The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (373 page)

That day, he told Roosevelt in July, would come in 1943, after subjecting Germany and Italy to naval blockade and “ceaseless and ever growing air bombardment. These measures may themselves produce an internal convulsion or collapse.” That statement captures the essence of Churchill’s war strategy, and his faith in airpower. But plans should be made, Churchill added, to land “armies of liberation when opportunity is ripe.” Those landings, in turn, would be spearheaded by thousands of tanks off-loaded from the special tank ships Churchill was asking Roosevelt to build. In coming weeks Churchill made clear where he envisioned those landings would someday take place: in Norway and French North Africa. In the meantime, Churchill told Roosevelt, he intended to bring his tanks to Cyrenaica, to battle Germans and Italians. Churchill’s telegrams to Roosevelt in the weeks after the Russian invasion foreshadow a disagreement over strategic priorities that would bedevil the Anglo-American partnership for the next three years. George Marshall and his military advisers did not contest Churchill’s call for tanks, especially as Churchill was fighting Hitler, where the Americans were not. “The tools” were Churchill’s to use as he saw fit. Marshall and his planning staff had for months been forming a strategy in the event that America’s civilian leadership sent the U.S. army into war. Marshall’s preferred strategy was simplicity itself: Carry American armies to England, and from there take them to Europe by the shortest and straightest line, across the Channel and into France. This was the direct approach, versus Churchill’s indirect approach, which was coming now into focus.
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But the invasion of Russia had changed the calculus of tanks and their deployment. Stalin needed tanks, now. For that reason, Churchill demanded that Britain must do for Russia what Roosevelt was doing for Britain—supply the tools, not only because to do so was the best way to help Russia, but because it was the best way to keep the wolf away from Britain. He knew just the man to produce the tools. Within the week, Beaverbrook took over the Ministry of Supply, which together with the ministries of Aircraft Production and Labour formed a three-legged beast that addressed the matériel needs of the armed forces. Immediately the Beaver ordered more factories built, more night shifts, and instilled in the department a sense of
urgency he found lacking. The ministry dealt mostly with the army. When Churchill wanted bombers in January, the Beaver had delivered. Now Churchill wanted tanks, for Stalin, who Beaverbrook believed could survive if reinforced rapidly and heavily enough. Beaverbrook produced the tanks and in coming months persuaded the Americans to produce more, thousands more. “Some people take drugs,” Churchill told Colville. “I take Max.”
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By mid-July Stalin had recovered enough of his composure to request that Churchill establish “a front against Hitler in the West [France] and in the North [the Arctic].” By such maneuvers, he argued, “the military situation of the Soviet Union, as well as Great Britain, would be considerably improved.” Then, either because he was still in shock or simply ignorant of British public opinion, Stalin proclaimed that such a front “would be popular with the British Army as well as the whole population of southern England.”
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Thus began Stalin’s crusade for a second front. Within weeks he enlarged upon his request by asking Churchill “to create in the present year a second front somewhere in the Balkans or France, capable of drawing away from the Eastern front thirty to forty [German] divisions.” Stalin asked for 400 aircraft and 500 tanks
per month,
twice the quantities Britain had available, along with the delivery within three weeks of 30,000 tons of aluminum, enough to build more than 10,000 fighter planes. Then, Stalin offered, “It seems to me that Great Britain could without risk land in Archangel twenty-five to thirty divisions” in order to establish “military collaboration” between the Soviets and British on Russian soil. Churchill not only lacked the transports to dispatch thirty divisions—more than 450,000 men—to Russia, he lacked the divisions. Thanks to Churchill’s “invasion scare” re-armament program, thirty just happened to be the number of combat-ready divisions Churchill had in England that summer. Stalin wanted them all.

Stalin’s request, Churchill later wrote, was “almost incredible,” and indicated “a man thinking in terms of utter unreality.” Cripps, always eager to help the Soviets, suggested that Churchill display his solidarity by sending just a few British divisions to fight alongside the Russians. Churchill attached much irony to the pleas of Cripps and Stalin, because just the previous year there had
been
a second front, in France. And just three months before Hitler smashed into Russia, Churchill had pushed into
another
front, the Balkans, thereby buying Stalin several more weeks to take defensive steps. But Stalin, secure in his pact with Hitler, chose to sit on the fence as events played out in France and in the Balkans. Now, he had no fence to
sit on; the Wehrmacht had obliterated it. Churchill told Cripps as much after Cripps called for a “super-human effort” to help the Russians: “It is not our fault that Hitler was enabled to destroy Poland before turning his forces against France, and to destroy France before turning them against Russia.” As for any “super-human effort” “rising superior to space, time, and geography, unfortunately these attributes are denied us.”
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When Cripps implied that the Soviets justly distrusted the British given Churchill’s refusal to send men to Russia or invade France, Churchill—still fuming over Cripps’s failure to deliver his April warning to Stalin—sent a scathing reply: “We have acted with absolute honesty. We have done our very best to help them at the cost of… exposing ourselves… when the spring invasion season comes.” To send two or three divisions to Russia “would be silly” and result in those troops being “cut to pieces as a symbolic sacrifice.” The Soviets, he told Cripps, had “brought their own fate upon themselves when… they let Hitler loose on Poland, and so started the war.” That the Russian government would “accuse us of trying to gain advantage… at their expense… leaves me quite cold. If they harbor suspicions it is only because of the guilt and self-reproach in their own hearts.”
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There would be no second front anytime soon. Churchill could not comply with Stalin’s wishes, and the Chiefs of Staff would not, even had Churchill been so inclined. It was simply unthinkable, Churchill informed Cripps, to contemplate a return to France, where “the bloody repulse… that would be sustained” would result in “the loss of the Battle of the Atlantic and the starvation and ruin of the British Isles.” The British Expeditionary Force had been swept from France in 1940 and again just weeks earlier from Greece and Crete. Churchill could do no more. Hitler, Churchill informed both Cripps and Stalin, had “forty divisions in France alone.” As well, “the whole coast has been fortified with German diligence… and bristles with cannon, wire, pill-boxes, and beach mines.” Any British invasion “would only lead to fiascos” and “would be over without them [the Germans] having to move or before they could move a single unit from your [Russian] front.” As for a new Balkan front, it had taken seven
weeks
to land just two unopposed divisions in Greece. The best he could do, he told Stalin, was to send submarines to patrol the Arctic, and dispatch a few fighter squadrons to Murmansk, the vital and northernmost ice-free port in the Soviet Union.
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To the Chiefs of Staff he advocated less traditional means of helping the Russians. He told them to “make Hell while the sun shines.” Thus Churchill sent his beloved commandos out to ignite Norwegian warehouses and blow up Italian bridges. The results were so paltry—one or two Germans captured for three or four British casualties—that Churchill demanded the cabinet keep all news of commando results away from the
press. If the Continent was ablaze, it was at the bidding of Hitler, not Churchill. And Stalin was on his own, alone with his hopes, as had been Churchill while England burned.
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By September, Harriman, Beaverbrook, and Hopkins had made their way to Moscow to coordinate a rescue effort. Lend-Lease was Moscow bound. “You can trust him [Hopkins] absolutely,” Churchill cabled Stalin. “He is your friend and our friend.” Churchill, though disinclined to sacrifice British troops in France, nonetheless was eager to prove himself Stalin’s friend. When the service chiefs objected that “not a rowing boat, rifle, or Tiger Moth could be spared [for Stalin] without… grave risk” to England, he told them he expected all branches to give equally, and generously. For the remainder of the year, he made up the middle link in a three-man bucket brigade. He snatched from Roosevelt the munitions he sorely needed, dipped into his own stocks of tanks and guns, and passed everything along to Stalin via Arctic convoys and Iranian railroads. To further encourage Stalin, he promised that a “terrible winter of bombing lies before Germany. No one has yet had what they are going to get.”
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Stalin was unmoved. He had twice, while pleading for a second front, reminded Churchill that Hitler had already dealt Russian soldiers and civilians more terrible blows than Churchill proposed to inflict on Germany a few months hence. The Red Army, not Churchill’s promise of a “terrible winter,” was all that stood between Hitler and Moscow. To encourage his armies to fight, Stalin proclaimed his policy regarding surrender. Up to a point, his words echo Churchill’s when Egypt appeared threatened: “Those falling into encirclement are to fight to the last and try to reach their own lines.” Yet where Churchill declared that to surrender if not surrounded and unarmed would result in dishonor, Stalin declared, “Those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by any means, while their families are to be deprived of all state allowances and assistance.” Lest anyone doubt him, when Army Group Center overran Minsk just six days into the invasion, Stalin recalled to Moscow the general in charge of the city’s defense, Dmitry Pavlov. Pavlov and his top generals dutifully reported to the Kremlin, where they were tried, found guilty of incompetence, and summarily shot. Under Stalin, harshness in defense of the homeland took on new and unimaginable meaning. When he heard that the Germans were using tens of thousands of old men, women, and children as human shields, pushed along in front of the Wehrmacht as it approached Leningrad, and that the Bolshevik defenders of Leningrad held their fire for fear of injuring the civilians, he announced, “I think that if there are such people among the Bolsheviks, then they should be destroyed first, because they’re more dangerous than the German Fascists.”

The citizens of Minsk might have disagreed; the Germans massacred
thousands when the city surrendered in early July. From the Baltic to the Black Sea a war of annihilation had overtaken the dairy farms, granaries, small factories, and mills of Mother Russia. The peoples of White Russia, the Ukraine, and the Baltic states now found themselves crushed between two unforgiving armies—the largest in history—commanded by two unforgiving warlords.

Churchill could not publicly excoriate Stalin for his myopia. He focused his anger on another blunder, one quite minor in the greater scheme of things. He just could not let go of Cripps’s bungling of the April telegram in which he had warned Stalin. Cripps’s delay roiled the Old Man well into the autumn, when far bigger fish were in need of frying. It was simply too much when he learned in the fall that Stalin had told Beaverbrook that he could not recall “when he was warned.” A half year had passed since Cripps’s error, and the Germans were by then hurtling toward the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow. Stalin’s lack of concern when given credible warning was frustrating enough, but Cripps’s effrontery in sitting on his warning had infuriated Churchill for months. He told Eden, then in Moscow, that Cripps must bear “a great responsibility for his obstinate, obstructive handling of this matter.” Had Cripps “obeyed his instructions, it is more than possible that some kind of relationship would have been constructed between me and Stalin.”
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That was unlikely. Stalin’s ongoing suspicion of Britain, not Cripps’s blunder, stood in the way of a relationship. In July 1940, Cripps had conveyed to Stalin Churchill’s warning of German designs in the East, which Stalin ignored and, incredibly, had actually passed on to Berlin in order to demonstrate his loyalty to Hitler. Cripps’s tenure as ambassador was marked by a measured and perceptive approach to the Soviet regime, which he rather admired. This was not a surprise, given his political persuasions, too far left even for his Labour Party. Cripps was a lawyer, considered by many the best in Britain. But Churchill cared little for the man’s legal talents; Cripps lacked the conviviality that Churchill desired in his companions. The ambassador came across as austere if not gloomy. He was both deeply religious and a vegetarian, a combination that had earned him around Whitehall the monikers of “Christ and Carrots” and “Stifford Crapps.” Years later, espying Cripps walking past (just out of earshot), Churchill offered, “There but for the grace of God goes God.” Yet many in Churchill’s circle considered Cripps’s talents wasted in Moscow and believed he could better serve the government in a post where his great intellect could be brought to bear. Churchill dismissed that notion, calling Cripps “a lunatic in a country of lunatics and it would be a pity to move him.”
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The war had shifted east on June 22, and in so doing lowered the price
Britons would pay in coming months to preserve their homeland. The price Russians would pay was incalculable, but Stalin let it be known that price was no object. Churchill believed that Stalin intended to fight to the end. To read of his demands on his people, and his threats to those who did not embrace the sacrifice required, is to shudder, in part because his show trials, his pogroms, and his gulags were all manifestations of who he was—a stone-cold killer. He had murdered to gain power, and murdered to keep it. No colleague ever wrote of Uncle Joe, as Churchill’s colleagues wrote of him, that he was all bluff and bluster. Stalin possessed none of Churchill’s eloquence, nor anything that could be called nobility of character. He saw no need to inspire his people, no need to ask his people to give their blood, toil, sweat, and tears. Yet, whatever their myriad differences in personality, politics, and spirituality, and they were profound, in Stalin Churchill had found an ally who, like himself, was willing to kill as many Germans as it took to defeat Hitler. Over the next three years, many in Washington and London came to believe that Stalin, like the Bolsheviks in the Great War, would quit if he could find a satisfactory way out. Churchill never believed that.