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Allied diplomacy in the Second World War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2009
Extract
Is there such a subject? The study of Allied diplomacy has been slow to establish itself, partly because the bulk of the American and British records have only recently become available, but mainly because of the debate about the origins of the Cold War – the contemporary equivalent of the war-guilt question. Because of the paucity of Soviet material it has in practice turned into an argument about American policy and has not, of course, been confined to the wartime period. The search for origins, turning-points and causes employs the advantage of hindsight in deciding what is relevant. It, therefore, tends to overlook the side issues, dead ends and the short-term nature of much wartime diplomacy. Nobody would deny the importance of the origins of the Cold War or of wartime American-Soviet relations. Yet it is misleading to see Allied diplomacy solely in terms of this one theme. There is room for an attempt to examine some other wartime issues and to indicate topics worthy of further exploration. In the rest of this article, therefore, the Cold War will as far as possible be ignored.
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References
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page 290 note 1. Ibid pp. 52–56. Divine, op. cit. pp. 108–11 points out the significance of the Polish vote in the 1944 Presidential election.
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page 291 note 5. Pogue, op, cit. pp. 460–5 defends the role of the Joint Chiefs in zonal planning.
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page 292 note 1. Sharpe,op. cit. pp. 12–25. His interpretation of the evidence in Soviet military memoirs therefore, differs from that of Diane Clemens, alta (New York, 1970). Lensen, op. cit. p. 275, mentions a similar argument over the timing of the Soviet attack on Manchuria. Shtemenko argues that the dropping of the atomic bomb did not affect Soviet strategy. But Vasilevsky claims that Stalin rang up from Potsdam after hearing of the bomb to try and get the date of the offensive advanced. Over the feasibility of a Soviet attack on Berlin in early 1945 Sharpe prefers Shtemenko's account whereas Clemens follows Chuikov. It is reassuring to find that Soviet military memoirs can provoke disagreement as much as their Anglo-American counterparts.
page 292 note 2. Inevitably some books tend to be overlooked in a tour d'horizon of this nature. One such is Wheeler-Bennett, J. W. and Nicholls, A.,The Semblance of Peace; The Political Settlement after the Second World War (London, 1972)Google Scholar. Part One provides a survey of allied diplomacy which is unsympathetic to revisionist viewpoints and on the whole takes the British side. For a general survey which is more sympathetic to Russia see King, F. P.,The New Internationalism: Allied Policy and the European Peace 1939–40 (Newton Abbot, 1973)Google Scholar.