
Allies at War
How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World
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Narrated by:
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Tim Bouverie
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By:
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Tim Bouverie
About this listen
A landmark history of the alliance that won the war and made the peace, by the critically acclaimed author of Appeasement
After the fall of France in June 1940, all that stood between Adolf Hitler and total victory was a narrow stretch of water and the defiance of the British people. Desperate for allies, Winston Churchill did everything he could to bring the United States into the conflict, drive the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany apart, and persuade neutral countries to resist German domination.
By early 1942, after the German invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the British-Soviet-American alliance was in place. Yet it was an improbable and incongruous coalition, divided by ideology and politics and riven with mistrust and deceit. Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin were partners in the fight to defeat Hitler, but they were also rivals who disagreed on strategy, imperialism, and the future of liberated Europe. Only by looking at their areas of conflict, as well as cooperation, are we able to understand the course of the war and world that developed in its aftermath.
Allies at War is a fast-paced, narrative history, based on material drawn from more than a hundred archives. Using vivid, firsthand accounts and unpublished diaries, Bouverie invites listeners into the rooms where the critical decisions were made and goes beyond the confines of the Grand Alliance to examine, among other topics, the doomed Anglo-French partnership and fractious relations with General Charles de Gaulle and the Free French, and interactions with Poland, Greece, Francoist Spain and neutral Ireland, Yugoslavia, and Nationalist China.
Ambitious and compelling, revealing the political drama behind the military events, Allies at War offers a fresh perspective on the Second World War and the origins of the Cold War.
©2025 Tim Bouverie (P)2025 Random House AudioCritic reviews
“Tim Bouverie has done a remarkable thing: He has found a novel and illuminating way to tell the story of World War II, and in so doing he has given us an important and timely study of the centrality and the complexity of alliances. This is a terrific book.”—Jon Meacham
“In Allies at War, Tim Bouverie fully lives up to the dazzling reputation he won with Appeasing Hitler. Again, he combines depth of research shrewdness of judgement and lightness of touch. The result is an absorbing read as well as a major work of history, illuminating the drama and complexity of modern history’s greatest and yet most troubled alliance.”—Robert Tombs, author of The Sovereign Isle
“A sweeping, fast-paced narrative of one of the great turning points of the 20th century. Deeply researched yet highly readable.”—David Reynolds, author of Mirrors of Greatness
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