[4.2] THE ANGLO-SOVIET OCCUPATION OF IRAN
[4.3] THE INVASION SLOWS / THE CAPTURE OF KIEV
[4.4] LENINGRAD ISOLATED
[4.1] THE WEST REACTS
* British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had long been an enemy of Bolshevism, having helped support White forces working against the Reds during the Russian Civil War two decades earlier. Churchill had never restrained his criticisms of Stalin and his ugly regime. However, on the evening before the invasion Churchill had announced to dinner guests that the USSR was going to attacked, and declared that Britain and the United States should do everything to help the Soviets.
Later his private secretary, John Colville, asked him how he could make such an abrupt turnabout. Churchill replied: "I have one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."
The next day, the German invasion went forward on schedule, smashing through Soviet defenses. Churchill had been courting the Soviets for months, and though it had been an exercise in frustration, it had at least paid off in revealing to Stalin that the British had been telling the truth all along. The prime minister addressed the British nation, employing his gift for oratory to the fullest: "No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last 25 years. I will unsay no word I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle now unfolding."
Churchill knew there were those who thought letting the Red and Nazi predators bleed each other dry was to Britain's benefit. He disagreed, pointing out that once Hitler swallowed up the USSR, there would be nothing to prevent his final domination of Europe. Churchill concluded, with his dramatic command of the English language: "We will never parley with Hitler and any of his gang. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until with God's help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke. Any man or state who fights against Nazidom will have our aid."
US President Franklin Roosevelt was more cautious in speaking out, but Roosevelt felt that the United States should go to the aid of the Soviet Union. As Oscar Cox, one of the administration's staffers, put it in a memo to the president: "Our practical choice is clear: whether or not we like Russia's internal and other policies, we will aid Russia, in our national interest, to eliminate the far more immediate danger to our security from Hitler's already partially executed plans to rule the world."
The USA was already providing military assistance to the British under the "Lend-Lease" program, passed in March, in which the USA financially underwrote and shipped war material to the UK. Now the president wanted to similarly provide assistance to the Soviets, though at the outset they would have to pay for what they got. On 23 June, the US government added an American declaration of support for the USSR's struggle.
Roosevelt was aware that Stalin's rule was a tyranny, but the president's perception was that the Soviets were not particularly interested in far-flung conquests. As Roosevelt put it, a week after the invasion: "Now comes this Russian diversion. If it is more than just that, it will mean the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination -- and at the same time I do not think we need to worry about any possibility of Russian domination."
The citizens of the Baltic States might have disagreed with that assessment, and Roosevelt has long been criticised for what has been often judged his naivete about America's Soviet ally. In reality, Roosevelt had few sticks to use against the USSR and so he had little alternative but to rely on carrots. Certainly, no matter how troublesome the Soviets were, they were still killing Germans, and every German they killed was one less that America would eventually have to fight. If American weapons helped the Soviets kill even more Germans, or helped them kill so many Germans that America wouldn't have to fight at all, all the better -- and there was no sense in trying to use munitions shipments to squeeze the Kremlin.
Besides, Roosevelt saw the forced alliance between the USSR and the West as an opportunity to bring the Soviet Union out of its isolation to work as a partner in shaping the post-imperialist, post-
colonialist world that he saw as following the war. In hindsight, Roosevelt was letting his inclination to the optimistic get the better of him, failing to grasp that Stalin was more thug than statesman. Still, for the time being there were plenty of justifications for America to take a soft line with the USSR. However, all that Britain and America could provide for the moment was moral encouragement. Britain was slowly rebuilding strength after the disasters in the West during the spring of 1940, and America's mobilization for war was only then ramping up. There was also the problem of getting war material to the USSR, since shipping was in short supply and suffering from German U-boat attacks. Churchill judged that it would be impossible to deliver any serious quantity of supplies before mid- 1942.
Many American conservatives and isolationists doubted that supporting a thug regime like Stalin's was a good idea, but the American Communist Party, having done an about-face to support Hitler when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed in 1939, did another about-face and joined the cry against Hitler. The British Communist Party was a bit slower to react but turned around on 25 June to support the war against Hitler. In the occupied countries of the Continent, Communist cadres began to ramp up resistance campaigns that would create substantial armies of partisan fighters.
* With the Soviet Union and Britain now faced with a common enemy, Stafford Cripps was much more welcome in the Kremlin and no longer had to put up with snubs. A British military mission, under the direction of General Noel Mason-MacFarlane, was sent to Moscow to back up Cripps, arriving on 27 June 1941. The British also had a very capable code-breaking effort, codenamed ULTRA, that was listening in on German communications in the East, and the British embassy was
now passing on the intelligence from ULTRA to the Soviets. The exercise was codenamed VULTURE, with the source of the intelligence disguised.
However, dealings between the two supposed allies were not at all congenial; on 29 June, the Soviets simply handed Cripps an extensive list of military supplies required by the USSR from Britain, while they absolutely refused to share any real information with the military mission. As annoying as it was, the British did want to help, but there was little they could do over the short term. They did promise to provide more help in the future, signing an Anglo-Soviet military assistance pact on 12 July 1941. The Soviets were not much more civil to the Americans. Stalin's ambassador to the USA, Konstantin Oumansky, was described by an American official as "insulting in his manner and speech", inclined to demand everything as if it was "a natural right", and protested all disagreements as if they were "heinous offenses." The Americans swallowed their annoyance as well. On 8 July, Oumansky had presented the US government with a huge "shopping list" that asked for thousands of aircraft, tens of thousands of antiaircraft guns, and massive quantities of everything else. There was no way the request could be met over the short term, but Roosevelt wanted to at least reassure Stalin that the United States understood the gravity of Soviet Union's situation and was putting aid to the USSR high on the priority list.
On 27 July, Roosevelt sent his aide Harry Hopkins to Moscow. Hopkins was in charge of Lend-Lease for the moment and wanted to determine Soviet requirements. Hopkins spoke with Stalin in two sessions lasting a total of eight hours. Stalin spoke Russian to Hopkins in a flow, hardly bothering to allow the interpreter to keep up, detailing in fairly accurate terms the military situation and outlining what the United States needed to provide the USSR to help beat Hitler. Hopkins was particularly impressed with the fact that Stalin's shopping list included substantial requests for tooling and materials. Had the Soviets believed they were in danger of immediate defeat, they would have just wanted weapons they could immediately put into the fight, but it was clear Stalin was thinking in terms of a protracted war.
On receiving feedback from the sessions, in early August Roosevelt discussed the matter with his cabinet. The president was highly emphatic, even angry at times, insisting that everything needed to be done to help the Soviets and that bureaucratic obstacles needed to be kicked down. In the
aftermath, Oumansky was given further assurances that the commitment of the US government to support the Soviet cause was dead serious. The truth of that was demonstrated by the fact that Roosevelt was then pushing hard for the US to pick up the bill for aid to the USSR by bringing the Soviets into the Lend-Lease program; the appropriate legislation would be passed in September. However, given the staggering disasters suffered by the Red Army over the previous month, few in London or Washington were confident that the Soviet Union would survive no matter what was done. That made no difference. Even if the Hitler won, his victory would have to be made as expensive as possible. Altruistic or cynical, either way the logic behind military aid to the USSR was hard to argue with.
In the meantime, Hopkins was returning from Moscow to personally brief the president. He made his way to Newfoundland, where Roosevelt and Churchill engaged in their first face-to-face meeting of the war, devising the "Atlantic Charter", which was signed on 14 August. The Atlantic Charter stated that the US and Britain had no territorial ambitions in the conflict with Hitler, and outlined the principles on which the postwar world would hopefully be run. The Soviets publicly endorsed the charter, though Stalin was privately disgusted. The whole exercise seemed abstract, even flippant, while the USSR was fighting for its life, and the US and Britain had announced war aims and policies without consulting him. To reassure Stalin, steps were taken at the Atlantic Charter meeting towards three-way talks.