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This is history caught in close, relentless focus: The war of the summits between Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, with occasional walk-on parts for Chiang Kai-shek and - teeth gritted - that impossible posturer, de Gaulle.
Generals and admirals come and go, like the campaigns they fight, but the
three men who matter most have to stay on and on - and somehow stick together. They are not friends: Their aims and interests differ hugely.
They are sick in body and sometimes in soul. But common enemies and common desperation bind them, in extremis.
Jonathan Fenby poses yet again the eternal question of political coverage: Is it policies that matter, or personalities? How can America's New Deal for a new post-conflict world subdue Britain's imperial obsessions or Soviet communism's ruthless appetite for an empire of its own? Such base motives are always there or thereabouts, just above or just below the surface. But it is human chemistry that binds this bizarre coalition.
Everybody is either ill or old, or both. Roosevelt, the youngest of the trio, is a wheelchair-bound encyclopedia of mortal ailments perennially hovering near death's door. Churchill, the oldest, is a fat, cigar-puffing alcoholic who lives on rich nosh, adrenalin and his own heady rhetoric. And Stalin, already beginning to drown in vodka, murders more millions than the Fuhrer who sought to defeat him.
So how do they get on? First in the scheme of things, Churchill and FDR must find a shared wavelength. That isn't as easy as it first appears.
These chieftains, who wage a war from day to day, spend inordinate time worrying about their pet dreams if it's won. Roosevelt sees free trade as a universal panacea, and British imperial preference as a rock that bars its way.
Roosevelt is physically weak and, towards the end, mentally enfeebled, too. He rambles and nods at Yalta - and collects much criticism for it - but in truth the die was cast several years before. Britain tried and failed to drag American public opinion into uniform on its side: Only Japan turned that trick. But even Britain and America together would probably have been doomed too had the Red Army, some 10 million-strong, not brought Hitler's panzer divisions to a grinding halt and drained Germany's resolve.
Russian resilience - and then its unconquerable resolve - were the keys to victory. But they also locked away freedom throughout much of Europe for half a century.
The most dismaying episodes in this account come from unexpectedly callous calculations. Churchill bargains solo with Stalin. Give us Greece and you can have a 50-50 share of influence over Hungary, with 75-25 in Bulgaria. Let's wheel and deal and settle this whole sordid thing in a cigar-smoke-filled room. You want Bulgaria at 90-10? Okay, we can wear that.
And so on, and so disreputably forth. Maybe the London Poles need Churchill's support against Stalin's Lublin puppets, but they don't get it when cold winds begin to blow. The liberties that Britain and America supposedly hold dear are abandoned in a trice. Realpolitik rules, okay.
That doesn't stop Churchill performing his familiar pyrotechnics. But his influence wanes year after year. He, and his bankrupt country, seem busted flushes: Empty vessels devoid of influence. The ideas that win - for a United Nations, an International Monetary Fund and a World Bank - are FDR's; the troops who triumph and divide belong to Stalin.
Fenby, a superb researcher, tells a compelling story brilliantly well and lets the most important facts shape his conclusions. We had leaders and they led, didn't they? No. We had titans when we needed them, and they found a way to tower over the smoking ruins the Nazis left behind.
* Published by Simon & Schuster
- OAMARU MAIL