The Mistake That Saved the World with Tim Bouverie

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1:27Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk to some of the brightest minds about everything surrounding the written word. That's everything. That's from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Before we dive in, make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to leave a review. Good or bad, I want to hear from you. I want to hear whether you're enjoying it or where we can improve. I can take the hits, so let me know. If you don't like something, say it straight. Now, let's get into it.

2:10Joining us now on Open Book is Tim Bovary. He's a historian and a bestselling author. and by the way, I was delighted to receive this because you know, I'm a huge World War II buff. I got this, I think from your publisher, Tim. Okay, so that's the one from the publisher. This is the one that was purchased at Hatcherts. Okay, right there on Piccadilly. And the title of the book is Allies at War, How the Struggles Between the Allied Power Shape the War and the World. What a brilliant exposition. And of course, you have my good friend, James Holland on the front of your book, praising the book. And I want to start right there because he also wanted me to ask you a question from him, which I'm pretty sure you're prepared for.

2:55He thinks that you have overtipped the scales on Russia winning the Second World War. You've bought into a little bit of the Russian propaganda of their great patriotic war. And that was really the Americans that supplied all the equipment. What say you, Tim, before we get into the book? Hey, everyone, it's Anthony Scaramucci here with some straight talk. Let me tell you, we've got 85 % of our viewers who haven't hit the subscribe button yet. What's up with that? It hurts. Listen, I've been my career by going all in. Right now, only 15 % of our viewers are part of our subscribed family. So please take action.

3:30This helps us book more amazing guests. Hit subscribe, join our community, and let's turn these numbers upside down. Now back to the show. I think that's a big mischaracterization of what I believe. I just wrote an article for the Times in which I argued, and indeed it's my thesis in the book, that without American lend-lease material, the Soviets could not have continued the war on the East, despite the fact that we know that they had unlimited human resources. It is the American and British, one should acknowledge the British contribution, material that allows the Soviets to keep on fighting.

4:06So I think James Holland needs to maybe reread a bit of the book. Okay. Well, I got some of that from the book, but I do think that there's some tension now. I guess there's some revision and some tension in that whole debate about the war and ultimately the Russians getting to Berlin ahead of Eisenhower, etc. But let's go to you for a second. Tell us a little bit about your background. So I studied history at Oxford University, and then I went and worked in television documentaries, history and political documentaries, which led me to Channel 4 News, a terrestrial news channel in the UK, where I worked as a political journalist for five years.

4:48And during that time, I started working on my first book, which was called Appeasement, Chamberlain, Hitler, Lurt Churchill and the Roads to War about the 1930s, the build up and lead up to the Second World War. And that came out in 2019. And this is the sequel. Okay, well, this is I got to go back and read that one. Actually, I haven't read that one. But I love I love this book because it's it's so rich in I mean, I feel like you're in the room with these people. So let's talk a little about your writing style. How did you get, are you also a fiction writer or? No, I'm a mere historian, not a fiction writer.

5:29I read a lot of fiction, but I don't write it. Right. Well, I found the book so compelling. I felt like I was in this story with you. There's two great books written, I think in the, maybe the late 60s, early 70s called The Winds of War by Herman Wolk. I don't know if you've ever heard of those books, but it's an American novelist who got turned into a TV series. But when I was reading your book, I was like, wow, you have all the content, but you have this very rich narrative going at the same time. Bring the readers into the room for a second where history turned. Let's go to, I want to go to some stories about Tehran, a little bit about Yalta, Washington, and Moscow.

6:12But let's start in Tehran for a second because it's a fascinating pivots to what's going on in the war. Certainly is. So Tehran occurs in November 1943, and it's the first time that the big three allied powers, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, have met together. Churchill has met Roosevelt several times beforehand off Klesendia Bay in Newfoundland, in the White House. He's also traveled to Moscow and met Stalin in August of 1942. But this is the first time that they all come together. And for the British, it's a pretty disagreeable experience because for so long, Britain has been alone. And then there has been this Anglo-American partnership and burgeoning friendship between Roosevelt and Churchill.

7:01But this is upset at Tehran because the Americans, quite rightly, I should point out for a strategic point of view, are determined to hold the Brits to a commitment to reinvade France in the spring of 1944. And this has been the consistent demand of Stalin and the Soviets pretty much since Operation Barbarossa commenced in June of 1941. But to Churchill's horror, he finds himself outnumbered and outvoted by Roosevelt and Stalin and also outmaneuvered. Roosevelt is a very, very wily politician. He's a great man. But as I write in the book, almost everything I think that you can say about Franklin Roosevelt, you can also say the exact opposite.

7:45He was one of the most open and charming of politicians, but he was also cold and devious. He was a great idealist, and yet he's also the consummate master of realpolitik. And you see all of these really fascinating different facets of his personality in play at Tehran. It's interesting because he had a detachment, anybody that knew him, if you go to the oral histories of the war, they say exactly what you're saying to him, that he had a remarkable detachment about him where if he had to cut you loose, it was no problem. He could have been your friend for 15 years, but if it was politically expedient to cut you loose, he would do so.

8:27So Nigel Hamilton, a fellow historian, wrote a trilogy about Roosevelt. I want you to react to it. He felt that Roosevelt had a better understanding of what was going on in the war than Churchill. He overruled Churchill a few times in North Africa. He overruled. Churchill wanted to invade the Mediterranean, and Roosevelt stuck to the Normandy invasion. Um, do you, did you see that in your research that you felt that there was a little bit of a brinksmanship going on between Churchill and Roosevelt in terms of the way they were handling strategy in the war? There certainly was. But at the beginning stages of the Anglo-American alliance, it wasn't so much Roosevelt as the U.S.

9:10chiefs of staff and General Marshall and the Navy who wanted to cross the channel at the earliest possible date. They wanted to cross the channel in 1942 or 1943. And I'm not a military historian, but I don't know any military historian that thinks that the 1942 D-Day would have worked. I think a 1943 D-Day is also extremely problematic. And so to give great credit to Roosevelt, he supported the next best thing and did not allow his chiefs of staff to cut ties with the British and focus on the Japanese in the Pacific, which is what a lot of Americans, for understandable reasons, wanted. where i think churchill showed far less judgment than fdr was in his appreciation of or lack of appreciation of china fdr saw that china was going to be a great power very very soon and he wanted china to be on the western side specifically the american side and churchill was encumbered by his imperialist victorian prejudices couldn't see that where however i think churchill was a bit more realistic than Roosevelt was in the moments of pessimism, not the moments of optimism, but the moments of pessimism he had about Stalin and future cooperation with the Soviet Union.

10:25There are quite a lot of instances where Roosevelt assures not just Churchill, but his own cabinet and his own advisors, I can handle Stalin. I'm a very persuasive guy. I'm good at diplomacy. And I think that this guy will work with me and that his post-war intentions are limited. and that, of course, turned out not to be the case. Are you a yo-yo dieter? You diet, you lose weight, but gain it all back plus a few extra pounds. Then later, you lose it and regain it again and again. It's dangerous. Studies show that increase your risk of heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and other health problems.

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11:50That's code OpenBook20 at TakeLean.com. Yeah, well, he was also sick, right? I mean, this is the problem. And he probably overestimated his personal talents, if you will, but he also got sick. Let's go to Yalta. He's sick in Yalta, basically, right? He's having a hard time physically. He's got congestive heart failure, high blood pressure. How do you think that factored into the decision-making? There's absolutely no doubt that FDR was not on his best form at Yalta. He had all of the conditions that you said. He had only six weeks to live. But in my book, I downgrade the importance of Yalta for two major reasons.

12:33One is that the policies which Roosevelt pursued at Yalta were not revolutionary. They were the same policies he'd been pursuing since 1942, which was to come above all to an understanding with the Soviets that would bring the Soviets into this new international organization that he wanted to create, the future United Nations, and that would bring the Soviet Union into the war against Japan, which before the successful test of the atomic bomb was projected to last for a further 18 months. I don't think, therefore, that his illness at Yalta really made a huge amount of difference. He certainly didn't give Churchill the backing that Churchill wanted on Poland.

13:16But then again, neither of the allies, neither the British or the Americans could do much about Poland by Yalta, by February 1945, when the Red Army was already there. If FDR and Churchill really wanted to put pressure on Stalin, then they had to try and make it clear to him that the future Grand Alliance was dependent upon some degree of freedom for Eastern Europe, even if there were security arrangements. And that the stick they had with which to beat Stalin to get this was, as we mentioned at the start of the podcast, all of this huge amount of material that the Americans and to a lesser extent, the British were giving him.

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14:36Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from make it happen to made it happen and keep striving. Visit Strayer.edu slash Jack Welch MBA to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Shevin as many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street North in Arlington, Virginia. You know, I mean, I learned so much in your book, but I want you to say it in your words. There's these different images from the, you know, like when you're a schoolboy in the United States and you learn about Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin, you don't see the complexity that you're describing in your book and also the tension that there was in that alliance.

15:19I mean, there was obviously, you know, stories of Roosevelt tweaking Churchill at Yalta to try to, you know, show Stalin that there wasn't that Anglo-American closeness and so forth. In your own words, Tim, tell us a little bit about each of these figures that people perhaps wouldn't know from basic research on the three of them. Well, I describe the alliance of these three men as improbable and incongruous, because it was. Nobody could have expected it at the beginning of the war. FDR is proclaiming American neutrality, and Stalin is allied with Hitler. He has unleashed the war and is carving up Eastern Europe with the Nazis.

16:04There are certain similarities between Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin. They all had a reverence for history. And I know, Anthony, you love history. So that's one thing you have in common with the leaders of the big three. Stalin was a voracious reader of history books, as was Churchill. Neither Churchill nor Stalin went to university. They all had a great sense of themselves. None of them were shrinking violets. None of them were shy. But thereafter, their worldview views were very, very different. And it's obvious to point out the major differences between Stalin and the Western leaders, the Western leaders believing in democracy, freedom of speech and expression and all of that.

16:48But the Roosevelt-Churchill conception of the world was fundamentally different. It was Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher who was stationed in Washington during the war, who said that Churchill was essentially a man of the 19th century. He was an imperialist who saw the Pax Britannica succeed, whereas Roosevelt was a far more modern thinker in so many different ways. And there was a huge amount of tension between the two of them. But he was also an anti-imperialist, right? I mean, Roosevelt was very critical of imperialism. Exactly. And it was a longstanding American goal to dismantle the British Empire.

17:27And particularly, and very ironic given what's going on at the moment, to end this system of tariffs, which protected the British Empire, known as imperial preference. Long before the Second World War broke out, the Roosevelt administration, particularly Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, was obsessed with the idea that tariffs caused international tensions and ultimately wars. Of course, there was the other commercial side of this, which is the US being the largest credit nation in the world, the richest nation in the world. The opening up of these markets would be hugely advantageous to the United States.

18:02And the U.S. has lived off that economic dividend right up until the present. You see, Tim, that's the big irony that is misunderstood by a large group of Americans in the population. We open those markets and we slightly disadvantaged ourselves in the trading system to create a hold on those people for American products. And people have a tendency not to remember that, of course. So there's some great irony there. But go back to Stalin for a second, because the brutish criminal, obviously war criminal, kills, I mean, you know, with the, I don't think it's as well known how many genocidal deaths Stalin perpetrated as opposed to Hitler.

18:49So let's talk about him for a second. Stalin had certainly been responsible, not just for a few more deaths, but millions more deaths than Hitler by the beginning of the war in 1939. He had killed almost three million Ukrainians, deliberately starved them to death as part of a purpose famine in the early part of his time. He was a paranoid zealot. He absolutely believed in his brand of Marxism. And the ultimate end justified any possible means, the ultimate end for this socialist state. It didn't matter how many people died. And the West did know about this, but it was far less reported than actually the atrocities that occurred in Germany during the 1930s, not least because the West was to a far greater degree responsible for post-First World War Germany, and that under Hitler, it was Germany, not the Soviet Union, which was clearly the coming power threatening the Western world and European security.

19:59But there were a lot of people who thought that the Western powers, the Western democracies could not claim to be fighting a just war, particularly at the beginning when the Soviet Union was allied with Hitler, if they declared war merely on Hitler, but not on Stalin. Stalin, I mean, he's curious, because on the one hand, I think he comes out of my book as one of the best negotiators of the big three. But we must also remember he miscalculated. He miscalculated badly, badly. He made this deal with Hitler, which then rebounded spectacularly when Hitler turned on him and he almost lost not just himself and his regime, but the entire Soviet state.

20:38He was completely shocked and flabbergasted about the attack. He didn't expect it. He actually had signal intelligence that suggested it was going to happen and he rebuked it. He didn't believe it. It's just an amazing story of these different things. Let me ask you an alternative history question. And I want you to think about this, what mistakes did Hitler make and what strategies and potential luck did the allies have to turn the course of the war? So, one of the mistakes obviously is going into Russia, don't you agree? I mean, I think that was a big mistake. He could have controlled most of Central and Western Europe had he not done that for a pretty long period of time.

21:24What are some of the mistakes and what are some of the strategies you think that were successful for the Allies? Undoubtedly, the invasion of the Soviet Union is the greatest mistake, a cataclysmic mistake. But before that, a slightly less obvious one, though tied to it, would be if Hitler had continued the invasion of France with the invasion of Spain, and there were plans for this, it was known as Operation Felix, then the Germans could have closed the Mediterranean to the British. And suddenly, all of Britain's Middle Eastern and North African interests are severely imperiled. German U-boats operating off the west coast of Spain could have wreaked havoc on Britain's Atlantic convoys, Britain's lifeline during the Second World War.

22:09And it was this that Hermann Goering, Hitler's right-hand man, when he was incarcerated at the end of the war, told his American interrogator had been the Fuhrer's greatest mistake. He said it was his failure to invade Spain. I also think at the time when Britain is alone, Churchill is an incredibly inspiring figure and his words have a great effect. But you can only ask a people to sacrifice everything, blood, toil, tears and sweat, the works, when they feel the real sense of danger, when they feel the sense of an impending invasion. And the irony of the Blitz and things like that is it didn't crush British morale.

22:47It brought the Brits far more together. If Hitler had just stopped after the fall of France, maybe he consolidates in the Balkans. Maybe he invades Spain. If he didn't begin to attack Britain, if he didn't attack the Soviet Union, after a while, the voices of appeasement, those voices which I wrote about in my first book, would have resurfaced because everyone knew that there was a potential case of stalemate here. Because of the Royal Navy and because of the RAF, Britain could survive, but she could not win. Britain couldn't win without allies. Britain needed the US. Britain needed the Soviet Union.

23:31And after a while of two or three years of extreme rationing and all the other hardships of war, people would have sort of started to ask, well, what's the exit strategy here? What does victory look like? The U.S. isn't coming into the war. And we could talk about this, but I really don't think that you ask what were moments of Allied luck. As tragic as it was, Pearl Harbor turned out to be a massive bit of Allied luck because I don't really believe that the U.S. was coming in anytime soon were it not for Pearl Harbor. Well, let me ask you this. It's hypothetical, of course, but Hitler declares war on the U.S.

24:08right after Pearl Harbor, before the United States can declare war on Hitler. Do you think Roosevelt would have declared war on Germany, contemporaneous to Japan? No. And Roosevelt was very clear on this. There were members of the Roosevelt administration who said, Mr. President, you've got to take advantage of this. You know, the people's blood is up. We can even manufacture links between Germany and Japan. We can say the Germans helps them. And he is so cautious. we're all prisoners Anthony of our own history and our own experience and FDR had watched as his hero Woodrow Wilson had got ahead of US public opinion and US congressional opinion and being unable to sell the Treaty of Versailles sell the League of Nations to a highly isolationist American public and FDR was determined that he wasn't going to do that so in his famous speech to Congress where he asks for a declaration of war.

25:05There's only, by the way, one moment of rhetoric, which is the famous day of infamy moment. There's not a single mention of Germany. And while I do think that thereafter, America would have joined the European war by the nature of alliances, Japan and Germany working together, it would have happened at some stage. It could have taken quite a long time. It certainly wouldn't have been imminent. So that is another massive bit of luck for the Allies. Yeah. So again, the thing that I'm also fascinated by in your book is that there's so many incidental things that are happening. We read history like it's a Hollywood script and there's a happy ending, at least for the allies.

25:44But the way your book reads to me is there was so many improbable things that had to happen for us to have the ending that we ultimately had. Because one of the things that struck me in the book, and you have just unbelievable, unexpected details in this book. But one of the things that struck me is in 1942, British readers were pro-Russian. They were reading War and Peace. It became a bestseller, as you point out in the book. What do moments like that tell us about how public sentiment shifted with the alliance? Well, there were foreign policy experts in both Britain and in the State Department, famously George Kennan and people like that, who despaired of the facts the British and the Americans, were swept up with pro-Soviet sentiment.

26:31Uncle Joe, right, Tim? Uncle Joe. And after the Wehrmacht had been driven back from the gates of Moscow and then been encircled at Stalingrad. And it's very interesting, the Soviet Union was far ahead of Britain in polls taken in America of which allies you admired most. Because they were doing most of the fighting. the biggest battles were being fought on the Eastern Front. And everyone was prepared to forget what Uncle Joe had done in the 1930s. And even people who were deeply anti-communist. There's, I mean, a lovely memorandum I found in an archive, which I put in the book, showed the British ambassador, Lord Halifax, being questioned by a group of Republican congressmen just after Operation Barbarossa.

27:16So America's not yet in the war. Hitler's just invaded the Soviet Union. And these Republican congressmen are really skeptical of the idea of allying with Soviet Russia. And Halifax, who was very anti-Soviet himself, just said, a man at the bottom of a hole will accept the arm of a gorilla, even if it's his only way out. And the Republican congressman said, well, but what if the gorilla turns on you when you get out of the hole? And he said, we will cross that bridge when we come to it. And that was it. Everyone's making sacrifices. The great sacrifices the British and the Americans are making politically are they're having to sacrifice their principles and they're having to make a real moral judgment and strategic judgment as to what is the primary enemy here.

28:01And they're having to say to themselves that, yeah, it's better to go along with Uncle Joe's lies about the massacre of some 21 ,000 Polish officers and the Katyn Forest. It's better to not break up the alliance over the Soviet failure to help the Poles in the Warsaw Uprising. It's okay to accept all of these incredibly hypocritical remonstrances from Uncle Joe about you not throwing division after division across the channel to be mown down by German machine guns. All of this has to be done for the bigger picture. Amazing. So I'm at the point in this podcast where I have my producer and I come up with five words, Tim, and then we just want you to react to these words as we close out the podcast.