Can "anything new be said about the Second World War", asked Adam Sisman in The Observer. "Unexpectedly the answer is yes."
Among the "surprising facts" I learnt from this "revelatory book" are that pro-Russian feeling was so strong in Britain in 1942 that "War and Peace" became a bestseller, and that Mahatma Gandhi considered Hitler "not as bad as he is depicted".
A "work of old-fashioned diplomatic history", "Allies at War" focuses on the fraught and often shifting alliances between the countries that opposed the Axis powers: chiefly Britain, America, the Soviet Union, but also the Free French (led by Charles de Gaulle) and China. In the foreground are the "Big Three" leaders – Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin – but there are also "walk-on parts" for a host of foreign ministers, ambassadors and emissaries. Although Tim Bouverie has clearly done his research, he doesn't let this overwhelm his narrative, which is consistently lucid, entertaining and witty.
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In public, the Allies were mostly "models of civility", said Caroline Moorehead in The Spectator. But privately, their dealings were beset by "ancestral grudges", "profound suspicion" and differing views on the "sort of peace they sought".
Bouverie charts their fallings-out and reconciliations with "great sensitivity and sometimes humour", said William Waldegrave in The Independent. His book starts with "British policy based on the presumed rock of the French army" – a faith crushed in May 1940 when Nazi tanks rolled into Paris – and with "Stalin supporting the German economy and war machine". It ends with Roosevelt (and to a lesser extent Churchill) so "genuinely" trusting of "Uncle Joe" that they agree to "horrible things" at the Yalta Conference of 1945, not least the repatriation of thousands of eastern Europeans "to their deaths in the Soviet Union".
A big strength of Bouverie's book is how it takes in many of the War's lesser-known struggles and connects them to its main narrative, said Andrew Roberts in The Telegraph. He covers the Iraqi revolt of May-June 1941, and the sacrifices made by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist China (which lost around 15 million people) – and shows how these created "stresses and strains" which impacted relations between the Big Three. As well as being historically illuminating, his book is also "extremely timely" – for it comes at a time when, thanks to Donald Trump, the Western alliance that has "kept the peace between the Great Powers for 80 years" is under strain as never before.
