Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw

  VIII

  The scale of the catastrophe was unprecedented in history. And it followed what still stands out as one of the most extraordinary miscalculations of all time. Stalin had, as we have detailed, repeatedly drawn the wrong conclusion about German intentions, even down to the eve of the invasion. Attempts to satisfy German economic demands continued to the last. Warnings from all sides were ignored. Those who tried to press arguments to the contrary were treated with contempt. Stalin was insistent: he understood how Hitler thought. The German dictator would attack; but not yet. Hitler’s first priority, he was sure, was the economic exploitation of the USSR. The insistence upon economic appeasement rested upon this disastrous misconception.205 With unfinished business in the west, Hitler’s early priority had to be Soviet submission, not all-out war. This would win Germany benefits for an economy in trouble, and it would put further pressure on the west. Meanwhile, furious Soviet rearmament would continue. If peace negotiations should take place, the Soviet Union needed to be involved, and from a position of strength. Even as the danger signs mounted, Stalin was confident that he could defer conflict with Germany throughout the spring and summer of 1941. By then it would be too late to invade that year. And by 1942, the Soviet Union would be ready for Hitler. Stalin’s thinking ran roughly along such lines. His conviction that he was right, and that all warnings to the contrary were disinformation or were hopelessly wrong misreadings of the situation, became ever more entrenched. The combination of fear, subservience and admiration that underpinned the Soviet dictator’s autocracy meant that serious alternatives could scarcely be proposed, let alone adopted. But what might the alternatives have been? What options existed to avoid the calamity?

  Molotov, at Stalin’s right hand the entire time, persistently took the view that whatever mistakes were made were unavoidable.206 Khrushchev, by contrast, castigated Stalin’s miscalculations and errors of leadership in his denunciation of the dead dictator, in 1956, blaming them on the arbitrary actions of one man who had accumulated total power.207 This heavy personalization of responsibility conveniently exonerated those, not excluding Khrushchev himself, who had applauded Stalin and supported his policies. It also largely whitewashed the military leadership–though their own shortcomings cannot be entirely laid at Stalin’s door. More recent research has qualified this assessment. Even so, Khrushchev’s withering verdict still has wide currency. The realistic choices confronting Stalin are seldom posed. And yet, one leading authority, who has subjected the evidence to meticulous scrutiny, concluded that ‘Stalin’s failure to prepare for the German onslaught primarily reflected the unappealing political choices which the Soviet Union faced before the outbreak of the Second World War’, adding that ‘even with hindsight, it is hard to devise alternatives which Stalin could have safely pursued’.208

  What does seem obvious is that whatever options Stalin might have had narrowed sharply over time. Earlier decisions, and the thinking that lay behind them, had necessarily meant that by the eve of the German invasion his room for manoeuvre had become greatly constrained. But some years before this, his hands had been less tied. It was then that he made a catastrophic error that limited his later options.

  With no external pressure, he instigated in 1937, as we noted earlier, the decimation of his army leadership, with immeasurably harmful consequences for the rebuilding of a professionalized military force capable of countering the rapidly growing danger from Hitler’s Germany. Apart from the phantoms in the minds of Stalin and his acolytes, the purges lacked all rationale. They were wholly unnecessary. Stalin was not compelled to have the purges carried out; he chose this option. But not only did they do incalculable damage to the future construction of Soviet military strength; they also instilled in Hitler and his advisers an indelible notion of the weakness of the Red Army. To Hitler, this very weakness was an invitation to strike before a powerful military machine could be constructed. In Hitler’s eyes, then, Stalin’s purges gave him the chance. He thought Stalin must be mad. As early as 1937 he had remarked: ‘Russia knows nothing other than Bolshevism. That is the danger which we will have to knock down sometime.’209 In choosing to destroy his army leadership, Stalin removed his most important backbone of strength at a later date, when the crisis unfolded. An immense effort was put into a crash programme of rearmament and militarization in 1940 and 1941. But too much ground had been lost. It could not be completed before the German threat became overwhelming. That Stalin had left himself with too little military room for manoeuvre in 1940–41 is in good measure attributable, therefore, to the choice he made in 1937–8 to undermine his own military capacity. And this was just as Europe was being thrown into upheaval by the German incorporation of Austria and much of Czechoslovakia, with the complicity of the hapless western democracies.

  By 1939, with war looming in Europe, Stalin now faced a second, highly unenviable choice. Should he ally himself with the western democracies, whom he intensely distrusted, or with Nazi Germany, the ideological arch-enemy? This, indeed, turned into a fateful choice. We have noted the plausible reasoning that made Stalin, in August 1939, opt for a pact with Hitler. Britain and France had shown little appetite for an alliance with the Soviet Union. Stalin, along with other Soviet leaders, thought western motives were scarcely less cynical than Hitler’s. At least a pact with Germany would provide some breathing space. And it held out the prospect of Germany and the western powers fighting each other to a standstill, to the ultimate benefit of the Soviet Union.

  What the consequences might have been in the unlikely event of Stalin joining forces with the west can only be a matter of counter-factual speculation. Hitler’s attack on Poland would have been riskier in such an eventuality. And those in high places within Germany, fearful of the consequences of involvement in a general European war against powerful enemies, would have had their hand strengthened. Hitler postponed the mobilization against Poland once, at the last minute, and might have been further deterred had he faced a triple alliance of the USSR and the western powers, a reconstitution of the anti-German coalition of 1914. But he might have gone ahead and invaded Poland anyway.210 The western democracies would probably still have done nothing militarily to help Poland.211 In such circumstances, the Soviet Union would also have most likely refrained from direct conflict, but would have found Germany after victory in Poland not as an ally but, instead, as an enemy on her doorstep. Perhaps, then, a German attack on the Soviet Union would have come earlier than it did. On the other hand, Hitler’s big western offensive in spring 1940 (which greatly upset Stalin’s calculations) would have been far more hazardous with a hostile Soviet Union poised in the east. Who knows how it might have turned out? The guessing-game is pointless. The variables in the equation are simply too many to make speculation fruitful.

  What does seem apparent, however, is that Stalin was too blinkered by his ideological preconceptions to allow the Soviet Union to play other than a passive role in dealings with the west in the summer of 1939.212 It was certainly the case that Britain and France did little during those months to expedite the ‘grand alliance’ that might have been the last hope of blocking Hitler. They had scant interest in joining forces with the detested and distrusted Soviet Union. The negotiations as European war grew close were predictably sluggish. But the Soviet Union was also locked into passivity. More urgent and determined diplomacy on Stalin’s part could conceivably have paved the way, despite British and French hesitations, for a new triple alliance with the west. It would at the very least have given Hitler and the German ruling elites pause for thought. However, Stalin was content to let the negotiations with the western democracies drift on while the war clouds gathered ominously. The result was that inaction from the Soviet, not just the western, side eventually pushed the choice towards that which made most sense in terms of the USSR’s security at the time, the pact with Hitler’s Germany.

  Stalin saw the pact as a great Soviet diplomatic coup. But in practice it worked more in favour of Germ
any than of the Soviet Union. Certainly, the USSR was able to extend its defensive frontiers westwards through territorial aggrandizement. And the removal of the imminent threat from Germany allowed time to rebuild the Red Army and prepare defences. Obviously, however, the time was insufficient. The rebuilding was flawed and inadequate. And the Germans, too, were given time to make themselves ready, not just militarily, but also in the spread of diplomatic sway. During 1940, after the German victory over France had completely upturned the balance of power in Europe, Hitler was able to exert increasing influence over the countries of the Danube basin. German dominance in Romania, especially, and the vain attempts by Stalin and Molotov to prevent the Balkans and, in the north, Finland falling within the German orbit led to the growing tension that was so manifest in the visit of Molotov to Berlin in November 1940. Mussolini’s Balkan adventure had meanwhile destabilized the region even further. And by the following spring, German intervention in Yugoslavia and Greece squeezed out any last hope of Soviet influence in south-eastern Europe (as well as contributing to the concealment of ‘Barbarossa’, since Stalin could see little sense in Hitler striking to the east that year immediately following his conquests in the Balkans).213 The Soviet Union was now fully isolated. Turkey, the gateway to the Black Sea, remained neutral, though relatively well disposed towards Great Britain. Otherwise, the USSR was more or less ringed in the west by countries under German influence. The pact had brought short-term advantage to the Soviet Union, but over its duration the danger from Germany had become greatly magnified. Whether Stalin made the right choice in 1939 might, therefore, be justifiably questioned.

  Between August 1939 and June 1941, Stalin’s policy, as we have seen, was consistently to rearm with all speed, but to mollify Germany as far as possible. He was not naive enough to believe that conflict with Germany could be avoided. He had read and digested the parts of Mein Kampf that advocated the winning of ‘living space’ in the east. But he thought he could head off trouble until 1942, and he believed he could ‘read’ Hitler’s intentions: to force the Soviet Union into political submission before reaching a settlement with Britain and only then to turn his aggression eastwards. Stalin thought Hitler would act with the same cold, brutal rationality that he himself would have deployed. Sure that Hitler would pose an ultimatum before any attack (a German deception that Stalin swallowed), he felt confident that he could win time. Meanwhile, the least provocation had to be avoided. This was doubly important, from Stalin’s point of view, since the Soviet Union continued to face the additional, if lesser, threat from the east, from Japan. But it made him excessively cautious.214 Was there an alternative to this policy?

  Stalin’s policy of avoiding war at all costs was strongly criticized, many years later, by Marshal Alexander Mikhailovich Vasilevsky, deputy head of the operational administration of the General Staff in 1941 and from 1942 to 1945 chief of the General Staff and Deputy Commissar for Defence.215 Vasilevsky claimed that

  Stalin did not grasp the limit beyond which such a line became not only unnecessary, but dangerous. Such a limit should have been correctly determined, the armed forces brought to full combat readiness at the maximum possible speed, accelerated mobilisation carried out, and the country converted into a single armed camp. While trying to put off armed conflict, whatever hidden work was possible should have been carried out and completed earlier. There was more than enough evidence that Germany planned a military attack on our country…We had come, due to circumstances beyond our control, to the Rubicon of war, and it was necessary determinedly to take a step forward.216

  Rearmament and militarization were, in fact, as we noted, under way at a frantic pace during 1940 and 1941. But Vasilevsky was emphatic that much more should have been done: early and full mobilization of the armed forces for combat readiness. The implication is that the policy of non-provocation had reached a point where it had become highly dangerous. Full mobilization should have been undertaken at this point. The risk of an earlier German attack would have had to be borne. But it would have been a risk worth taking. As Stalin’s military advisers knew, the earliest the Germans could have invaded was, in fact, when they did attack, in spring 1941. The worst that ‘provocation’ could have achieved, in other words, was what took place anyway (though Stalin had wanted to avoid what he probably for long envisaged as limited German action, not necessarily all-out war, to seize border territory and compel greater economic dependence).217

  They also knew that in summer 1940 the Japanese leadership had opted for the advance to the south. A prior attack by Japan from the east could, therefore, be as good as ruled out.218 A show of deterrence, rather than allowing the German build-up to take place unchallenged over so many months, might, then, have proved successful in staving off the attack for the few precious months of the summer of 1941. Moreover, advertising Soviet strength would have countered the overriding image of the Red Army’s weakness that prevailed within the German leadership. Instead, Stalin, petrified about offering any provocation, allowed repeated German reconnaissance flights to take photographs recording precise details of Soviet military installations and troop placements, evidence which confirmed the impression that the Wehrmacht would sweep through the Red Army’s ranks.219 Stalin was unquestionably in an unenviable position. But the preference for non-provocation over deterrence was another fateful choice.

  By June 1941 the options had drastically diminished. As we noted, Zhukov later acknowledged that Stalin’s rejection of the pre-emptive strike plan of 15 May 1941 had been correct. To pursue the plan would have courted even greater disaster. As it was, the frontier defences were hopelessly stretched, divisions badly deployed, fortifications incomplete.220 To compound the problem, Soviet military planning in 1940 and 1941 had anticipated the main German thrust in any attack coming through southern Poland, south of the Pripet marshes. And this is where the bulk of the Soviet forces were arrayed in June 1941. But, completely unanticipated by the Red Army command, the crushing German advance, when it came, was through the central area of the front, north of the Pripet marshes, in the direction of Minsk, Smolensk and Moscow.221 Collectively, then endorsed by Stalin, the Soviet military leadership had disastrously chosen the wrong option.

  Ultimately, the failings were those of a system of highly personalized rule. ‘Stalin was the greatest authority for all of us, and it never occurred to anybody to question his opinion and assessment of the situation,’ Zhukov later commented.222 In a climate of fear and sycophancy, where one individual’s paranoid phobias, sense of his own infallible judgement, limitations in military strategy and ruthless unpredictability had become decisive structural components of the Soviet system, there could be no correctives to Stalin’s preferred options. Toadying, at all levels, was endemic. The Politburo kowtowed. The military were generally no different and, when voicing reservations, were browbeaten into submission. The refusal of the Soviet dictator to accede to requests from his commanders, only a week or so before the invasion, to have troops at battle readiness in better defensive positions was symptomatic of a system where reason had lost its way.

  Stalin’s despairing obscenity, days after the invasion, with which this chapter began, is easy to understand. It reflected his own sense that the Soviet leadership collectively, and he personally, had made a calamitous miscalculation. In the end, for all the self-deception and delusions, his options could be narrowed down to a straightforward choice: was he to do everything imaginable to prepare the Soviet Union for war with Germany in 1941 (which could not objectively be ruled out), or persist in his belief (with attendant risks) that conflict could be postponed until 1942? Did he, putting it another way, prefer to work on the basis of a best-case or worst-case scenario? The answer is obvious. It was indeed a fateful choice. And yet, the path to that choice had been anything but a straight one. Even at this distance, it is impossible to be certain about what would have been the most advantageous turning at the crucial junctions. What can be plainly seen is that the choices Stali
n made courted disaster. The astonishing recovery from that disaster is another story.

  7

  Washington, DC, Summer–Autumn 1941

  Roosevelt Decides to Wage Undeclared War

  If he were to put the issue of peace and war to Congress, they would debate it for three months. The President had said he would wage war, but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative…He would look for an ‘incident’ which would justify him in opening hostilities.

  Churchill’s report of President Roosevelt’s remarks,

  19 August 1941

  The German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 took the emerging global conflict onto a new plane. Fresh hope for the western allies, Great Britain and the United States, but also fresh uncertainties, entered the picture. The administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt needed to reconsider the strategic options.

  Germany was now involved in a war on two fronts. When Britain and the United States were most fearing a major thrust to north Africa and the Middle East following the German dominance of the Balkans in spring 1941, Hitler had chosen to attack the Soviet Union. The defeat of Great Britain by armed invasion, which had seemed such a danger–to the defence of the United States, too–in the summer of 1940, and had appeared to remain a distinct possibility as late as spring 1941, had now receded (though not completely vanished). And a new, potentially powerful, if for the western partners uncomfortable, ally had been forced to enter the arena in the defence against Hitler’s Germany. All this posed grounds for optimism at a point when the fortunes of war had seemed bleak.