by Max Hastings
For all Churchill’s professions of enthusiasm about dispatching war material 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 9 September 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 remain 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 staffs’ objections delayed even a shipment of 200 US-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 shorthand-writer George King wrote on 16 September: ‘Hitler is throwing all he has got into the Eastern battles. 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-strong British delegation including Ismay, Churchill’s chief of staff, and accompanied—remarkably, given that the US was still a non-belligerent—by eleven Americans led by Roosevelt’s emissary Averell Harriman. ‘Make sure we are not bled white,’ Churchill told Beaverbrook at 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 one-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 10 October 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 British 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.
Beaverbrook’s subsequent Second Front campaign, of which more will be said, was irresponsible and disloyal. He displayed naïveté or worse in his extravagant eulogies of the Soviet Union, ignoring and even denying the bloodstained nature of Stalin’s tyranny in a fashion Churchill never stooped to. Alan Brooke was among those who harboured lasting bitterness about the commitments Beaverbrook made in Moscow, which he considered irresponsibly generous. Yet as Minister of Supply, Beaverbrook grasped a fundamental point that more fastidious British politicians, generals and officials refused to acknowledge. Whatever the shortcomings of Russia as an ally, the outcome of the struggle in the east must be decisive in determining the fate of Britain. The North African campaign might loom large in British perceptions and propaganda, but was of negligible importance alongside Stalin’s war. If Hitler overwhelmed Russia, he might become invincible in Europe even if America later entered the war.
Until March 1942, when the Germans awoke to the importance of interdicting Allied supplies and strongly reinforced their air and naval forces in north Norway, convoys to Russia were almost unmolested, and only two British ships were lost. Churchill appointed Beaverbrook chairman of a new Allied Supplies Executive, to plan and supervise deliveries. Yet even with his support, shipments remained modest. The British dispatched obsolescent and poorly crated Hurricane fighters, many of which arrived damaged; US-built Tomahawk fighters, which the Russians found unreliable, and for a time grounded; together with tanks and Boyes anti-tank rifles which the British Army recognised as inadequate. The second so-called ‘PQ’ convoy to Russia sailed only on 18 October 1941, the third on 9 November. In their desperation, the Russians came as near as ever in the war to displaying gratitude. A Soviet admiral said later: ‘I can still remember with what close attention we followed the progress of the first convoys in the late autumn of 1941, with what speed and energy they were unloaded in Archangel and Murmansk.’
Lord Hankey, however, wrote with malicious satisfaction about the perceived hypocrisy of Beaverbrook’s enthusiasm for arming Russia, when as Minister of Supply he was responsible for the shortcomings of British tank production: ‘Now I have to bring to light the fact that he is building nothing but dud tanks when he is vociferously appealing to the workers to work all day and all night to produce for Russia innumerable Tanks—all dud Tanks.’ The Russians valued the Valentine, which coped with the conditions of the eastern front much better than the Matilda, which was also shipped in quantity. But they quickly grasped that most of the weapons dispatched from Britain were those its own forces least wanted. They scarcely helped themselves by contemptuously dismissing British offers of technical instruction. The new users’ unfamiliarity caused much equipment to be damaged or destroyed. Several Russian pilots killed themselves by attempting to take off without releasing their Tomahawks’ brakes.
When large-scale American supplies began to reach Russia in 1943-44, these exercised a dramatic influence on the feeding and transport of the Red Army. The Russians soon lost interest in tanks and planes, which they preferred to build for themselves, seeking instead American trucks, boots, technical equipment, aluminium and canned meat. It is arguable that food deliveries narrowly averted starvation in Russia in the winter of 1942-43. US shipments eventually totalled £2.5 billion, against Britain’s £45.6 million. Allied aid is thought to have contributed 10 per cent to the Soviet war effort in 1943-44—but only 5 per cent in 1942, and a negligible proportion in 1941. Chris Bellamy, among the best-informed Western historians of the Soviet Union’s war, suggests that while such a contribution seems marginal, when the Soviet Union hung close to defeat it may have been decisive.
In 1941-42 the British and Americans cannot realistically be blamed for dispatching so little to Russia, because both weapons production and shipping were inadequate to meet their own needs. The relevant point is merely that there w
as a chasm between Anglo-American rhetoric and the real Western contribution. In the first year after Barbarossa was launched, of 2,443 tanks promised by the Western powers only 1,442 arrived on time, together with 1,323 of 1,800 aircraft. During this period, the Russians were themselves producing 2,000 tanks a month—most of notably higher quality than those shipped to Murmansk and Archangel. The Red Army sometimes lost a thousand tanks a week on the battlefield.
By the autumn of 1941, the tension between popular enthusiasm in Britain for Stalin’s people, and contempt for the Russians in some parts of the war machine, was imposing intense pressure on the prime minister. An Observer columnist suggested that Russia’s entry into the war fed Britain’s instinctive complacency: ‘The effect upon us psychologically is unhealthy. We have found a short cut to victory…We settle back to read with satisfaction how our air offensive against Germany is helping our great Soviet ally. With Russia and U.S.A. on our side, now surely all will be well.’ Edward Stebbing, discharged from the army and working as a laboratory technician, wrote in October: ‘My main feeling is one of bitter, flaming anger at the inertia of our government…our help to Russia has been almost negligible.’
Even as Stebbing was penning his angry reflections, the prime minister warned Middle East command of ‘the rising temper of the British people against what they consider our inactivity’. To his son Randolph in the Middle East on 31 October, he described the sniping of his critics in Parliament and Beaverbrook’s frequent threats of resignation: ‘Things are pretty hard here…The Communists are posing as the only patriots in the country. The Admirals, Generals and Air Marshals chant their stately hymn of “Safety First”…In the midst of this I have to restrain my natural pugnacity by sitting on my own head. How bloody!’ Gen. John Kennedy wrote in his diary in September: ‘The fundamental difficulty is that altho we want the Germans to be knocked out above all, most of us feel…that it would not be a bad thing if the Russians were to be finished as a military power too…The CIGS constantly expresses his dislike of the Russians…The Russians on their side doubtless feel the same about us.’
Pownall, Dill’s vice-chief, wrote in October: ‘Would that the two loathsome monsters, Germany and Russia, drown together in a death grip in the winter mud.’ Oliver Harvey at the Foreign Office was astonished by the strength of ill-will towards Moscow within the government: ‘The Labour ministers…are as prejudiced as the P.M. against the Soviets because of their hatred and fear of the Communists at home.’ Churchill himself, according to the diplomat, was prone to spasms of doubt about how far aid to Russia was cost-effective: ‘After his first enthusiasm, he is now getting bitter as the Russians become a liability and he says we cannot afford the luxury of helping them with men, only with material.’
Yet Churchill recognised how fortunate his nation had been, thus far to wage war at relatively small cost in lives compared to those lost by Poland and France, not to mention Russia. He marvelled: ‘In two years struggle with the greatest military Power, armed with the most deadly weapons, barely 100,000 of our people have been killed, of which nearly half are civilians.’ Such a cool assessment of what would, in other times, have been deemed a shocking ‘butcher’s bill’ helps to explain his fitness for the nation’s leadership. Robert Menzies, when still Australian prime minister, noted this: ‘Winston’s attitude to war is much more realistic than mine. I constantly find myself looking at “minor losses” and saying “there are some darkened homes.” But he is wise. War is terrible and it cannot be won except by lost lives. That being so, don’t think of them.’
Churchill, once more desperate for military theatre, urged the War Office to accelerate plans for raids on the Continent. ‘The Army must do something—the people want it,’ he told John Kennedy and the Director of Military Intelligence during a lunch at Downing Street. ‘Surely this [is] within our powers—The effects might be enormous—The Germans engaged in Russia—now [is] the time.’ Kennedy wrote: ‘Winston is in a difficult position. He is hard pressed politically to take action while Russia is struggling so desperately. He keeps saying “I cannot hold the position.” The difficulty is that with a disaster the position may be harder to hold.’ News from the eastern front was unremittingly grim. The Red Army’s losses were appalling. A great swathe of Stalin’s empire had already fallen to Hitler. Churchill, after a meeting with his generals on 11 October, bade them farewell with a mournful headshake: ‘Yes, I am afraid Moscow is a gone coon,’ he said, padding off along the Downing Street passage towards his afternoon nap.
The Soviet Union had not the smallest moral claim upon Britain. Even if Churchill had stripped his own nation’s armed forces and dispatched heavier shipments to Murmansk after Barbarossa was launched, the impact on the early eastern front campaigns would have been small. As it was, the chiefs of staff were dismayed by the impact of aid to Russia upon British tank and aircraft strengths in the Middle and Far East, which were anyway grievously inadequate. Worse, American deliveries to Britain were significantly cut so that Roosevelt could meet his own commitments to Stalin. Given the weakness of British arms in 1941, it was unrealistic to suppose that Churchill could have done much more to aid the Russians. In 1942, however, a yawning gap opened between British and American undertakings, and quantities of material delivered. It was ironic, of course, that the boundlessly duplicitous Soviets should thereupon have proclaimed, and even sincerely harboured, moral indignation towards Britain and the United States. But the principal reality of subsequent military operations would be that Russians did most of the dying necessary to undo Nazism, while the Western powers advanced at their own measured pace towards a long-delayed confrontation with the Wehrmacht.
For many years after 1945, the democracies found it gratifying to perceive the Second World War in Europe as a struggle for survival between themselves and Nazi tyranny. Yet the military outcome of the contest was overwhelmingly decided by the forces of Soviet tyranny, rather than by Anglo-American armies. Perversely, this reality was better understood by many contemporary British people than it has been by their descendants.
SEVEN
The Battle of America
1 Strictly Cash
Throughout 1941, even after torrents of blood began to flow across the plains of Russia, Churchill’s foremost priority remained the enlistment of the US as a fighting ally. As he followed the fortunes of Britain’s desert battles, the pursuit of the Bismarck, Atlantic convoy struggle, campaign in Greece and faltering bomber offensive, his American vision dominated the far horizon. Unless or until the US joined the war, Britain might avert defeat, but could not aspire to victory. Among Churchill’s priceless contributions to Britain’s salvation was his wooing of the USA, when many of his compatriots were rash enough to indulge rancour towards what they perceived as the fat, complacent nation across the Atlantic. ‘I wonder if the Americans realise how late they are leaving their intervention,’ wrote John Kennedy in May 1941, ‘that if they wait much longer we may be at the last gasp.’ In a notable slip of the tongue, a BBC announcer once referred to the threat of ‘American’ rather than ‘enemy’ parachutists descending on Britain.
It would be hard to overstate the bitterness among many British people, high and low, about the United States’s abstention from the struggle. The rhetoric of Roosevelt and Churchill created an enduring myth of American generosity in 1940-41. Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, wrote of ‘rushing vast quantities of weapons to Britain in the summer of 1940’. In truth, however great the symbolic importance of early US consignments, their practical value was small.
American-supplied artillery and small arms were obsolete, and made a negligible contribution to Britain’s fighting power. Aircraft deliveries in 1941 were moderate both in quantity and quality. The fifty old destroyers loaned by the US in exchange for British colonial basing rights were scarcely seaworthy: just nine were operational at the end of 1940, and the rest required long refits. Only from 1942 onwards, when Britain received Grant and Sherman tanks, 105mm sel
f-propelled guns, Liberator bombers and much else, did US war material dramatically enhance the capabilities of Churchill’s forces.
Moreover, far from guns, tanks and planes shipped across the Atlantic representing American largesse, until the end of 1941 these were cash purchases. Under the terms of the Neutrality Act imposed by Congress, no belligerent could be granted credit. For the first two years of the war the US reaped huge profits from arms sales. ‘The United States Administration is pursuing an almost entirely American policy, rather than one of all possible aid to Britain,’ Eden wrote to Churchill on 30 November 1940. Roosevelt anticipated British bankruptcy, and adopted the notion of ‘loaning’ supplies, an idea which originated with New York’s Century Association, before Churchill asked him to do so. But the president was furious when Lord Lothian, in October 1940 still British ambassador in Washington, told American journalists: ‘Well boys, Britain’s broke. It’s your money we want.’ There is doubt whether the ambassador used these exact words, but the thrust of his remarks was undisputed.
