Abstract
For those of us engaged in studying Anglo-American relations in the twentieth century, the Second World War is a high point. Whether or not that struggle is the only time that any sort of ‘special relationship’ existed is debatable.2 What is certain is that the wartime period is crucial, in one way or another, to any understanding of the broader, longer-term aspects of Anglo-American relations and relationships.
Comments and questions at Michael Hogan’s diplomatic history seminar at The Ohio State University prompted me to develop further my ideas and offer them as my contribution at the Callum MacDonald Commemorative Conference, ‘Global Horizons: US Foreign Policy after World War Two’, held at the University of Warwick, 23 May 1998. My thanks to the organizers, and also to the conferees for their advice, particularly Lloyd Gardner of Rutgers University. I am grateful to David Reynolds of Cambridge University for his comments, and to the Master and fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge, for the Churchill Archive By-fellowship in spring 1998 that provided the quiet-time needed to work on this chapter.
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Notes
Witness the excellent studies by Charles S. Campbell, From Revolution to Rapprochement: The United States and Great Britain, 1783–1900 (New York: Wiley, 1974)
Bradford Perkins, The First Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1795–1805 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1955);
Among the more important assessments of the ‘special relationship’, in order of increasing scepticism, are: the essays in Wm. Roger Louis and Hedley Bull (eds), The ‘Special Relationship’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986);
David Reynolds, ‘A “Special Relationship”? America, Britain and the International Order since the Second World War’, International Affairs, 62, 1 (Winter 1985–86), 1–20;
Alex Danchev, On Specialness: Essays in Anglo-American Relations (New York: St Martin’s Press — now Palgrave, 1998);
Alan P. Dobson, ‘Special in Relationship to What? Anglo-American Relations in the Second World War’, in Peter Catterall and C. J. Morris (eds), Britain and the Threat to the Stability in Europe, 1918–1945 (London: Leicester University Press, 1993);
Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978);
John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995).
Raymond Seitz, Over Here (London: Trafalgar Square, 1998), and the broad popular survey, Fighting With Allies: America and Britain in Peace and at War (New York: Times Books, 1996), by the British diplomat, Sir Robin Renwick.
Percy Craddock, In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major (London: John Murray, 1997), which manages to be remarkably informed and uninformative at the same time.
James Field, ‘American Imperialism: The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book’, American Historical Review, 83 (1978), 644–83.
The text is James T. Patterson, America in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).
Warren F. Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill and the Second World War (New York and London: Wm. Morrow and Harper Collins, 1997), 209.
Kolko, The Politics of War (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1968);
Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957);
McNeill, America, Britain, and Russia: Their Co-operation and Conflict, 1941–1946 (1953; New York and London, 1970);
Arthur S. Schlesinger, Jr, ‘Roosevelt’s Diplomacy at Yalta,’ in Paola Brundu Olla (ed), Yalta: Un Mito che Resiste (Rome: Edizioni dell’ Ateneo, n.d. [1987]), 137–58;
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945: With a New Afterword (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
R.C. Raack, Stalin’s Drive to the West, 1938–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
Among other historians taking up the Raack position are Remi Nadeau, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt Divide Europe (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990);
Elena Aga-Rossi, ‘Roosevelt’s European Policy and the Origins of the Cold War: A Reevaluation’, Telos, 96 (Summer 1993), 65–85; and the essay by
Norman Davies, New York Review of Books, 42, 9 (25 May 1995), 7–11.
W.F. Kimball, ‘Churchill, Roosevelt and Post-war Europe’, in R.A.C. Parker (ed), Winston Churchill: Studies in Statesmanship (London and Washington: Brassey’s, 1995), 135–49.
Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (6 vols; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948–53).
On the influence of Churchill’s memoirs see W.F. Kimball, ‘Wheel Within a Wheel: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Special Relationship’, in Robert Blake and Wm Roger Louis (eds), Churchill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 291–307.
Warren F. Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War (New York: William Morrow, 1997);
Warren F. Kimball, David Reynolds and Alexander Chubarian, Allies at War: The Soviet, American, and British Experience, 1939–1945 (New York: St Martin’s Press — now Palgrave, 1993).
For statistics on military forces on the Eastern Fronts see David Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).
Generally see Richard Overy, Russia’s War: Blood Upon the Snow (New York: TV Books, 1997).
W.F. Kimball, “‘Fighting With Allies”: The Hand-Care and Feeding of the Anglo-American Special Relationship’, in D.F. Schmitz and T.C. Jespersen (eds), Architects of the American Century: Individuals and Institutions in Twentieth-Century US Foreign Policymaking (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 2000), 34.
and Overy, ‘Co-operation: Trade, Aid and Technology’, in David Reynolds et al. (eds), Allies at War (New York: St Martin’s Press—now Palgrave, 1994), 201–27.
See, for example, Dennis Dunn, Caught Between Roosevelt and Stalin: America’s Ambassadors to Moscow (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998), which epitomizes the self-righteous contempt, and ahistorical anger of the new perfectionists.
For those with doubts about Wilson’s abiding hostility to Bolshevik rule in Russia, see David S. Foglesong, America’s Secret War against Bolshevism: US Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Gerhard Weinberg, A World At Arms (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
See Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
Callum A. MacDonald, The Lost Battle: Crete 1941 (New York: Free Press, 1993).
William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell, 1962);
Anders Stephanson, ‘Fourteen Notes on the Very Concept of the Cold War’, in Georoid O’Tuathail and Simon Dalby (eds), Rethinking Geopolitics (London: Routledge, 1998), 62–85.
Charles Maier, ‘The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Foreign Policy after World War II’, International Organization, 31 (Autumn 1977), 607–33.
For a sampling of those few who have examined the ‘external’ New Deal, though none comprehensively, see Barry Karl, The Uneasy State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983);
Alan Milward, War, Economy and Society: 1939–1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977);
Lloyd C. Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964);
Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
Carolyn W. Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–49 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries, 3 vols (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959–67), particularly ‘A New Deal in International Economics’, vol. III, 228–78;
Lloyd C. Gardner, ‘The Role of the Commerce and Treasury Departments’, in Dorothy Borg and S. Okamoto (eds), Pearl Harbor As History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 261–85;
Jürg Martin Gabriel, The American Conception of Neutrality after 1941 (London: Macmillan–now Palgrave, 1988), 42–65;
W.F. Kimball, Swords Or Ploughshares? The Morgenthau Plan for Defeated Nazi Germany (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1976).
The dissertation is that of Regina Gramer, ‘Reconstructing Germany, 1938–1949: US Foreign Policy and the Cartel Question’ (Rutgers University, 1996).
On Bretton Woods and other economic issues see Georg Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks (New York: St Martin’s Press — now Palgrave, 1995)
Randall B. Woods, A Changing of the Guard: Anglo-American Relations, 1941–1946 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
Spoken to one of Charles de Gaulle’s emissaries; as quoted in John L. Harper, American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean C. Acheson (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 113.
John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993), 460–1. This is not to single out Charmley; he is only the latest such accuser in what is a very long line.
US Department of State [Harley A. Notter], Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 1939–1945 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1950), 92–3, 96–7;
W.F. Kimball, ‘ “A Victorian Tory”. Churchill, the Americans, and Self-Determination’, in Wm Roger Louis (ed), More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics, and Culture in Britain (New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998), 221–39.
On the ‘ganging up’ issue, see Warren F. Kimball (ed), Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), II: R-418 (11 November 1943);
Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History, rev. ed. (New York, Grosset and Dunlap, Universal Library, 1950), 707–8.
As quoted in Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), 1026.
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Kimball, W.F. (2002). The Second World War: Not (Just) the Origins of the Cold War. In: Carter, D., Clifton, R. (eds) War and Cold War in American Foreign Policy 1942–62. Cold War History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403913852_2
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