IB History Political Leadership Including Wartime Alliance Notes

Leadership Under Pressure Held the Grand Alliance Together

1. The military victory of 1945 depended on three powers with incompatible political systems sustaining a working alliance for four years. Britain was a parliamentary democracy with a global empire. The United States was a constitutional republic that had formally opposed foreign entanglements. The Soviet Union was a one-party Communist state. What held them together was a shared enemy and the recognition that none could defeat Germany alone.

Churchill: Holding the Line, 1940-1941

1. Churchill becomes prime minister amid collapse: He became British Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, the same day Germany launched its western offensive. Within days France was collapsing and some cabinet voices favoured negotiating with Hitler. Churchill rejected this and committed Britain to continued resistance.

"We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender."

1. Sustained resistance through Anglo-American ties: He secured continued American material support through Lend-Lease and maintained British morale through radio addresses and parliamentary speeches. His personal relationship with Roosevelt underpinned the Atlantic Charter (August 1941) and the eventual Europe First strategy.
   1. A Mediterranean strategy: Churchill pushed for operations in the Mediterranean and North Africa, areas where Britain could attack before a cross-Channel invasion was feasible, since British forces still had to defend Egypt, the Suez Canal, and the routes to Middle Eastern oil.

Roosevelt: The Arsenal of Democracy

1. Navigating around the Neutrality Acts: The Neutrality Acts of the 1930s restricted US support for belligerents. Roosevelt worked around these constraints before formal US entry into the war, first through the Destroyers for Bases agreement (1940), then through the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, which allowed the USA to supply any nation whose defence was deemed vital to US security.
2. Pearl Harbor removes the political barriers: Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941) and Hitler's declaration of war on the United States four days later ended domestic opposition to full US involvement. Roosevelt then sustained the Europe First strategy against significant pressure from military commanders and public opinion to concentrate on Japan, judging Germany the more dangerous opponent.
   1. Building a coalition command: Roosevelt backed the Combined Chiefs of Staff to coordinate Anglo-American planning, approved Operation Torch in November 1942 despite British and American disagreement over the timing of a cross-Channel invasion, and pushed the doctrine of unconditional surrender as a public statement of Allied unity that ruled out a separate peace.

Stalin: Surviving Barbarossa and Mobilising the USSR

1. Catastrophic initial losses: Operation Barbarossa (June 1941) shocked the Soviet state. In the first six months the Wehrmacht encircled and destroyed several entire Soviet army groups, and over three million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner in 1941 alone. Stalin initially froze when news of the invasion arrived, having ignored several prior warnings of a German attack.
2. Recovery and total mobilisation: He recovered, reorganised Soviet command structures through a new State Defense Committee that concentrated political, military, and economic authority, and drew on Russian nationalism alongside Communist ideology to motivate the population. Factories were relocated east of the Urals with extraordinary speed, and by 1943 the Soviet Union was producing more tanks, artillery, and aircraft than Germany. Stalin also proved a shrewd diplomat at the major Allied conferences, extracting promises of a second front and agreement on post-war spheres of influence.
   1. A costly early instinct: Stalin's early orders forbidding retreat contributed to some of the war's worst encirclements, but he gradually gave successful commanders such as Zhukov and Rokossovsky greater operational freedom as the war went on.

The Big Three Conferences: Shaping the Alliance

1. Casablanca and Quebec set the groundwork: at Casablanca in January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to continue Mediterranean operations and announced the unconditional surrender policy. The Quebec Conference of August 1943 then advanced detailed planning for the eventual cross-Channel invasion.
2. Tehran (November-December 1943): The first meeting of all three leaders agreed that Operation Overlord (the Normandy landings) would proceed in 1944, and that the USSR would declare war on Japan after Germany's defeat.
3. Yalta (February 1945): The Big Three agreed on the post-war division of Europe into occupation zones and on Soviet entry into the Pacific war within three months of Germany's surrender.
   1. Potsdam (July-August 1945): held after Germany's surrender, with Harry Truman now representing the USA following Roosevelt's death in April, and with Clement Attlee replacing Churchill partway through after Labour's general election victory. The conference confirmed the occupation zones and reparations arrangements already sketched at Yalta, but the personal trust that had eased earlier summits was largely gone.
4. The conferences revealed both the strength and the fragility of the alliance. On military strategy the three powers cooperated effectively. On post-war political arrangements, particularly the future of Poland and Eastern Europe, tensions were already evident by Yalta. The alliance held long enough to defeat Germany but began to fracture immediately after.

Tensions Within the Alliance

1. Mutual suspicion over strategy: Stalin suspected that Britain and the United States were deliberately delaying a second front in the west to let Germany and the USSR exhaust each other, while Churchill feared Soviet expansion and wanted operations in the Mediterranean and Balkans to shape the postwar balance of power there.
2. Poland as the sharpest fracture line: the Katyn massacre and the Soviet break in relations with the Polish government in exile deepened mistrust well before Yalta, and disputes over Poland's borders, government, and security guarantees exposed how differently the Allies understood the future of Eastern Europe.
3. Limits on Western leverage: Britain and the United States did not recognize every Soviet territorial aim, but their armies could not determine events already controlled by the Red Army on the ground, and the Allies also disagreed over colonialism and the meaning of national self-determination more broadly. These tensions did not destroy military cooperation because Germany remained a greater immediate threat, but the alliance functioned through bargaining rather than complete trust.

1. Historians disagree sharply about how much credit, or blame, individual leaders deserve for the alliance's wartime record.