by Max Hastings
If Hitler, rather than turn east, had instead chosen to increase pressure on Britain, and even if he still flinched from invasion, he might have intensified the night blitz, seized Gibraltar and Malta, reinforced Rommel, and expelled the Royal Navy from the Mediterranean. Had these things come to pass, it is by no means assured that Churchill could have retained the premiership. As it was, providence lifted the spectre of immediate catastrophe in the west—if only the Atlantic convoy routes could be kept open. Here, in mid-1941, Ultra’s role became critical. More and more German naval signals, above all orders to U-boats at sea, were being broken at Bletchley Park in “real time.” From July, some convoys were successfully diverted away from known submarine concentrations, substantially reducing losses.
The critical choice for Britain, after June 22, 1941, was how far to deplete its own inadequate armoury to aid the Russians. The Cretan experience intensified British paranoia about paratroops. It was feared that German night airborne landings in southern England might negate all calculations about the Royal Navy’s and the RAF’s ability to frustrate an amphibious armada. On June 29, Churchill offered the War Office one of his more fanciful projections: “We have to contemplate the descent from the air of perhaps a quarter of a million parachutists, glider-borne or crash-landed aeroplane troops. Everyone in uniform, and anyone else who likes, must fall upon these wherever they find them and attack them with the utmost alacrity—‘Let every one / Kill a Hun.’”
Against this background, the service ministers and Chiefs of Staff strongly opposed sending planes and tanks to Russia. Here was a mirror image of the debate in Washington about Britain. Churchill’s soldiers, sailors and airmen displayed as much reluctance as their American brethren had done a year earlier to dispatch precious weapons to a nation that might be defeated before they could be put to use.
The Russians scarcely assisted their own cause. On the one hand, they made fantastic demands upon Churchill’s government: for twenty-five British divisions to be shipped to Russia; for an army to stage an immediate landing on the Continent, to force the Germans to fight on a “second front”—a phrase of which much more would be heard. On the other hand, they confronted British diplomats and soldiers in Russia with a wall of silence about their own struggle. An American guest at a London lunch party dominated by political grandees wrote afterwards: “It was quite evident that all of the Britishers296 were deeply distrustful of the Russians. Nobody really knew much about what was happening.”
Until the end of the war, the British learned more about the Eastern Front from Ultra intercepts of enemy signals than from their supposed allies in Moscow. Many German operational reports were swiftly available in London. Rigorous security sought to conceal from the enemy the fact that Bletchley Park was breaking their codes. Churchill was much alarmed by a report which appeared in the Daily Mirror headed SPIES TRAP NAZI CODE. The story began: “Britain’s radio spies are at work297 every night … taking down the Morse code messages which fill the air … In the hands of experts they might produce a message of vital importance to our Intelligence Service.” The Mirror piece was published in absolute ignorance of Ultra, and merely described the activities of British amateur radio “hams.” But Churchill wrote to Duff Cooper, then still information minister, deploring such reporting. He was morbidly sensitive to the peril of drawing the slightest German attention to their radio security.
Yet there were dangerous indiscretions, including one by the prime minister himself in a BBC broadcast on August 24. He drew upon Ultra intercepts to highlight the numbers of civilians being murdered by the SS in Russia. The Germans noticed. Hitler’s top police general, SS-Obergruppenführer Kurt Daluege, signalled all his units on September 13: “The danger of enemy298 decryption of wireless messages is great. For this reason only non-sensitive information should be transmitted.” It was fortunate that the German high command failed to draw more far-reaching conclusions from Churchill’s words.
In the first weeks after the panzers swept across the Soviet frontier, intelligence revealed that the Russians were suffering colossal losses of men, tanks, planes and territory. Everything the War Office could learn confirmed the generals’ predisposition to assume that Stalin would be beaten. Only two important powers in Britain pressed the case for aid to Russia. The first was public opinion. Beyond the orbit of senior officers, aristocrats and businessmen who disliked the Soviets, Barbarossa unleashed a surge of British sentiment, indeed sentimentality, in favour of the Russian people, which persisted until 1945. Factories and shipyards, where Communist trade unionists had hitherto shown lukewarm support for a “bosses’ war,” were suddenly swept by enthusiasm for Russia. Communist Party membership in Britain rose—not least because frank discussion of the Soviet regime’s barbarity was suspended for the duration. The British people nursed a shame about their own defeats, a guilt that their nation was accomplishing so little towards the defeat of Hitler, which would be ever more stridently articulated in the years ahead.
Then there was the prime minister. In the matter of Russia, as in his defiance of Hitler a year earlier, he embraced a policy which entirely accorded with the public mood: all aid to Britain’s new comrades-in-arms. American military attaché Raymond Lee found it droll to see the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, “almost a pariah in London299 for so many years,” now communing constantly with Churchill, Eden and U.S. ambassador John “Gil” Winant. Churchill’s bigness on this issue emphasised the smallness of most of his colleagues. He perceived that whatever the difficulties, however slight the prospect of success, it must not be said that Russia suffered defeat because Britain failed to do what it could to assist her. At first, following Barbarossa, he pressed the Chiefs of Staff for a landing in northern Norway, to open a direct link to the Red Army. When this notion was quashed, in large part because Norway lay beyond range of land-based air cover, he ordered that every possible tank and aircraft, including some bought by Britain from the Americans, should be shipped to Stalin. There persisted, however, a very long day’s march—much longer than most historians have allowed—between intent and effective implementation. Through the summer of 1941, while Russia’s survival hung in the balance, pitifully little war matériel was dispatched.
As for the United States, the country was at first uncertain what to make of the new situation. Roosevelt sounded almost flippant in a letter to U.S. ambassador Adm. William Leahy in Vichy on June 26: “Now comes this Russian diversion. If it is more than just that it will mean the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination—and at the same time I do not think we need worry about any possibility of Russian domination.” But the isolationist Chicago Tribune asked why the United States should ally itself with “an Asiatic butcher and his godless crew.” The New York Times remained hesitant even in August: “Stalin is on our side today. Where will he be tomorrow?” Senator Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri shrugged, saying, “It’s a case of dog eat dog.” Archisolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana declared his matching contempt for Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt.
The U.S. Chiefs of Staff were even more reluctant to see weapons shipped to Russia than to Britain. Though the president forcefully expressed his determination to aid Stalin’s people, months elapsed before substantial U.S. matériel moved. At the beginning of August, Roosevelt berated the State and War departments for their failure to implement his wishes on aid: “The Russians feel that they have been given the run-around in the United States.” By the end of September, only $29 million worth of supplies had been dispatched. There was a sharp contrast between U.S. financial treatment of Britain and Russia. Where Britain in 1940–41 was obliged to sell its entire negotiable assets to pay American bills before receiving Lend-Lease aid, when Washington put a similar proposal to Moscow it was angrily rejected. Roosevelt acquiesced with a docility the British would have welcomed for themselves. American supplies to Russia were provided gratis, under Lend-Lease. But progress towards implementation remained slow. As in Britain, there was a lack o
f will as well as of immediate means.
The absence of Western aid made it all the more urgent that Britain should be seen to fight in the west, that the desert army should once more take the offensive. Auchinleck, “an obstinate, high-minded man”300 as Churchill described him in an unpublished draft of his war memoirs, insisted that he could not attack before autumn. Operation Crusader, as the new desert push was code-named, was repeatedly postponed. Churchill chafed and fulminated, even muttering implausibly about replacing Auchinleck with Lord Gort. But he continued to receive the same message from Cairo. The only bright spot in North Africa was the continuing defence of Tobruk by the 7th Australian Division. Churchill was exasperated beyond measure later in the year when the Australian government, in Canberra, by then led by Labor’s John Curtin after Robert Menzies’s eviction from power, insisted that this formation should be evacuated from the beleaguered port and replaced by British troops. On August 25, British forces entered Persia after the pro-Nazi shah’s rejection of an ultimatum from London, demanding the expulsion of several hundred Germans from the country. Churchill and Eden shared an embarrassment about the Persian incursion, intensified when Russian forces moved into the north of the country. Persia became an important supply route for aid to Stalin, but the British were conscious that their seizure of power there echoed Hitler’s method of doing business.
At home, Churchill urged the RAF’s Bomber Command to intensify its night attacks on German industry. Yet these were not merely ineffectual, they were also shockingly costly. Between August 1 and 18 alone, 107 British bombers were lost over Germany and France. The night blitz on Britain incurred Luftwaffe losses of less than 1 percent for each raid, a substantial proportion of these to accidents. Yet the RAF’s wartime bomber losses averaged 4 percent. This was a sobering statistic for young aircrew obliged to carry out thirty sorties to complete a tour of operations. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy’s heroic and bloody Mediterranean convoy battles to sustain the defence of Malta commanded much media attention, but did nothing to divert German attention from the east.
As the Russians fell back, whole armies disintegrating before the Nazi juggernaut, Stalin was infuriated when Eden and Lord Moyne, government leader in the House of Lords, made speeches ruling out any prospect of an early Second Front. The ministers’ intention was, of course, to quash speculation at home. But in Moscow, their remarks were perceived as crass. They obliged Hitler, by explicitly forswearing any threat to his rear. Stalin cabled Maisky at the end of August: “The British government, by its passive301, waiting policy, is helping the Nazis. The Nazis want to knock off their enemies one at a time—today the Russians, tomorrow the British … Do the British understand this? I think they do. What do they want out of this? They want us to be weakened. If this suspicion is correct, we must be very severe in our dealings with the British.”
British efforts to guard secrets from their new cobelligerent were fatally compromised by the plethora of Communist sympathisers, headed by Donald Maclean and John Cairncross, who had access to privileged information. More British documents, cables, committee minutes and Ultra intercepts were passed to the Soviet Union than Russia’s intelligence service had resources to translate. For instance Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s intelligence chief, reported to his leader on August 28, 1941:
We would like to inform you on the contents302 of a telegram from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of England dated 18 August this year addressed to the English ambassador to the USA. Contents of this telegram have been obtained by the Intelligence Department of NKVD of the USSR in London using our agents. “In response to Paragraph 3 of your telegram No. 3708 of 8 August. Our attitude towards Russians will be determined entirely on the principle of reciprocity. We must make them open their military installations and other objects of interest to our people in Russia. So far we have shown Russians almost nothing. In the near future they will be shown factories producing standard weapons. They will not, however, be admitted to experimental plants. Chiefs of staff have established the general principle for all institutions, whereby Russians can only be given such information or reports as would be useless to the Germans even if they gained possession of them … We hope that American authorities will not exceed the limits to which we adhere.
Such privileged insights into British thinking did nothing to persuade the Russians to lift the obsessive secrecy cloaking their own military and industrial activities.
For all Churchill’s professions of enthusiasm about dispatching war matériel from Britain, precious little was happening. Within his own government, the policy commanded wholehearted support only from Eden and Beaverbrook. Lord Hankey was among those who openly opposed aiding Stalin, urging instead a higher priority for the Atlantic battle. Churchill declared in a BBC broadcast on September 9 that “large supplies are on the way” to the Soviet Union. Three weeks later he told the House of Commons: “In order to enable Russia to remain303 indefinitely in the field as a first-class war-making power, sacrifices of the most serious kind and the most extreme efforts will have to be made by the British people, and enormous new installations or conversions from existing plants will have to be set up in the United States, with all the labour, expense and disturbance of normal life which these entail.”
Yet the Chiefs of Staff’s objections delayed even a shipment of two hundred U.S.-built Tomahawk fighters and a matching number of Hurricanes promised to Stalin by the prime minister. These planes reached Russia at the end of August. Otherwise, Britain’s main contribution by autumn was a consignment of rubber. Churchill’s people were as bemused as Moscow was angered by Britain’s failure to employ its own forces in some conspicuous emergency action to distract the Germans. Surrey court reporter George King wrote on September 16: “Hitler is throwing all he has got into the Eastern battles304. I think we all wish here we could strike him somewhere in the West, but I suppose we are not ready yet.” And again a few weeks later: “The marvellous Russians are still holding the enemy.”
Late in September, the British government undertook an important initiative. Lord Beaverbrook, now minister of supply, sailed for Russia with a twenty-two-member British delegation including Ismay, Churchill’s chief of staff, and accompanied—remarkably, given that the United States was still a nonbelligerent—by eleven Americans led by Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s emissary. “Make sure we are not bled white,” Churchill told Beaverbrook on parting. But Beaverbrook was determined to stretch out a hand to Stalin, to demonstrate a goodwill and generosity beyond anything the British government and Chiefs of Staff had mandated. In three meetings with Stalin, at which the Russian leader displayed insatiable curiosity about Churchill, Beaverbrook deployed all his charm and enthusiasm. He swallowed Stalin’s insults—“What is the use of an army if it does not fight? … The paucity of your offers shows you want to see the Soviet Union defeated.” The press lord sought to amuse as well as encourage the warlord. A civil servant observed cynically that Beaverbrook and Stalin achieved a rapport because they were both racketeers. The British promised tanks, planes and equipment—explicitly 200 aircraft and 250 tanks a month—while Harriman, on behalf of the Americans, offered matching largesse. The British proposal represented between a quarter and a third of 1941–42 domestic production of fighters, and more than a third of tank output. It was as much as any minister could have offered, but the Russians considered it nugatory in the context of the titanic struggle to which they were committed.
Beaverbrook returned to London on October 10 in messianic mood. In public, he praised to the skies Stalin and his nation. To the Defence Committee of the War Cabinet, he wrote: “There is today only one military problem—how to help Russia. Yet on that issue the chiefs of staff content themselves with saying that nothing can be done.” So violently did he press the Russian case that Ian Jacob of the War Cabinet Secretariat became persuaded that he aspired to supplant Churchill as prime minister. Beaverbrook urged an immediate landing in Norway, while from Moscow Cripps cabled, proposing that Briti
sh troops should be sent to reinforce the Red Army. Thenceforward, Beaverbrook became the foremost advocate of an early Second Front, exploiting his own newspapers to press the case. It is sometimes suggested that he made his only important contribution to Britain’s war effort during the summer of 1940, as minister of aircraft production. But his intervention in the autumn of 1941, to demand supplies for Russia, was of even greater significance. At a time when many others in London, commanders and ministers alike, were dragging their feet, the press baron’s intemperate zeal made a difference to both public and political attitudes.