The war without an end

Even as Britain reached peak military power, its ability to shape the peace fell away

On 7 December 1943, the men in charge of the Anglo-American alliance dined in a Cairo hotel. It had been an exhausting few weeks: ill-mannered discussions with the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, in the Egyptian capital; a tense conference with the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, in Tehran; then back to Cairo to finish their own disputes.

Stage-managed by the Americans to avoid any British challenge, the conferences had demonstrated to the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, how calamitously his country’s international power had declined. As the prime minister put it: “A bloody lot” had “gone wrong.” Having got what he wanted, the US president, Franklin Roosevelt, had left that morning. The remaining participants – including Churchill and the top servicemen from both sides of the Atlantic – were all sick of the sight of each other, but glad the wrangling was over. The drink flowed and Churchill began to recover his equilibrium. Over dinner, he got the generals to place bets on when the war against Germany would end. The most optimistic gave him 6/4 odds on March 1944; the most pessimistic, that November.

This anecdote highlights the difference between how the war was experienced, even by those most in the know about strategic planning, and how we think about it in historical perspective. We know the outcome and the timing. They knew they were going to win, but not how long it would take. If we want to understand what happened in those closing years of the conflict, we have to restore