Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Max Hastings

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       SIX Comrades

      The German invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 transformed the Second World War. The British, through Ultra intercepts, had long been aware of Hitler’s impending onslaught. They persuaded themselves that their intervention in Greece had imposed a delay upon Operation Barbarossa. In reality, a late thaw and German equipment shortages were the decisive factors in causing the assault to take place later than Hitler had wished. The British and American peoples to this day perceive their contribution to the eastern war in terms of convoys heroically fought across the Arctic to Murmansk, bearing massive Western aid. Reality was less simple. In 1941-42, both Britain and the US were desperately short of war material for their own armed forces, and had little to spare for Stalin’s people. For eighteen months after Russia was invaded, the period during which its survival hung in the balance, Western aid was much more marginal than the rhetoric of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt suggested, and ordinary citizens in the West were encouraged to suppose.

      In June 1941, the immediate impact of Barbarossa in Britain was surprisingly muted. The shocks of the previous year had imposed an anaesthetising effect. In people’s gratitude at finding themselves still unscathed at their breakfast tables each morning, their island spared from Nazi pillage, many received tidings of this epochal event with surprising insouciance. Edward Stebbing, a twenty-one-year-old soldier whose impatience with the struggle was cited earlier, felt bewildered: ‘There is nothing straightforward about this war. In the maze of lies and treachery it is almost impossible to find the truth.’ The Financial Times columnist Lex wrote on 23 June: ‘Markets spent the morning trying to make up their minds whether the German aggression against Russia was a bull or a bear…The majority concluded that whatever happened we could hardly be worse off as a result of Hitler’s latest somersault.’ Here was another manifestation of Churchill’s ‘three-inch pipe’ theory about human emotions. Amid a surfeit of drama and peril, many people took refuge in the sufficient cares of their own daily lives, and allowed a torrent of world news, good and ill, to flow past them to the sea.

      Most of Britain’s ruling class, from the prime minister downwards, regarded the Soviet Union with abhorrence. The Russians had rebuffed all British diplomatic advances since the outbreak of war, and likewise London’s warnings of Nazi intentions. Until the day of the German assault, under the terms of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact Stalin provided Hitler with huge material assistance. Only a few months earlier Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, was bargaining with the Nazis, albeit unsuccessfully, for a share of the spoils of British defeat. The extravagance of Soviet demands provided Hitler with a final pretext for launching Barbarossa.

      In addressing the history of the Second World War it is necessary to recognise the huge moral compromises forced upon the nations fighting under the banner of democracy and freedom. Britain, and subsequently America, strove for the triumph of these admirable principles wherever they could be secured—with the sometimes embarrassing exceptions of the European overseas empires. But again and again, hard things had to be done which breached faith with any definition of absolute good. If this is true of politics at all times, it was especially so between 1939 and 1945. Whether in dealing with France, Greece, Iraq, Persia, Yugoslavia or other nations, attitudes were struck and courses adopted by the Allies which no moral philosopher could think impeccable. British wartime treatment of its colonies, of Egypt and above all India, was unenlightened. But if Churchill’s fundamental nobility of purpose is acknowledged, most of his decisions deserve sympathy.

      He governed on the basis that all other interests and considerations must be subordinated to the overarching objective of defeating the Axis. Those who, to this day, argue that Churchill ‘might have saved the British Empire’ by making a bargain with Hitler, leaving Russia and Germany to destroy each other, ignore the practical difficulty of making a sustainable deal with the Nazi regime, and also adopt a supremely cynical insouciance towards its turpitude. The moral and material price of destroying Hitler was high, but most of mankind has since acknowledged that it had to be paid. In the course of the war the prime minister was repeatedly called upon to decide not which party, nation or policy represented virtue, but which must be tolerated or supported as the least base available. This imperative was never more conspicuous than in Britain’s dealings with the Soviet Union.

      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 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 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 СКАЧАТЬ