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

A more practical concern was that raised in January 1940 by cabinet member Lord Hankey, who pointed out that the wider objective of hamstringing Germany by hitting the Soviet oil industry was unrealistic. “Only a trickle” of Soviet oil was reaching Germany, he said, adding—quite correctly—that Romania was “by far the largest source of oil” for German industry. Though his figures were revised by a subsequent report to cabinet, the gist of his argument was not. In March, Secretary for Mines Geoffrey Lloyd told the cabinet that petroleum exports from the USSR and occupied eastern Europe into Germany to that point accounted for only 3 percent of Germany’s fuel stocks. Hitler’s dependence on Soviet fuel, it seems, had been vastly exaggerated.

Despite such objections, planning for Operation Pike continued until it was overtaken by events and finally shelved when German forces invaded France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940. Hitler, it seemed, had found his own solution to the tedium of the drôle de guerre .

One counterargument that puzzlingly does not appear to have occurred to the military and civilian planners of Operation Pike concerns the likely strategic consequences of any such action. Generally, the proposed attack on the USSR was given a broader rationale of disrupting Stalin’s relationship with Hitler, but the idea that any such attack might have had the opposite effect and actually strengthened the Berlin-Moscow connection does not appear to have arisen. Similarly, little intellectual effort seems to have been expended on the issue of what might have happened if Operation Pike succeeded beyond Slessor’s wildest dreams and led to the destabilization of the USSR. In that event, the most likely benefactor would have been not the Western powers but rather Hitler, who would have been free to march east unopposed and seize for himself those same Caucasus oilfields and much else besides.

It remains an open question how the prospect of blatant aggression against the Soviet Union might have been received by the wider British public, which persistently viewed the USSR in general and Stalin in particular much more positively than did the political and military elite. In the summer of 1939, for instance, shortly before the outbreak of the war, a questionnaire circulated by Mass Observation—an official network established to keep the government informed of public opinion—asked contributors to rank the world leaders for whom they had the greatest respect and the nations that they would “prefer the British nation to collaborate with and associate with.” The results would have surprised many among the ruling class, with the Soviet Union ranking fourth among the nation’s potential allies, close behind France and above Poland; Stalin even ranked second as a “respected” leader, behind President Roosevelt.

It seems that by the winter of 1939, those assessments were essentially unchanged, despite the nasty surprise of Stalin’s collaboration with Hitler. Although the same questionnaire exercise was not repeated until 1941, it is clear from the anecdotal evidence gathered by Mass Observation that a positive view of the Soviet Union still prevailed. In the first half of 1940, public opinion was optimistic that the Soviet Union would ultimately enter the war on the Allied side, with even those who were instinctively anticommunist recognizing the need for cooperation with Stalin.

In the summer, as France fell and Britain was imperiled, that positive view of the Soviets barely changed, despite Moscow’s repeated expressions of support for Hitler. In early July, for instance, opinion in Nottingham expressed a decrease in anti-Soviet feeling and the curious desire to “accept Russian help,” even though none was actually being offered. Even the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina that summer did nothing to alert the majority of the British people to Stalin’s aggressive, expansionist intentions. Indeed, an opinion from Wales, in July 1940, merely expressed the plaintive hope that “Russia will be helpful to us in her own time.”

Only with the start of the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 did a degree of realism in the public sphere begin to emerge. Given that Britain was now fighting for her very life, it was perhaps inevitable that a shift in opinion, away from an expectation of assistance from outside and toward a cussed self-reliance, should be discernable. By August, therefore, although outright hostility to the Soviet Union was seldom expressed, there was a growing awareness that expecting help from Moscow was “wishful thinking” and even that the Soviet Union was simply “playing her own game.” Yet, despite that gradual shift in public opinion, there was none of the outright fear that infected the British military and political establishment about the ideological threat that the Soviet Union still posed. Stalin’s credit, though profoundly dubious, evidently still held good with large numbers of ordinary Britons.

Of course, the power that Britons most desperately wanted to have onside in 1940 was the United States. Yet, in that tumultuous summer, Roosevelt’s America was still determined to keep Europe and all its troubles very much at arms’ length. For all Roosevelt’s high-flown rhetoric about the need to defend democracy against tyranny and to “quarantine aggressors,” he had proved unable to challenge an isolationist domestic consensus, which—though broadly supportive of the British and French—was profoundly wary of renewed European entanglements. Congress had passed four Neutrality Acts in the late 1930s forbidding American involvement in foreign conflicts and imposing an embargo on arms sales to belligerent nations. Once war arrived in Europe in 1939, Roosevelt had duly reasserted American neutrality but had nonetheless sought gently to nudge American opinion toward a qualified support of Britain, even securing a revision of the Neutrality Act that permitted foreign powers to purchase war materiel from the United States on a “cash-and-carry” basis.

To their credit, Roosevelt and his administration were generally as clear-eyed and critical of the Soviets as they were of the Germans, seeing the two very much as totalitarian cousins, a view amply confirmed by the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Indeed, some in the State Department and diplomatic service held a downright damning opinion of the Soviets. The US ambassador in Moscow, Laurence Steinhardt, for instance, employed some distinctly undiplomatic language in referring to his hosts. The Soviets, he explained, “need us a great deal more than we need them and as the only language they understand is the language of force, I think it high time we invoked the only doctrine they respect.” Steinhardt’s colleague, assistant military attaché Joseph Michela, was even more outspoken, denouncing the “ruling hierarchy” of the USSR as “ignorant cunning, shrewd, cruel and unscrupulous,” with policies “based on expediency alone.”

Roosevelt himself, at one remove from the somewhat febrile atmosphere of the Moscow embassy, was more cautious, wary of exacerbating the ongoing conflict and driving Stalin further into Hitler’s embrace. Thus, he resisted labeling the USSR as a belligerent nation after the latter’s invasion of Poland in mid-September 1939. Similarly, he accepted the Soviet military expansion into the Baltic states the following month at face value, choosing to interpret it as an anti-German move rather than the subversion of three independent states.

Such tactical caution would be difficult to maintain, especially after the Soviet invasion of Finland in November appeared to give definitive proof of Stalin’s perfidy. Roosevelt declared the United States as “not only horrified, but thoroughly angry” after the Soviet attack and even considered breaking off relations with Moscow. “People are asking,” he wrote on November 30, “why one should have anything to do with the present Soviet leaders, because their idea of civilisation and human happiness is so totally different from ours.” In response, he issued condemnations, called for restraint, and restricted raw material sales to the Soviets, but he stopped short of supplying the Finns, even though the decision amounted—according to the Finnish ambassador—to signing Finland’s death warrant.