such obligation in the case of Japan’s seizure of Manchuria or Italy’s rape of Ethiopia. Perhaps these were situations where a stand on principle yielded to a greater menace from Germany. Whatever the answer, many remained unconvinced of Britain’s disinterestedness. The empire and its security took precedence. On the other hand, some within Britain believed that war over Poland exceeded its capacity and that it was foolhardy to sacrifice a generation of young men, an empire and the national treasury to restore a small nation misfortunately located in the wrong part of the world. The results of six years of war suggest they had some force to their argument.

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  Grand Strategy and Military Alliances

  • Peter R. Mansoor, Williamson Murray(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  50 Hastings Lionel Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (New York, 1960), pp. 262–63; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President- Elect, 1890–1952 (New York, 1983), p. 186. The Grand Alliance in World War II 165 continue into the postwar era. Interestingly, all three desired a postwar continuation of the alliance, albeit each on its own terms. With the defeat of their enemies, however, there was no longer a pressing need to com- promise in order to keep the coalition together. Consequently, The Grand Alliance shared the fate of all other wartime alliances: dissolution. That in no way lessens its extraordinary success in World War II. 51 51 One should not forget, however, that while the Tripartite Grand Alliance dissolved, the Anglo-American “special relationship” did not. Indeed, it became a cornerstone of a new alliance system, NATO, directed against the former Soviet ally. 166 7 Adapt and survive NATO in the Cold War Ingo Trauschweizer In spring 1985, former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, a frustrated Atlanticist, delivered the Henry L. Stimson Lectures at Yale University. 1 Speaking at a time when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) appeared in perpetual crisis, Schmidt concluded that the West lacked a common grand strategy. He outlined four phases of the Western alliance: an attempt at cooperation with the Soviet Union in World War II’s immediate aftermath, a Cold War and arms race that began in 1947, a period of détente from the mid 1960s, and, since the beginning of the 1980s, a second Cold War. At no point had NATO inte- grated its grand strategy, even though one might surmise from Schmidt’s comments that he believed the efforts of the allies had been somewhat more successful in the 1950s and 1960s. 2 Here he expanded on an argu- ment he had made the previous year: the United States, Britain, France, and West Germany each had their own grand strategy.

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  Alternatives to Appeasement

  Neville Chamberlain and Hitler's Germany

  • Andrew David Stedman(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  4 ALLIANCES

  If a number of states were assembled around Great Britain and France in a solemn treaty for mutual defence against aggression; if they had their forces marshalled in what you may call a Grand Alliance ... and if it were done in the year 1938 – and, believe me, it may be the last chance there will be for doing it – then I say you might even now arrest this coming war.1

  (Winston Churchill, House of Commons, March 1938)

  Introduction

  A large body of Chamberlain’s critics, amongst contemporaries and historians alike, have suggested that the National Government should have pursued a policy of alliances as an alternative to appeasement in the years before war. Indeed, Churchill’s famous notion of the ‘Grand Alliance’, first advocated following the Anschluss , has emerged as perhaps the favourite rival strategy of those later appeasement detractors who like to imagine scenarios of what might have been. Whether envisaged as the spurned deterrent that could have driven Hitler away from war, or as the best means to have won the battle once it was joined, the option of an anti-Fascist bloc of nations is probably the most popularly explored alternative among scholars looking back on this period. It is, therefore, central to this study.

  For the purposes of this chapter, an alliance or pact is considered to be a formal treaty between two or more powers, usually military in character as a pledge to defend one another from attack. Such agreements as guarantees, blocs and fronts, however, will also be considered under this broad umbrella. A guarantee could indicate a partnership between two powers that did not quite constitute a formal alliance, which were typically reciprocal in nature. A bloc or front could well comprise a more informal grouping of many countries, often in close geographical proximity and with several smaller alliances at its heart. Calls for ‘closer relations’ between powers, moreover, need not represent any such binding arrangement at all. Many of these terms were actually interchangeable at the time, as will become clear.

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  The Major International Treaties of the Twentieth Century

  A History and Guide with Texts

  • John Grenville, Bernard Wasserstein(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  IX  ·  The Grand Alliance, 1941–45

  Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, June 1941–June 1942

  In a broadcast on the evening of 22 June 1941, Winston Churchill promised help to Russians fighting for their homeland in the cause of ‘free men and free people’ everywhere. Military supplies from Britain and America began to reach the Soviet Union in appreciable quantities in the autumn of 1941. The Anglo–Soviet alliance against Germany was first placed on a formal basis by the brief Anglo–Soviet Agreement of 12 July 1941, in which the two powers undertook to render each other assistance and support in the war against ‘Hitlerite Germany’, and not to negotiate an armistice or peace treaty except by mutual agreement. From the first, relations between the Soviet Union and Britain, and later the United States, were made difficult by Stalin’s insistent demand that Russia’s allies should engage the Germans on the continent of Europe. His call for a second front was not fully satisfied until the Allied landings in France in June 1944. As a result of Russian pressure, however, Britain declared war on Finland, Hungary and Rumania on 6 December 1941. Bulgaria had not joined in the German war against the Soviet Union, but to show a theoretical loyalty to the Axis declared war on Britain and the United States on 13 December 1941.

  An Anglo–Soviet–Iranian Treaty was concluded on 29 January 1942 (p. 247) which promised Britain and Russia all facilities to defend Iran from aggression, and Britain and Russia promised to respect Persian independence and integrity and to withdraw not later than six months after the war. Negotiations for a full Anglo–Soviet alliance were long drawn-out. Stalin’s suspicions of Britain’s resolution to relieve German military pressure in Russia, and Russian territorial demands in the post-war European settlement, were the major obstacles. Russia wished recognition of her right to the Baltic states and to Poland up to the Curzon line, with possible minor frontier readjustments. But Britain, and later the United States, had agreed to postpone all questions of the new frontiers until after the war. Finally the Russian denial of, and Poland’s insistence on, her claim to the right of restoration within her pre-1939 frontiers could not be reconciled; Britain gave support to Poland in 1941, declaring in a Note to the Polish Government, 30 July 1941

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  Palgrave Advances in Cold War History

  • Geraint Hughes, S. Dockrill(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Ententes can evolve into a full-scale alliance, as the Anglo-French- Russian entente of 1907 did in 1914. Ideological factors also can play a role in making an alliance, as they did in the Sino-Soviet alliance of 1949 to counter the perceived capitalist threat from the West. The distinctions between ideological and pragmatic reasons for making alliances are often blurred. Occasionally without the benefit or even a wish for an alliance coincidental coordination of actions could place adversaries on the same side; both the United States and the Soviet Union condemned the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in 1956, as Ole Hosti observed. It should be recognised that ‘an alliance is a formal agreement 111 112 palgrave advances in cold war history between two or more nations to collaborate on national security matters’. 2 George Modelski concluded that there is a considerable literature on the working of an alliance – ‘on intra-alliance consultations and restraints. But paradoxically, we learn very little about what alliances in fact are.’ 3 The historian is compelled to illustrate by example. The classic case of an alliance, one that involved a number of states with binding obligations, was the Achaean League of Greece in the third century BC. In many ways it served as an unintended model for NATO, the primary case study in this chapter. Initially, it was a confederation of 12 cities (the precise number of nations in the original NATO). It had a federal constitution that left internal affairs to the constituent city-states, each having equal power in a council that met at least twice a year. The council was responsible for all matters of foreign policy, management of the army, and collection of federal taxes. The chief executive was commander-in-chief of the army, serving a one-year term but eligible for re-election every other year. Wars with other city-states weakened the league over the years, with its dissolution at the hands of Rome in 146 BC.

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  Britain and America Since Independence

  • Howard R Temperley(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  The most that could be counted on was that Germany’s turning eastward allowed a breathing space in which Britain could prepare its defences. Churchill’s hope was that he could persuade Roosevelt to find a way of getting the United States to enter the war. In this he was disappointed. Nevertheless, the meetings led to a close personal friendship being established between the two leaders. World War II and The Grand Alliance 143 After several days visiting back and forth on their respective flagships they issued a joint statement setting forth their shared hopes for a better world once Germany had been defeated. The so-called Atlantic Charter was not a treaty. Strictly speaking, it was simply a press release. But as an indication of the understanding that existed between the two nations it was a document of key importance, later incorporated into the Declaration of the United Nations of 1 January 1942, setting forth the war aims of the anti-Axis powers. Although originally drafted by the British, it struck a high moral tone reminiscent of Wilson’s Fourteen Points in a manner designed to appeal to American sensibilities. Among the points listed were the renunciation of territorial aggrandisement, opposition to territorial changes not approved by those affected, and the right of peoples to select their own forms of government. Taken at face value, these principles could be interpreted as an undertaking to dissolve the British Empire. Churchill later told the House of Commons that ‘At the Atlantic meeting we had in mind the restoration of the sovereignty of . . . states . . . now under the Nazi yoke . . . quite a separate problem from the progressive evolution of self-governing institutions in the regions and peoples that owe allegiance to the British Crown.’ 5 This was not quite how Americans interpreted the document. But with Britain’s very sur-vival at stake it was hardly a time for quibbling over the exact meaning of a press release.

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