Saving Stalin: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Cost of Allied Victory in Europe

Historian Kelly (Never Surrender) offers a solid look at the evolving relationships among FDR, Churchill, and Stalin that led to their cooperation to defeat Germany in WWII. Kelly begins in June 1941, as Hitler violates the 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact by invading the Soviet Union. After some initial German successes, Stalin’s forces managed to stall the advance, which was hampered, according to Kelly, by the Nazis’ hubristic expectations that the campaign would be over quickly, rendering the need to supply German troops with winter-appropriate clothing and gear superfluous. Kelly details high-level discussions among Allied leaders in Washington, D.C., Moscow, and Yalta, and is particularly good at conveying how victory over Hitler was far from inevitable. He describes numerous instances that could have altered the course of WWII, such as when a navigational error almost brought Churchill’s plane within range of German anti-aircraft guns in January 1942, but ends the book rather abruptly with Stalin’s May 1945 victory speech, offering little insight into the postwar dynamics among the U.S., U.K., and Soviet Union. Occasionally overwrought prose (“soldiers began to grab death by the waist and dance her across the sodden fields just for the thrill of it”) distracts from Kelly’s firm grasp of the history and the personalities involved. The result is an enjoyable but nonessential account of the alliance that won WWII. (Oct.)