Friends and Enemies : The Allies and Neutral Ireland in the Second World War

Friends and enemies: The Allies and neutral Ireland in the Second World War examines the personal friendships and embittered conflicts among British, American, and Irish national leaders, their Dublin-based foreign policy advisers, and an American journalist as those relationships warmed and cooled, shifting in response to their nations’ fortunes during the six years’ war. The dominant personalities of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Eamon de Valera, marked by their distinctive prejudices and predilections, in combination with the culturally and historically specific British, American, and Irish masculine ideologies that prescribed their privileged and powerful roles, determined the ways that they each constructed politically useful national identities and war stories. Through their public addresses and in their private correspondence and recollections, they associated specific character traits, behaviors, allegiances, and affinities with themselves, their nations’ male citizens, and with their personal “friends” and national allies, as they distinguished themselves from their “enemies” in order to rally their compatriots to either support – or reject – the most consequential of all political projects: to go to war. Churchill’s, Roosevelt’s, and de Valera’s constructions of those identities and narratives, shared and reinforced by their advisers and propagandists, helped to shape the emotional, patriotic, and gendered experiences of the Second World War among their nations’ people, as well as their nations’ wartime policies. This history of Anglo-American efforts to overturn Ireland's neutrality policy during the Second World War adds complexity to the grand narrative of the Western Alliance against the Axis Powers, exploring relatively unexamined emotional, personalised, and gendered politics that underlay policymaking and alliance relations. Friends and enemies combines the methodologies of diplomatic history through its close reliance on archival documentation with attention to new theoretical understandings regarding the roles played by personal friendships and enmities and competing masculine ideologies among national leaders. Including, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Eamon de Valera, and their close foreign policy advisers in London, Washington DC and Dublin, as they constructed national identities and defined their nations'special relationships in time of war. Front Matter Dedication Contents List of figures Acknowledgments Map of Eire during the Emergency Introduction Agreements made, pledges broken: Europe in the 1930s Neutral states in a world at war, September 1939 to May 1940 “Unstoppable” Germany, “unbeatable” Britain, June to December 1940 In pursuit of America’s friendship, January to June 1941 British friend, Irish foe, July to December 1941 Efforts to “break the backbone” of Irish neutrality, January 1942 to December 1943 Eire, neutral to the bitter end, January 1944 to June 1945 Conclusion Bibliography Index This history examines the fraternal friendships and embittered masculine conflicts among British, American, and Irish national leaders and their Dublin-based advisers during the Second World War, as those leaders sought to secure – or reject – Ireland’s alliance with the Western Allied powers in their existential conflict with the fascist Axis powers. -- .