Customer Reviews

1945: The War That Never Ended

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Perhaps for those who have yet to turn gray, this treatment of WWII is merely excellent and compelling history. But for those, like me, who grew up through the late 1940s and 1950s, Dallas' well researched recounting of the events surrounding that war goes a long way in explaining the war's bizarre aftermath.

Let me begin by confessing that during the early 1980s, while I was stationed for three years in Germany with the USAF, I had no idea that a peace treaty ending WWII had yet to be agreed upon. My understanding of WWII rested on having read Churchill's eight volume history, which peevishly ends when he is turned out of office. Granted, Gregor Dallas has the advantage of a half-century of retrospection, but he is also not encumbered by the live political sensitivities with which Churchill tempered his writing.

This book sheds light on the following issue that had always puzzled me:

Why the British Empire faded
Why the French government tends to be so contrary with the US
Why Europeans in general are so cautious in dealing with the US
Why the Nuremberg Trials happened
Why the Western Allies tolerated so much bad behavior from the USSR
Why Warsaw was obliterated
Why the USSR so rapidly shifted from ally to opponent
Why the USSR and the US confronted each other in the Middle East
Why the Korean Conflict happened
Why the US ended up fighting on behalf of colonial France in Indo-china

The list is much longer. Does Dallas offer the final word on these issues? Of course not. But he raises many points of fact that tend to be minimized by American histories of the conflict. While it is difficult for an American to feel compassion for defeated Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war, we can certainly sense the tragedy of it in reading Dallas' account of the systematic rape of the inhabitants of Berlin by the conquering Soviet army. And not to let the US off the hook too easily, Dallas details the US policy of forcibly repatriating anti-communist Russians in Western Europe to the welcoming arms of Stalin.

Certain sections of this book are burdened with a ballast of names that were unfamiliar to me. This was more than compensated by the wealth of candid history. While I can not attest to the validity of all of Dallas' assertions, most of them, including some of the more outrageous, have a ring of truth about them. It portrays the war as a messy business laboring under the pressures of politics, both local and global.

Finally, I should point out that the book's title is misleading. Although the author uses the year 1945 as a pivot, he reaches back to WWI and forward well into the end of the twentieth century.

A very readable, well-written work, this author both knows his subject area and is not afraid of expressing STRONG opinions. The author makes points, or at least states positions, that will make you think. Opinions about Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Montgomery, Truman, etc., are well thought out and quite provocative. I particularly enjoyed some of the author's thoughts about the Holocaust & Holocaust studies. Gregor Dallas has some very unkind things to say about Eisenhower, but he backs them up. Also, the author sets out some matters which I had forgotten about, such as Patton's anti-semetism. I also enjoyed that Dallas is a British writer not afraid to use his "foreign" point of view when discussing the United States. Its the difference between a British band that sings its songs in flawless English, as opposed to with a natural English accent. The book also has a glossary of individuals & entities at the end of the book which gives concise and interesting "definitions". This book has interested me enough in some of the areas it touched upon to influence me to have just ordered a book on the Soviet General Vlasov, and on the Venona de-crypts. Its a 4 1/2 star book, and I recommend reading it.

A highly opinionated British historian describes his view of the closing year of combat in Europe of World War II and the long political aftermath of military and political decisions made then and into the 1950s. (This is a book on the makings of modern Europe not Asia.)

Most Americans will be taken aback by the accusation that the U.S. Administration was compromised by a few communist agents pulling key levers of policy power for, at best, a very distracted FDR; the highly negative portrayal of Eisenhower's leadership; the assertion that it is a myth that U.S. troops won the war; and the dismissing of the good intentions of the Marshall Plan.

I do not accept all the basic assertions of Dr. Dallas, especially his broad contempt for the actions and motives of the U.S. However, he has written an extremely interesting, albeit biased, history on why the fifty year period of time after 1945 played out as it did especially as between Poland, France, Germany, the USSR, and Great Britain. A challenging book well worth reading for those interested in Europe at a time when politics were conducted as a different form of war.

This book taugh me some things about the conduct of WW II that I had not known, and for that I found it extremely interesting. The author,however, does a lot of second-guessing about many of the decisions made during the war, particularly by the American politicians and General Eisenhower in particular. Churchill and Montgomery are given credit for having the right ideas at the right time, unlike FDR and Ike. I agree with the author about the way Roosevelt treated Churchill in relation to Stalin, for that has been featured in many books. Of course, the American decision not to attempt to reach Berlin before the Russians is also not new. Hindsight is always 20-20, and this book engages in a lot of that type of statement. Overall, however, I found it a very useful book on many aspects of the end of the war, particularly as it related to Poland and the countries of Eastern Europe.

While titled "1945," the book spends much of the first half on events in 1944. I found this a compelling historical work. The author's premise is that, similar to World War I, World War II did not end in 1945 as commonly believed. His second premise is that the "movement of armies" dictated the final peace. In this case, the order of battle, as it ended in May 1945, ensured the enslavement of much of eastern Europe until the late 1980s. Dallas details the utter incompetence of Roosevelt and Eisenhower who appear to have lacked the capacity to understand the reality of the new Europe. While Churchill and Montgomery urged Roosevelt and Eisenhower to take Berlin, enter the Balkans through Greece and advance deeper into Central Europe in order to forestall its domination by Stalin's USSR, their arguments were arrogantly dismissed. In fact, Roosevelt foolishly advises Stalin that the U.S. would withdraw all of its forces out of Europe within two years after the war's end and had no interests in Europe- much to Churchill's angst. Dallas further documents the disasterous decision by Eisernhower to split British and American forces in 1944 and send U.S. forces on a worthless effort to conquer southern Germany in search of the mythical "Nazi redoubt." Dallas reveals that Rooservelt and other key American officals saw Britain as a future military threat and actually drew up a plan ("The Red Plan") on how to wage war against the British Empire after WWII. All this nonsense while Stalin was planning his domination of Europe. It is only to Montgomery's energy that Scandavavia did not fall to Russian conquest. This book puts into perspective how ignorance, dogma, hubris, intrigue and incompetence led to tragic unintended consequences. Truman shows the necessary leadership to admit his mistakes, albeit only after millions of Europeans die from diseases, starvation or murder by the USSR, and finally adopted the Churchillian view of the world.

I originally purchased this book in the belief that it would deal with the conclusion of the European segment of WW2 and how peace "broke out" even if the war never ended, at least not until 1990. What I did get was a great book giving a series of well stated arguments on why 8th May 1945 came the way it did and its impact on the Europe that evolved from that moment. The compare and contrast between two major European capital cities, Paris and Warsaw gave a clear record as to how the 3 major powers would treat not only those they liberated but those they conquered as well.
Dallas puts forward the case that Stalin was wedded to the Soviet/Nazi non-aggression pact of 1939 dividing up Poland and the changes in the contiguous southerly territorial boundaries which arose from this agreement and how it wasn't until the latter part of 1943 when Stalin realised he could achieve the same ends without Nazi participation. And he did. After re-stating this 5 or 6 times in the rest of the book, this once well received case becomes a little bit of "got it the first time, what else have you got?"
The build up to the concluding months of the war reads very well. Potsdam is covered, Nuremberg is there, the triumphal visit of Berlin by Truman and Churchill too. For me, how the DP's (displaced persons), POW's, slaves, infrastructure, returns to some form of surrealistic normalcy deserved more coverage. Maybe that is a different book. If so his last chapter on evolving western Europe similarly should be in a different book as well.
I do take issue with a couple of points: Primarily his dismissing of The Truman Doctrine of containment of the communist threat. Given the various battles within the Cold War from the Berlin Airlift to the invasion of Grenada, cumulative victory did end up in Bush Senior's hands. Democracy and/or Capitalism in its various forms won. Secondly the captions for the photographs. Maybe one is simply a typo confusing 1945 with 1944, the second though is a picture of the Potsdam roundtable with Truman being wrongly identified, placing him alone amongst the Soviets whilst he is actually across the table surrounded by his own team. A sloppy piece of work by the editorial team, not a biggy, but still....
Overall happy with the purchase, enjoying the different way things are discussed without needing the flattery of a book to reflect my viewpoint. I would be happy to share it with someone else who is similarly anal about this historic time frame.

It was the best of times and the worst of times to purloin a line from Dickens! In this brilliant book the British historian Gregor Dallas takes a detailed look at the end of World War II
in Europe.
Dallas has previously done the same job with his earlier tomes on the end of the Napoleonic wars and the conclusion of World War I.
World War II was an horrific event. In this work Dr. Dallas examines in microscopic detail:
a. Relationships among the Allies. He details how Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union used diplomatic channels to assert their own desires. The Soviets distrusted the West; in their grab for land and peoples in Eastern Europe they descended an iron curtain across Eastern Europe and precipitated the Cold War.
b. Dallas looks at the lives and careers of such leaders as FDR,Truman,
Churchill, Stalin, DeGaulle, Adenauer and the Polish men who led the London government and the communist Lublin group.
c. Dallas also looks at military strategy. We learn of the military careers of Montgomery, Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley,
Hodges and the way they devised the endgame for Nazi German in
strategy and tactics. Dallas is British and is very harsh in his assessments of the US militarily and politically.
d. One of the fascinations of this book was the way Dallas explains the economic situation of the belligerents.He is a fan of John Maynard Keyes in Britain .
e. We learn of the horrible and terrible extermination plans of the Nazis and the Gulag apparatus of Stalin. Dallas is good in letting the reader know what horrors were happening in Eastern Europe.
Dallas has a point of view which is Anglocentric. He is a big fan of Churchill and felt FDR was too left-leaning and enamored of the Soviets. His writing is easy to read and understand.
This would be a wonderful book in a classroom course on World War II if used with judicious care by the instructor.

This is a well written and perceptive account of the end and aftermath of the WWII fighting in Europe. The author excels at descriptions of the events, personalities and motives that made the aftermath of that war in Europe, in a real sense, worse than the war itself.

I purchased this book for my son who is doing his HSC in Oz - he says it has been very helpful and interesting

I found this book interesting and instructive almost to its end. But when he calls Truman a banker, based on an early (pre-World War I) experience working in a bank, my Kansas City background does a triple flip. My best recollection is that Truman, far from being a successful banker, was drowning in red ink trying to breathe life into the men's store he and a friend had started in downtown Kansas City. It was from this dire situation that Tom Pendergast rescued him and gave him his political start.
Truman never forgot his debt to Tom, flying back to Kansas City for Tom's funeral on a USAAF bomber he commandeered for the purpose. He seems to have ignored all the political flack aimed at him for that.
It came as a surprise, considering his obvious favoritism toward Truman, that Dallas would so firmly boot such an easy ball. It certainly makes Truman sound much better than he is in my memory. Yes, he may have had the highest ever approval rating. In my memory, you could not be an acceptable radio commedian on any network with fewer than 5 Harry Truman jokes per program.