 Welcome everybody. Thank you so much for coming and welcome to the Sir Michael Howard Center for the History of One, your lecture 2023. I'm utterly delighted and giddy almost and thrilled to have Professor Margaret McMillan here with us today. Margaret is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Emeritus Professor of International History at the University of Oxford. She was Provost of Trinity College Toronto from 2002 to 7 and Warden of St. Anthony's College Oxford from 07 to 17. She's currently a trustee of the Imperial War Museum. Her research specializes, which you probably know already, in British Imperial history and in the international history of the 19th and 20th century. Her latest book is War, How Conflict Shaped Us and Other publications include Paris 1919 and the War that Ended Peace. She gave the CBC's Massey Lectures in 2015 and the BBC's Wreath Lectures in 2018. More importantly of course today you're giving the Sir Michael Howard. Awards include the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and the Governor General's Literary Award. She has honorary degrees from several universities and is an honorary fellow of the British Academy. She is also a companion of the Order of Canada, a companion of Honor UK and member of the Order of Merit. Not a bad life. Not a bad effort. And so today Margaret's going to talk to us about an unlikely match, the Grand Alliance in the Second World War. I think Margaret's going to talk for about 40 minutes then we'll engage in a series of questions for about another 40 minutes and afterwards we can retire to the drinks at the back and and chat away. So over to you, Margaret. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm going to stand up so I can see anyone in the back who falls asleep. But thank you very much for that kind introduction. It is a great pleasure and a great privilege to be giving this Sir Michael Howard Lecture. I knew him. Before I knew him I read his books and his essays with great admiration. I think his book on the Franco-Prussian War is one of the few books I stayed up all night to finish because it was just such a good story. And I used to go and see him. He lived in Berkshire in a very pretty little village and when I was an Oxford I'd drive over and see him. And I knew that if I took him smoked salmon and a couple of mystery stories or thrillers this would be the appropriate thing to take. We both shared a taste, a low taste probably, for mystery stories and thrillers. I don't know what it is about academics but we love stories about murder. Maybe it's something to do with the lives we live but Sir Michael and I would talk about this and what I wish and I think all of us who knew him wish is that we'd been like Boswell when written down some of the things he said because he was extremely wise and many of the things he said occasionally float back into my memory as I'm thinking about the present. So it is a great honour and a great pleasure to be giving the lecture in his name. And talking about alliances I think is something that actually is quite opposite at the moment. I think we've all been thinking about the nature of alliances, how they work, whether they can work, will they last. I was talking to someone just before we started who said he was possibly going to ask a question about will NATO survive? And it's a good question. At the moment NATO seems to have been revivified but how long that will go on depends on a number of things including the next presidential election in the United States. And so I think alliances is something that we think about in the present and have certainly been very much part of the past. I could go back to the Dealian League but that might take us a very long time for me to get up to the present again. Views on alliances vary. The famous Churchill statement was that there's only one thing worse than fighting with allies and that is fighting without them. And that was Churchill in the Second World War as recorded by Lord Allenbrook. General Eisenhower, who knew a fair thing about alliances as the Supreme Allied Commander, wrote in 1948 about, and I quote, the ineptitude of coalitions in waging war. He said even Napoleon's reputation as a military leader suffered when students in staff college came to realize that he always fought against coalitions and therefore against divided councils and diverse political, economic and military interests. Alliances as we know can be, however positive, they can be a basis for victory which the Grand Alliance in the Second World War was. The British and French Alliance and then joined by the Americans and of course with the Italians from earlier on in the First World War is an example of a successful alliance. Not always easy to achieve but eventually it did result in victory in the First World War and of course the Grand Alliance, the original Grand Alliance which was formed against Napoleon in 1814 and 1815 and successfully ended his rule. You will not see much about it in the movie Napoleon. I don't know how many of you have seen it. You will see a great deal of Josephine. So alliances can be positive and I think you can argue that NATO on the whole has been positive for its members. It's provided mutual security and it has provided a very necessary deterrent in the Cold War and so alliances can be positive. They can also be and many people see them as dangerous, the danger that an alliance may lead us into trouble of some sort and of course what comes to mind is the famous statement, the famous warning by George Washington in his farewell address which he published in 1796 that the United States should not interweave its destiny with any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice. It is, he said, our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world and in some ways I think that view is still there influencing American foreign policy and American attitudes towards the world. The United States of course was fortunate in being able to remain free of entangling alliances because of its geography, because it was protected by the two great oceans of the world and because of its size. Smaller powers have not had that luxury. Smaller powers have often had to put themselves into alliances, bandwagoning as the political scientists call it because they have no alternative and of course there is a further danger when the small powers ally with big powers that in some cases the larger power may find itself drawn into conflicts of the smaller power. This was very much the case with Russia and Serbia in the First World War. Russia made an ally and Serbia was of course eager to make the alliance with the much smaller country of Serbia and in doing so took on Serbia's quarrels with Austria-Hungary and with its neighbors and the problem always for great powers is when they have small allies the question of prestige and authority comes in so that they abandon the smaller ally they are seen as somehow weak and unable to carry out their commitments. I think you could argue very much the same about China with North Korea. I think the Chinese would dearly love to see a different sort of North Korea which is a dangerous and unstable power in the North Pacific but if they abandon North Korea then what does it say about Chinese authority and Chinese position in the world? You could also say the United States faces the same dilemma with Israel that it has committed itself to a much smaller power and therefore has taken on the quarrels of that much smaller power. The alliance system as it was called we know is often blamed for the outbreak of the First World War the idea that Europe had divided itself into two very tight alliance systems the triple alliance of Germany, Austria, Hungary and I'm trying to remember the third one now Italy because Italy did not actually stay in and then the triple entente of Russia, France and Britain. In fact those alliance systems are much looser than some people would have it. There were only a couple of military alliances within the triple entente and the triple alliance and of course the thing always with there was no military alliance no commitment that Britain made to either France or Russia beyond informal suggestions and the only countries that were obliged to come to each other's defense in the triple entente were France and Russia and the only countries that were obliged to come to each other's defense were Germany and Austria, Hungary. The Italians were able to stay out and in the course due course we're going to join the triple entente so I would argue the alliance system wasn't really a system and did not really lead to the outbreak of the First World War. Alliances can also be transactional and temporary made for a particular purpose dissolved as soon as that particular purpose is achieved and of course the British were very good at doing this Lord Palmerston's famous statement that no country is marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual and those interests it is our duty to follow and so the whole question of alliances are they good are they bad what are they for is one that is still very much up in the air. They're also two different largely two different definitions of what alliances are. I'm going to go with the second one but let me give you the first one the first one is rather narrow and it is that it is alliance consists of a treaty binding two or more independent states to come to each other's aid with armed force under certain circumstances that usually means an attack or threat on one of the alliance partners. In fact, you can sometimes get larger alliances than just two NATO article five an attack on one is an attack on all. I would argue that alliances are more than that narrow definition that they're not just a promise to come to each other's aids in the case of an attack. They're not just about military force not just about the resistance to force or the application of force that alliances can actually involve the management or constraint of others. Bismarck for example, the German Chancellor formed the deal alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1879 partly to keep it under control. He was afraid of a war which was always a possibility between Austria-Hungary and Russia and he felt that if Germany allied itself to Austria-Hungary there would be less chance of it getting into a confrontation with Russia and alliances can also be about shared values promoting a particular view of the world promoting particular values in the world. The concert of Europe did not involve the five powers in the concert of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars and Prussia, Austria, France, Russian and England or Britain did not involve them signing necessarily formal treaties with each other but it was an informal arrangement where they would work together they would consult with each other when it looked like the piece of Europe was going to be threatened again. It was basically a conservative grouping but I would call it an alliance and in fact was quite a successful alliance. But the more modern alliances we've seen have also involved more than just coming to each other's defense they've involved trying to promote a particular way of organizing and running the world. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, Roosevelt during the Second World War and Woodrow Wilson in the First World War were very anxious that the wars should result in a different world order that they should result in a world order in which nations work collectively to defend each other that they work collectively to ameliorate conditions in the world or to remove conditions in the world that might cause wars. And so I would argue that alliances involve much more than simple military arrangements that they involve this sharing of goals, shared interests, sharing of values in some cases. And so I'm going to be going with the second rather broader definition but that doesn't mean that fear and the fear and the possibility of a threat aren't very important ingredients in making an alliance. The grand alliance in the Second World War was something that Roosevelt with support from Churchill who was always more cynical I think about the possibilities of a liberal international world order. But the alliance in the Second World War was something that President Roosevelt thought and a number of smaller powers thought was going to result in a better world order. The United Nations was meant to provide the sort of collective security that the League of Nations had failed to provide. And it was meant to again deal with some of the problems in the world that helped to cause wars. A number of the institutions and organizations from the League of Nations were in fact carried over into the United Nations and continued to carry out the same sorts of things that the League had tried to do. Getting rid of gun trafficking for example, getting rid of slavery, improving working conditions around the world and trying to deal with some of the inequities and injustices in the world. So that the possibility and the hope was there in the Second World War that the grand alliance would carry over into peace time and begin to make the world the sort of place where another war, even worse, because the weaponry would have become even worse, even worse in the First and Second World Wars, would not happen. And so there was I think a very real sense that the grand alliance, Britain, British Empire, United States and the Soviet Union, would come together as the three great world powers after 1945 and build a different sort of world. Well of course often the problems with alliances, the reason they come into being will disappear. The grand alliance would not have come into being I think without Hitler. It is highly unlikely given the histories and the outlooks and the ideologies and the values of the three great partners in the grand alliance, it's without Hitler they would not have come together and I'll talk about that a bit in a moment. But of course it was the fact of Hitler attacking Britain, threatening the United States and then attacking Russia and then after Pearl Harbor declaring war on the United States that created the grand alliance. They had no choice but to come together and as so often with alliances they stayed together to win the war but as the end of the war drew closer the glue that held them together began to dissolve and began to weaken and the very real differences between the three great parties to the grand alliance is grand alliance began to show up. And of course one of the most difficult things with alliances and I think we're seeing this today with NATO and with the coalition which is the even wider coalition the NATO which is supporting Ukraine is that alliances like any relationships have to be nurtured and maintained and very important in any alliance is at least some congruence of attitudes some overlapping of values if you have completely incompatible partners then it's highly unlikely that they're going to be able to work together. And of course one very important ingredient of an alliance is the building of trust the hope and and laying the fear that one party to the alliance will go off and make a separate piece with whoever it is they're fighting. Napoleon managed to hang on to power I think for so long because partly he was able to make separate pieces with the parties that eventually came he made a separate piece with pressure he made a separate piece with Russia he made a separate piece with Austria he never made a separate piece with Britain and neither side neither Britain or France were prepared to do that but Napoleon was able I think to last as long as he did because he was able to maneuver among those who had opposed him and it was only at the end at the sixth attempt that metanich the great Austrian Chancellor managed to bring a coalition together which stuck together just long enough to defeat Napoleon so there is always that danger that one party in an alliance will see that its interests are not being met feel that it's not really worth fighting in this particular struggle thinks that peace might be better and it's certainly something that in the Second World War Stalin in particular was very conscious of he never trusted the capitalist powers and he had some reason not to trust them but he was nevertheless I think unlikely to trust them he had a deeply suspicious nature and was heavily influenced he saw the world through the eyes of his own theories Marxist theories Leninist theories and his own contributions to them and he felt that it was impossible that he could ever entirely entrust what he saw as capitalist powers and he was always watching out for signs that Britain or the United States that Churchill or Roosevelt were talking to Hitler in 1942 for example he sent a telegram to his ambassador in London Micey and said all of us in Moscow have gained the impression that Churchill was aiming at the defeat of the USSR in order then to come to terms with the Germany of Hitler or brooning at the expense of our country and throughout the war much as I think the French had felt in the First World War throughout the war he had felt that the British and the Americans actually wanted to see the Soviet Union bled dry by the German invaders so that they could eventually then come in and scoop up parts of it and so maintaining an alliance takes a great deal of diplomacy takes a great deal of reassurance takes a great deal of care it's not something you just make and then leave it and it simply works it takes a great deal of time and energy one of the reasons that Roosevelt announced at Casablanca in January 1943 it was really his idea but Churchill went along with it that the allies would have a policy at least the British and Americans would have a policy of unconditional surrender was to reassure Stalin that there was no way that they were going to make any sort of deal with Germany that Germany would have to be utterly utterly defeated that did not alas actually allay Stalin's fears and so a very important part of the Grand Alliance in the Second World War is the highly personal diplomacy not just the meetings between the leaders there were only two meetings between all three leaders one at Tehran in the autumn of 1943 and then the other one at Yalta in February 1945 by the time the three leaders of the United States Britain and the Soviet Union met again in Potsdam Roosevelt was dead and he'd been replaced by President Harry Truman and Churchill was going to be replaced halfway through because of the general election that was held in Britain so much to Stalin's amazement Churchill was defeated and Clement actually appeared in his stead in Potsdam but those meetings of the leaders I think were terribly important because the in the case of Churchill and Roosevelt they did know each other personally in the case of Stalin neither man knew Stalin and it was very important I think that they should meet what was also important was the contacts and the missions that was sent between the leaders of the three great powers Roosevelt said sent perhaps his most trusted emissary Harry Hopkins who had been with him since the early 1930s since the beginning of the New Deal and he sent Hopkins as soon as Germany had attacked in Barbarossa in 1940 in 1941 he sent Hopkins to Moscow to talk to Stalin and this was I think a very important indicator of the importance that he placed on the relationship and he was to use Hopkins a very sick Hopkins Hopkins who had to be lifted off airplanes given blood transfusions who volunteered had nevertheless to do it Hopkins was his emissary he sent Hopkins for the last time in 1945 and the trip pretty much killed Hopkins but this was very important if you couldn't meet and of course meeting was was extremely difficult extremely dangerous if you look at the trips these men took particularly Roosevelt who traveled the greatest distance and was probably the fray list physically Stalin very only once or twice when he came to Potsdam but when he went to Tehran left left the Soviet Union otherwise he obliged and even so he obliged Churchill and Roosevelt to come to him but if you look at the travels and the dangers of those travels you understand the great importance that both Roosevelt and Churchill placed on the contact that they could make with Stalin when they could not travel themselves they did it through emissaries and they also had a very extensive correspondence which has been edited and published that correspondence often sounds as though it's very casually written and Churchill and Roosevelt will send happy birthdays to Stalin on his birthday or the sentiment congratulations on a victory but those letters that were sent went through the Foreign Office went through the State Department were revised amended every word was very heavily weighed and the same thing with the letters from Stalin back to Churchill and Roosevelt so the communication was seen as extremely important where possible face-to-face but where it not through through letters which was sent which was sent over diplomatic was usually sent over diplomatic cables bringing these three countries together and bringing their three leaders together meant that a great deal of history had to be overcome not just between the Soviet Union and the British and the Americans but initially between the Americans and the British the Americans and the British were moving closer to each other after 1939 after the Second World War broke out in Europe but it was not an easy relationship because there was too much that they remembered they remembered their uneasy relationship in the 1920s and 1930s there was very bad feeling between the United States and the British government over for example the war loans that the American government had raised post 1917 to help finance the Allied war effort and Britain had been a major beneficiary of those war loans the Americans felt the British were dragging their feet on paying them back the British felt that the Americans didn't appreciate the sacrifice they'd made and there was a very bad tempered correspondence plus face-to-face discussions between the British and the Americans throughout the 1920s and where the British would point out just how many lives they'd lost how much they'd paid for the war more or less underlining the point although they didn't quite say so openly the United States had benefited from British sacrifices and the Americans were demanding their blood money in a way that the British felt was very unfair there was also very bad feeling over the Manchurian crisis of 1931 where the British felt the Americans weren't prepared to do enough and the Americans felt the British were expecting them to take a role in the Pacific which they were not yet ready to take I think it goes deeper than that too there were those including President Roosevelt himself who looked back to the American Revolution and said how lucky we were to escape from the British Empire that the British were snobbish the British didn't understand the United States the British looked down on Americans Joseph Kennedy the father of President Kennedy who is the American ambassador in London for the late part of the 1930s complained that the only movies the British ever saw about Americans were gangsters and thugs and cowboys and they gave them a very false impression of what American life was like and the Americans had similar views of the British the British felt the Americans were uneducated and uncultivated not all British felt like this and a great many British people actually had gone to the United States lived their work their new Americans but there were these stereotypes and the Americans had this view of the British as being very snobbish rather a feat very very devious there's a wonderful quotation which I must just find for you if I can find it here from a marshal Slesser who said the trouble with us is that even when we do something really stupid the Americans think we're being very devious and they try and work out what it actually is that we're up to and so I think you had a while you had a willingness on both sides to work together and there was certainly those including President Roosevelt himself who felt that it was definitely in the United States interest that Britain should not be defeated and hoped that the British would be able to hold out and was prepared to go to considerable lengths exceeding perhaps it's still a matter of debate his power to funnel American military supplies for example declaring destroyers obsolete or declaring aircraft were not necessary for the defense of the United States and funneling them to the British there was still those in the United States who felt that the British was simply going to take advantage of the Americans they had done so in the First World War number of those in the American military actually number of the generals in the American army felt that if they're going to fight anyone they'd rather fight the British than the Germans so you do get us you do get these feelings these stereotypes which I think can be extremely important and then of course there are the differences in the ideology the Americans it was not as severe between the Americans and the British but the Americans tended to think the British were not truly Democrats they didn't truly understand what the will of the people meant they didn't understand the glories of the American Constitution and the British tended to feel that the Americans were dangerously populist tended to appeal that American politicians tended to appeal to the lowest common denominator you don't have to agree with any of these but this is certainly how both British and Americans tended to think well if the differences in styles and stereotypes and ideology were great between more significant between Britain and the United States you can imagine how much greater they were between the Soviet Union on the one hand and the United States and Britain and its empire on the other Stalin's view was that they were capitalist powers and as such they were doomed probably to fight each other first but eventually whoever one to turn on the Soviet Union now there is much debate about Stalin's motivations and what his ideas on foreign policy were my own view for what it's worth is that he was in someone who saw through Marxist eyes he believed that capitalism was doomed to eventually fall out capitalist would doomed eventually to fall out with each other he believed that they were the enemies of socialism that if possible they would strangle social socialism in its cradle and the only cradle where socialism had really taken root and where the baby was thriving was the Soviet Union itself and so he saw them as enemies he believed that initially at least the war that broke out was simply a fight Hitler was capitalist United States Britain France all capitalist countries they were simply fighting over who would dominate the world eventually one of them would become triumphant and at that point would begin maybe not right away he tended to think the Soviet Union would have about 30 years would turn on the Soviet Union because that was the nature of capitalism that violent class struggle was the only way in which change was going to take place in the world others have argued that he really was a Russian nationalist and there is some evidence for this partly because he was Georgian who as often people from the fringes of empires become even more devoted to the empire than those who were born into it Stalin was always embarrassed by his Georgian accent and the actor who played him in the many agilatory films that were made about him and modified over time I think he probably had some suggestions and hints from the boss modified over time his Georgian accent so that by the end Stalin was speaking absolutely perfectly fluent Russian in the movies without or the actor playing Stalin without a hint of a Georgian accent Stalin admired he was a great reader he admired leaders like Ivan the terrible and Peter the great enormously there is that famous moment which Molotov recalls towards the end of the Second World War where Stalin is looking at a map and he's looking at the periphery of the Soviet Union he's saying oh yes we got that back we got the Baltic countries back we got part of Poland back he said sort of out loud thinking to himself I've got back pretty well everything that the Tsars had and so I think yes there was a strong element of Russian nationalism in Stalin but I my view is that his etiology as a communist as a Marxist meshed with his Russian nationalism he felt that the Russian proletariat was the most advanced part of the proletariat of the world the most advanced workers of the world that they were the most pure revolutionaries and so in defending the homeland of these pure revolutionaries in Russia he was also defending the future of socialism in addition I think because he had a mast of course enormous power within the Soviet Union he'd come to think of himself as embodying this meshing of nationalism Russian nationalism and socialism that he was essential for the survival of socialism essential to protect it within Russia and essential to make sure that eventually it would be able to spread throughout the world and so I may be wrong but I think this is one of the ways to understand Stalin that in his own mind there was no distinction between being a Russian nationalist and being a profound socialist and no difference between protecting his own power and protecting the homeland of socialism in Russia so that you get very very different views of the world between the what we call the Western Allies the United States and Britain and the Soviet Union and what you also have just as you have between the United States and Britain memories of past differences past insults past hurts past grievances you certainly have those with Russia and the Western powers more with Britain than with the United States Russian views on the United States were fairly as far as their views on capitalist powers went were fairly moderate they tended to see what partly the United States was very far away and so it wasn't a direct threat as the capitalist powers in Europe much closer were a threat but they also tended there was a certain sentimentality which you saw sometimes in the United States as well that the Russians and the Americans were both frontier people they had both expanded across bias continents they had something in common and there was Lenin for example greatly admired American business and production methods something called Taylorism there's a famous industrial engineer who divided up tasks in factories into single to screed tasks so you could build an assembling line and someone would do the same task every time repetitively you could produce much more than if you had someone doing a number of two or three different things and Lenin introduced and Stalin followed his practice the practice of Taylorism into the Soviet Union the 1920s in fact hired American engineers to come and work in the Soviet Union and so although the United States was a capitalist power and therefore tainted as all capitalist powers were in the Soviet mind by its propensity its willingness to fight to destroy socialism it wasn't quite as bad as the others the one for the Soviet Union that was the most dangerous and certainly in Stalin's view you get this was Britain and the British Empire because it vanished so quickly at the end of the Second World War we tend to forget just how powerful Britain looked in the 1920s and in the 1930s and for Stalin the British Empire was the great enemy of the Soviet Union it had been the great enemy in the Civil War which Russia had endured at the beginning of the from 1918 to 1922 and its leader Britain's leader Churchill had been one of the most fervent advocates of intervention against the Soviet experiment against the Bolsheviks in the years immediately after the First World War I mean you're probably all familiar with what Churchill said among his more mild epithets about the Bolsheviks were bloodstained hairy baboons and he vociferously talked in the press in parliament and to his colleagues about sending forces to destroy the Bolshevik experiment in Russia and this was not something that Stalin of course forgot and the Russians did not forget and so they always had much deeper suspicions of Churchill than they did of Roosevelt nevertheless they they regarded both as as being part and parcel of the same of the same of the same type of thinking what Stalin seems to have thought in the case of the Second World War was that well first of all he thought as the Americans had done that the capitalists would fight for a time among themselves he was absolutely shocked when France fell in 1940 he's reported to have said they couldn't have they shouldn't have he thought that the Second World War would be like the First World War that there would be a very long stalemate that the French would fight to defend French territory and that the war would drag on for a number of years and that he and the Soviet Union would have time to repair for what was going to be the inevitable attack at some point by the capitalist powers it's one of the reasons that Stalin did the Nazi Soviet pact with Nazi Germany he felt that he could buy time he felt that he could work on the divisions among the capitalist powers but that he would have plenty of time he was of course to be very very shocked by this but he also as the war dragged on and as the United States came in then thought that once the war was over there would be this period of reconstruction and rebuilding he in fact thought that the United States which by the end of 1945 had become the world's leading economic power responsible for something like 45 percent of all production in the world he thought the United States was going to have to export was going to have to find markets including in Russia otherwise it would have a slump like it had at the end of the First World War and so his assumption was which in many ways was not correct was that the United States would eventually go to war with Britain they too would eventually fall out the United States would probably triumph because it was now much the greater power by 1945 but that he had time and that in the shorter run the capitalist powers again the United States in particular would want to conciliate the Soviet Union want to work with the Soviet Union would want to use the markets which the Soviet Union could provide and if necessary use the raw materials of the of the of the United States so of the Soviet Union and so you get very different views of the world you get these suspicions which come out of the past the only thing I think that could have made this relationship work was as I say Hitler himself that Hitler called into being the alliance that was eventually going to destroy him it was never going to be an easy alliance even between the British and the Americans but of course much more so between the Soviets and the British and the Americans the British and the Americans did have their tensions but they were somehow part of the same family they spoke the same language even if they misunderstood each other sometimes there's a famous moment where Eisenhower I think it was complained and said no sorry it was it was Eisenhower who was there one of Churchill's advisors maybe Allen Brooks said you really clean my clock with that and Eisenhower said you mean he actually fixes clocks there that there can be even when you speak the same language that can be misunderstandings but the British and the Americans developed a much fuller relationship than either ever developed with the Soviet Union there was something like by the end of the war there was something like 10,000 British officials working in Washington on a whole variety of projects from borrowing money to placing orders in American factories to dealing with all the issues of a very very full alliance something like 1.5 million American soldiers American military went through Britain during in the course of the First World War in the course of the sorry the Second World War changing in some ways British society there were tensions when when there were American servicemen here a lot of British disapproved of the American Army's practice of keeping its black soldiers in segregated units and trying to prevent them from going to British pubs and that there were actually protests from the British and in the British press there were also complaints in the famous phrase that sums it up the Americans are overpaid over sexed and over here there were feelings that the Americans were just too attractive to British women they could give them things like nylon stockings they their uniforms were smarter they had more money to spend and so there were always tensions in the relationship and and always unease and there were often very serious disagreements I mean the American military always worried when Churchill was going to meet Roosevelt because they felt that Churchill could be so persuasive he would talk Roosevelt into doing something the Americans didn't want to do so there's always this fear that the British were trying to invigorate the Americans into doing things that the Americans shouldn't do and among a lot of American officials including in the military there was a feeling that the British really were trying to use the Americans to support the British Empire and this you often get in the in the correspondence and in the statements we are not doing this to support the British Empire we're doing it to defeat Japan we're doing it to defeat the part the fascist powers in Europe the British may think that we're going to save their empire for them but we won't and from the top down from Roosevelt himself the Americans made a very clear message that they expected the British Empire would begin to be wound up in fact at Tehran in 1943 Churchill said sorry Roosevelt said to Stalin and poor old Winston he wants to hang on to it all but I really think you know the Indians need to revolt against him it was an extraordinary thing from an American president to stay to the Soviet dictator undermining his own ally Churchill but there was this American attitude that the Britain's time had come it had gone and that was the time of the Americans and the Americans wanted to see a different sort of world as far as the relationship between either the United States or Britain with the Soviet Union went there really was hardly a relationship at all Soviet society was so closed so paranoid about spies so afraid of outsiders that there was no way that large numbers of foreigners could come and live within the Soviet Union the few diplomats who were allowed to come to Moscow were constrained they knew that the people working for them were also working for the KGB they knew they were being spied upon they knew they were being watched all the time they often found it very difficult to meet their Soviet counterparts they were constantly being put off Stalin was often inaccessible Molotov, his foreign minister was often inaccessible and in fact most of those in the American Embassy who worked there for any length of time became profoundly anti-Soviet because of the conditions under which they had to work and because of the suspicion and the walls the suspicion with which they were surrounded and the walls which they encountered a few journalists were allowed to come to Moscow and again they found the same sort of frustration they could not find people to ask questions nobody wanted to talk to them if they did have an interview it would be very much a sort of formal interview where someone would read from a bit of paper and simply make a statement there was none of what Western journalists considered the proper way of asking questions a number of American and British servicemen did come in in various capacities the Soviet Union British sailors for example came into Mamatsk and Archangel they were restricted to a very small area around the port they were told they could go to one club which was set up by as it turned out the KGB with very hand-picked people if they talked to local Soviet women who were actually quite keen to talk to them those local Soviet women often got into trouble a number of them formed relationships with British sailors or other British personnel working there and they were often deported miles away from their hometowns fraternization was profoundly discouraged and the same thing happened with the American air bases in Ukraine which the Soviets very reluctantly allowed to be built the Americans had been pressing for them ever since they came into the war on the Soviet side and the Soviets had been resisting but eventually two or three air bases were built in what is today Ukraine and again the conditions were very restricted American personnel if they went into the local towns were watched the whole time any American the Americans in their innocence had sent Russian speakers to Russia they thought this would make sense children of immigrants or recent immigrants because they thought it would be easy to get on which of course created profound suspicion who are these Russian speakers they must be spies and so they were constantly watched they found in spite of the willingness on the part of a number of Soviet military personnel to cooperate with them they found that anything they wanted had to be requested often requests had to go back to Moscow where they simply disappeared for weeks on end and so there was never the sort of relationship for better or worse that the British and the Americans had that was a much fuller relationship which went right down from the leadership right down into quite often the lower ranks into society at large that sort of relationship simply did not exist between the Soviet Union and the British and the Americans well you probably all know the disagreements and I could list them all but I'll just say something very briefly they disagreed both between the Americans and the British but between the Soviets and the British and the Americans this was never sort of just the British and Americans against the Soviets often it was a three-way disagreement there was disagreements of course over strategy disagreements between and within the British and the American forces over Europe versus the Pacific disagreements over the Mediterranean strategy going into North Africa and then going into Italy and possibly Greece which the British favored disagreements of course over the opening of the second front both between the Americans and the British the Americans were pushing for a landing on the continent much earlier than the British felt that it was possible they were pushing for it in 1942 without the landing craft without the personnel without the forces to do it I mean the American desire I think was premature but the Soviets were pushing for it as well and of course the Soviets were fighting very very hard until Stalingrad in at the beginning of 1943 it was not at all clear that the Soviets were going to be able to prevail against the Germans and so you've got profound disagreements over the opening of the second front and at Tehran Staling was openly sarcastic and if not contemptuous of the British resistance to the idea of a second front he kept on saying it's just a little bit of water I don't know what you're making such a fuss about it was it was even and Roosevelt with Stalin's support got the British to commit to it to a second front there were disagreements and quarrels over resources and logistics again between the United States and the British the United States increasingly the great supplier but also between the United States and the Soviet Union both the British and the Soviet Union felt that the United States was not doing as much as it could that it could be sending more not very grateful necessarily for what the Americans did send I think it's been argued by Phillips Pace and O'Brien and others without land lease we know that the British couldn't have gone on but without land lease the Soviet Union might well not have been able to prevail as it did in the Second World War huge numbers of American cars trucks were poured into the Soviet Union making it possible for the Soviet military to move in ways that they wouldn't have been able to before and the aircraft the Americans provided the technology the Americans provided made a huge difference Stalin mentioned this and accepted with some gratitude during the Second World War but the prevailing line ever since has been that land lease made very little difference that in fact we did it on our own and the Americans sent us some stuff that wasn't that good and we didn't really need it anyway and then of course you began to get disagreements over the peace what is it going to look like what sort of world are we going to have and the disagreements were there at Tehran highlighted at Yalta and confirmed again at Potsdam and there were disagreements over the fate of Germany disagreements over the fate of Poland disagreements over what Europe was going to look like after the war again we don't know entirely what Stalin was thinking but he seems to have thought that it would be possible for the Soviet influence to spread in Europe without the Soviet Union having to impose its type of government he actually said on a number of occasions we can have different kinds of socialism in different countries we can let people choose their own way of getting to socialism but given Stalin's control of the Soviet Union it was unlikely that he would be able to tolerate that in the end he imposed very rigid and strict Soviet control from the top and so not surprisingly after 1945 after the surrender of Germany and its allies the alliance fell to pieces it was already under terrific strain it was already becoming clear by Yalta that they had very different views of what the world was going to be like the Soviets seemed to have thought that they could continue to cooperate with the Americans and the British that they would have this period of peaceful cooperation and they seemed to be making plans for such a period of peaceful cooperation but it was Soviet actions in my view that made that impossible opinion began to turn very swiftly in Britain and even more swiftly I think in the United States against the Soviet Union recognizing the Soviet Union had made the end of the war possible but dismayed at what the Soviet Union was doing in Europe as it imposed its empire in March 1946 Churchill made his famous speech in Fulton Missouri when he talked about the iron curtain and this was something by this point a number of people not just Churchill were feeling had happened I don't think the alliance could have lasted into the post 1945 period it was something that came together for war but it lacked the substance that some of the broader and more lasting alliances such as NATO have had that substance where you have shared attitudes shared values at least enough to make the alliance work well we'll have to see what happens today with the Western alliance and whether it's going to work as well whether it's got sufficient depth and sufficient inter-relationship for it to survive it's under strain and that strain is I think only going to grow on that cheerful note I'll leave you okay folks we can we can settle in now and have a bit of a debate and a chat the better rich and conceptually rich talk okay I think the play is put your hands up please when you have questions if you could state your name and your affiliation that would be great the team at the back have microphones and they will bring them around to to make it nice and clear we might start off with single questions and then add maybe take two or three as we go if if there are multiple questions I at least have three questions so we could just sit here and have fun between us can we start at the very front oh yeah that'll do yeah just Western Association so wrong war unfortunately but the question I have is to what extent do you think the Nazi-Soviet pact impacted reviews of a British and the Americans over Russia and also what Russia was able to do with that pact in terms of moving into Poland and and the Baltic States how far did that do you think impacts attitudes of we yeah I think the Nazi-Soviet pact which was was created just before the Second World War broke out in which they pledged neutrality in the case of a war of a war against either one of them and which of course had the famous secret protocols in which they basically divided up the center of Europe was seen by the British as confirmation of the untrustworthiness of the Soviets I mean they knew what they thought about Hitler already but they felt that the Soviets were completely untrustworthy the Americans I think felt very much the same what they expected certainly the British did and they had quite good intelligence they expected that sooner or later Hitler would probably make a move against the Soviet Union and as the evidence began to come in from that they tried not always very successful of course they were collecting some through Altra so they couldn't the the the decoding at that but actually they couldn't reveal their sources they tried to warn Stalin in a variety of ways that the the Nazis were planning to attack but Stalin was determined that it wouldn't be in the interest of the Nazis to attack he thought you know no good capitalist power would attack when they can get everything they want anyway he was busily funneling whatever the Soviets or whatever the Nazis wanted to Nazi Germany and they got huge amounts of raw materials in return he got considerable amount of technology and equipment so I think the British thought and hoped actually that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany would fall out when Hitler heard that Barbarossa had started he said I think you know he said we may have been saved because if Germany takes on the the Russian steamroller then it is taking on probably too much and Churchill with his great understanding of history remembered what had happened to Napoleon when he went to Russia in 1912 but I think you know I think from the British and American point of view both were as reprehensible as the other I think less was known about the Soviet Union and so there were those on the left who thought it was a sort of paradise because of the tight control the Soviets had far more was known about Nazi Germany and the views I mean I've looked at the Gallup polls which are very useful for this period the American public becomes more and more antipathetic to Nazi Germany even though it doesn't want to fight it but nevertheless it becomes more and more hostile views of the Soviet Union are not so strong not nearly as strong partly because less was known about it I think but once the Soviets become allies in the Second World War there's a very marked shift and again you get it in the United States Stalin becomes Uncle Joe and the Russian bear becomes a cuddly sort of teddy bear and time has Stalin as its man of the year in 1942 it goes too far I mean there's an almost foolish willingness to believe the best of the Soviet Union and occasionally journalists and writers and others are taken on very carefully curated trips and shown various bits of the Soviet Union and write very favorable things again you get that sudden reversal at the end of the Second World War when suddenly it turns out that Uncle Joe isn't so nice and the cuddly bear is in fact a ravening monster grabbing all sorts of Europe and these are the cartoons and so you get that sudden reversal again but the Nazi Soviet pact was seen as a pact between dictators I think the British certainly had very good reason to think that it probably wouldn't last that long I wonder if you can expand on the point about Gallup polls so is this a history of high politics and chiefs of staff or does it extend to ordinary soldiers ordinary citizens I think it has to extend to ordinary citizens certainly in democracies you know what the ordinary Soviet citizens thought was not as important although Stalin was with reason extremely worried about it after the German invasion you know he suddenly did this concordat with the Orthodox Church having torn down every church if you get his hands on and killed a great many priests he suddenly decided the church was represented the soul of Russia and he suddenly starts talking you notice the language changes it's mother Russia it's not the Soviet Union so much and he reintroduces Tsarist insignia into the armed forces so you know I think he is worried and it was one of the things he always worried about in the 30s I think he always worried and because his view of the world was utterly paranoid I think and suspicious he always worried that there were internal enemies within the Soviet Union who opposed socialism for whatever reason who had links to eminent enemies outside he always felt that Russia lived in a world of the Soviet Union lived in a world with enemies everywhere and of course if you came from a national minority inside Russia if you were German speaker or Polish speaker or Ukrainian then you were really dangerous so I think from Stalin's point of view he did care about the public only as far as it could threaten the Soviet war effort and his own position but I think he had enough power and he may have faltered there are stories that he lay drunk in a room after the German invasion which I think are not true but he seems to have lost his nerve for a bit there were a couple of times Molotov and Co he was out at the dacha not saying anything and Molotov and Malenkov I think and a couple of others said we better go and talk to him and they came out to see him and they were coming to ask him to take control of the sort of council of ministers and Stalin was looking apparently very uneasy and said what do you want with me and I think he thought they'd come to bump him off which is how Soviet politics tended to do changes of leadership but sorry this is a long winded answer but I think it was much more important in democracies where governments had to think about elections and Roosevelt always took the pulse of American opinion very very carefully indeed he had digests of the press brought in every day he read the Gallup polls which started I think in 1936 and so he monitored them very closely indeed and he was always very careful never to go too far out ahead of public opinion it's it drove a lot of people crazy because he would not take steps until he was sure the public was with him I mean sometimes he did but he was always very careful and he said once he said he made a couple of mistakes when he took on the Supreme Court in 1937 and got really lambasted for it and he said to one of his advisors it was a great mistake to go further than the American people want to do and I didn't want to find myself out there again was no one behind me so I think you know and but in democracies as the First World War had shown it really matters even in in autocracies it really matters in a war of that scale you have to have the public with you sorry long-winded answer the gentleman at the front thank you Mark Steele formerly of Boston University I thought you might be able to tell us something about how the Dominion countries fit into the Grand Alliance well the Canadians and Australians if I'm speaking of the British Empire were very concerned to make it good they were coming in voluntarily there had been this moment in this First World War where the British had declared war on behalf of the Empire and the Canadians had presented the Australians had presented it the Indians had presented it in the Second World War they declared war separately Mackenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister actually waited for about I think a week before he declared war he had every intention of declaring war on Germany but he waited when he waited after the British had done it and so the Dominions came in very much on their own India was in a slightly different situation because it was partly independent but not yet as independent as Canada or Australia or South Africa or New Zealand and so it still had a considerable amount of British influence but two million Indians volunteered to fight in the Second World War so clearly there was some sort of support in India for it but certainly in the case of Canada which is the case I know best the Canadians simply assumed they would be coming in but they wanted to make it quite clear they were coming in as themselves and the Canadian contribution like the Australian and Indian contribution to the British War if it was enormous I found it intensely irritating in the run up to the referendum campaign on whether to leave Europe there was a lot of talk about how in 1940 we in Britain fought alone and we can fight alone again and we've always fought alone and I thought as a Canadian this is wrong I mean and how many Australian divisions were in the Middle East and in Britain a quarter of all the pilots flying for the RAF bomber command were Canadian you know the huge financial amount the Canadian Navy was taking over part of the convoying on the North Atlantic passage so the British did have on the whole the willing cooperation of their empire not all parts of the empire than some parts of the empire had no choice but certainly the ones that were more advanced and self-government came in willingly can we go down the middle there please there's two can we take two questions together Ems you want yeah yeah let's let's go for the this is Halleke who has just won the Wolfson Prize congratulations what was that and good evening Kristonkin interested amateur and nothing more given the the cracks that were clearly showing in the in the alliance even by early 1945 what what in your view was really going on in Churchill's mind around Operation Unthinkable around the British sorry what was the last word the British Operation Unthinkable Operation Unthinkable the the British plan for attack on the Soviet Union oh so can I can we take two questions okay Paul will you hand it to the lady in blue as well thank you so much sorry Halleke independent scholar I was interested in what you said about trust because I what I have been always interested in is how they undermine each other to give examples at Tehran Roosevelt going off for private chats with Stalin and sort of say well I agree with you totally but I can't say anything publicly because of the presidential election and certainly Churchill's signing of the naughty documents the percentages agree when stopped October 1944 so I was wondering if you could comment on that sure well both of them both involved in Churchill yeah Churchill's plan was I think a plan of desperation and his military thought it was crazy the idea was that if the United States pulled out of Europe after 45 after the war was over which it said it was going to do you know the Americans had no intention I mean they've still got troops here they had no intention of that ever happening you know they were going to go back to the United States they were going to demobilize they were going to go back on to a peacetime footing and so Churchill ordered his military to prepare this plan which I think they mostly thought was completely crazy and the British didn't have the resources they didn't have the manpower the British public would not have gone for it and the Soviets I mean this is what I always say when people say Yalta was a complete betrayal of the center of Europe the Soviets were there you know they were there in force they had millions of troops there and there was no way that the British could have taken them on no I think it was just Churchill stabbing it that the Churchill loved grand schemes most of which you know his military thought were completely impossible you know Alan Brooke who was his chief military advisor said I sometimes think we won't win the war with him I don't know how we'll win it without him you know that was the dilemma the military found on the issue of trust yes no trust is never complete but what Roosevelt was trying to do at Tehran and I think wrongly myself he was trying to show Stalin that he trusted Stalin and that he Roosevelt could be trusted and so when the Soviets came up with I think this highly dubious theory that elements of you know crack German assassination team had landed in Tehran or smuggled themselves into Tehran and were going to kill Roosevelt and said to Roosevelt you'd be much safer staying in the Soviet embassy Roosevelt accepted the invitation in order to show that he completely trusted Stalin of course Roosevelt's room was bugged according to Barry's son's memoirs and the Russians would sit there listening to Roosevelt and people talking saying don't they know we're listening to them you know they couldn't believe that they would talk so freely also that people would disagree with Roosevelt because you didn't do that with Stalin in quite the same way but I think what Roosevelt was trying to do there was to show Stalin that he could be trusted and he was trying to detach himself from Churchill as the imperialist Churchill the Americans thought that the British were probably more imperialist and more determined to hang on to the empire than they actually were they mistook I in my view Churchill for being typical of all as being typical of all all British politicians in fact we know the Labour Party were quite prepared to see the empire being wound up over the next years after the war ended so I think what was happening then and was certainly it was very hurtful to Churchill I think in a way Roosevelt behaved badly but he said in a letter to a distant cousin Daisy Stucley who he wrote a lot to it he said you know I'm just going to pull Winston's leg and I'm going to sort of show Joe that you know Uncle Joe that he can trust me that I'm really a good guy it was unkind to Churchill and there were a couple of occasions when Churchill got extremely upset and sort of marched out but he did then Roosevelt did then sort of make it up to Churchill so that I was ribbing you a bit he said but you know I had to show Joe that you know we I have differences of opinion with you and and I think Churchill understood it not that he had much choice he had he had to rely on Roosevelt but you're right I mean it was I think sorry very unfortunate episode and I think Churchill was badly treated and I'm not sure it made Stalin trust Roosevelt any the more I mean both Churchill and and Roosevelt had I think highly unrealistic ideas of what Stalin was really like you know Roosevelt said at one point you know you look into his eyes and you can see he went to a seminary it's like George Bush looking into Putin's eyes and seeing his soul you know not very convincing they also developed this series certainly Churchill did and Roosevelt went on with it whenever they got a rude letter from Stalin they said oh that's his ministers that's his hard line ministers that's the bad Stalin and then they'd get a sort of friendly thing or a happy birthday from Stalin and they said that's that's that's Stalin you know so they explained away some of the cruelties and insults that came from Stalin and as Stalin grew more confident he became often more brusque and they explained it away by saying that's just he's been pushed by his his hard line ministers and he's not really like that shall we take two from online and then Paula we might take two questions at the frontier all right we've got one question from our online audience this is from Mark Bowen who writes it's axiomatic that there are no friendly intelligence services though the Five Eyes may be an exception can you talk a bit about the relationship between the grand alliance and intelligence sharing okay that's all for us for now okay go do you want me to yeah I'd say answer that and then we'll okay I think I know who asked that question who knows much more about if it's Mark Bowen he knows a lot more about intelligence than I do there was intelligence sharing Churchill shared a lot of the ultra-intelligence with Stalin before Barbarossa took place reports and also reports that have been picked up by British diplomats in in capitals around the center of Europe where they would have German military attaches saying we're going into Russia next month you know the fact that I mean it was fairly obvious I mean the Germans had moved huge numbers of troops close to the Russian border when when Stalin raised it with the Germans they said oh we're just giving them a rest from France and they just you know need a bit of fresh air and you know completely unconvincing Hitler said there's completely unconvincing the trouble with intelligence sharing particularly if you're sharing it with the Soviet Union is they're only going to believe what they want to believe and they're probably not going to trust you anyway because they're going to think you have an ulterior motive for doing it and so although Stalin got a lot of warning about Barbarossa about the German invasion of the Soviet Union he tended not to believe it he thought the British were trying to embroil in him in a war with with Hitler which of course is what the British wanted but in fact they were pursing on legitimate intelligence but he was not prepared to believe it and when you have someone as suspicious as Stalin he tends to mistrust everything that comes across his desk and so he simply when he got reports and he had highly placed spies in in Berlin when he got reports from Berlin he tended to think it was misinformation again he said it you know it may be the British trying to get us into a war with trying to get us into into a war with them with Germany and we simply will not fall for it and then you got just before Barbarossa that very strange episode of Rudolf Hess landing trying to find the Duke of Hamilton who he felt was a sympathizer landing in a field much the bewilderment of the Scottish farmers who found him there and Stalin was was I think fairly persuaded that this was a plot of the British and that Hess was bringing some sort of peace offer to the British and the British were going to then try and encourage the Soviet the Germans to attack the Soviet Union so there was intelligent sharing with Stalin but he tended not to believe it the British and the Americans did share a lot of intelligence and they had developed in fact a very close relationship and shared intelligence even before the Americans came into the war they had begun to do that and so I think they trusted each other and that relationship was one that survived and I think survives up to the present day in spite of blips in the relationship as as the Five Eyes in general has survived okay Polish let's take so I can see kind of three pockets of questions let's do a question down here so can we go up front and you want to take it back there okay we'll take a pocket of questions there can you do two or three questions please sorry folks then we'll go you and then we'll come over here we have do you need a pencil you can keep it hello hi thank you for the amazing talk that was excellent I'm a recent professor graduate from Bristol and I was amazed by your anecdotes you gave about the personal relationship between Churchill and Stalin and stuff and I was wondering what do you think if they were different people if they weren't Churchill it wasn't Stalin do you think the alliance would have been affected by that and in what way okay thank you me I don't have the question thank you hi yeah I'm from Kingston Ontario so hi from home yeah and I was actually just wondering you know we talked about the big three a lot but what something that like a country like Canada contributed to the alliance that's like an unsung story that isn't really talked about but you would know a lot about sorry I missed the end of that that was like something that the Canadians contributed to the big three or the alliance so the Canadian part of it okay yeah that isn't really talked about because we focus a lot on obviously the big three sure should we go with that maybe you could add in China as well I don't know what China and the Second World War yeah just to make it easy for you okay well the personalities I think are interesting I mean there's always this debate among historians especially well not just those of us who do political history or history of international relations how much do the personalities matter and you know the you don't want to say they matter entirely on the other hand I don't think you can discount them sometimes and I think we look at the world today would we have the war in Ukraine without Putin would we have China following a particular policy that it's following safe towards Taiwan without Xi Jinping if President Trump gets reelected will that make a difference to American policy I think so so you know who is in positions of power occupying powerful offices with the capacity to use those offices and to make decisions does matter I think in the case of the of the Second World War the big three personalities are very important partly because they had very large and powerful countries and in the case of the British and Empire but also because you can see reflected in their personalities some of the decisions that are made yes they had advisors in the case of Stalin he he tended to dominate all decisions you know the people around him were essentially broken men they did what they were told I mean you know you're Molotov you're his foreign minister he's got your wife off in the gulag you know are you going to disagree with him really well Molotov did more than the others but you have to be very very careful how you do it and so Stalin and Stalin took an intense interest I mean one of the things he did do was work extremely hard and huge amounts of material went across his desk and he made notes on it I mean this is this has been explored in the archives so I think the personalities matter and I think Churchill laid himself out he was both important as a British war leader and particularly I think in 1940 I think later on I think he often advocated some very bad policies or listened to perhaps to the wrong advisors but I think he laid himself out to charm Roosevelt and I think he largely succeeded Roosevelt was a very tricky and difficult customer but I think as much as he liked anyone he did like Churchill although he never again completely trusted him and Roosevelt I think was enormously important Roosevelt in his own way and whether you think this was good or bad I mean he's still a divisive figure in the U.S. but Roosevelt managed to get the United States into the war or managed to get it ready for war before Pearl Harbor and I think this was very important he moved the Americans towards thinking that war was coming and he made lend least possible and before where the huge amounts of American equipment were basically given to the Soviets given to the British first and then when the Soviet Union was attacked given to the Soviets on the understanding they'd eventually return them which everybody knew wasn't probably going to happen you know a used truck that's been battering around on the Eastern front isn't going to be much use five years later but it was very very important indeed and whether another politician could have done it and finessed it in the way Roosevelt did I don't know so I think the personalities were important of course so was a lot else so were the productive capacities the fact that the United States could outproduce the Japanese outproduce the Soviets outproduce the Nazis outproduce you know the capacity of the United States was extraordinary you know by the end of the war they had 150 aircraft carriers the Japanese I think had at most 15 the Americans were just producing and producing that the capacity was huge on Canada the Canadians were very much junior members of the Alliance a couple of important meetings were held in Quebec and Mackenzie King Canadian Prime Minister who knew both Churchill and Roosevelt knew Roosevelt quite well they'd met first at Harvard before the First World War and Mackenzie King was one of the few people Roosevelt invited to come and stay at the White House so the two of them and they would sit around in the evening and talk about the world and I think there was a sort of friendship there but they but Canada was at the meetings but not in the big meetings so in Quebec Mackenzie King actually says in his diary and in the diary is worth reading you may have read it says in his diary I did feel a bit like a sort of superior sort of battler you know I made sure everything was okay but I wasn't invited in to the end of meeting but the Canadians were consulted and they were a major player I mean they helped to finance the British war effort and by the end of the war it's hard to believe but I think we had the fourth biggest army in the world our armed forces in the world partly because some of the others of course have been destroyed as far as China goes it was a real difference of opinion I think in the case of Stalin he was watching what happened in China he did not want to get involved in a war with Japan I mean he'd signed a non-aggression pact with Japan in 1940 after some fighting on the common frontier and he was very reluctant to fight on two fronts and only came into war against Japan in the last few weeks which he eventually promised to do when it looked like he was safe on his eastern front in the case of the United States Roosevelt had this plan and I'm not sure quite what it was based on that China would become one of the four policemen of the world that after the war was over there'd be the Soviet Union the British Empire of the United States and China and together they would form a sort of group who would help to make the world a safer place help to provide stability he pushed China to become a member a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council he pushed China to be brought into a number of international conferences and I think he saw China as a force for stability in the Far East once Japan had been defeated in the end that wasn't what happened but Roosevelt seems to have had this hope that China would become something more important than it was this was Chiang Kai-shek's China not communist China in the case of Britain the British I think were less persuaded of the potential of China I mean they were perfectly happy to trade with China to look after their investments in China but they had few illusions about the nature of the Guomindang government and so I don't think they particularly saw China as being important but they went along with what Roosevelt wanted because the Americans were doing the bulk of the fighting in the Far East and it was their war essentially Okay let's take Eddie and then Yeah, Eddie O'Sullivan specialist in the Italian campaign I think very much for dealing with China because 80 years ago in November was the Sexton Conference involving Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek and they had a plan so that's the big four there was a big four then actually shouldn't you be talking about the big five because in 1943 there was a summit in Casablanca involving Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and the French the next protest was occupied but it was an alienation and this month in Italy the French army was being reconstituted under General Joanne so can you share with us you dealt with how Stalin viewed and Churchill viewed China I'm interested in what Churchill thought China and how the three the big three viewed the other one which is France which is an ally and is going to play a very important role in the liberation of Europe Yeah, can we ask the lady here at the front as well and take two questions is that okay because I think there's a lot of people with questions and and I'll try and not I'll try and be very short yeah I think yeah yeah firstly I just wanted to say thank you for such a fascinating lecture my name is Devin I'm a recent graduate of the war studies department in your most recent book you talk about the role of human nature and sort of the wise and how's of why humans go to war and so I was wondering building off of that and the tendency that humans have to form groups and tribes are there any sort of relationship or behavioral patterns that we can apply to alliances at the national level apply to alliances at the national level yes that's interesting well I'll deal with that first because as you know there is a great debate among the evolutionary biologists and others and historians such as me about what actually determines human behavior and are we condemned by our biological inheritance to fight do we have certain behavior patterns and there's been some very interesting research done on this and clearly we have certain traits as a species that the fear or fight flight or flight or fight is something which seems to be ingrained in us and seems to be ingrained in our closest cousins the chimpanzees who are very close cousins indeed do we fully know what we're doing and what motivates us and I'm sure we don't I mean I'm sure we like certain people and we don't like other people instinctively not because of anything they say or do but we get a sense I mean I do think we have that but I think that's mediated through culture in my view and that we are products of our cultures and people behave in certain ways because of the culture in which they grow up and so you look at the ways in which cultures have changed in Germany for example where you got what could be called a militaristic culture certainly in certain parts of society up to and including the Second World War that's gone or Sweden in the 17th century if you were in any part of Europe during the 30 years war and you heard the Swedes were coming you cleared out I mean they were not coming to give you IKEA and barriers from the forest they were coming to rape, loot and pillage I mean they were dreadful they were absolutely ruthless and so I do think it's a debate that will go on and I think the more we learn about human impulses and human biology I think the more interesting it gets I was just reading something earlier today that Freud wrote about how much we are creatures are impulses and how he felt that we were divided between what he called Thanatos or no between Eros and Thanatos Eros was not sexualized love but Eros was love of life and what and Thanatos was the love of death and so it's love versus death and he felt that these impulses were always at a war within us but I think culture plays a huge part whatever the truth of that culture plays a huge part in mediating the ways in which we behave the things we think value and none of us I think or very few of us are natural soldiers natural killers that's why there's so much training in the military you have to take people and turn them into someone who will risk his or her life and be prepared to take another's life you know that's why you know the training has a purpose and it's not just learning to march nicely it's learning to do things which may go against your deepest instinct so a debate that goes on and I don't know the answer so maybe you'll find out more about it in the course of your work I hope as far as France goes yeah I mean look all as the Americans wanted to make China into a policeman and China was not equipped to do it I mean the other the the sufferings of China I mean China had been fighting since 1931 Chiang Kai-shek had lost a good deal with his army he was also facing a very strong communist force in the northeast of China it was highly unlikely the British had no illusions about Chiang Kai-shek's regime it was also deeply corrupt the Americans I think knew some of that but I think they still thought that if they promoted Chiang Kai-shek and they promoted China they would be able to manage which is perhaps why the corresponding American shock when China fell to the communists you know that the more they had bulked up China the more horrified they were when it didn't work and then there was all that ridiculous stuff in the 50s of we lost China or who lost China which which had never been there's in the first place as far as France goes it was similar but a bit different but the British definitely wanted France as a European power again they felt that the continent of Europe they worried about as did many people the revival of German power and there was talk initially of dividing Germany up into its component parts or turning it into some sort of little agricultural paradise the Morgantau plan where all Germans would be sheep farmers and have no industry I mean it was completely unrealistic it was always a fear of the revival of German power as had happened after the First World War and I think with France the British very much wanted France as a bulwark against that France still had an empire it was still a world power and the Americans I think had an un-reasoning dislike well it was easy to dislike to go and the Americans and the British certainly did at times but the British saw his appeal to the French and believed he was the only Frenchman who could actually bring the country together they had no faith in some of his opponents like Giroudou they simply didn't think that he had the capacity the Americans absolutely couldn't stand the goal and resisted as long as possible recognizing as the leader of France but they found themselves unable to stop him as many did the goal was sort of unstoppable so I think but it was an analogous situation but in the case of France France did manage to get a workable government which Chiang Kai-shek was increasingly less able to do okay we have four minutes so can I take Paula can we go around this side because these very patient thanks I don't know yes we'll take that one and then is there a gentleman with stripy jumper we take those two that's it folks and then you can answer it as you please okay thank you all right Alexander Chalofsky from the National Archives you sort of mentioned a little bit what Hitler what Stalin thought about Hitler and the capitalist powers what did sort of Roosevelt and Churchill think of Stalin did they think him as sort of a a realist Russian nationalist you could be contained or someone bent on world revolution yeah stripy jumper thanks Eleanor thank you Emile Wilson King's College Alumni at War Studies as well thank you for your lecture and so final question I guess is in your opinion despite how the grand alliance faded out towards the end of the war or in 1945 do you think there's enough recognition amongst the the western allies of the horrid experiences that the Soviets experienced when in the war against the Nazi Nazi Germans yeah well on Stalin I don't think most people outside the Soviet Union understood the full extent of what the Soviet Union was like because there were so few sources that they could find out from you know there was so little capacity on the part of western powers or journalists to find out and so the the diplomats as I've said were so limited in what they could do there was I think concern and in some cases shock in the west about the show trials there were reports of collectivization and the horrors that were caused by the forced collectivization of the Kulaks but I think the full extent of what was happening was not properly understood and you got what Lenin would have called useful idiots who went to the Soviet Union wrote glowing was shown you know shown sites I mean there was a famous case where I think a party of American women possibly including Eleanor Roosevelt were taken to an orphanage which was filled with fat happy little children playing games the real orphans had been sent away for the day and these were the children of the KGB who got better food than anyone else you know there was a lot of stage stuff like that and then there was the notorious whose name I'm now forgetting correspondent of the New York Times what was it yes Walter Duranty who they used to be a plaque on the wall of the New York Times for his honest reporting they've since taken it down or they've amended it who said everything is great and you know what are people complaining about or the webs or Bernard Shaw who went to Russians you know so said it's all wonderful and people look very happy and I don't know what everyone's complaining about so there was a lot of illusion about the Soviet Union and I think a full understanding of what Stalin's regime was like was very difficult to get even for the Russians themselves or the Soviet people themselves and so I think you know I think Stalin was seen by both Churchill and Roosevelt of someone who was very tough who'd come up through a revolutionary world who fought his way up I don't think they ever quite realized just how many crimes he'd committed or been responsible for and as far as Stalin as a war leader I mean yes the Soviets made terrible sacrifices and the war on the Eastern Front was fought as Timothy Snyder and others have pointed out with absolute brutality and any lack of restraint I mean it was a war of extermination the Germans Nazis treated the Soviet prisoners of war appallingly they shot huge numbers of the population including of course the Jews but not just the Jews they killed ethnic minorities everywhere I mean they were they treated the territories they conquered as theirs to do whatever they wanted and what they wanted to do was fearful and frightful and so there was I think the war on the Eastern Front was appalling my own view was it was made much worse by Stalin he eventually backed off but in the initial stages of the war he interfered with the generals and he told them not to retreat so for example something like a hundred thousand I think Soviet soldiers were surrounded at Kiev because he would not let them retreat rather like some of the orders that Hitler used to give if you look at the initial Soviet losses in the first six weeks of Barbarossa the first two months of Barbarossa they're absolutely hideous and a lot of that is because Stalin would not allow his military to retreat he eventually learned to back off and he learned to let people like Zhukov do what they did but he fought as the I don't want to say the Russians always do but he certainly fought as Putin seems to fight with very little regard for how many lives he was losing he simply doesn't seem to have cared about how many were killed it was irrelevant to him after all he'd already killed a great many of his own people in the 1930s he was not someone who shrank from casualties for death Happy? Yeah well no not to end on that note sorry I apologize but perhaps we all need a drink yeah well it's in a day like this takes a lot of organization may I thank my fellow directors of the St Michael Howard Center Mark Kondos who's standing at the back Christina Goulter who's sitting here at the front Bill Philpott and I'm Jonathan Fennell I'd also like to thank Megan Hamilton who's our postgraduate lead at the center and the the comms team Megan at the front here and the comms team who've done a lot of the heavy lifting that's now market yeah yeah and finally may I thank Professor Margaret MacMillan for giving us a marvelous annual lecture thank you thank you