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The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin

The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin

Robin Edmonds
3.7/5 ( ratings)
This is an absorbing study of success and failure on a grand scale. of three men who changed their nations and the map of the world in our time. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin are twentieth-century icons, their actions and personalities still commanding awed attention five decades after their deaths. Not until this brilliant account by an eminent diplomat and historian, however, has anyone fully traced out how the Big Three conducted a fight to the finish against common enemies across the world and how they reacted personally to each other not only at Tehran and Yalta but also at less-heralded meetings and through urgent, frank, and, at times, abrasive communication.

By narrating their wildly disparate paths to power, Robin Edmonds shows how the three leaders were tempered in peacetime by personal and political adversity for their wartime roles. By 1941, as Hitler breached the Nazi-Soviet agreement, launching a massive attack on Russia, the odds weighed heavily against the eventual allies.

The furious drive of the Nazi war machine had already claimed most of Europe when Churchill and Roosevelt held their first meeting as leaders of their nations off the Newfoundland coast. From that conference came the ringing declaration known as the Atlantic Charter; more important, as Robin Edmonds writes, it gave the British prime minister a chance to size up the American president, who would lead his nation into a grand alliance after the Japanese attacked Pear Harbor.

A year later, the prime minister's plane touched down in Moscow where Churchill had his first face-to-face meeting with Stalin. "To make friends with Stalin would be equivalent to making friends with a python," wrote one of Churchill's aides, yet the two leaders reached an apparent accord for an eventual opening of a second front in Europe to alleviate the military blows that were hammering the Soviet Union.

Drawing on material from sources not previously explored, Robin Edmonds chronicles the firming of the alliance as the Big Three exchanged frequent communications through correspondence and emissaries. He then shows how their military and political strategies evolved, leading up to the fateful conferences at Teheran and Yalta, the only occasions where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin all met together. Edmonds provides a dramatic picture of the play of personalities at the conference and a fresh perspective on the decisions reached by the Big Three on the remaining stages of the conflict and the political contours of postwar Europe.

In the final chapters, rifts among the wartime allies emerge, rifts that separated the lofty aims of the Big Three for the world after the war from hard political realities. In the face of mounting strains, similar to those that caused the downfall of the triumvirate of ancient Rome, a brief period of attempted negotiation gave way to a cold war of threat and counterthreat. Forty-five years later, Europe is, in Edmonds's concluding words, being offered "a second chance."
Language
English
Pages
512
Format
Hardcover
Release
January 01, 1991
ISBN 13
9780241129401

The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin

Robin Edmonds
3.7/5 ( ratings)
This is an absorbing study of success and failure on a grand scale. of three men who changed their nations and the map of the world in our time. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin are twentieth-century icons, their actions and personalities still commanding awed attention five decades after their deaths. Not until this brilliant account by an eminent diplomat and historian, however, has anyone fully traced out how the Big Three conducted a fight to the finish against common enemies across the world and how they reacted personally to each other not only at Tehran and Yalta but also at less-heralded meetings and through urgent, frank, and, at times, abrasive communication.

By narrating their wildly disparate paths to power, Robin Edmonds shows how the three leaders were tempered in peacetime by personal and political adversity for their wartime roles. By 1941, as Hitler breached the Nazi-Soviet agreement, launching a massive attack on Russia, the odds weighed heavily against the eventual allies.

The furious drive of the Nazi war machine had already claimed most of Europe when Churchill and Roosevelt held their first meeting as leaders of their nations off the Newfoundland coast. From that conference came the ringing declaration known as the Atlantic Charter; more important, as Robin Edmonds writes, it gave the British prime minister a chance to size up the American president, who would lead his nation into a grand alliance after the Japanese attacked Pear Harbor.

A year later, the prime minister's plane touched down in Moscow where Churchill had his first face-to-face meeting with Stalin. "To make friends with Stalin would be equivalent to making friends with a python," wrote one of Churchill's aides, yet the two leaders reached an apparent accord for an eventual opening of a second front in Europe to alleviate the military blows that were hammering the Soviet Union.

Drawing on material from sources not previously explored, Robin Edmonds chronicles the firming of the alliance as the Big Three exchanged frequent communications through correspondence and emissaries. He then shows how their military and political strategies evolved, leading up to the fateful conferences at Teheran and Yalta, the only occasions where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin all met together. Edmonds provides a dramatic picture of the play of personalities at the conference and a fresh perspective on the decisions reached by the Big Three on the remaining stages of the conflict and the political contours of postwar Europe.

In the final chapters, rifts among the wartime allies emerge, rifts that separated the lofty aims of the Big Three for the world after the war from hard political realities. In the face of mounting strains, similar to those that caused the downfall of the triumvirate of ancient Rome, a brief period of attempted negotiation gave way to a cold war of threat and counterthreat. Forty-five years later, Europe is, in Edmonds's concluding words, being offered "a second chance."
Language
English
Pages
512
Format
Hardcover
Release
January 01, 1991
ISBN 13
9780241129401

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