Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

French opinion was, if anything, more belligerent. France had broadly echoed British actions over previous months, compensating for her domestic difficulties by providing London with vital moral support. But Prime Minister Édouard Daladier took a very provocative stance toward the Soviets that winter—outlawing the French Communist Party and expelling the Soviet ambassador, for instance—in part to preempt criticism of his failure to adequately help the Finns. Consequently, the idea of attacking the Caucasus had the support of many in the French cabinet, such as the French navy minister César Campinchi, who had optimistically declared that “if only we could detach Russia from Germany, we should have won the war.” Others were more ambitious still. The French air force officer Paul Stehlin recalled being shown a secret map at air force headquarters in Paris that winter, depicting “two big arrows, one starting from Syria and the other from Finland, meeting east of Moscow.” The assistant to the chief of staff explained to him, “Russia is now allied to Germany. Accordingly, by attacking it we will deprive Hitler’s Germany of its essential resources and also remove the war further from our borders. General Weygand is in command of our troops in Syria and the Lebanon, which will march in the direction of Baku in order to put an end to the oil production there; from there they will proceed towards the north in order to join the armies that will march from Scandinavia and Finland on Moscow.” Astonishingly, the operation in the Caucasus was only a prelude to what the French High Command really had in mind.

Beyond these soaring ambitions, a number of murkier ulterior motives were at play, not least a French desire to avoid simply provoking the Germans on the western front and a British wish for some “action” to lift the suffocating gloom of the “Phony War.” At the root of it all, it seems, was a dose of old-fashioned anti-Bolshevism, a fear of the Nazi-Soviet Pact developing into a genuine alliance, and an assumption that the USSR somehow represented Hitler’s “soft underbelly.” As one French commentator noted in 1940, the perception in French government circles was that Russia “would collapse from the slightest blow” and that France “could not beat Hitler until it had crushed Stalin.”

The idea of bombing Baku had already swirled around the British and French governments for some time by the end of 1939, but with the Soviet victory against the Finns in the Winter War in March 1940, it gained renewed traction. At the beginning of the year, a report from the British Air Staff predicted that just a handful of bombers could succeed in rendering the Soviet oil industry lame, thereby hitting Hitler’s military production. In early March 1940, the War Office duly approved the construction of the necessary airfields in Turkey, and within the month, a modified Lockheed Electra, belonging to the RAF’s Photographic Development Unit at Heston, had made two sorties out of Habbaniya in Iraq to take reconnaissance photographs of the targets. In line with the secret agent’s guiding concept of “plausible deniability,” the Lockheed had had its RAF roundel removed and replaced with civilian markings. Similarly, its five-man RAF crew wore civilian clothes and carried non-military identification.

Although the first reconnaissance mission passed without incident, the second—overflying Batumi on the eastern Black Sea coast on April 5, 1940—attracted the attention of Soviet defense forces. Sighted crossing the Turkish-Soviet frontier, the Lockheed was targeted by flak gunners over the city before finally being driven off by fighter aircraft of the Red Air Force. As if to underline the importance of the mission, those intercepting Red Air Force fighters were recorded as being German-built Messerschmitt Bf-109s.

The Soviet Union’s reaction was not limited to a few Messerschmitts. At the same time that the Lockheed was circling the Caucasus, British emissary Sir Stafford Cripps was in Moscow for talks with Molotov. His mission was primarily concerned with the establishment of a trade deal, but as ever it was premised on the idea of trade as a precursor to an improvement in political relations, with a view to preventing even closer relations between the Soviets and the Nazis. Surprisingly, perhaps, Molotov was very accommodating, indicating to Cripps that the Soviet Union was keen to make a trade and political agreement with the United Kingdom.

The root of Molotov’s uncharacteristic bonhomie seems to have been an awareness of Anglo-French plans for Baku and Batumi. How the Soviet authorities got wind of this intelligence is unclear, but they were certainly aware of it by early March 1940, when, according to French diplomatic sources, they had been so concerned about the possibility of an air attack on the Caucasus that they asked the advice of American engineers as to the possible consequences on the ground. The reply was unequivocal. “As a result of the manner in which the oil fields have been exploited,” it said, “the earth is so saturated with oil that fire could spread immediately to the entire neighbouring region; it would be months before it could be extinguished and years before work could be resumed.” Soon after that opinion was delivered, the Soviet ambassador in London had approached Halifax with an offer of trade negotiations. Clearly a Soviet charm offensive was underway to forestall any such belligerent action. As soldier and diplomat Fitzroy Maclean surmised, the Soviet aimed to sow doubt in Allied minds about the best course of action and, “by confusing the issue, keep us in play for as long as possible, and thus gain a very necessary respite.” In that process, Maclean added sourly, “they appear to have found a willing tool in Sir Stafford Cripps.”

Meanwhile, as the Lockheed and her crew returned to Heston, the films were handed over to the RAF Intelligence Section, which analyzed the results. In their assessment, forwarded to their political masters in mid-April, the analysts concluded that any “substantial reduction in output of oil from Russia’s own resources must lead sooner or later to the complete collapse of the war potential of the USSR.” “Moreover,” they added, “the repercussions of the dislocation of the Russian oil industry might well prove disastrous for Germany as well.” Soon after, the RAF proposal for the bombing of Soviet oil installations in the Caucasus was given the name “Operation Pike.” Its primary advocate was none other than Air Commodore John Slessor, the director of plans at the Air Ministry.

Slessor’s advocacy was instructive. As a veteran airman and author of the 1937 study Air Power and Armies , which proposed a greater degree of collaboration between the army and air force and the use of aerial bombing as a weapon against enemy morale, Slessor was one of the RAF’s most senior proponents of the tactical use of airpower. He was not alone. The year 1940 was in many ways the high-water mark of faith in the military potential of aerial bombing: the Luftwaffe’s devastating attack on the Spanish town of Guernica, three years earlier, was still fresh in many minds, as was the German bombing of Warsaw the previous year. The belief, expressed by British prime minister Stanley Baldwin in 1932, that “the bomber will always get through” still held considerable currency, at least until the Butt Report of 1941—a government-sponsored assessment of bombing accuracy—exploded the myth of aerial omnipotence by demonstrating that only one in four RAF crews could drop their munitions within five miles of the target. Operation Pike, then, can be seen in retrospect as an expression of RAF hubris—a wildly exaggerated confidence in its own abilities.

There were other objections. Many who had balked at the prospect of British military intervention in the Winter War were shocked by the offhand and glib way in which an aggressive strike against the USSR was being discussed. Labour MP Josiah Wedgwood expressed his indignant opposition to an attack on the Soviet Union during a House of Commons debate on the Finnish crisis in March 1940. “It is an amazing idea,” he said, “that in the middle of a war with Hitler we should gratuitously take on another war with Russia.” He spoke from personal experience. As a younger man, he had been wounded in another so-called peripheral action, the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915, and had participated in a British intelligence-gathering mission to Siberia three years later.