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

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. -- .

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.