He repeats the long discredited idea that all communist movements in the Third World were run from Moscow or Peking - the cardinal error that led to disaster in Vietnam. Dallas is firmly convinced that the Soviet Union was the greatest evil ever to befall the human race. It is a point of view that has had many advocates, but all the best western historians of the USSR in World War Two (Erickson, Beevor and, above all, the brilliant Richard Overy) manage to shed genuine light on the "Great Patriotic War" without engaging in this kind of polemic. It is one of Dallas's good points that he has absolutely no illusions about US foreign policy.Yet the heart of this book is the treatment of the great dictators.
Those who hope for extended treatment of Operation Market Garden, the Battle of the Bulge, or the last days in the Berlin bunker will be disappointed. Instead Dallas attempts to probe Hitler's geopolitical objectives. The author takes Halford Mackinder (usually dismissed as a crank) and his theory of the "world-island" of Europe-Asia very seriously and explains the aims of Hitler and Stalin as being the attempt to dominate this "heartland", leaving the seaborne periphery to second-rate nations like Britain. He argues that the reason Hitler went for the option of alliance with the Soviet Union in 1939 (in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) was that Japan would not co-operate with his geopolitical aims and concentrate their efforts in the Indian Ocean, instead taking on a multiplicity of enemies everywhere from Burma to Midway.
Hitler's irrationality, for Dallas, consists in his obsession with Russia, a piece of purely mindless ideology, since he could get all the raw materials (rubber, tin, tungsten) he needed from Stalin without fighting him. Stalin for his part wanted to do a deal with Hitler and only fully abandoned the idea in 1943. In Dallas's view, Vichy France, Mussolini, Stalin and Japan all made the same mistake: they assumed that (and collaborated with Germany on the basis that) Hitler's real target was Anglo-Saxon imperialism: it wasn't, it was always Russia.Always interesting and controversial, often wrongheaded, misguided or kite-flying, Dallas's mammoth essay stays more or less on the rails until he comes to deal with Stalin and the Soviet Union. Article VII of the Lend-Lease treaty demanded the end of protectionism and Imperial Preference as the price of aid; this was ruthlessly exacted, and Lend-Lease was equally ruthlessly cut off the moment Japan was defeated, leaving Britain in economic crisis, and Attlee, Bevin and Keynes gasping in incredulity at this treatment from an "ally". He is at his best on the phoney so-called "friendship" between Churchill and FDR.
