On the morning of May 8, 1945, Gen. George Marshall traveled from his Pentagon office to the White House to tell President Harry Truman that Germany had surrendered. “I’m glad to hear it,” Truman said, “because for a while there I thought we were fighting the British.”
The Marshall-Truman tale, though undoubtedly apocryphal, was repeated thereafter as a reminder that, during the war in Europe, the relationship between the British and Americans was so acrimonious that Marshall, and his British counterparts, feared their alliance might shatter. It didn’t, but a working knowledge of the fraught Anglo-American partnership remains crucial to understanding the European conflict. The same is true for the war against Japan, though for a different reason. There, the inter-Allied feuding that marred the war with Germany was replaced by a fractious competition between the United States Navy and the Army over resources, strategy and public acclaim.
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