The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  When a Soviet military mission arrived on July 26, he served as their escort around Washington as they pressed their hosts for quick action. Faymonville was so eager to accommodate them that he even showed them classified documents. This led to charges that he had violated military regulations. But Hopkins’—and by extension Roosevelt’s—backing ensured that no action was taken against him. In fact, he would soon be given broader responsibilities for the Russian program.

  At about the same time, Hopkins left London for Moscow. When the RAF flew him as far as Archangel, he got a first taste of official Soviet hospitality: a four-hour “monumental” meal, with multiple courses featuring cold fish and caviar, and the inevitable vodka toasts. “Vodka has authority,” Hopkins reported later. “It is nothing for the amateur to trifle with.” Then, after only two hours’ sleep, it was off to Moscow, where he was met by Ambassador Steinhardt.

  In their first conversations, Hopkins wanted to know whether Steinhardt considered the reports of Major Yeaton, the current military attaché, to be accurate. In other words, was the war going as badly for the Russians as Yeaton maintained? Steinhardt replied that it would be a mistake to underestimate the Russians, since their history indicated that they would defend their homeland. But the ambassador pointed out that it was extremely hard to know where things really stood, since the Kremlin’s obsession with secrecy and fear of foreigners meant that all diplomats assigned to Moscow could only piece together fragmentary information and impressions of what was happening.

  During Hopkins’s three-day visit to Moscow, Stalin offered a personal welcome in several hours of face-to-face talks that left his visitor clearly awed and confident that he had been made privy to inside information. After conveying his messages of support from Roosevelt and Churchill, Hopkins found himself treated to an overview of the military situation and a detailed discussion of what kinds of supplies the Kremlin was looking for. Despite the setbacks his army had suffered, Stalin insisted that the Germans had underestimated his forces. “Stalin said that his soldiers did not consider the battle lost merely because the Germans at one point and another broke through with their mechanized forces,” Hopkins later reported. The Soviet leader noted that the German troops were overextended and “even the German tanks run out of petrol.”

  Most significantly, Stalin’s specific requests for supplies such as anti-aircraft guns, machine guns, aluminum for the construction of planes, high-octane airplane fuel, and more than one million rifles indicated he envisaged a long-term war. “Give us anti-aircraft guns and the aluminum and we can fight for three or four years,” he told Hopkins. He also claimed that resistance fighters behind German lines were already making life difficult for the invaders. Moreover, Hopkins could see for himself that Moscow was a city well prepared for air raids. It was blacked out completely at night, and when German bombers appeared in the skies, they were met by a hail of anti-aircraft fire.

  Stalin argued that the United States would eventually find it necessary to join in the fight against Hitler, and he told his visitor to convey the message to Roosevelt that he would welcome American troops under their own command on the Russian front. As a surprised Hopkins noted in his report, “I told him that I doubted that our Government, in event of war, would want an American army in Russia but that I would give his message to the President.” The Soviet authorities’ consistent refusal to allow Yeaton and other military attachés to visit the front, let alone participate in any action there, suggested that Stalin was simply throwing out this offer for dramatic effect.

  Hopkins was impressed as much by Stalin’s delivery and appearance as by his message. “He talked as he knew his troops were shooting—straight and hard,” he recalled later. He described the Soviet leader as “an austere, rugged, determined figure in boots that shone like mirrors, stout baggy trousers, and snug-fitting blouse. He wore no ornament, military or civilian. He’s built close to the ground, like a football coach’s dream of a tackle…. His hands are huge, as hard as his mind.”

  Little wonder, then, that Hopkins had no patience for Major Yeaton, the military attaché who had been sending reports predicting a Soviet defeat, when they ran into each other over breakfast at the embassy. The visitor promptly told Yeaton that he was convinced that the Soviet Union would prevail in the conflict, and that the United States would provide it with “all possible” military and economic aid. This assistance, he added, would never be used as a bargaining chip.

  Yeaton was dismayed. Alluding to Hopkins’s poor health, he wrote later, “His enthusiasm to get us involved in this war and his readiness to negotiate with Stalin on an ‘I trust you’ basis gave me reasons to question whether or not his illness had affected his mind.” Facing Hopkins, Yeaton launched into his counterarguments, explaining his far more pessimistic view of the military situation and the nature of Stalin’s regime. “When I impugned the integrity and methods of Stalin, he [Hopkins] could stand it no longer and shut me up with an intense, ‘I don’t care to discuss the subject further,’” Yeaton reported.

  The next morning, Yeaton tried to patch things up. He apologized to Hopkins for upsetting him and requested his help. If the United States and the Soviet Union were to be allies, he explained, it was important for him to be allowed to move about freely to assess the military situation. In other words, the Kremlin should be told to stop restricting the movements of Western military attachés. As Yeaton reported it, Hopkins responded with “a cold, emphatic ‘no.’” There could be no more convincing evidence that Hopkins meant it when he told Yeaton that American assistance would never be used as leverage with the Russians, even on such procedural matters. Aid would be truly unconditional.

  It wasn’t just the Americans who were split in their predictions about whether the Soviet Union could withstand the German invaders. In dispatches that were intercepted by the NKVD, two of Japan’s military attachés stationed in Moscow were delivering diametrically opposite assessments to their superiors in Tokyo. Back in April, Colonel Michitake Yamaoka, the senior attaché, was predicting a summer invasion, and he was convinced that the Germans would be victorious by the end of the year. A Japanese newspaper correspondent who was in close contact with Yamaoka wrote in his diary on July 19, “The fate of Moscow will be resolved within the week.” On August 11, he predicted, “Moscow should fall in early September.”

  But Captain Takeda Yamaguchi, the naval attaché, reported on August 11 that the Germans’ initial goal of achieving victory within two months was unrealistic. “If the war is conducted according to such plans, it will undoubtedly be lost and we should probably expect an extremely dangerous situation in the future,” he wrote to the Ministry of the Navy. The result, he predicted, would be a protracted war. Reporting on the German drive from the south against Moscow in September, he added that the Red Army had been “pretty successful” in inflicting losses on the enemy, particularly on General Guderian’s units.

  This was a far from academic debate. Japan and the Soviet Union had signed a five-year neutrality pact in April 1941, but Stalin was worried that Japan might decide to attack from the east, especially if the Germans looked as though they were about to score a swift victory. From inside the German Embassy in Tokyo, Soviet master spy Richard Sorge was reporting persistent German pressure on the Japanese to join the fighting. On July 1, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop had argued in a cable to his Japanese counterpart that “the impending collapse of Russia’s main military power and thereby presumably of the Bolshevik regime itself offers the Japanese the unique opportunity” to seize Vladivostok and then keep going. “The goal of these operations,” Ribbentrop added, “should be to have the Japanese Army in its march to the west meet the German troops advancing to the east halfway even before the cold season sets in.”

  That was a case of rhetorical overkill, since not even Germany’s top generals envisaged such a meeting of the two armies, which would have required both to advance thousands of miles before the winter. But the idea was to entice Tokyo
to strike. And as long as Japan’s intentions remained uncertain, Stalin felt he couldn’t afford to redeploy large numbers of troops from the Soviet Far East to help their beleaguered comrades trying to stop the German drive toward Moscow. Thus, Japan was looming larger and larger in the Soviet leader’s strategic thinking.

  During his Moscow visit, Hopkins had discussed this situation with Molotov. The American reported that, while not expecting an immediate blow, the Soviet foreign minister “felt the Japanese would not hesitate to strike if a propitious time occurred.” Molotov told Hopkins that given this uncertainty about Japan’s intentions, he hoped that Roosevelt might warn the Japanese that any such action would prompt the United States to join in the defense of Russia. Hopkins cautiously responded that the U.S. government was monitoring the situation “with great care” but didn’t want to be “provocative” in its relations with Japan.

  In other ways, however, Roosevelt and his advisers sought to demonstrate that they were responding quickly and positively to Soviet appeals for help. On August 2, Roosevelt wrote a no-nonsense note to Wayne Coy, who had been given oversight of the Soviet aid program while Hopkins was away. The president pointed out that he had complained in the last cabinet meeting that six weeks after the German invasion, the U.S. had done “practically nothing” in terms of actually delivering the supplies the Russians had requested. “Frankly, if I were a Russian I would feel that I had been given the runaround in the United States,” he complained. He ordered Coy to “with my full authority, use a heavy hand—act as a burr under the saddle to get things moving.” And he concluded with a blunt order: “Step on it!”

  At their famous summit at sea from August 9 to 12, Roosevelt and Churchill reviewed the situation in Europe and the Far East and prepared their joint statement of principles known as the Atlantic Charter. Among them were the promises that there would be no territorial changes “that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned” and everyone should be free “to choose the form of government under which they will live.”

  In theory, those principles should immediately have raised concerns about the Soviet Union’s long-term goals, since Stalin was already pushing for acceptance of his country’s territorial and political gains that had been made possible by the now defunct Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. But that was hardly the priority at the time. Proceeding from Hopkins’s report about his Moscow visit, Roosevelt and Churchill discussed how best to respond to Stalin’s requests. They sent him a joint statement on August 14. “We are at the moment cooperating to provide you with the very maximum of supplies that you most urgently need,” they assured him. “Already many shiploads have left our shores and more will leave in the immediate future.” But they cautioned against grandiose expectations, since the war was taking place on many fronts and they had to allocate their resources carefully. They then proposed sending a high-level British-American delegation to Moscow to work out a detailed joint plan of action to ensure an effective aid program for Russia.

  Fearing that Hopkins wasn’t up to another trip to Moscow, Roosevelt designated Averell Harriman, chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, for the mission. Churchill appointed Lord Beaverbrook, the press baron and minister of supply, to represent the British side. While both men would prove to be eager to demonstrate what they could do to help the Soviet war effort, their leaders were already displaying some differences in attitude. Churchill told Beaverbrook, “Your function will be not only to aid the forming of plans to aid Russia, but to make sure we are not bled white in the process.”

  On the other side of the Atlantic, Roosevelt was more preoccupied with finding ways to present his Russia policy in the best possible light. On September 11, he met Ambassador Umansky and suggested that the Russians could help their cause by publicizing their putative commitment to freedom of religion, since this “might have a very fine educational effect before the next lend-lease bill comes up in Congress.” At the same time, Roosevelt wanted to reassure the Russians that the Americans would be coming to Moscow as friends. One key signal was the decision to include Colonel Faymonville, the former military attaché, in Harriman’s delegation.

  While every bit as committed to providing Stalin with vital military supplies, Churchill was more calculating in his handling of the Soviet leader and not about to allow him or his envoy to browbeat him into decisions that he might regret. On August 29, he wrote Stalin that in response to ambassador Maisky’s pleas for fighter aircraft, forty Hurricanes would reach Murmansk by September 6 and two hundred Tomahawks were also in the works. He offered to send another two hundred Hurricanes, for a total of 440 fighters, “if your pilots could use them effectively.” But he warned against unrealistically high expectations since “fighter aircraft are the foundation of our home defense” and were needed in North Africa as well. Politely but firmly, the prime minister was making the point that he had to attend to his country’s needs first.

  On September 4, Maisky showed up to deliver Stalin’s reply, the Soviet leader’s “first personal message since July,” as Churchill bitterly noted. Admitting that the position of Soviet forces had “considerably deteriorated” in the previous three weeks, Stalin made clear that he considered Churchill’s offer insufficient to help slow the German drive deep into his territory. To tip the balance, he declared, Britain needed “to establish in the present year a second front somewhere in the Balkans or France, capable of drawing away from the Eastern front thirty or forty divisions,” supply the Soviet Union with thirty thousand tons of aluminum by early October and provide “a monthly minimum of aid” consisting of four hundred planes and five hundred tanks.

  Not content to allow Stalin’s letter speak for itself, Maisky complained that Russia had been under attack for eleven weeks, struggling on its own to repel the huge concentration of German forces arrayed against them. Churchill was sympathetic to Russia’s plight, but his temper flared when Maisky asked, almost threateningly, how Britain could expect to win the war if it allowed Russia to be defeated. “Remember that only four months ago we in this Island did not know whether you were not coming in against us on the German side,” the prime minister replied. “Indeed, we thought it quite likely that you would. Even then we felt quite sure that we would win in the end. We never thought our survival was dependent on your action either way. Whatever happens, and whatever you do, you of all people have no right to make reproaches to us.”

  Maisky backed off. “More calm, please, my dear Mr. Churchill,” he pleaded. As the Soviet ambassador recalled, “I began to fear that at the height of his irritation he might say a good deal that was unnecessary.”

  Stalin didn’t help matters by sending a telegram on September 15 with another suggestion. “It seems to me that Great Britain could without risk land in Archangel twenty-six to thirty divisions, or transport them across Iran to the southern regions of the U.S.S.R. In this way there could be established military collaboration between the Soviet and British troops on the territory of the U.S.S.R.” Churchill was stunned that Stalin could believe, even for an instant, that Britain was in the position to contemplate such an action. “It is almost incredible that the head of the Russian Government with all the advice of their military experts could have committed himself to such absurdities,” the prime minister wrote in his memoirs. “It seemed hopeless to argue with a man thinking in terms of utter unreality.”

  Later, Maisky showed that he understood the need for the occasional gesture to help keep such tensions in check. When a new edition of War and Peace was published, for example, Maisky’s wife presented a copy to Mrs. Churchill with the inscription: “1812–1942: We destroyed our enemy then, we shall destroy our enemy also today.”

  But in the summer of 1941, any sense of confidence that the enemy would be destroyed was hard to find, particularly among Moscow’s foreign community. For the Americans, the tenuousness of the situation was brought home by a thousand-pound bomb that exploded only about fifty yards from Spaso House, blowing out al
most all the windows of Ambassador Steinhardt’s residence. Moscow felt far from safe.

  On September 28, the Anglo-American delegation led by Beaverbrook and Harriman arrived in Moscow. Quentin Reynolds, who had tried but failed to get a visa to Russia as a war correspondent, managed to arrange to go in as the mission’s press officer. Collier’s Weekly, his regular employer, had agreed to lend him for the duration. Given the grim news that the Germans were fast approaching Moscow, he wanted to get there any way he could. On the flight over in an army bomber, he sat in the frigid cabin next to Colonel Faymonville. “He was one of the few Americans I had met who doubted the Germans could conquer Russia,” he recalled.

  While other members of their delegation convened in subcommittees with their Soviet counterparts, Beaverbrook and Harriman met for three consecutive evenings with Stalin, each time for about three hours. At their first meeting, the Soviet leader reviewed the overall military situation, dwelling particularly on the three-to-one or even four-to-one ratio of German to Soviet tanks. Then he went on to provide a wish list of supplies—tanks, anti-tank guns, planes, anti-aircraft guns, even barbed wire. Addressing Beaverbrook, he again raised the possibility of British troops joining Soviet forces in the Ukraine. Like his prime minister, the British envoy offered no encouragement. Harriman tried to raise the issue of religious freedom, noting that it was of concern to the American public, but Stalin hardly bothered to respond. Nonetheless, Harriman and Beaverbrook were pleased with that first session, reporting that it was “extremely friendly.”

  But the next evening was a different story. “Stalin was very restless, walking around and smoking continuously, and appeared to both of us to be under an intense strain,” Beaverbrook recounted. While the two visitors later concluded he must have been preoccupied with the reports indicating that the Germans were about to seize Moscow, they were taken aback by his brusque, seemingly deliberately rude behavior. He picked up the phone and made three calls in their presence, dialing himself. When Beaverbrook handed him a letter from Churchill, Stalin barely glanced at it and left it on the table, ostentatiously ignoring it.