Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45

Between 1917 and 1938, Churchill sustained a reputation as an implacable foe of Bolshevism. Yet in the last years before attaining the premiership he changed key, displaying a surprising willingness to reach out to the Russians. In October 1938, against Chamberlain’s strong views he urged an alliance with Moscow, and counselled the Poles to seek an accommodation with Stalin. This line did as much to raise his standing with British Labour MPs as to lower it among Tories. In September 1939 he urged Chamberlain to perceive the Soviet advance into Poland as a favourable development: ‘None of this conflicts (#litres_trial_promo) with our main interest, which is to arrest the German movement towards the East and South-East of Europe.’ In a broadcast a fortnight later, he said: ‘That the Russian armies (#litres_trial_promo) should stand on this line [in Poland] was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.’ In January 1940, it is true, he became an enthusiastic supporter of Finland, then beset by the Russians. He once enquired about the possibility of bombing Russian oilfields at Baku in the Caucasus, to stem fuel deliveries to Germany. Excepting this interruption, however, Churchill showed himself willing to make common cause with the Russians if they would share the burden of defeating Hitler. This was probably because he could not see how else this was to be accomplished.

The prime minister was at Chequers on that June Sunday morning when news came of Barbarossa. He immediately told Eden, a house guest, of his determination to welcome the Soviet Union as a partner in the struggle, then spent the rest of the day roaming restlessly under hot sunshine, refining themes and phrases for a broadcast. He communed with Beaverbrook and Sir Stafford Cripps, the Moscow ambassador who chanced to be in Britain, but did not trouble to summon the cabinet. When at last he sat before the BBC microphone that evening, he began by acknowledging his own past hostility towards the Soviets: ‘The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. It is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination. No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twentyfive years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it.’ But then he asserted, in bold and brilliant terms, Britain’s commitment to fight alongside Stalin’s Russia:

The past, with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies flashes away. I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers tilled from time immemorial. I see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray—ah, yes, for there are times when all pray—for the safety of their loved ones, the return of the bread-winner, of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten thousand villages of Russia where the means of existence is wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play.

I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, delighted to find what they believe is an easier and a safer prey.

I have to declare the decision of His Majesty’s Government…Any man or state who fights on against Nazi-dom will have our aid…We shall give whatever aid we can to Russia and the Russian people…The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free people in every quarter of the globe.

Not for the first time in the war, Churchill’s words received the acclaim of most British people, while inspiring doubts among some Tory MPs and senior officers. Repugnance towards the bloodstained Soviets ran deep through the upper echelons of British society. Leo Amery, the India Secretary, recoiled from making common cause with communists. Col. John Moore-Brabazon, Minister of Aircraft Production, was rash enough publicly to assert a desire to see the Germans and Russians exterminate each other. Jock Colville described this as ‘a sentiment widely felt (#litres_trial_promo)’. Lt.Gen. Pownall complained about the limp-wristed attitude he perceived in approaches towards the Russians by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the diplomats of his department. ‘They think they are dealing (#litres_trial_promo) with normal people. They are not. Russians are orientals and need treating quite differently and far more roughly. They are not Old Etonians.’ Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam observed with curious detachment: ‘I don’t suppose (#litres_trial_promo) that the “conquest” of Russia will take very long. And what then—presumably either Hitler will make some kind of peace offer based upon our acceptance of the “New Order”, or he will try his hand at an invasion here or push on in the [Middle] Eastern theatre.’ Headlam thought Churchill’s posture tactically sensible, but like many other people found himself unable to anticipate a happy ending without the Americans. He fell back upon hopes of loftier assistance: ‘One feels that God (#litres_trial_promo) is on our side—that’s the great thing.’

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 (#litres_trial_promo). 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)…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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.