Saving Stalin

September 1, 2020
Historical account of the relations between the three Allied leaders during World War II. Kelly begins on June 22, 1941. Having dismissed repeated warnings from Britain, his spies, and Red Army units along the border, Stalin remained stubbornly loyal to his friendship treaty with Hitler, so that day's massive German invasion caught the Soviet Union unprepared. After the opening, the author alternates between the fighting and Stalin's subjects as they tried to get along and manage the various campaigns. Although certainly as evil as Hitler, Stalin may have been less of a megalomaniac. Both micromanaged their armies with terrible consequences, but a year of disaster persuaded Stalin to step back; thereafter, he often took his generals' advice. Although it was Stalin's own fault, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the violence and casualties, and he never let Churchill and Roosevelt forget it. Many Russian historians have argued that the Allies deliberately held back their armies, only jumping in once the Wehrmacht was in full retreat in 1944. The conventional portrait of Roosevelt and Churchill as a harmonious team was only accurate early in the war. By 1943, with America the dominant partner and exasperated at Churchill's reluctance to support a cross-channel invasion, Roosevelt began calling the shots. A gifted politician, he believed he could deal with Stalin better than the conservative Churchill, and historians give him low marks for the results. In his defense, Kelly points out that ruthlessness is a poor substitute for intellect. With the Red Army on the spot, Stalin had no trouble installing puppet governments throughout Eastern Europe. His goal--protection from a resurgent Germany--proved unnecessary, and the satellites produced only trouble and expense for his already dysfunctional economy. The author relies mostly on secondary sources, but he chooses them well. As a result, this is high-quality history that will disturb only readers who learn about WWII from the History Channel. A well-rendered popular history describing war and great men.

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September 28, 2020
Historian Kelly (Never Surrender) offers a solid look at the evolving relationships among FDR, Churchill, and Stalin that led to their cooperation to defeat Germany in WWII. Kelly begins in June 1941, as Hitler violates the 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact by invading the Soviet Union. After some initial German successes, Stalin’s forces managed to stall the advance, which was hampered, according to Kelly, by the Nazis’ hubristic expectations that the campaign would be over quickly, rendering the need to supply German troops with winter-appropriate clothing and gear superfluous. Kelly details high-level discussions among Allied leaders in Washington, D.C., Moscow, and Yalta, and is particularly good at conveying how victory over Hitler was far from inevitable. He describes numerous instances that could have altered the course of WWII, such as when a navigational error almost brought Churchill’s plane within range of German anti-aircraft guns in January 1942, but ends the book rather abruptly with Stalin’s May 1945 victory speech, offering little insight into the postwar dynamics among the U.S., U.K., and Soviet Union. Occasionally overwrought prose (“soldiers began to grab death by the waist and dance her across the sodden fields just for the thrill of it”) distracts from Kelly’s firm grasp of the history and the personalities involved. The result is an enjoyable but nonessential account of the alliance that won WWII.