Between Churchill and Stalin

The Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the Origins of the Grand Alliance

Steven Merritt Miner

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807865699, 9780807817964
• eBook ISBN: 9781469639994
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

It is well documented that relations between the Allies and the Soviet Union were deteriorating from 1943. This volume examines the causes of this conflict that may, in fact, have started in 1940 with the problems of the Baltic states.

Originally published 1988.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

CHAPTER ONE
A QUICK QUARREL WITH THE SOVIET

JANUARY–JUNE 1940

In late August 1939 the British man in the street might well have thought that relations between London and Moscow could scarcely get worse. Stalin and his foreign commissar, Viacheslav Molotov, had hosted Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, in the Kremlin, where the Soviet dictator had actually toasted the health of the Führer—though this last fact would not be known to the world until the capture of German archives at the end of the war. What the British knew in 1939 was, for them, ominous enough: Stalin had rejected the Western democracies’ offer of a defensive alliance in favor of a nonaggression pact with the Nazis; an Anglo-French military mission had been in Moscow ironing out the details of a military protocol when the news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact broke.

Our average Briton would have been wrong had he thought Anglo-Soviet relations could deteriorate no futher than they had by August: they quickly did just that. In a secret protocol attached to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin and Hitler partitioned much of Eastern Europe between themselves. Though the existence of this protocol was also revealed only after the war, its outward manifestations were soon evident. Once war had broken out and the German Army was on the verge of crushing Polish resistance, on September 17 the Red Army moved into eastern Poland—ostensibly to restore order, in fact to enforce prearranged Soviet territorial claims. Fuzzy black and white photographs portray smiling Nazi officers side by side with grinning Red Army men as they made adjustments to the new border between the German and Soviet empires. After the Polish state was safely crushed, Molotov exulted to the Supreme Soviet:

The ruling circles of Poland boasted quite a lot about the “stability” of their State and the “might” of their army. However, one swift blow to Poland, first by the German Army and then by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this ugly offspring of the Versailles treaty which had existed by oppressing non-Polish nationalities. The “traditional policy” of unprincipled manoeuvring between Germany and the USSR and the playing off of one against the other, has proven unsound and suffered complete bankruptcy.

The collapse of Poland did not lead immediately to fighting between Germany and the Western democracies. Instead, the two sides quietly faced each other throughout the winter of 1939-40 in what became known derisively as the “Sitzkrieg,” or “Phony War.” And the war did indeed have a distinctly unreal air about it; for months, for example, the British and French high commands debated whether sowing mines in German rivers and canals would provoke Hitler to retaliation.¹

But the war could not long remain in suspended animation. Once again acting on the basis of his secret protocol with Hitler, on November 30 Stalin declared war on Finland in order to create a territorial buffer zone north of Leningrad and to extend further the Soviet sphere of influence, possibly even to annex all of Finland. It is one of the paradoxes of the period of World War II between September 1939 and April 1940 that, as world attention was riveted on the German-French border, the Red Army, not the Wehrmacht, was the most active force.

We now know that Nazi-Soviet friendship was short-lived, but from August 1939 to June 1941 Western leaders could not be so sure. Seen from the outside, relations between Moscow and Berlin seemed at times to be quite close, and nobody in the West knew for certain whether the Soviet Union had in fact joined the Axis powers in formal alliance. In the spring of 1940, the British government sought to devise a Soviet policy suited to this ambiguous situation.

Searching for a Policy

The Soviet attack on Finland evoked widespread outrage in the West, the virulence of which surprised the Soviets. As Molotov later pointed out, up to 1939 Western opinion had been far more passive in the face of German expansionism. The Soviets must have assumed that with world attention fixed on the Franco-German border the Finnish operation could be carried out quickly and quietly. The Western reaction, combined with evidence of Red Army inefficiency, must have come as a rude shock in Moscow. On January 1, 1940, in a final meeting with the departing British Ambassador, Sir William Seeds, who was being withdrawn because of the Finnish War, Molotov dropped his customarily icy facade, revealing the extent of Soviet fears, when he told Seeds that “Finland would never have been so openly hostile to the Soviet Union even during the negotiations [preceding the war] had she not been instigated by us [Great Britain]. Nobody in their senses would instigate a people of three millions against one of one hundred and eighty millions.”² Molotov might not have been so irate had Finnish resistance not proven so stubbornly effective.

In Britain reaction to the Russo-Finnish war ranged from concern that the USSR must now be considered an enemy in the German camp to jubilation and more than a bit of smugness when Finnish resistance and Soviet military ineptitude proved greater than expected. According to Churchill, “In British circles many people congratulated themselves that we had not gone out of our way to bring the Soviets in on our side, and preened themselves on their foresight. The conclusion was drawn too hastily that the Russian Army had been ruined by the purge, and that the inherent rottenness and degradation of their system of government and society was now proved.”³ One of Ambassador Seeds’s last telegrams from Moscow on January 2 reflected this attitude. Reporting the sudden departure of the Italian ambassador, Seeds wrote: “This is very satisfactory from every point of view ... the French Ambassador has also been recalled. Thus the British, French, and Italian Ambassadors will all have left Moscow for an indefinite period within a week of each other. It is a pity that Mr. [Laurence] Steinhardt [the American ambassador] didn’t go too.”⁴ Moscow seemed for the moment to be a diplomatic leper, but British optimism was premature. Finland’s defensive resources, though stronger than most had foreseen, were finite. The USSR would not long remain bogged down in the Finnish quagmire.

To comprehend British diplomatic thinking at the beginning of 1940, it is necessary first to understand British military reasoning. The central point in British strategic thought around which all else revolved was the war against Germany; operations in theaters other than France were subsidiary. The worth of such operations was judged solely by their probable impact upon the German war effort. In prosecuting the war against the Germans, the British not unnaturally drew upon what they felt to be the lessons of World War I. The first such lesson was that a repetition of trench warfare and attrition in the style of 1914–18, with its enormous casualty lists, should be avoided at all costs. Consequently, the idea grew that naval blockade might prove once again to be the decisive strategic factor. The War Cabinet therefore rather optimistically hoped to duplicate the successes of World War I without the costs: the Maginot Line would be held with the fewest possible casualties while at the same time the Germans would be starved into submission as in an enormous medieval siege.⁵

For such a siege to be successful, the naval blockade would have to be nearly watertight, but on this point the analogy to World War I broke down. In 1939-40, as in the Great War, the British Navy was more than a match for its German adversary, but the situation on the Continent differed in one crucial respect from 1914-18: there was no Eastern Front as yet, and the neutrals, especially the USSR, leaked contraband like a sieve.

The Germans fully realized the importance of the Soviet Union as a chink in the British blockade. As the German author of a memorandum on the Russo-German Commercial Agreement of February 11, 1940, noted: “If we succeed in extending and expanding exports to the East in the required volume, the effects of the English blockade will be decisively weakened by the incoming raw materials.”⁶ Ivan Maiskii, the well-in-formed, sometimes perceptive, but always slippery, Soviet ambassador to Britain, summed up the situation succinctly in a conversation with the Yugoslav ambassador. “It seems to me,” he said, “and this is the view of a great number of people in leading English circles, that neither the Maginot line, nor the Siegfried line can be broken. The war must be decided by three factors, the economic factor, ... the naval factor, . . . and the political factor. This last means that that side will win which succeeds, at the [right] psychological moment, in finding new and powerful allies or in preventing the other side from doing so.” It hardly needs to be pointed out that the “new and powerful” ally of which Maiskii spoke was none other than the Soviet Union. Nor was Moscow oblivious to the value Berlin placed on trade with the USSR. Stalin himself told the German ambassador in Moscow, Count von der Schulenburg, that “the Soviet Union rendered a very great service to Germany” by selling the Nazis raw materials that would otherwise have been denied them by the British blockade.⁷

Until June 22, 1941, an analysis very much like Maiskii’s underlay British policy toward Russia. The USSR, the British reasoned, must either be divided from the Germans by means of an Anglo-Soviet agreement, or at the very least closed off as a conduit for contraband supplies to Germany. In the early part of 1940, however, London saw precious little chance of splitting Germany and Russia by a deal with the latter. Soviet-German collaboration looked far too cozy for that. This drove British planners reluctantly to consider the second option, some sort of military action against the USSR.

Apart from extending the naval blockade to Soviet shipping, there were only two points of contact where the British could inflict serious damage on the Soviets, Scandinavia and the Caucasus. In the War Cabinet Churchill, as first lord of the admiralty, was the strongest advocate of extending aid to the Finns. British military aid to Finland, he argued, would have the added benefit of disrupting supplies of Swedish iron ore to Germany. On January 9, the War Cabinet considered such a Scandinavian operation as well as possible moves against the Soviets in the Middle East. On the tenth, they discussed an eighteen-page “Review of Military Policy in the Middle East,” prepared by the General Staff. This report concluded that any attack on the Soviet Union would enmesh Britain in a far greater struggle than her slender and already overextended resources would warrant.⁸

The Cabinet did not, however, firmly reject military action against Russia in the Middle East, in part because the aforementioned military policy review was somewhat out of date. Fitzroy Maclean, the hawkish Russian expert at the Foreign Office, commented in a minute on the review that, “in my opinion there are several new aspects of the situation which it does not take sufficiently into account, notably the repercussions of the Finnish War, the evidence of close Soviet-German collaboration and our decision to regard the Soviet Union as an actual rather than a potential enemy”⁹

For the time being, aid to Finland appeared to be the most effective means of striking a blow at the Soviet Union, and through her at Germany. On January 17, a Foreign Office memorandum concluded “that in assisting Finland, His Majesty’s Government are best serving their own interests.” The fundamental consideration regarding any British move, it was stressed time and again, must be the probable effect of such a move on the war against Germany. The author of the memorandum felt that aid to Finland would be unlikely to push Germany and the Soviet Union closer together and might in fact disrupt their cooperation by tying the Soviets down and forcing them to divert resources that might otherwise be channeled to Germany.¹⁰ On February 2 Fitzroy Maclean further developed this line of thinking in another memorandum: “The obvious conclusion is that it is to our interest to continue to afford all possible support to Finland, regardless of the consequences, and do everything in our power to damage Soviet interests on the grounds that the prolongation of the war in Finland must necessarily make it difficult for the Soviet Union either to afford any help to Germany or to embark on any further military adventures in regions where British interests are more directly concerned.”¹¹

The problem with aiding Finland militarily was the attitude of the Scandinavian neutrals, without whose help or at least acquiescence any British assistance would be impossible. Norway and Sweden were markedly cool to the idea of a British force crossing their territory en route to Finland. The Swedes even balked at the idea of British naval forces operating in Norwegian territorial waters in retaliation against German sinkings there, as Oslo felt this might provoke the Germans into occupying Denmark or even all of Scandinavia. On January 7, Erik Boheman, secretary general of the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, rather acidly told a British diplomat: “I should have thought that the British Government had the fate of a sufficient number of smaller States on their consciences as it is.”¹² Clearly, no help could be expected from that quarter.

In mid-January, the British hoped that the Italians, who at this stage of the war had not yet irrevocably cast their lot with the Nazis, might send some aid to the Finns, perhaps, for example, aircraft and pilots with experience from the Spanish Civil War.¹³ The Foreign Office even heard from the French ambassador that the Pope might favor such a course: “He himself was naturally opposed to war as such, but he felt that if the Italians were going to fight there was no better cause than a crusade against the Bolshevik abomination of desolation.”¹⁴ Although eventually the Italians did send some equipment to Finland, the aid was minimal and made no impact on the course of the war.

In the Middle East, British policy was also checkmated by frightened and hesitant neutrals. The Soviet invasion of Finland had understandably sent a shock wave through the Soviet Union’s smaller neutral neighbors. The Iranians adopted the rather curious attitude that Finland had somehow brought her troubles on herself and “had acted precipitately in breaking off their conversations here [in Moscow] and that with a little more patience and forebearance they might have reached an agreement more satisfactory both to the Soviets and to themselves.”¹⁵

The position of Turkey was more ambivalent, since the Turks regarded the USSR as a very real threat; but, like the Iranians, they were reluctant to take steps that might anger Moscow. The British ambassador in Ankara, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, consistently warned London of the Soviet threat to the British position in the Middle East and relayed Turkish fears to London.¹⁶ Responding to one of these dispatches, Deputy Under Secretary of State Sir Orme Sargent wrote to Knatchbull-Hugessen, “It is extremely satisfactory that the Turkish Government should not only be taking active measures to strengthen their defence against the Soviet Union, but should also be willing to discuss these measures with us.” It would be best, Sargent reasoned, for Turkish-British cooperation to receive the widest possible publicity in the hopes of “deterring [the Soviets] strongly from embarking on any such adventures.” Then, if deterrence failed, and if the Soviets should attack Afghanistan or Iran, “we could with the support of Turkey, if the need arose, make a counter attack against the Caucasus, and in particular against the oil wells of Baku and the Batum-Baku pipe line. With Turkey as our active ally we should be able to send a force into the Black Sea; and we should also stand a much better chance of stirring up a rebellion in the Caucasus. With the Caucasus in a state of turmoil and the oil supplies cut off, we should have little to fear from the Russians anywhere else.” “The weakness of the Red Army, about which we n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. A Quick Quarrel with the Soviet: January-June 1940
• Chapter 2. From the Fall of France to Oran—Moscow Reassured: June-August 1940
• Chapter 3. The Education of Sir Stafford: August-November 1940
• Chapter 4. The Russian Danger Is Our Danger: December 1940-June 1941
• Chapter 5. We Must Be Guarded in Relations with the English: June-December 1941
• Chapter 6. A Dismal Tale of Clumsy Diplomacy: December 1941-April 1942
• Chapter 7. Triumph of Accommodation?: April-June 1942
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index