Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  Among the British left, however, and the public at large, enthusiasm for Churchill’s declaration of support for Russia was overwhelming. Independent Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, an almost unflagging critic of Churchill’s leadership, nonetheless congratulated him on his welcome to the Russians as comrades-in-arms: ‘It was an exceedingly clever statement, a very difficult one to make, but made with great wisdom and strength.’ Surrey court shorthand-writer George King wrote: ‘I glory in all this. I have always had a soft spot for the Russians, and never blamed them for their dislike of us. We gave them good cause in the years after the last war…Thank God for Russia. They have saved us from invasion this year.’ Londoner Vere Hodgson wrote on 22 June: ‘The Russians have not been too nice to us in the past, but now we have to be friends and help one another…So we have got one fighting ally left in Europe. I felt my morale rising.’ She added in the following month, with notable sagacity: ‘Somehow I think Stalin is more a match for Hitler than any of us…he looks such an unpleasant kind of individual.’ In this she was entirely right. It was never plausible that, in order to defeat Hitler, British people would have been willing to eat other. But the Russians did so during the siege of Leningrad. Indeed, they endured many worse things between 1941 and 1945, which spared the Western Allies from choices such as the British prime minister never flinched from, but his people did.

  British communists, many of whom had hitherto been indifferent to the war, now changed tune dramatically. Some, like Mrs Elizabeth Belsey, henceforward matched impassioned admiration for Mother Russia’s struggle with unremitting scorn for Britain’s leaders. She wrote to her soldier husband:

  I was agreeably surprised…that Churchill received Russia so promptly into the circle of our gallant allies. I had thought he might either continue his own war, ignoring Russia’s, or clear out & let Russia hold the baby. On mature reflection, I realise that the course he took was for him the only realistic one. His speech disgusted me…The damnably sloppy picture he drew of the Russians ‘defending their soil’, and the even-atheists-pray-sometimes attitude towards Soviet women! And the way in which every single speaker on the subject makes it quite frankly clear that whereas we supported Greece for the Greeks, Norway for the Norwegians, Abyssinia for the Abyssinians and so on, we are now supporting Russia solely for ourselves…And as for Churchill’s personal record! Who’s going to remind him of his statement that if he had to choose between communism & fascism he wasn’t sure he’d choose communism?

  Churchill derived Micawberish satisfaction from the fact that Hitler’s lunge eastward signified that ‘something had turned up’. But he shared with his generals a deep scepticism about Russia’s ability to withstand the Wehrmacht. A year earlier, tiny Finland had humiliated the Red Army. British national pride argued that it was wildly implausible for Russia to repulse Hitler’s legions, where the combined might of the French and British armies had failed to do so in 1940. Pownall wrote on 29 June: ‘It’s impossible to say how long Russian resistance will last—three weeks or three months?’ The best that Britain’s service chiefs sought from the new eastern front, following the launching of Barbarossa, was that the Russians might hold out until winter. British troops continued making preparations against a German descent on the home shore, partly because there was no other credible occupation for them. Pownall expressed scepticism: ‘I don’t believe Winston is at heart a believer in invasion of this country. Of course he can’t say that, because everyone would then immediately slacken off.’

  Much of the British Army—a substantially larger part than that deployed in the Middle East—stayed in Britain, where it would remain for three more years, to the chagrin of the Russians and later also of the Americans. Of some twenty-five infantry and four armoured divisions at home, only perhaps ten were battleworthy. There was no purpose in shipping formations to the Middle East, or for that matter to Britain’s Eastern Empire, any faster than they could be equipped with tanks, anti-tank guns, automatic weapons and artillery. All these things remained in short supply. It was considered necessary to sustain production of weapons and aircraft known to be obsolete, because introduction of new designs imposed delays that seemed unacceptable. A host of ill-equipped, half-trained, profoundly bored British soldiers lingered in their own country month after month, and eventually year after year, while much smaller numbers of their comrades fought abroad. Alan Brooke, C-in-C Home Forces, complained how difficult it was to hone units to fighting pitch when they lacked the stimulus of action.

  Moreover, the overwhelming bulk of the RAF’s fighter strength continued to be deployed in southern England, conducting ‘sweeps’ over northern France which were deemed morally important, but cost the RAF greater losses than the Luftwaffe—411 pilots between June and September, for 103 Luftwaffe aircraft shot down (though the RAF claimed 731). Generals and admirals chafed at this use of air resources. Fighters were of priceless value in the Middle East and over the Mediterranean. When Admiral Cunningham was told that he was to become a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath, he responded tartly that he would rather be given three squadrons of Hurricanes. ‘Why the authorities at home apparently could not see the danger of our situation in the Mediterranean without adequate air support passed my comprehension,’ he wrote. There was a further difficulty, which would handicap the RAF for the rest of the war: the Spitfire and Hurricane were superb interceptors, ideal for home defence, but had very limited fuel endurance. The further afield the war extended, the more severely Britain suffered from the absence of long-range fighters. The Royal Navy lacked good carrier aircraft until American types became available in 1944-45. The large home deployment of fighters was justified by the chiefs of staff on the grounds that if Hitler launched an invasion, the RAF would play the critical role in national defence. It nonetheless seems an important strategic mistake that throughout 1941-42 Britain retained extravagantly large air forces on domestic airfields—seventy-five squadrons of day fighters against thirty-four in the whole of the Middle East in late 1941—even after most of the Luftwaffe had departed for the eastern front. Britain remained heavily over-insured against invasion well into 1942, at important cost to its overseas battlefield forces.

  If Hitler, rather than turn east, had instead chosen to increase pressure on Britain in 1941, 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 22 June 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 RAF’s ability to frustrate an amphibious armada. On 29 June 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 co
uld 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 Britishers 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 work 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 24 August, in which 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 Oberstgruppenführer Kurt Daluege, signalled all his units on 13 September: ‘The danger of enemy 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, 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 trades 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 London for so many years’, now communing constantly with Churchill, Eden and US ambassador ‘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 north Norway, to open a direct link to the Red Army. When this notion was quashed, chiefly 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 material was dispatched.

  As for the United States, the country was at first uncertain what to make of the new situation. Roosevelt sounded insouciant, almost flippant, in a letter to US ambassador Admiral William Leahy in Vichy on 26 June: ‘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 US 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: ‘It’s a case of dog eat dog.’ Arch-isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler declared his matching contempt for Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt.

  The US 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 US material moved. At the beginning of August, Roosevelt fiercely abused 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 US 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. The Russians refused to part with their gold. Roosevelt acquiesced with a docility the British would have welcomed for themselves. US supplies to Russia were provided gratis, under Lend-Lease. But progress towards implementation remained slow. As in Britain, there was a lack of 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’, 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 codenamed, 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 9th 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’ eviction from power, insisted that this formation should be evacuated from the beleaguered port, to be replaced by British troops. On 25 August, 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 1 and 18 August alone, 107 British bombers were lost over Germany and France. The night blitz on Britain had incurred Luftwaffe losses of less than 1 per cent for each raid, a substantial proportion of these to accidents. Yet the RAF’s wartime bomber losses averaged 4 per cent. This was a sobering statistic for you
ng 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 passive, 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 co-belligerent 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 Beria, Stalin’s intelligence chief, reported to his leader on 28 August 1941: ‘We would like to inform you on the contents 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.”’ Knowledge of British attitudes did nothing to persuade the Russians to lift the obsessive secrecy cloaking their own military and industrial activities.