Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  The task of helping the Soviet Union was eased by the reaction of public opinion in both states. In Britain the cause of the Red Army was taken up with enthusiasm. The great battles of the east came at a time when the British war effort was stagnating. The British labour movement now had a fellow working-class with which to identify, but even among British elites it became the fashion to hail the Soviet Union as a firm ally. On 1 January 1942 a New Year pageant was held in the Albert Hall in London for ‘Empire and Allies’. When the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, was introduced he received, according to The Times, a tumultuous welcome; the entire audience greeted him with a ‘V’ for Victory sign.33 In the United States popular opinion was more divided. Little more than half the people admitted in opinion polls to trusting the Soviet Union, but by October 1941 73 per cent in a Fortune poll favoured working with her, and by February 1942 the figure was 84 per cent.34 They could see, like their President, that Soviet belligerency was good for American security.

  To the Soviet authorities expressions of goodwill and solidarity were no substitute for a firm commitment to help. Stalin wanted a formal alliance between the three powers. Roosevelt would not entertain the idea. Britain accepted a limited joint declaration, signed on 10 July 1941, that both states would keep fighting against Hitler and would not make a separate peace. Beyond that, assistance was conspicuous by its absence. In September Maisky complained to Eden that the British were more like ‘spectators’ than allies.35 The same month Stalin sent a desperate appeal for military help to Churchill. To Maisky, who delivered it, Churchill replied: ‘I do not want to delude you; until winter we cannot give you any serious help … All we can give you is a drop in the ocean.’ Throughout 1941 the United States sent only 20 million dollars in aid, against more than a billion for Britain.36

  Over the next two years the Soviet Union wanted only one thing from the west: the opening of a Second Front. The story of the western response has already been told, but the ambiguities in the western position did nothing but harm in Moscow. Roosevelt’s promise of a Second Front when Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov visited Washington in May 1942 was given more to keep the Soviet Union in the war than from genuine commitment. Soviet suspicions that western assistance was ‘prompted by expediency rather than by friendliness’ were not entirely misplaced. Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s personal representative in Moscow, recalled long after the war that he had been sent to the Soviet Union ‘to keep Russia in the war and save American lives’. In November 1942 Admiral King observed ‘in the last analysis’ that ‘Russia will do nine-tenths of the job of defeating Hitler’.37

  The Soviet authorities did little to help their cause. They refused to supply their co-belligerents with detailed information about military strategy or economic planning. They shared almost no technical or intelligence information with the west, while expecting a great deal in return. Contact between the Soviet people and visiting foreigners was carefully limited. Soviet citizens could not fraternise without running serious risks. Journalists and diplomats were confined in Moscow except for short stage-managed visits to the front or to showpiece factories. In the capital, according to one British correspondent, ‘an invisible fence sprang up around us … and moved with us wherever we went’.38 Soviet officials were routinely awkward and obstructive, without explanation. General Deane, head of the American Military Mission, wrote after the war that when it was ‘“kick-Americans-in-the-pants week” even the charwoman would be sour’.39 By contrast a good deal of sensitive technical and military material was passed regularly to Moscow. Fifteen thousand Soviet experts visited factories and military installations in the United States during the war. Not until 1944, when it became clear that Soviet economic demands were now being tailored for the postwar economy, did the American authorities begin to refuse further Lend-Lease supplies. Throughout the period of the coalition relations between the three states were strained by mutual distrust and prejudice. Teheran eased the tension but it did not eradicate the deep political gulf between east and west.

  The proverbial man from Mars, observing such a coalition, might well ask how he should distinguish friend from foe. The common denominator for the Allies was hostility to Hitler’s Germany. Only the German threat was sufficiently powerful to hold three such unlikely partners together through so many disagreements. Each had an interest in the others’ continued hostility to Germany, and each worked to prevent a separate peace. Their options were in reality exceptionally narrow. Before Barbarossa, Roosevelt interpreted America’s prime interest as ‘everything we can do, short of war, to keep the British Isles afloat’. After the German attack in the east his priority was to keep both Britain and the Soviet Union fighting. Stalin in his turn needed to be confident that the west was really committed to the war, and not just hoping that fascism and communism would batter each other to a standstill. He watched hungrily for any evidence of western good faith. In June 1943 the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Maxim Litvinov, sent back to the Kremlin a very full report on American attitudes to the war. Everything he had seen or heard confirmed what Stalin wanted to know: ‘the most important strategic task of the United States is the struggle against Hitler.’ Though the coalition fought what the British politician Stafford Cripps called ‘two relatively unrelated wars’, their joint commitment to the defeat of the Axis was scarcely in doubt.40

  The temporary confluence of interest was sustained throughout by American economic aid, which bound both Britain and the Soviet Union willy-nilly to the coalition. Over the course of the war the United States supplied Britain with one-fifth of all military equipment, and large quantities of food, oil and machinery. The Soviet Union received much less in the way of weapons, but was sent large amounts of vital industrial equipment and materials to enable Soviet factories to produce their own military equipment. One-fifth of supplies to Russia consisted of food, enough to provide every Soviet soldier with a daily ration. The ubiquitous tins of Lend-Lease spam were nicknamed ‘Second Fronts’ by the Soviet soldiery.41 Without American aid neither Britain nor the Soviet Union could have fought so effectively. The recipients were not particularly grateful for this wartime dependence. Churchill once remarked that he had no intention of paying it back, while the Soviet regime complained constantly at the delays in delivery or the quality of goods supplied. A generation of postwar Stalinist writing ignored altogether the role of Lend-Lease in Soviet victory. It is now known that Stalin privately viewed the aid as vital to Soviet survival. Nikita Khrushchev, his successor, recalled in taped interviews in the 1960s (released only thirty years later) that Stalin had on a number of occasions told his close circle that without Lend-Lease the Soviet Union ‘would not have been able to cope’.42

  There was little idealism about the future of collaboration to bind the three leaders together, and what there was has long been discounted by historians as misplaced. Little of it touched Stalin, who for most of the war thought the worst of his allies but remained impressed by Hitler, ‘a very able man’ he informed Harry Hopkins at Teheran.43 Churchill was quite realistic about the limitations of the coalition. To one Soviet complaint, late in 1941, he retorted: ‘We in this island did not know whether you were not coming in against us on the German side … we never thought our survival was dependent on your action either way.’44 Roosevelt was more of an optimist. He seemed genuinely to have hoped that cooperation with the Soviet Union would create a foundation both for greater freedom in the communist world and for international peace after the war. The close personal relationship he believed he had with Stalin mattered to him perhaps more than the certainty of Churchill’s loyalty. ‘Stalin hates the guts of all your top people,’ he told his British ally. ‘He likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.’45 Roosevelt’s motives in extending help to Britain and the Soviet Union stemmed from a real desire for a more hopeful international order after the war, based on a genuine warmth between the leaders of the coalition. National interest nevertheless prevailed. When
the three Allies began to address the political issues that were raised by the imminent defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, the wartime friendship rapidly evaporated, to be replaced by the incipient antagonisms of the Cold War.

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  The account of the personal efforts made by the three Allied leaders to secure and sustain a coalition that could defeat the Axis prompts the further question of how important leadership was in explaining the outcome of the war. There has never been much doubt that it mattered a great deal in Hitler’s case. The defects in his leadership contributed to Germany’s eventual defeat in ways that can easily be demonstrated. But in the Allied case the issue is more complex. Two of the leaders were democratically elected; Stalin was a dictator like Hitler. None of them expected to be called upon to lead his nation in war, whereas Hitler made war a central ambition of the regime he led. In the event all three Allied leaders in their different ways, and from their very different backgrounds, became wartime leaders of real substance. Hitler, on the other hand, failed the test of war.

  Unlike the Allied leaders of the First World War, who in the main left the fighting to the generals, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin dominated the whole process of waging war. Throughout its course they were closely involved both with military operations and with the mobilisation of the home front. Though only Stalin was a dictator, all three men were able to exert considerable personal authority. Each acted as commander-in-chief of his respective forces. This was Roosevelt’s prerogative as President of the United States. Stalin acquired the title on 8 August 1941, though it was not widely publicised at first because Stalin did not want his name to be identified with defeat.46 Under the British constitution the King was formally Commander-in-Chief, but Churchill informally assumed the role. As Prime Minister, Minister of Defence and chairman of the Defence Committee he was uniquely placed to act the military chief, though it was never entirely clear whether he could constitutionally compel the armed services to obey his commands.47 All three leaders encouraged the centralisation of the Allied war efforts around their own person. Here the similarities end. Roosevelt and Churchill had some things in common beside language, though less than the rhetoric of ‘special relationship’ might suggest. But with Stalin, the artisan’s son from Georgia, the contrast was complete.

  Any assessment of Stalin’s leadership during the war has to steer between two extremes. Soviet propaganda presented Stalin uncritically as the saviour of his people and the architect of victory. In unravelling this distorted image the temptation is to highlight the weaknesses and errors in Stalin’s conduct of the war, and to diminish the contribution of his personality. Neither approach does justice to its subject. Stalin’s was an extraordinary story. Born in 1879 in the small Georgian town of Gori, his early life was spent in conditions of urban squalor; he was beaten mercilessly by his father, a failed and drunken cobbler. At six he survived smallpox, but he bore its facial scars for the rest of his life. An infected ulcer left him with a slightly withered arm. His tough upbringing produced in him, a childhood friend recalled, a personality both ‘grim and heartless’.48 At school he excelled, thanks to a phenomenal memory. He was transferred to a seminary in Tiflis where he first made contact with Russian Marxism. He became an active revolutionist, and moved in and out of Tsarist jails. In 1917 he was prominent in the inner circle of Bolshevik leaders working to turn the overthrow of Tsardom in February 1917 into a communist revolution. When Lenin’s coup succeeded in October, Stalin was rewarded with his first taste of office, as People’s Commissar for the Russian Nationalities. In 1922 Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the Party. It was a fateful appointment, for this ambitious, secretive, devious revolutionary, both more plebeian and more brutal than the committee of intellectuals who ran the Party, used the new office as the instrument to create an unassailable power-base. By the late 1920s Stalin – ‘man of steel’ – dominated the Soviet state apparatus and his own party.

  In the decade before the war Stalin was the driving force behind the rapid state-imposed modernisation of Soviet industry and agriculture, and the build-up of the largest armed forces in the world. This ‘revolution from above’, with its ceaseless chaos and emergencies, permitted him to centralise power even more completely in his own hands. The apparatus of propaganda lionised Stalin as the genius of socialist reconstruction and father of his people. The reality was grotesquely different. Stalin was obsessively distrustful of those around him and used the machinery of state terror to insulate himself against enemies real or imagined. The massive problems of social dislocation thrown up by forced modernisation were viewed by Stalin as so much sabotage, to be punished with deportation or death. Stalin appeared to those who met him in public unassuming, almost timid, quiet-spoken but firm, with little of the monster about him. In private Stalin revealed a coarseness in his nature; he was vindictive and bullying, given to bouts of red-faced fury. His colleagues learned when to talk and when to stay silent. After Stalin spoke in committee all those present were said to applaud.

  Stalin travelled a long road from early poverty and obscurity to the dizzy heights of state power. He was above all a survivor, who created his dictatorship through a combination of hard work, political acumen and an almost complete lack of moral scruple. Though he was hardly a charismatic figure, the possession of absolute power gave him a distinct presence in any company, enhanced by the public demeanour of imperturbability. Harsh-tongued, brutal and cynical, he was well-informed on all issues and trusted no one. Given such a personality it was all the more disconcerting that Stalin should have been caught so completely by surprise when Germany launched the Barbarossa campaign on 22 June 1941. His conviction that Hitler simply would not attack while the British Empire remained undefeated in the west became unalterable during the spring and summer of 1941 and those who tried to challenge it ran very great risks. The German attack provoked the most serious potential crisis in Stalin’s whole history of dictatorship. It was once thought that Stalin had suffered a complete nervous collapse and retreated from his official duties. Witnesses certainly recall a quite different Stalin, ashen-faced, tired and irritable. But the post-glasnost revelations have shown that Stalin flung himself into an exhausting spell of activity after the invasion, scarcely sleeping for days on end. When he withdrew to his dacha at the end of June it was not to abandon his office, but to draft decrees setting up a new Soviet Defence Council and his first address to the Soviet people, which he gave on his return to Moscow, on July 3. None the less, Stalin was aware of how he had let down his people, just as he had been betrayed by Hitler. At a speech in May 1945 after the war had ended he took the curious step of thanking the Soviet people for not saying to him at the point of crisis in 1941: ‘Go away, we shall install another government’.49 On June 30, when a delegation from the Soviet government came out to see Stalin at his dacha, he may well have wondered whether this betokened something more sinister. Instead, his colleagues came to make sure that he would put himself at the head of the new defence committee, and to reassure him of his indispensability to the Soviet system.50 That same day the State Committee for Defence was formed.

  On 10 July the Supreme Headquarters was set up, based at Stalin’s modest apartment in the Kremlin building. Stalin now took over running the war. He assumed the role of Commissar of Defence and appointed himself Supreme Commander-in-Chief. He had no scruples about easing his party crony Klement Voroshilov out of the key post of commander of the northern front. A veteran of the Tsaritsyn battles of the civil war, Voroshilov was utterly unqualified for the military offices he held. Khrushchev regarded him bluntly as the ‘biggest bag of shit’ in the army. Following the older Russian tradition of promotion on merit, Stalin selected Georgii Zhukov as his deputy, an appointment that proved to be of critical importance for the eventual revival of Red Army fortunes.51 Under Zhukov’s lead the role of the notorious ‘commissars’ in the armed forces – political officers who enjoyed equal rank with the military commanders – was emasculated a
nd the armed forces were restored to military control.

  From then on Stalin exercised very close supervision over the conduct of the war. He worked long hours, rising late but working until two or three o’clock the following morning. He took hardly a break over the next four years. At Teheran western officials noticed how much he had aged, his dark grey hair gone almost white, his swarthy complexion sallow. He imposed this arduous regime on his General Staff, who literally operated round the clock throughout the war, sometimes working an eighteen-hour day. Stalin expected reports three times a day from the General Staff, the last, in the evening, a personal briefing in the Kremlin. At this session Stalin would go over the maps of the front in detail, and look through the operational orders for the following day prepared by the staff. He seldom travelled far from Moscow, but he insisted that his Chief-of-Staff and his deputy, Zhukov, should make regular trips to the front-line to oversee major operations. He was methodical and rigorous, but he made no pretence that he had great operational imagination. The one thing he insisted on, that Hitler would not strike on the southern front in 1942, though not a foolish calculation, almost brought another summer of disaster. The victories at Stalingrad and Kursk were designed by the military leaders, not by Stalin, who played a smaller role as the war went on and the General Staff matured into an effective command and planning unit. Stalin’s role was to act as a spur, driving the whole war effort along. He harried and bullied his subordinates where he sensed failure or timidity. The threat of imprisonment or death hung over every mistake. Stalin placed particular worth on the willingness of his staff to present the true state of affairs, ‘straightforward and unembellished’. Once it was realised that Stalin could actually be told the truth without risking life and limb, the prospect of operational miscalculation was much reduced. By 1944 Marshal Voronov, Chief of Artillery, recalled that the atmosphere at Supreme Headquarters had eased: ‘Stalin was more balanced, far more even-tempered than before.’52