Finest Years (75 page)

From a balcony in Whitehall that evening, Churchill addressed the vast, cheering crowd: ‘My dear friends, this is your hour. This is not victory of a party or of any class. It's a victory of the great British nation as a whole. We were the first, in this ancient island, to draw the sword against tyranny…' The crowd sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory' and ‘For He's a Jolly Good Fellow' as Churchill returned to the Downing Street Annexe, to spend the rest of the evening with Lord Camrose, proprietor of the
Daily Telegraph
. In his company, the prime minister cast aside the exuberance of the afternoon, once more rehearsing his dismay about Soviet barbarism in the east. At 1.15 a.m., when Camrose left, Churchill returned to his secretaries and papers.

Pravda
asserted triumphantly that ‘
the significance of the link-up
of the Red Army and the Allied Anglo-American forces is as great politically as militarily. It offers further proof that provocations by Hitler's people designed to destroy the solidarity and brotherhood-in-arms between ourselves and our allies…have failed.' Yet Churchill spent the first days of peace plunged in deepest gloom about the fate of Poland. On 13 May he cabled Truman:

Our armed power on the continent is in rapid decline. Meanwhile what is to happen about Russia[?] I have always worked for friendship with Russia but, like you, I feel deep anxiety because of their misinterpretation of the Yalta decisions, their attitude towards Poland, their overwhelming influence in the Balkans excepting Greece, the difficulties they make about Vienna…and above all their power to maintain very large armies in the field for a long time. What will be the position in a year or two, when the British and American armies have melted…and when Russia may choose to keep two or three hundred [divisions] on active service? An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front…Surely it is vital now to come to an understanding with Russia, or see where we are with her before we weaken our armies mortally, or retire to the zones of occupation. I should be most grateful for your opinion or advice…To sum up, this issue of a settlement with Russia before our strength has gone seems to me to dwarf all others.

Truman answered: ‘
From the present point of view
, it is impossible to make a conjecture as to what the Soviets may do when Germany is under the small forces of occupation and the great part of such armies as we can maintain are fighting in the Orient against Japan.' The president agreed with Churchill that a tripartite meeting with Stalin had become urgently necessary.

Yet what if talking to Stalin got nowhere, as was highly likely? Within days of Germany's surrender, Britain's prime minister astounded his chiefs of staff by enquiring whether Anglo-American forces might launch an offensive to drive back the Soviets by force of arms. Churchill was enthused by the robust attitude of Truman,
whose tone suggested a new willingness to respond ruthlessly to communist flouting of the Yalta terms. Brooke wrote after a war cabinet meeting on 13 May: ‘
Winston delighted
, he gives me the feeling of already longing for another war! Even if it entailed fighting the Russians!' On the 24th, the prime minister instructed the chiefs of staff that, with the ‘
Russian bear sprawled
over Europe', they should consider the military possibilities of pushing the Red Army back eastwards before the Anglo-American armies were demobilised. He requested the planners to consider means to ‘impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire' to secure ‘a square deal for Poland'. They were told to assume the full support of British and American public opinion, and were invited to assume that they could ‘count on the use of German manpower and what remains of German industrial capacity'. The target date for launching such an assault would be 1 July 1945.

The Foreign Office—though not Eden himself—recoiled in horror from Churchill's bellicosity. One of Moscow's Whitehall informants swiftly conveyed tidings to Stalin of an instruction from London to Montgomery, urging him to stockpile captured German weapons for possible future use. Zhukov wrote in his memoirs:

We received reliable information
that while the final campaign was still in progress Churchill sent a secret telegram to Marshal Montgomery instructing him carefully to collect German weapons and material and store it in such a way that would permit retrieving it easily in order to distribute among German units with which they would have to cooperate if the Soviet advance had continued. We had to make a harsh statement at the next session of the Allied Control Commission. We stressed that history knew few examples of such perfidy and betrayal of allies' obligations and duty. We declared that we thought that British government and army leadership deserved the most serious condemnation. Montgomery attempted to refute the Soviet statement. His colleague American General [Lucius] Clay was silent. Apparently, he was familiar with this instruction by the British Prime Minister.

Though Zhukov's version was sensationalist, it was founded in a reality unacknowledged in detail in Britain until the relevant papers were released by the National Archive in 1998. Alan Brooke and his colleagues faithfully executed the prime minister's wishes, to examine scenarios for initiating military action against the Russians. The report prepared by the war cabinet joint planning staff required feats of imagination from its creators unprecedented in Churchill's premiership. In the preamble, the drafters stated their assumption that, in the event of hostilities between the Russians and the Western Allies, Russia would ally itself with Japan. ‘
The overall or political object
is to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire.' Yet the planners immediately pointed out that the scope of any new conflict initiated by the Western powers would not thereafter be for them to determine: ‘Even though “the will” of these two countries may be defined as no more than a square deal for Poland, that does not necessarily limit the military commitment. A quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will…but it might not. That is for the Russians to decide. If they want total war, they are in a position to have it.'

The planners observed that even if an initial Western offensive was successful, the Russians could then adopt the same tactics they had employed with such success against the Germans, giving ground amid the infinite spaces of the Soviet Union: ‘There is virtually no limit to the distance to which it would be necessary for the Allies to penetrate into Russia in order to render further resistance im-possible…To achieve the decisive defeat of Russia…would require…(a) the deployment in Europe of a large proportion of the vast resources of the United States (b) the re-equipment and re-organisation of German manpower and of all the Western European allies.'

The planners concluded that Western air power could be used effectively against Soviet communications, but that ‘Russian industry is so dispersed that it is unlikely to be a profitable air target.' They proposed that forty-seven Allied divisions might credibly be deployed in a Western offensive, fourteen of these armoured. More than forty
divisions would have to be held back for defensive or occupation tasks. The Russians could meet an Allied thrust with 170 divisions of equivalent strength, thirty of them armoured. ‘It is difficult to assess to what extent our tactical air superiority and the superior handling of our forces will redress the balance, but the above odds would clearly render the launching of an offensive a hazardous undertaking.' The planners proposed two main thrusts, one on a northern axis, Stettin-Schneidemuhl-Bydgoszcz, the second in the south, on an axis Leipzig-Poznan-Breslau. They concluded: ‘If we are to embark on war with Russia, we must be prepared to be committed to a total war, which will be both long and costly.'

They warned in an annexe that Moscow could probably call upon the aid of local communists in France, Belgium and Holland to conduct an extensive campaign of sabotage against Western lines of communications. The word ‘hazardous' is used eight times in the planning document to describe the proposed Anglo-American operations. Annexe IV addressed likely German attitudes to an invitation to participate in hostilities between Russia and the West: ‘The German General Staff and Officer Corps are likely to decide that their interests will be best served by siding with the Western Allies, although the extent to which they will be able to produce effective and active co-operation will probably be limited at first by the war-weariness of the German Army and of the civil population.' It was dryly suggested that German veterans who had fought on the eastern front might be reluctant to repeat the experience. However, addressing the issue of morale among Allied soldiers invited to fight the Russians, the planners displayed astonishing optimism. They claimed that their men might be expected to fight with little diminution of the spirit they had displayed against the Germans—this, though Alexander in Italy had already annoyed the prime minister by reporting that his troops were reluctant to engage Tito's communists.

The chiefs of staff were never under any delusions about the military, never mind political, impracticability of launching an offensive against the Russians to liberate Poland. The CIGS wrote on 24 May:
‘
The idea is of course
fantastic and the chances of success quite impossible. There is no doubt that from now onwards Russia is allpowerful in Europe.' On the 31st, the chiefs ‘again discussed
the “unthinkable war”
against Russia…and became more convinced than ever than it is “unthinkable”!' The debate cannot have failed to rouse, in the minds of those privy to the secret, echoes of 1918-19, when Churchill insisted upon committing to Russia a British military expedition designed to reverse the verdict of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

Passing the planners' report to the prime minister on 8 June, Ismay wrote: ‘In the attached report on Operation “UNTHINKABLE”, the Chiefs of Staff have set out the bare facts, which they can elaborate in discussion with you, if you so desire. They felt that the less was put on paper on this subject the better.' The chiefs themselves appended a comment to the report: ‘Our view is…that once hostilities began, it would be beyond our power to win a quick but limited success and we should be committed to a protracted war against heavy odds. These odds, moreover, would become fanciful if the Americans grew weary and indifferent and began to be drawn away by the magnet of the Pacific war.'

Churchill responded on 10 June:

If the Americans withdraw to their zone and move the bulk of their forces back to the United States and to the Pacific, the Russians have the power to advance to the North Sea and the Atlantic. Pray have a study made of how then we could defend our Island, assuming that France and the Low Countries were powerless to resist the Russian advance to the sea. What naval forces should we need and where would they be based? What would be the strength of the Army required, and how should it be disposed? How much Air Force would be needed and where would the main airfields be located?…By retaining the codeword ‘UNTHINKABLE', the Staffs will realize that this remains a precautionary study of what, I hope, is still a purely hypothetical contingency.

In the original draft of this note, Churchill's final words were ‘a highly improbable event'. He altered these in his familiar red ink, to make implementation of
Unthinkable
seem remoter still.

On 11 July, the chiefs' joint planning committee responded to the prime minister's enquiries about the implications of a possible Soviet advance to the Channel following demobilisation of Eisenhower's armies. Russian naval strength, they concluded, was too limited to render an early amphibious invasion of Britain likely. They ruled out a Soviet airborne assault. It seemed more likely, they suggested, that Moscow would resort to intensive rocket bombardment, on a scale more destructive than that of the German V1s and V2s. To provide effective defence against a long-term Russian threat, they estimated that 230 squadrons of fighters, 100 of tactical bombers and 200 of heavy bombers would be necessary.

The
Unthinkable
file was closed a few days later, when another cable arrived from Truman. He rejected the arguments for renouncing or even delaying Allied withdrawal to the occupation zones agreed at Yalta. Washington had decided there was no case. The prime minister was obliged to recognise that there was not the slightest possibility that the Americans would lead an attempt to drive the Russians from Poland by force, nor even threaten Moscow that they might do so. It was also unimaginable that Churchill's own government and fellow countrymen would have supported such action. In June 1945 his perception of the Soviet Union was light years apart from that of his nation. Most British people were much less impressed by the perils facing Poland than by the wartime achievement of their Russian comrades-in-arms, whom they had learned to regard with enthusiasm. Churchill was hereafter obliged to undertake a dramatic reversal of view. If the Western Allies could not liberate Poland, then a new attempt must be made to persuade Stalin to compromise about its future. Turning aside from his brief dalliance with
Unthinkable
, the prime minister committed himself to renewed diplomatic efforts, to exploit his supposed relationship with Stalin in pursuit of Polish interests.

It was fortunate for Churchill's reputation that his speculation
about confronting Russia in arms was not revealed in detail for another half-century. In the years following the end of the war, it became progressively apparent to the chiefs of staff, and to the Western world, that it was necessary for the Western Allies to adopt the strongest possible defensive measures against further Soviet aggression in Europe. On 30 August 1946, Field Marshal ‘Jumbo' Maitland-Wilson reported from Washington that the US chiefs of staff had become sufficiently fearful of possible conflict with the Russians to favour commencing military planning for such a contingency.
In London, the
Unthinkable
file
was taken out and dusted down. Military preparations for a conflict with the Soviet Union became a staple of the Cold War, though at no time was it ever deemed politically acceptable or militarily practicable to attempt to free Eastern Europe by force of arms. In May and June 1945, Churchill's warrior instincts were still astonishingly powerful. But the society in which he lived had only just sufficient ardour to finish the Japanese war. There was none whatsoever for engaging new enemies, whatever the principled merits of the cause.