‘A long, slow and painful road’: The Anglo-American alliance and the issue of cooperation with the USSR from Teheran to D-Day

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 Taylor & Francis.The Second World War Anglo–American alliance was less cohesive on the political side than the military. There were widening divergences between Britain and the United States with regard to the best way to handle co-operation with the Soviet Union during 1944. Some shared assumptions about the motivations of Soviet policy existed, but British and American policy-makers not only formulated different approaches, they consistently viewed their own to be more successful than those of their ally. There was an opportunity to co-ordinate polices during American Under-Secretary of State Edward Stettinius's mission to London in April 1944 but the fact that the issue was barely discussed is symptomatic of the situation. The British Foreign Office gained the backing of Winston Churchill in an attempt to forge ahead with pragmatic arrangements with the Russians. A satisfaction with their own efforts on both sides meant that the British and American bureaucracies made no serious and sustained attempt to co-ordinate their policies towards the Soviet Union through 1944, in contrast to the closeness of co-operation in other areas

Temperature dependence of the coercive field in single-domain particle systems

The magnetic properties of Cu97Co3 and Cu90Co10 granular alloys were measured over a wide temperature range (2 to 300K). The measurements show an unusual temperature dependence of the coercive field. A generalized model is proposed and explains well the experimental behavior over a wide temperature range. The coexistence of blocked and unblocked particles for a given temperature rises difficulties that are solved here by introducing a temperature dependent blocking temperature. An empirical factor gamma arise from the model and is directly related to the particle interactions. The proposed generalized model describes well the experimental results and can be applied to other single-domain particle system.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, revised version, accepted to Physical Review B on 29/04/200

Poincar\'e and sl(2) algebras of order 3

In this paper we initiate a general classification for Lie algebras of order 3 and we give all Lie algebras of order 3 based on $\mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathbb C)$ and $\mathfrak{iso}(1,3)$ the Poincar\'e algebra in four-dimensions. We then set the basis of the theory of the deformations (in the Gerstenhaber sense) and contractions for Lie algebras of order 3.Comment: Title and presentation change

‘They treat us with scant respect’: Prejudice and Pride in British Military Liaison with the Soviet Union in the Second World War

Britain stationed a military mission in the USSR from 1941-45. This article examines the British conduct of the Mission at a crucial stage of the war, from November 1942 to November 1943. Prompted by a report from the head of the Mission, the Chiefs of Staff decided in February 1943 to institute a ‘new deal’, to try to end what was seen as ‘one-way traffic’ in the relationship. A new head, General Martel, was appointed, to make higher-level contacts. The attempt to try and make the relationship equal, reciprocal and symmetrical was short-lived as other military concerns moved the ‘bargaining’ approach of the ‘new deal’ back towards an acceptance of asymmetry. While the Soviet contribution on the battlefield was a weighty element in the balance, this article demonstrates that in the diplomacy of alliance military liaison, such rational calculations were accompanied by irrational factors like concern for personal or national prestige, cultural differences concerning ‘manners’, the pressures of life as a foreigner in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and inter-service rivalries in Whitehall that set the representatives in Moscow often at cross-purposes