World War II Behind Closed Doors (16 page)

The finale to this less than competent operation was a BBC radio broadcast on 9 September that called the ‘daring’ Spitsbergen expedition ‘the first big campaign in which the Canadian troops have been employed for some time’.
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Sir Stafford Cripps was furious when he heard about this piece of hyberbole, and complained in a telegram to the Foreign Office that ‘in view of their [the Soviet Union's] recent pressure on us to do something big in the West, this will be taken as an elaborate and stupid attempt to magnify a simple and safe operation into something large and important and will either be resented or laughed at’.
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In terms of its importance in the military conduct of the war, the Spitsbergen action is little more than a footnote. Its significance lies in what this first attempt at practical cooperation demonstrates about the attitude of the protagonists concerned. Mutual suspicion, recrimination and lack of respect characterized the relationship on the ground in Spitsbergen between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies – qualities that were also apparent in those early months of the war between the leadership of the countries concerned.

By the beginning of September Stalin was pleading once again for an immediate second front to draw some of the German forces away from the Soviet Union. The British had supplied little practical help so far, and the only concrete gesture – apart from the departure of one small convoy to Archangel – had been an agreement to give the Soviet Union £10 million of credit at 3 per cent
interest. Maisky handed over Stalin's latest missive in London on the 4th. Without the second front, claimed the Soviet leader, his country would be beaten or at best grievously weakened. When Maisky tried to browbeat Churchill over this crucial issue, the British Prime Minister replied: ‘Remember, that only four months ago we in this island did not know whether you were not coming in against us on the German side…. Whatever happens, and whatever you do, you of all people have no right to make reproaches to us’.
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But Churchill did promise an increase, albeit only a token offering, in the current trickle of British aid – to 200 planes and 250 tanks per month.

The United States initially behaved little better as far as Stalin was concerned. President Roosevelt not only ensured, as we have seen, that the American government's statement made immediately after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union condemned both regimes as ‘intolerable’, but when asked by reporters if it was ‘essential’ to America that Russia be defended, replied equivocally: ‘Oh, ask me a different type of question…’.
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And whilst, two days after the invasion, Roosevelt did allow the Soviet Union access to $39 million of assets that had been frozen, there was little other immediate sign of assistance. Part of the reason for his reticence was the prevailing view amongst his colleagues that the Soviet Union would shortly be crushed. Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy, told him: ‘The best opinion I can get is that it will take anywhere from six weeks to two months for Hitler to clean up on Russia’; and Henry Stimson, his Secretary of War, wrote to Roosevelt on 23 June, saying that ‘the Germans would be thoroughly occupied in beating the Soviet Union for a minimum of one month and a possible maximum of three months’.
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But another reason for Roosevelt's initial reticence to support the Soviet Union was almost certainly his desire not to move too far ahead of public opinion; he famously said: ‘It is a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead; and find no one there’.
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And Roosevelt knew what American opinion polls were revealing: the majority of people, whilst wanting the Soviet Union to win in a direct fight with the Nazis, still did not want to offer meaningful support to Stalin.

So, as ever, Roosevelt proceeded carefully and pragmatically. He agreed that his trusted adviser Harry Hopkins should visit Moscow at the end of July. Here, in the course of two lengthy discussions, Hopkins came to the conclusion that talking to Stalin was like ‘talking to a perfectly coordinated machine’.
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But during the talks this ‘machine’ made an astonishing suggestion – Stalin said that American forces under American command would be welcome in the Soviet Union, as long as they came to fight the Germans. It was yet another sign of Stalin's desperation.

But whilst there was no chance of America instantly offering the immediate level of aid that Stalin sought, there were signs that summer that Roosevelt was moving closer towards fighting on the British side against Hitler.

CHURCHILL AND ROOSEVELT MEET

The American and British leaders held their first wartime meeting in Argentia Bay off the coast of Newfoundland in August 1941. Churchill had spent the journey across the Atlantic in the warship
Prince of Wales
playing backgammon with Harry Hopkins (fresh from his meeting with Stalin) and eating the caviar that Hopkins had obtained in the Soviet Union. The British Prime Minister remarked to Sir Alexander Cadogan, who was also on the
Prince of Wales
, that: 'It was very good to have such caviar, even though it meant fighting with the Russians to get it'.
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Roosevelt and Churchill had first met at the end of the First World War, when Roosevelt had been on a visit to Europe. He had not liked Churchill, and this negative impression was no doubt partly behind his remark to his Cabinet in May 1940, after receiving the news that Churchill had become Prime Minister, that ‘he [Roosevelt] supposed Churchill was the best man that England had, even if he was drunk half of the time’.
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From the first, the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt was a good deal less simple than the propaganda of the time portrayed. Whilst both of them were members of an elite –
Roosevelt a wealthy member of one of the famed ‘Knickerbocker’ families of Dutch descent who were much to the social fore in New York, and Churchill the aristocratic son of Lord Randolph Churchill and the rich American socialite Jennie Jerome – they each subscribed to a very different set of political beliefs. Indeed, these were two people who, in ordinary circumstances, were not likely to get on together. Churchill, for example, had written before the war about how much he disliked the ‘New Deal’ – the package of social reform that was central to Roosevelt's political programme.
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Roosevelt for his part was adamantly opposed to the British Empire, something that almost defined Churchill's political vision. And in personal terms, despite each possessing an almost overbearing self-confidence and egotism, they were very different men. Churchill had demonstrated his bravery openly as a twenty-three-year-old cavalry officer in 1898 on the battlefield at Omdurman in the Sudan, whilst Roosevelt's courage, like his political mind, was much more subtle. In 1921, when he was thirty-nine, Roosevelt had been struck down by what was believed at the time to be polio – though his illness is now thought to have been Guillain-Barré's syndrome, which has much the same paralysing effect. As a result, Roosevelt lost the use of his body from the waist down. But he refused to let his disability harm his political life – or, indeed, his fundamentally optimistic and fearless temperament. Roosevelt, as we shall see, was capable of many deceptions, but perhaps his greatest was in concealing from the American public the extent of his disability. Roosevelt knew he was paralysed, but he pretended to the world he wasn't, wearing painful leg braces in public rather than using the wheelchair he used in private. Never openly – or indeed in secret as far as one can tell – did he indulge in self-pity. As he said to George Elsey, a naval intelligence officer at the White House, he was a ‘happy thought’ man.

These, then, were the two men who had their second meeting, now as wartime leaders, on 9 August 1941 in Canadian waters: very different people, but united in their desire to work together to defeat Germany, and determined to present a solid front to the rest of the world. The Atlantic Conference – as the meeting
became known – is significant in this history for two reasons. The first is that Roosevelt hinted that he was prepared for American troops to help in the British war effort. When Churchill told him that the British planned to occupy the Canary Islands and would not then, as a result, have the resources necessary to defend the Azores, Roosevelt offered to help. The President said that America would defend the Azores if Portugal (who owned these islands) asked. Subsequently Churchill decided against the occupation of the Canaries, but this exchange showed in principle that Roosevelt was prepared to allow the American military to assist the British, even though the United States still professed neutrality. However, this somewhat tortuous level of participation did still fall short of the ringing commitment to the war that the British had hoped to hear from Roosevelt.

But this conference was memorable for an even more important reason – the Atlantic Charter. This document – a statement of agreed principles – was to cause many problems later in the war. Indeed, it came to symbolize the schizophrenia that surrounded many of the dealings between the Western Allies and Stalin; because the Atlantic Charter represents nobility of ideal, whilst, as we have already seen, much of the reality of the relationship with Stalin was pure pragmatic politics.

The Atlantic Charter laid out in eight points the principles by which the British and American leaders together based ‘their hopes for a better future for the world’. But in truth this document was the brainchild of one man – Franklin Roosevelt. For Roosevelt, whilst practising day-to-day politics in an intensely practical and hard-headed way, was still driven by a sense of wider vision – a post-Wilsonian ideal (former American President Woodrow Wilson had helped establish the League of Nations after the First World War) that imagined, as point eight of the Atlantic Charter put it: ‘that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force’. It was this vision of a partnership within the world community that eventually led Roosevelt to push through the idea of the United Nations towards the end of the war. But it was points two
and three of this idealistic document that were subsequently to cause the most difficulties. Point two stated that: ‘They [Britain and America] desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’. And point three: ‘They respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’. The trouble, of course, was that Britain's new ally, the Soviet Union, had already acted against the ideal now expressed in point two of the charter by seizing eastern Poland in September 1939, and large numbers of people – not just in the Soviet Union but also in the British Empire, notably in India – were denied the opportunity to exercise their rights under point three.

But at the time all of this appeared somewhat academic, since America was still not formally in the war and – perhaps more importantly – it seemed as though the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse.

THE GERMANS ADVANCE TOWARDS MOSCOW

On 18 September 1941 Guderian's Panzer Corps captured Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, along with six hundred thousand Soviet prisoners of war. And this disaster – the result of the single greatest encirclement in military history – was largely the fault of Joseph Stalin, since he had insisted that Soviet troops should not withdraw from the city. Marshal Zhukov had suggested that the Red Army should pull back to a more defensible line, only to be told by Stalin that he was talking ‘rubbish’. As a consequence of Stalin's rebuke, Zhukov asked to be relieved of his post as Chief of the General Staff, and Stalin granted his request. Now the German army, its southern flank secure as a result of the occupation of Kiev, moved on through the central axis of the advance towards Moscow, and in the early days of October, the 3rd and 4th Panzer Armies advanced on the cities of Vyazma and Bryansk, west of the
Soviet capital. Once again the Germans overwhelmed the Red Army. Five whole Soviet armies were encircled. Soviet soldiers tried to fight their way out of the trap, often using antiquated First World War rifles, or in some cases no rifles at all, charging the German lines empty-handed.

At the twin battles of Vyazma and Bryansk another 660,000 Soviet soldiers were taken captive by the Germans. And the combination of this victory, plus the fact that Leningrad was now under siege, led Otto Dietrich, Hitler's press secretary, to announce that: ‘For all military purposes Soviet Russia is done with’.
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But there remained the small matter of Moscow – not just the capital of the Soviet Union, but the centre of Russia's transport and communications network. So, following the triumphs at Vyazma and Bryansk, the German army moved on towards this great prize, the culmination of Operation Typhoon.

Nineteen-year-old Grigory Obozny
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was one of the Soviet soldiers charged with the defence of the city that October. He remembers hearing the German artillery getting ever closer, and that ‘there was panic’. Other eye witnesses saw some managers of shops open their doors, saying, ‘Take what you want! We don't want the Germans to get these things!’ ‘On the one hand there were thousands who ran away, panicking’, says Zoya Zarubina,
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a teenager at the time. ‘They were taking food or whatever. [But] there was another group that was mining [the buildings]…they would come home crying that they had to mine it, but they knew they didn't want to leave it to the enemy’.