World War II Behind Closed Doors (13 page)

The meeting culminated in the farce of Ribbentrop and Molotov closeted in a bomb shelter during a British air raid. While Ribbentrop continued to describe how the British Empire was ripe
for plunder, Molotov remarked: ‘You say that England is defeated. So why are we sitting here now in this air raid shelter?’
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The relationship between the two countries was clearly splitting apart. Hitler's obsession with pushing the Soviet Union into participating in the future dismemberment of the British Emprie was an obvious ploy to see if Stalin could be persuaded to turn his gaze away from potential conflict with the Nazis in Europe. Molotov did not pursue Hitler's offer, and his series of awkward questions demonstrated only the fragility of the relationship. Thus Hitler became certain that he was right to push forward with plans to conquer the Bolsheviks and take what he needed by force, and the formal directive for the invasion of the Soviet Union was issued on 18 December.

As for Stalin, he saw little option but to maintain the relationship with Hitler as best he could. But already, amongst his comrades in the Politburo, there were small signs that some of them believed misjudgements had been made about the friendship with the Nazis. Perhaps, for example, it had been hasty to eliminate so much of the Polish officer corps, given that if war came with Germany, the Poles might turn from enemies into allies.

That seems to have been the view expressed by the NKVD boss Beria at a bizarre dinner party held in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow in October 1940. Beria was discussing the setting up of a Polish army, loyal to the Soviet Union, with a small number of Polish officers who had demonstrated their sympathy with Communism and had therefore (unbeknownst to them) escaped the massacre at Katyn and the other murder sites. The chief Polish collaborator, Colonel Berling, asked if it would be possible to get a number of officers released from the camps in order to help form the new army. Beria, who obviously knew that virtually all the other officers had been murdered, replied: ‘We have committed a great blunder’. He then repeated the same sentiment, saying: ‘We have made a great mistake; we have made a great mistake’.
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THE AMERICANS HELP

The day before Hitler issued the formal directive to invade the Soviet Union, a momentous event that would have major repercussions on the course of the war and the relationship between the great powers took place across the Atlantic. It was at a press conference on 17 December 1940 that President Franklin Roosevelt first raised the possibility of aid to the beleaguered British war effort via a system of economic help that became known as ‘Lend Lease’.

As we have seen, it had been obvious to Churchill from the moment he became Prime Minister that without American aid Britain could not continue the war. In one of his most famous letters to Roosevelt, dated 31 July 1940, Churchill had pleaded with the President to provide the British with military help, saying that ‘in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now’.
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By September that year this plea had crystallized into a deal whereby Britain was to receive fifty old American destroyers in exchange for allowing the United States the right to use a number of British possessions – mostly in the West Indies – as military bases. It was a good deal from the American point of view – and it needed to be if Roosevelt was to convince his sceptical countrymen to accept it. Whilst most of the American public wanted to help Britain, the majority also wanted to stay out of the war and, in the summer of 1940, didn't believe that Britain could ever win.
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Roosevelt's desire to provide more aid beyond the destroyers-for-bases deal was made especially difficult by the fact that Britain was fast running out of money. Lord Lothian, the British ambassador to Washington, put the issue succinctly on 23 November 1940 when he announced to American journalists: ‘Well, boys, Britain's broke. It's your money we want’.
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Hence Roosevelt's dramatic announcement at his 17 December press conference.
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‘Now, what I am trying to do is to eliminate the dollar sign’, he said. ‘That is something brand new in the thoughts of practically everybody in this room, I think – get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign…. Well, let me give you an illustration’, he
continued. ‘Suppose my neighbour's home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don't say to him before that operation, “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it”. What is the transaction that goes on? I don't want $15 – I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. But suppose it gets smashed up – holes in it – during the fire; we don't have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, “I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can't use it any more, it's all smashed up”. He says, “How many feet of it were there?” I tell him, “There were 150 feet of it”. He says, “All right, I will replace it”. Now, if I get a nice garden hose back, I am in pretty good shape. In other words, if you lend certain munitions and get the munitions back at the end of the war, if they are intact and haven't been hurt – you are all right; if they have been damaged or have deteriorated or have been lost completely, it seems to me you come out pretty well if you have them replaced by the fellow to whom you have lent them’.

It was an idea that caught the imagination of many American and British citizens. Roosevelt's folksy analogy cleverly played on the ‘neighbourliness’ of the two countries, and the American frontier-like quality of helping a friend in need. Only a few cynics pointed out what seems obvious today – that it was highly unlikely that any military equipment sent to the British would ever be returned. The Americans weren't lending a hose, they were lending goods that were all too likely to be consumed. But regardless, it was Lend Lease that allowed Britain to carry on fighting the war.

It was an arrangement that should not have come as a surprise to either Stalin or Hitler, since Roosevelt had consistently made the feelings of his administration clear about both repressive regimes. Nine months before, in February 1940, he had sent Sumner Welles, acting Secretary of State, on a fact-finding mission to Europe – chiefly memorable for Welles's disastrous meeting
with Ribbentrop. The German Foreign Minister lectured him for two hours ‘glacially…without the semblance of a smile…eyes continually closed’.
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His verdict on Hitler's Foreign Minister was simple: ‘Ribbentrop has a completely closed mind…a very stupid mind…I have rarely seen a man I disliked more’.

And whilst Welles's experience confirmed Roosevelt's views about the impossibility of a satisfactory deal with Hitler to end the war, the actions of the Soviet Union had demonstrated to the American President that Stalin was scarcely a statesman who respected the rule of law either. Roosevelt had been outraged at the Soviet invasion of Finland and, on 10 February 1940, had spoken to the pro-Communist Youth Congress of America about his feelings on the subject: ‘I, with many of you, hoped that Russia would work out its own problems, and that its government would eventually become a peace-loving, popular government with a free ballot, which would not interfere with the integrity of its neighbors. That hope is today either shattered or put away in storage against some better day. The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world. It has allied itself with another dictatorship, and it has invaded a neighbor so infinitesimally small that it could do no conceivable possible harm to the Soviet Union, a neighbor which seeks only to live at peace as a democracy, and a liberal, forward-looking democracy at that’.
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These were unequivocal views – particularly from a statesman who had a predisposition towards equivocation. And Stalin would have noted them.

STALIN'S DILEMMA

It all added up to a disturbing picture for the Soviet dictator at the end of 1940. The Americans were hostile to the Soviet Union and, although unlikely to enter the war in the near future, were still prepared to supply sufficient aid to enable the British to carry on resisting the Germans, even if not enough to let them conceivably
win the war; and Germany was in the ascendancy, systematically turning the eastern European countries between the Nazis and the Soviets into puppet or vassal states.

As a result of all this, one over-arching question dominated Stalin's mind – what would Hitler do next? It was clear that one possibility was a terrifying one – invade the Soviet Union. By the end of 1940 nearly three-quarters of the German army was encamped along the Soviet Union's eastern border – and Stalin knew all about it. He was receiving regular intelligence reports that revealed Hitler's intention to attack. The agent ‘Meteor’, for example, wrote that Karl Schnurre, who ran the Economic Division of the German Foreign Office, had said that Hitler ‘intended to solve the issue in the East by military means’.
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And Anatoly Gurevich,
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head of Soviet military counter-intelligence in France and Belgium, sent reports back to Moscow in early 1941 saying explicitly that ‘the war had to start in May 1941’.

But Stalin was not predisposed to believe these reports. It would scarcely be in Hitler's interests, he thought, to start a war against the Soviet Union when he had not yet finished a war against Great Britain. The Soviet dictator believed that the forces ranged against him in the East were designed to threaten rather than to fight. Since Stalin's views were well known to those around him, perhaps inevitably they coloured the interpretation of the intelligence material presented to him. A spiral of self-deception developed inside the Kremlin. The more obvious the reports of a possible invasion grew, the more likely were they to be dismissed as blatant disinformation. As Stalin saw it, the British wanted to provoke a war between the Soviet Union and Germany out of their own narrow self-interest, so any report that came from a source connected to the West was automatically tainted.

An element in Stalin's reasoning was simply wishful thinking. War games conducted by the Red Army in January 1941 demonstrated that Soviet forces were inadequate to hold any German advance at the borders of the Soviet Union and then conduct a counter-attack into enemy territory – the tactic of ‘active defence’ on which Soviet military theory was then based. The Red Army,
weakened by the purges of the 1930s in which thousands of experienced military personnel had been removed from their posts, was simply not in a position to fight the Germans and win.

Aware of the failings of his armed forces, Stalin was anxious lest any obvious attempt at military preparation by the Red Army to meet a potential German attack be considered a provocation by Hitler and thus render the Soviet Union still more vulnerable. The only practicable way forward, Stalin believed, was to appease the Germans and negotiate additional diplomatic support. That was the thinking behind both the Non-Aggression Pact concluded with Japan on 13 April 1941, and of Stalin's embarrassing behaviour at a Moscow railway station the same day when, while saying goodbye to Matsuoka, the Japanese Foreign Minister, he spotted Colonel Hans Krebs of the German embassy and embraced him, saying, ‘We will be your friends – whatever will come!’ Stalin was visibly under immense strain. Two days later Colonel Krebs wrote to a colleague in Berlin about the incident, remarking that ‘Stalin seemed to me, compared to the earlier encounters, aged. His hair was totally grey; the colour of his face looked very unhealthy. His left eye was, from time to time, closed. It can't be ruled out that Stalin was under the influence of alcohol….’
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The situation worsened still further once the German army had brushed aside any resistance and conquered both Greece and Yugoslavia by the end of April 1941. Somewhat belatedly, on 5 May, Stalin tried to buoy up the enthusiasm of his armed forces at a talk he gave in the Kremlin to new graduates of the Soviet military academy. ‘Now that we are strong’, he told them, ‘we must now go from defence to attack. In fully defending our country, we are obliged to act offensively. We most move from defence to a military policy of offensive action. We must reorganize our propaganda, agitation, and our press in an offensive spirit. The Red Army is a modern army, and a modern army is an army of attack’. This speech has sometimes been misinterpreted as evidence of Stalin's desire to attack the Germans. But it was not. It merely restated existing Soviet military theory that in the event of an attack, the Red Army should push forward in an attempt to conduct the war
on enemy soil. Stalin was furious with his generals, Zhukov and Timoshenko – who were among those who had misunderstood his 5 May speech – when on the 15th they presented him with a plan to launch a pre-emptive strike into the mass of German forces on their border. ‘Have you gone mad, do you want to provoke the Germans!’ demanded Stalin. ‘Timoshenko is healthy and has a large head but his brain is evidently tiny…. If you provoke the Germans on the border, if you move forces without our permission, then bear in mind heads will roll’.
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The Soviets did all they could to prove to the Germans that they were more valuable as friends than as enemies. They continued to deliver huge amounts of raw materials to the Germans (including 232,000 tons of petroleum and 632,000 tons of grain
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in the first four months of 1941 alone), even though the Soviet economy was creaking under the strain. In return the Soviets were contracted to receive payment from the Germans, sometimes in the form of goods to the same value or technical aid, like the plans for a new battleship; but that was scarcely compensation for the massive loss to the Soviets in practical terms.