The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (251 page)

H
ere their error was not only spectacular, it was historic. Harold Macmillan, one of the handful who suspected what was coming, was puzzled by their blindness. In part they were victims of a distorted self-image, an illusion common among superpowers; like Americans a generation later, they assumed that all other countries held them in high regard. Actually, the men in the Kremlin bore malice toward the Western Allies, and with reason. Both England and France had intervened in the Russian Civil War after the Armistice of 1918 and had sent troops to fight the Bolsheviks; both had imposed diplomatic sanctions on Russia’s new regime; and they had deprived the Soviet Union of Russian territories in postwar treaties. Postwar Germany had, on the other hand, shared in none of these actions. Even after the Nazi rise to power, Macmillan noted, “German-Russian relations had been good and even cordial.” To be sure, “Hitler’s violent and offensive anti-Communist propaganda no doubt angered Stalin, but he was not a man to be deterred by words from any action that he deemed advantageous.”
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Yet what diplomatic action, in the growing European crisis, would be to Russia’s advantage? War was coming, the Reich would be the aggressor, and Hitler did not wish Stalin well. If Russia allied herself with the democracies, the Führer would be forced to fight on two fronts. On the other hand, such a treaty would mean war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Britain and France could not guarantee Stalin peace—but Hitler could. A Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact would mean peace for a Russia which chose to remain neutral, and would bring about, without the loss of a single Red soldier, the recovery of the lost lands surrendered to Rumania, Poland, and the Baltic states twenty years ago at the insistence of the Western powers. If he chose that course and the Allies were defeated, eventually he would have to face Germany alone. But Hitler might be dead by then, or overthrown; or Germany might be defeated. The temptation to withdraw from the imminent maelstrom, to buy time to arm, was enormous.

Meantime, the talks with the Allies were permitted to continue, in the hope that they would give him reason to turn away from what would, in the long run, be the greater peril. Long afterward, Churchill wrote: “It is not even now possible to fix the moment when Stalin definitely abandoned all intention of working with the Western democracies” and turned his attention to “coming to terms with Hitler.” Maisky told Boothby he thought the die had been cast on March 19, when Halifax sandbagged Moscow’s Bucharest conference, but the evidence strongly suggests that a firm Anglo-French commitment could have saved the triple alliance as late as mid-August. Nevertheless Stalin was keeping his German option open.
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How long had it been open? After the war Russian expatriates published
Notes for a Journal
, identifying the author as Maksim Litvinov. Establishing its authenticity is impossible, but according to this source, the Soviet dictator had pondered a détente with Germany as soon as he read the Munich Agreement. He is quoted as having told Litvinov toward the end of 1938: “We are prepared to come to an agreement with the Germans… and also to render Poland harmless.” According to a journal entry dated January 1939, Stalin had instructed Alexei Merekalov, the Russian ambassador in Berlin, to open talks with Weizsäcker, telling him “in effect” that “We couldn’t come to an agreement until now, but now we can.”
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Almost certainly this, or a variant of it, is close to the truth. If Munich had been a battle, it would have been among the most decisive in history. Walter Lippmann wrote: “In sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Britain and France were really sacrificing their alliance with Russia. They sought security by abandoning the Russian connection at Munich, in a last vain hope that Germany and Russia would fight and exhaust one another.” Stalin was aware of that. On March 10, five days before Prague, he had savaged the democracies for sacrificing Austria and Czechoslovakia and accused them of trying to “embroil” the Reich in a war with the U.S.S.R., “pushing the Germans further eastward, promising them an easy prey and saying: ‘Just start a war with the Bolsheviks, everything else will take care of itself!’ ”
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Whitehall saw no shadows cast by coming events, but Gallic suspicions had begun well before Prague, when Coulondre had warned the Quai that a Nazi-Soviet rapprochement was in train; its objective, he said, would be to divide Poland between them. On May 9 he cabled the Quai: “For the last 24 hours Berlin is full of rumors that Germany has made, or is going to make, proposals to Russia leading to a partition of Poland.” On May 22 he reported that Ribbentrop had said that Poland “sooner or later must disappear, partitioned again between Germany and Russia. In his mind this partition is closely linked with a rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow.” Later Coulondre told Paris that the Führer “will risk war if he does not have to fight Russia. On the other hand, if he knows he has to fight her too he will draw back rather than expose his country, his party, and himself to ruin.”
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Daladier, having studied the cable traffic from Coulondre, afterward wrote: “Since the month of May [1939] the U.S.S.R. had conducted two negotiations, one with France, the other with Germany. She appeared to prefer to partition rather than to defend Poland.” Chamberlain seems to have been the last politician in Europe to discover that the Russians were keeping two sets of books. In late May, when the P.M. finally agreed to negotiate with the Russians largely on the basis of the terms embodied in Litvinov’s original proposal, Dirksen, the Führer’s envoy to the Court of St. James, advised the Wilhelmstrasse that Chamberlain had taken this step “with the greatest reluctance,” prompted by reports to the Foreign Office of “German feelers in Moscow.” Chamberlain and Halifax, according to Dirksen, were “afraid that Germany might succeed in keeping Soviet Russia neutral or even inducing her to adopt benevolent neutrality.”
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By then the two dictators were in fact on the way to the altar. Churchill observed afterward: “It is a question whether Hitler or Stalin loathed it most.” But marriages of convenience are not expected to be joyous. The one mot which won universal acceptance in the democracies and the United States was “They deserve each other.” Certainly the Führer, until now regarded as the new Machiavelli, had met his match in duplicity. It was characteristic of Stalin’s amorality that on the day after Litvinov had invited England and France to join Russia in an anti-Nazi alliance, Merekalov called on Ernst von Weizsäcker at the Wilhelmstrasse, ostensibly to discuss commercial issues arising from Czechoslovakia’s incorporation into what was now known as
Grossdeutschland
, beginning with a request for sales to Russia from the Skoda Works, now a Nazi arsenal.
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In fact the ambassador’s objectives transcended trade. His appearance in the office of Ribbentrop’s under secretary marked the beginning of a dramatic shift in relations between the two dictatorships. On that day Weizsäcker responded to the Skoda issue first. He told his visitor that reports of Soviet negotiations with Britain and France, looking toward a military alliance, did not create “a favorable atmosphere for the delivery of war materials to Soviet Russia.” But he knew that trade, even trade in arms, could not be the real reason for this visit. The ambassador had presented his credentials nearly a year ago, and this was the first time he had entered the Foreign Ministry. Weizsäcker, unlike Ribbentrop, was a trained diplomat; he had a pretty good guess at what was coming. To encourage Merekalov to get to the point, he remarked that the Russian press was not “fully participating in the anti-German tone of the American and some of the English papers.”
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At that, his visitor spoke up: “Ideological differences of opinion had hardly influenced the Russian-Italian relationship,” he said, “and they need not prove a stumbling block for Germany either…. There exists for Russia no reason why she should not live with Germany on a normal footing. And from normal, relations might become better and better.” This ground-breaking ceremony was followed, first, by two meetings between Dr. Julius Schnurre of the Wilhelmstrasse and Georgi Astakhov, the Russian chargé d’affaires, and second, on May 20, by a long talk in Moscow between Molotov and Ambassador Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg. Schulenburg found the foreign commissar “
sehr freundlich
” (“very friendly”) and ready to discuss both economic and political agreements between the two powers. Thus the seeds were planted. They might never blossom. Russian diplomats were still courting Britain and France. But if those talks fell through, Stalin had established an alternative.
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On July 24 prospects for an accord between the Reich’s three most powerful adversaries seemed to brighten. Molotov, summoning the British and French negotiators, was conciliatory; clearly he had received fresh instructions from the Kremlin. Since the political matters still to be thrashed out were technical, he said, he recommended that they draw up the related military convention spelling out the obligations of each nation, under the mutual assistance pact, in meeting Nazi aggression. The Foreign Office and the Quai were consulted; the French agreed enthusiastically, the British less so. Dirksen reported to the Wilhelmstrasse—now genuinely alarmed by the prospective alliance—that His Majesty’s Government regarded the military talks “skeptically.”
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Events swiftly confirmed the German ambassador. In diplomacy great importance is attached to the prestige of the men a nation sends to represent it. For these talks the Russians chose officers holding the highest ranks in the U.S.S.R.: Marshal Voroshilov, Russia’s commissar for defense; the chief of the Red Army’s General Staff; and the commanders in chief of the air force and the navy. To lead the French delegation Daladier picked General of the Army André Doumenc, formerly Maxime Weygand’s deputy chief of staff, regarded throughout France as one of the most brilliant officers to serve under the tricolor. Chamberlain, however, repeated the Strang snub, deliberately offending the Kremlin. A month earlier, when Anglo-Polish military talks were held in Warsaw, Britain had been represented by Tiny Ironside. This time Tiny was kept home. Instead, an obscure and undistinguished British party was led by Admiral Sir Reginald A. R. Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, of whom Dirksen wrote that he was “practically on the retired list and was never on the Naval Staff.”
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So slipshod were Whitehall’s arrangements for the talks that Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax wasn’t even given written authority to negotiate—a serious breach of diplomatic courtesy—though he had been instructed to be discourteous anyway; British foreign policy documents reveal that he had been told to be vague and “go very slowly.” As a final slight to the Russians, the British, who were handling transportation for the Allied teams, rejected the suggestion that they fly to Moscow, which would have taken a day. They boarded the nine-thousand-ton passenger-cargo ship
City of Exeter
, an ancient vessel whose top speed, Molotov’s deputy foreign commissar found, was thirteen knots. They left England on August 5 and did not reach Leningrad until very late on August 9; they arrived in Moscow August 11. The
Queen Mary
would have brought them to New York in less time. And in this August, like that other August a quarter-century earlier, every hour counted. The triple alliance now had Hitler’s undivided attention; he knew how formidable it would be and had ordered Ribbentrop to break it up. Joachim von Ribbentrop may have been only a wine salesman, but he had been a very good salesman, and he knew Molotov would be an eager customer. The only obstruction was Stalin. That was enough to discourage any diplomat except one who would have to return to the Führer empty-handed. The German’s main hope lay in the possibility that the Anglo-French officers would bungle their assignment.
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That is precisely what they—or, more accurately, their governments—did. The military talks in Moscow got off to a wobbly start. Marshal Voroshilov was offended by the failure of Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax to produce credentials signed by Chamberlain. Soviets put a premium on form; they interpreted the lapse as a sign that Britain did not regard the occasion as grave. General Doumenc, on the other hand, was on excellent terms with the Russians from the start. His
Ordre de Service
, signed by Daladier, was flawless; he had impressed the Red Army’s leaders by his knowledge of Russian military traditions; he sympathized with their painful memories of Allied hostility to the Bolshevik cause in their struggle of 1918–1920 and was tactfully silent about Stalin’s purges of the Red Army. In his determination to impress the Russians in their talks, he had, as one of his subordinates put it, “stretched the truth a little.” The Maginot Line, he said, now extended “from the Swiss frontier to the sea.” As any newspaper correspondent could have told the Soviets—and as their own intelligence service doubtless had—it was less than half that long. In Doumenc’s defense, it should be noted that the French delegation, like Britain’s, had been instructed by its senior officers to gloss over military weaknesses. The British were poorer liars. Their army spokesman blithely declared that Britain could field sixteen divisions “in the early stages of the war.” The French were “astounded,” one of their delegates later wrote; this was “three or four times” greater than Ironside’s figure in the most recent Anglo-French staff talks. Voroshilov, suspicious, pressed the issue, asking, “How many divisions will you have if war breaks out soon?” The embarrassing answer was that England’s standing army at present consisted of “five regular divisions and one mechanized division.” At that moment, one French officer later wrote, “the Soviet delegation understood better than it had the immense weakness of the British Empire.”
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The Russians’ crucial question was asked by Voroshilov late in the afternoon of Sunday, August 13. The Soviet Union, he pointed out, had no common frontier with the Reich. What, he inquired, did the French and British General Staffs think the Red Army could do if Poland or Rumania were attacked, since the Soviet troops could not take action without entering “the territory of other states?” There was silence. Doumenc and Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax replied that they would answer in the morning. That bought them a reprieve, but next day the marshal’s questions were more specific: Would Soviet forces be allowed to move against the Wehrmacht through Poland’s Wilno Gap and Polish Galicia? He said flatly: “We ask for straightforward answers to these questions. In my opinion, without an exact, unequivocal answer, it is useless to continue these military conversations.” It was up to the Allies to secure permission for the passage of Russian troops, he said, because they, not the Soviet Union, had guaranteed Poland and Rumania. For the next two days the military talks got nowhere, as Allied diplomats sought to win the cooperation of the Poles. By the seventeenth Voroshilov had run out of patience. He demanded that the meetings adjourn until a definite reply from Warsaw had been received. The negotiators agreed to reassemble on Monday, August 21.
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