Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (76 page)

In this personal struggle for survival, Stalin was greatly helped at every stage by the Western democracies. It can be said that, if Hitler’s policy saved the regime, Churchill and Roosevelt saved Stalin himself. When Hitler attacked, there were some cool heads who argued that Western aid to Russia should be on a basis of simple material self-interest, highly selective and without any moral or
political commitment. It should, George Kennan minuted to the State Department, ‘preclude anything which might identify us politically or ideologically with the Russian war effort’. Russia should be treated as a ‘fellow-traveller’ rather than ‘a political associate’.
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This was sensible. On a moral plane Stalin was no better than Hitler; worse in some ways. It was practical advice too, because it formed a framework within which bargains could be struck, and it raised no assumptions that Russia would be consulted about the disposition of the post-war world.

Britain had no obligations whatever to Russia. Up to the very moment of the German invasion, the Soviet regime had done its best to assist Hitler’s war-effort, fulfilling its raw-materials delivery contracts scrupulously. As late as early June 1941 the
RAF
was still contemplating bombing the Baku oilfields, which were supplying the
Wehrmacht.
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But at this point Churchill was close to despair about the long-term prospects for the war, and the likelihood of a successful German thrust right into the Middle East. When Hitler turned on Russia instead, his relief was so intense that he reacted in an irrational manner. Here was the opportunity to combine Anglo-Saxon industrial power with Russian manpower, to bleed the German army to death! It was exactly the same impulse which had prompted his Gallipoli scheme in the Great War, whose success, he still believed, would have altered the whole course of world history. The evening of the German invasion Churchill, without consulting his War cabinet, committed Britain to a full working partnership with Russia. Eden was even more enthusiastic, under the influence of his secretary, Oliver Harvey, a pro-Soviet Cambridge intellectual, who regarded the Gulag Archipelago as the necessary price for Russian modernization.
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To launch the new alliance Churchill chose as his emissary his friend Lord Beaverbrook. He brushed aside pleas from the specialists of the British embassy, who shared Kennan’s view, and who wanted hard bargaining, ‘trading supplies against detailed information about Russian production and resources’. Beaverbrook laid down the policy as ‘to make clear beyond a doubt the British and American intention to satisfy Russian needs to the utmost in their power, whether the Russians gave anything or not. It was to be a Christmas Tree party.’
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The aid was given unconditionally, being passed directly to Stalin’s personal autocracy. No questions were ever asked about what he did with it. The Soviet people were never officially informed of its existence. Thus Britain and America supplied the means by which Stalin bolstered his personal power, and he repaid them in the ready coin of his soldiers’ lives. Churchill and Roosevelt were content with this arrangement. Among Stalin’s gifts was an enduring capacity to
pose as a moderate. It served him well throughout the period 1921 to 1929, when step by step he fought his way to solitary eminence. He was always the moderate then, dealing with ‘extremists’ of both wings in turn. He posed as the moderate now. Churchill and Eden, Roosevelt and his envoy Averell Harriman, all accepted the view that Stalin was a statesman of the centre who, with considerable difficulty, kept his violent and fanatical followers under restraint. Stalin fed this fantasy with occasional dark hints. (Curiously enough Hitler, who had used the same tactics in the past, was taken in also; so was Mussolini.)
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Thus Stalin and his autocracy were the sole beneficiaries of democratic aid.

How critical Western assistance was to Soviet survival cannot be determined until scholars get access to the Soviet archives, and must await the demise of the system. Under carefully controlled conditions, Stalin was fed in spectacular detail knowledge of German dispositions and plans on the Eastern Front acquired through the Enigma/Ultra intelligence system.
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This had a major direct bearing on the campaign from 1942 onwards and helped to make possible Stalin’s spectacular victories in 1943–4, for which he has been given credit. Of more decisive importance in the first instance, however, were the military supplies rushed to Archangel and Murmansk in the first autumn of the invasion, which made possible Stalin’s 6 December offensive and tipped the balance during that first desperate winter. They included 200 modern fighter aircraft, intended originally for Britain’s highly vulnerable base in Singapore, which had virtually no modern fighters at all. The diversion of these aircraft (plus tanks) to Russia sealed the fate of Singapore.
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Thus, by one of the great ironies of history, Churchill, the last major British imperialist, may have sacrificed a liberal empire in order to preserve a totalitarian one.

The opening of the Soviet counter-offensive on 6 December 1941 marked the point at which Hitler lost control of the war. He had dominated world politics since he marched into the Rhineland in 1936, always keeping the initiative in his solitary hands. Now, suddenly, he was the servant of events rather than their master. Perhaps in unconscious recognition of this sombre fact – or rather to conceal it – he took five days later a decision of such insensate folly as to stagger belief.

One of the chief mysteries of Hitler’s entire career is his failure to co-ordinate his war plans with the Japanese. They had been allies since the Anti-Comintern Pact of 25 November 1936. As ‘have not’ powers with expansionary aims they had a great deal in common, including a short-term military capacity of tremendous vehemence and almost insuperable long-term logistical weaknesses (neither had
oil or access to it). For either to succeed they had to act together. Yet neither did so. Hitler gave Japan only two days’ warning of his pact with Stalin in August 1939, though it made complete nonsense of the Anti-Comintern pledges.
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When he decided to reverse the policy in 1941, he made the Japanese look even bigger fools. He knew that the Japanese ruling élite was divided between a ‘Northern’ strategy of attacking Russia, and a ‘Southern’ strategy against the old empires. Japan signed the Axis Pact on 27 September 1940. If Hitler drove first through the Middle East against Britain in 1941, then a Japanese ‘Southern’ strategy was to his advantage. If, as he eventually decided, he went first against Russia, then his interest was to persuade Japan to opt for a Northern attack. Early in April 1941 the Japanese Foreign Minister, Matsuoka Yosuke, who was strongly pro-Axis, was in Berlin. Hitler told him nothing about his plan to attack Russia. Matsuoka went from Berlin to Moscow and on 13 April signed a neutrality pact with Stalin, so clearing the way for a ‘Southern’ strategy. When Hitler invaded Russia eight weeks later, Matsuoka naïvely confessed to his colleagues: ‘I concluded a neutrality pact because I thought that Germany and Russia would not go to war. If I had known they would go to war … I would not have concluded the Neutrality Pact.’
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Thereafter Japan moved towards a ‘Southern’ strategy, and by October Stalin’s spy Sorge told him it was safe to move some of his twenty Eastern divisions to the Western front, where they arrived in time for the December counter-offensive.

Despite this, Hitler cleared the way for Japan’s attack on America by allowing Ribbentrop, on 21 November, to give Japan an assurance that Germany would join her in war on the USA even though not required to do so under the Axis Pact.
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From Hitler’s viewpoint the Japanese surprise attack on Britain and America, at 2 am on 8 December, could not have been more ill-timed, for it came just two days after the sinister news of Stalin’s offensive. Nevertheless, on 11 December, Hitler declared war on America. Ribbentrop summoned the US
Chargé
, Leland Morris, kept him standing, harangued him furiously and finally screamed: ‘
Ihr Präsident hat diesen Krieg gewollt; jetzt hat er ihn!’
(Your President wanted this war. Now he has it), and then stamped off.
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In fact it is most unlikely Roosevelt could have persuaded Congress to make war on Germany had not Hitler taken the initiative, still less to give the defeat of the Nazis priority. On 22 June 1941 Hitler took a tremendous gamble which did not come off, and thereafter the best outcome of the war he could hope for was a stalemate. But on 11 December 1941 he took a decision which made his defeat certain. The only short-term advantage he gained was the chance to launch a U-boat offensive in the Atlantic before America
was organized to meet it. He said to Ribbentrop: ‘The chief reason [for war] is that the US is already shooting at our ships.’
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But Hitler’s failure to create the 100-strong fleet of ocean-going submarines his admirals had demanded in 1939 blunted this preemptive blow; only sixty were available in December 1941, the rest were not ready until the end of 1942, by which time Allied counter-measures had made a German Atlantic victory impossible. In every other respect, short- and still more long-term, the war with America was to Germany’s overwhelming disadvantage. Hitler’s gesture was no more than a piece of bravado. He told the Reichstag: ‘We will always strike first. We will always deal the first blow.’ It was an attempt to persuade the Germans, the world, perhaps even himself, that he, Europe’s leading statesman, was still in a position to dictate global events. It did the opposite, signalling the end of European hegemony and introducing the age of the extra-European superpowers.

Japan’s entry into the conflict was equally short-sighted. But the background to it was more complicated. It contained elements of what might be termed rational hysteria. As the American Ambassador Joseph Grew put it, ‘a national psychology of desperation develops into a determination to risk all’.
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The Japanese were uneasily aware of their short staying-power in war, illustrated by the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5, which began with brilliant Japanese victories but developed into a war of attrition from which Japan was, in effect, rescued by the intervention of the Great Powers. The war with China, begun in 1937, had proved a similar illusion. By 1940 Japan had occupied all China’s great cities, seized the modern sector of her economy, and controlled all her main rail, road and river communications: yet the war had stalemated, China was unconquerable, all Japan’s economic dilemmas remained – had, indeed, been aggravated by the effort of the China struggle. It was not a case of Japan swallowing China, as the army hotheads had predicted, but of China, in its gigantic, wallowing helplessness, swallowing Japan. The almost undefended French, British and Dutch empires of South-East Asia and the Indies, the American Philippines, the vastness of the Pacific, offered similar temptations and dangers. The point did not escape even the limited intelligence of the Tenno Hirohito. When on 5 September 1941, the two Chiefs of Staff, General Sugiyama and Admiral Nagano, told him the ‘Southern strategy’ could be accomplished in a ninety-day war of lightning conquest, he replied that Sugiyama had said the same thing about the China war, now three years old and unfinished. Sugiyama: ‘China is a continent. The “south” consists mostly of islands.’ The Tenno: if the interior of China is huge, is not the Pacific
Ocean even bigger? How can you be sure that war will end in three months?’
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There was no answer to this question. As Admiral Nagano put it: if I am told to fight regardless of consequences, I shall run wild considerably for six months or a year. But I have utterly no confidence in the second and third years.’
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The ablest of the naval commanders, Admiral Yamamoto, said that Japan could not hope to win a war against Britain and America, however spectacular her initial victories. Colonel Iwakuro, a logistics expert, told one of the regular ‘liaison conferences’, where the top military and government bosses met, that the differentials in American and Japanese production were as follows: steel twenty to one, oil one hundred to one, coal ten to one, aircraft five to one, shipping two to one, labour-force five to one, overall ten to one. Yet to put forward such views, even in the privileged secrecy of the liaison conference, was to risk assassination or removal. It was contrary to the relativistic code of ‘honour’, now the dominant impulse in Japanese public life. After Yamamoto expressed his opinion, he had to be given a sea-command to get him out of range of the killers. The Colonel was promptly sent to Cambodia. Ambassador Grew reported (22 October 1940) that the Emperor was told plainly he would be murdered if he opposed the war policy.
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The result was to precipitate into power the reckless, indeed the emotionally unstable, such as Matsuoka. This man had been head of the Manchurian railways, prominent in the army—business network which provoked and profited from the China war. He actually embodied what was later to become the largely mythic concept of the ‘military-industrial complex’. It was he who gave the ‘Southern strategy’ some kind of political and economic rationale, inventing the phrase ‘the Great East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’.
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He epitomized the schizophrenia of Japan, the jostling incompatibility of new and old and east and west, combining Catholicism and Shinto, sophisticated business techniques and utter barbarism. He greatly resented it when, after signing the Russian agreement, Stalin (characteristically) waltzed him round the room saying, ‘We are all Asiatics here – all Asiatics!’ Hitler told Mussolini suspiciously that Matsuoka, though Christian, ‘sacrificed to pagan gods’ and combined ‘the hypocrisy of an American Bible missionary with the craftiness of a Japanese Asiatic’. Roosevelt, who, thanks to ‘Operation Magic’ which cracked the Japanese codes, read some of Matsuoka’s messages, thought them ‘the product of a mind which is deeply disturbed’. This view was shared by Matsuoka’s colleagues. After one liaison conference the Navy Minister asked, ‘The Foreign Minister is insane, isn’t he?’
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