A World at Arms (58 page)

If Japan’s turn to an offensive against the Western Powers relieved Soviet need for large numbers of high-quality units in East Asia, the very countries against which Japan was moving–especially Britain and the United States–were already trying to assist the Soviet Union. They had tried unsuccessfully to alert the Russian government about the danger it faced; until the last moment, these warnings were dismissed as transparent efforts to embroil the Soviet Union with Germany. Here, too, we may never know whether the accuracy which these warnings acquired in retrospect in any way affected Stalin’s subsequent evaluation of information he received from the West; but whatever the answer to that puzzle, there can be no doubt that he looked quickly and anxiously for help from that quarter.

Since Soviet policy had long been influenced by the belief that all the capitalist powers, especially those in the West, were merely awaiting a suitable opportunity to gang up on the Soviet Union, there may well have been concern in the first days of the German attack that Britain might now make peace with Germany with the United States standing
aside cheering on the invaders.
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The presence of Rudolf Hess in British custody appears to have fed such Soviet suspicions or at least provided a suitable public explanation for their being maintained in the face of all the evidence. In any case, there were no voices in the British government for a reversal of policy; ironically the only open advocates of peace with Germany had been the same Communist sympathizers who now switched to the most vociferous advocacy of assistance to the Soviet Union in its fight against Germany.

Churchill immediately declared in public the solidarity of Great Britain with the latest victim of German aggression.
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As intelligence reports had made it more and more obvious to the British that a German attack on the Soviet Union was imminent, the authorities in London in the two weeks before the invasion had considered both the policy to follow in that contingency and how best to implement it. Ambassador Cripps had left Moscow certain that the Soviet Union would give in to whatever the Germans wanted and originally did not expect ever to return.
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The Cabinet, however, thought it likely the Russians would fight and wanted a military mission to Russia prepared and ready to go to coordinate aid to the Soviet Union, while the Royal Air Force began preparations to take action to try to prevent the Germans moving air units to the East.
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Whatever the skepticism of many in the British military and government about Soviet military capabilities, it was obviously in Britain’s interest to help the Soviet Union maintain an Eastern Front as long as possible.
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What aid could be sent would be sent, and the special military mission under General Mason-Mac Farlane, once Britain’s military attaché in Berlin, was appointed to Moscow on June 24.
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At the beginning of his mission, the general was not only optimistic about the prospects for cooperation–an attitude which experiences in the Soviet Union would soon alter–but he was also firm in the belief that the Russians would hold on and hold out in spite of great difficulties; and in this view, first expressed after his arrival in Moscow and a reception by Stalin, in a letter to General Brooke on July 14, 1941, he never wavered.
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The aggravating incidents which later also bedeviled American military representatives to the Soviet Union were not allowed to interfere with the fundamental need to work together; as Brooke put it, “don’t press the Russians too hard in their agony.”
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At a time when Britain itself was hard pressed, there was no prospect
of major landing attacks on German-controlled Europe, so there were really only three ways in which the British could help the Soviet Union in the last half of 1941. They could and did increase the bombing of targets in Western Europe and in Germany, thereby forcing the Germans to keep a substantial portion of their fighter planes, and most of their anti-aircraft guns, away from the Eastern Front.
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They devised a program of delivering weapons and other supplies to the Soviet Union, a process seriously begun in mid-July
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and carried forward in spite of endless friction with and complaints from the recipients.
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Aconvoy of supply ships left Iceland for Murmansk on August 21, the first of forty which made the perilous journey during the war through the deadly seas where German submarines, planes and mines sank almost a hundred of the eight hundred ships to try the route.
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A possible alternative route for supplies would be across Iran; and the British and Russians agreed to occupy that country for the duration of the war. Beginning on August 25, Soviet and British troops made sure that there would be no repetition of the pro-Axis activities which had flared up in neighboring Iraq; and the ports, railway, and truck routes across the country came to carry a small portion of British aid and eventually almost a quarter of American aid for the Soviet war effort.
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A third and more immediate form of British action was the renewed British offensive in the Mediterranean theater. After the failure of “Battleaxe” in the summer, the British struck again on November 18, 1941. Operation “Crusader” forced back Rommel, relieved Tobruk, and pushed further forward. Churchill had hoped to have this offensive launched sooner and had been as upset as Stalin about the delay, but the commander on the spot had felt unable to move sooner. Now the British army struck hard.
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The impact of this on the Eastern Front was that the Germans, unable to spare land forces from the fighting there, decided to transfer a whole air fleet under Field Marshal Kesselring from the Eastern Front to the Mediterranean in the critical days of early December 1941 (along with numerous submarines). The earlier British defence against the German air force had already cost the latter heavily; she began the war in the East with 200
fewer
bombers than she had had on May 10, 1940.
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In such ways the British repaid the Russians for the diversion of German bombers to the East in the summer and winter of 1941; in any case, it was certainly a different procedure from the Soviet Union’s sending supplies to Germany in the summer months of 1940 when the English were fighting for
their
survival.

On the political front, the Soviet Union and Great Britain had signed an agreement in Moscow on July 12, 1941.
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Requested by Stalin as a
sign of cooperation, it provided for mutual assistance and an understanding not to negotiate or conclude an armistice or peace except by mutual consent. Soviet insistence on such an agreement presumably reflected their suspicion of Great Britain, though there is no evidence that either party to it ever ceased to have its doubt about the loyalty of the other if attractive alternatives were thought to be available. In any case, the Soviet leadership soon after the signing of the agreement demanded dramatic steps to relieve the pressure on the Eastern Front by landings on the French and Norwegian coasts. The British had no prospects of being able to carry out the former and only the slightest of bringing off the latter operation; it is not known when and whether Stalin understood this situation and whether the demands were in fact a form of bargaining to obtain supplies and political concessions from a power incapable of helping in other ways. The chorus of demands that would continue for years began in July, and it influenced first the British and American supply plans and then the British political posture in the last months of 1941 .

Before these matters can be examined, the role of still another country must be reviewed because of its central position in the wartime calculations and post-war expectations of all the major belligerents: Poland.

In the crisis faced by the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Stalin appears to have been willing at least for a short time to make some concessions to the government of the pre-war Polish state–which he had earlier asserted no longer existed–as represented by the Polish government-in-exile operating out of London. An agreement signed with it on July 30, 1941, implied full Soviet recognition of that government, declared that the Soviet-German treaties of 1939 about Poland were invalid, and provided for the release of Polish prisoners in the Soviet Union who could then join a new Polish army.
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Both sides to this shotgun wedding were reluctant; the Soviet Union would apparently have preferred to set up a subservient new Polish regime of its own,
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while many in the Polish government-in-exile wanted a positive affirmation of the 1939 border. Both sides were pushed by the British and to a lesser extent by the Americans, but most of all by the Germans. Stalin may well have figured that if the Soviet Union defeated Germany he would be in full control of Eastern Europe, while if the Germans did win, it all made no difference. Furthermore, he knew all too well that any rebuilt army would be without experienced and trained officers. The Polish leader, General Wladislaw Sikorski, on the other hand, appears to have been motivated especially strongly by the hope that the raising of a new Polish army out of the Poles incarcerated and exiled in the
Soviet Union would not only alleviate the fate of these individuals but would open up the possibility of a Polish army fighting on the
Eastern
Front
in alliance with the Red Army but under its own government as the Germans were eventually driven back. It all turned out very differently, and the first step toward a new Soviet-Polish relationship was to be the last. But for a short time a most difficult problem which threatened to separate the Soviet Union from its major present and potential allies was greatly alleviated. Polish prisoners began to be released, and for a while even the strongly anti-Soviet Polish ambassador in Washington, Jan Ciechanowski, acknowledged that “the Soviet government is legally fulfilling all its engagements.”
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It was precisely in the United States that there was at first some diffidence about extending aid to the Soviet Union. The American public was still upset over the Soviet invasion of Poland and attack on Finland in 1939, and the United States refused to recognize the incorporation of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union in 1940. At a time when the attempts of their government to provide secret information to Moscow about the forthcoming German invasion had fallen on deaf ears, the American public remained vehemently anti-Communist in its orientation. The German attack appeared to relieve Britain, which Americans were increasingly inclined to assist; but while most preferred for the Russians to defeat the invaders, there was strong opposition to helping them directly. This opposition derived not only from doubts about the Soviet system and reluctance to divert more supplies from the British, but also a belief among many of Roosevelt’s advisors that the Soviet Union would in any case not be able to hold out and resist effectively for long. In addition, the isolationist opponents of the administration now saw their own position vindicated.

President Roosevelt saw these issues differently. Contrary to the views of many of his advisors, he did
not
expect that the Soviet Union would collapse quickly; he was being urged by Churchill to act on this belief by helping the Soviet Union; and he was strongly reinforced in that opinion by Joseph E. Davies, an old friend from the years of the Wilson administration, whom he had sent to Moscow as ambassador from early 1937 to the summer of 1938. The President soon saw his confidence in the possibility of continued Soviet resistance bolstered by the reports of his personal confidant and emissary Harry Hopkins, whom he sent to see Stalin in late July.

As a careful politician who knew that he had to move cautiously on this difficult issue the President worked publicly and privately toward a program of aid to Hitler’s latest victim, doing what he could to remove domestic resistance to such a policy by special emphasis to the most
sensitive point: that of freedom of worship in the Soviet Union. It took several months of careful coaxing to obtain a basis of public support for his policy, but the point which needs to be understood is that he was steering the country in this direction from the first day of the German attack on June 22, 1941.
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Once the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the German and Italian declarations of war on the United States had drawn the country into the conflict, these issues would become less difficult on the American domestic scene. In the meantime, Roosevelt’s preference was encapsulated in his note on a memorandum from Hopkins on plans to ship airplanes to Russia, “OK but say to them from me; Hurry, Hurry, Hurry! F.D.R.”
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Even before the tiny trickle of American aid to the Soviet Union could become a substantial source of supplies for the Russian army and economy, the Germans and Japanese began to be concerned about the delivery of such aid across the Pacific to Vladivostok and other Soviet ports and bases.
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This was a subject on which they could never reach agreement because the Japanese decision to head south and go to war with Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States was predicated on their respecting the neutrality treaty with the Soviet Union, which might otherwise allow the United States to use Soviet bases for air attacks on the home islands of Japan. It would be a source of constant friction between the Tripartite Pact partners that about half of the volume of American aid to the Soviet Union could be shipped quite literally under the noses of the Japanese while the German army bled to death on the Eastern Front. Roosevelt with his perspective on global inter-relationships would be gravely concerned about the possibility of Japan switching to a defensive posture in the Pacific in the spring of 1942 and turning against the Soviet Union, with a resulting need for the United States to find ways to tie down the Japanese by attacks while developing new supply routes to the Soviet Union; but as will become apparent in the following chapter, this danger, if it ever existed, was obviated by developments in the Pacific War in 1942. It should, however, be noted that the converse would also remain a permanent feature of the Pacific War: the Soviet government until 1945 maintained its refusal of bases to the United States and thereby prevented massive air attacks on the Japanese home islands from a “second front” in the Soviet Far East. Similarly, the dangers on the front with Germany obliged the Soviet Union to tread carefully in its relations with Nationalist China, and a case can be made for the argument that Chiang was able to reassert authority in Sinkiang and thereby retain it for China because of the German–Soviet conflict.
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