ALLIES: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin

Churchill was in the political wilderness between the two World Wars, increasingly unpopular as he warned against appeasement of Hitler and the relentless militarisation of the Nazi empire. Roosevelt was a good-looking playboy whose wife Eleanor gave valuable support in his career when he became American President in the middle of the Great Depression. In Russia, Stalin was a ruthless operator who stepped into Lenin's shoes after World War I by eliminating his rival Trotsky and murdering millions of peasants who resisted land reforms, not to mention his own former colleagues. The three world leaders had little in common but in an extraordinary throw of the dice they co-operated to defeat Hitler. This highly readable account of the three men, their careers, their policies and their political triumvirate, is a page turning history of the biggest crisis of the 20th century. In June 1941 Hitler had failed to break British morale with the London blitz, and had concluded that the might of the British Navy, with more than a thousand warships and even greater reserves of warplanes, would quickly put paid to any attempted invasion. He therefore turned his attention to the east and in violation of a non-aggression pact with Stalin invaded the Soviet Union. Churchill had repeatedly warned Stalin that the Nazi Panzer divisions moving into Poland could mean only one thing, but Stalin had dismissed both the intelligence and 500 of his own Soviet army generals, leaving him with no option but to join the Allies when disaster struck. He also sent a posse of spies to the west to steal the secrets of nuclear weapons. 1941 saw the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought America into the war. When the map of Europe was finally carved into three at Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt had no illusions about the fate of the eastern bloc. 464pp, paperback, maps, black and white photos.