The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin

by Robin Edmonds

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 (particularly Soviet) 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."

Genres: History

512 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Robin Edmonds attended Oxford University, where he studies classics and was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1940. After five years service in the Second World War, Edmonds joined the British Foreign Service, in which he served until his retirement.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

David Edmonds’s examination of the wartime relationship between Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin sits at an interesting juncture in the historiographical chronology of the Second World War. Written by a veteran who served in the conflict, it was written at a point when he was able to benefit not just from the major British and American disclosures about the role played by secret intelligence from the war, but as well from the preliminary access to the Soviet archives in the glasnost era at the end of the Cold War. This gives Edmonds the best of both worlds: the revelations from the unveiling of decades of secrets, coupled with the personal insights of someone who not only lived through the era but spent his postwar career as a distinguished member of the British Foreign Service.

At least that’s the promise. Unfortunately, the reality proves to be very different, as the strengths of Edmonds’s study are too often offset by deficiencies that limit the value of his study. The first is its ostensible focus on three of the most dominant personalities of the twentieth century. While any book featuring Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin together has an abundance of good material, too often the author digresses into expositions of the events that they are addressing. Some background is undoubtedly necessary, but too often Edmonds’s book becomes more a Euro-centric international history of the war. It’s not bad, but it’s also not what was promised by the author.

The narrative Edmonds provides is well-written and engaging enough to be a good introduction to the conflict for anyone unfamiliar with the overall events of the war against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Yet he fails to offer the same fresh look at the context that he provides into the relationship of the “Big Three,” as the text is riddled with minor errors, misconceptions, and disproven assumptions. Claiming that Franklin Roosevelt “might have run for either party” when he entered politics, for example, is predicated on a superficial understanding of the Roosevelt family’s involvement with New York politics. Stalin’s nickname “Koba” is Georgian in origin, not Turkish. The decision to halt the German advance short of Dunkirk in May 1940 was not a choice but a necessity dictated by problems of geography and supply. And so on. Any of these longstanding misconceptions might have been corrected with just a little additional research, yet Edmonds prefers to recycle them in what is ostensibly a fresh take on a familiar subject.

None of this is helped by the sense that Edmonds felt it necessary to pad his book. Though any assessment of the interrelationship between the world leaders is not really possible until May 1940, when Churchill joins the ranks of Roosevelt and Stalin as the head of a government, Edmonds spends roughly a third of his text covering events up to that point. Such coverage is necessary, but the amount of space devoted to it is excessive, and detracts from the ostensible focus on the relationship between his three main subjects. Many important subjects that would have benefited from closer and more detailed examination are addressed only in passing, leaving the reader wanting for more.

These criticisms might have mattered less when the book was first published in the early 1990s. But since then a wealth of new material had become available, which has informed many new studies. And while most of this does not alter Edmonds’s basic points, they make his book increasingly obsolete. Those readers desiring a good (if Euro-centric) international history of the Second World War focused on the leaders of the three main powers will find much to value in Edmonds’s clear prose and interesting arguments. But with newer studies such as Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship and Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership available today, readers seeking to learn about the subject would be best served starting with these more up-to-date examinations before turning to Edmonds’s useful but dated and flawed, work.

[Joe Kloss · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Big Three was a very interesting book to read especially since it's a topic about WWII that I did not know existed. The fact that these three world leaders were able to work together to try and end the biggest war in human history amazes me. They are all from different countries, one is a paraplegic, the other is Russian, and the last is on an island nation that is under siege by the Luftwaffe. This book captures that story in an interesting way and I recommend this to anyone interested in military and political history.