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

In a radio broadcast that same evening, the veteran anti-Bolshevik made his new support for Stalin and the Soviet Union plain. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, Churchill declared, was nothing less than the fourth “climacteric,” the fourth “intense turning point” in the progress of the war. Hitler—a “monster of wickedness” and a “bloodthirsty guttersnipe”—was now carrying his “work of butchery and desolation” to the vast multitudes of Russia and Asia, “grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and the rights of hundreds of millions of men.” That human catastrophe, Churchill suggested, transcended everything: “The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. It is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination. It excels in all forms of human wickedness, in the efficiency of its cruelty and ferocious aggression. No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I’ve spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies and its tragedies, flashes away.” In a strikingly lyrical passage, he implied that it was not communism that was being attacked but Mother Russia herself:

I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. I see them guarding their homes where their mothers and wives pray—ah yes, for there are times when all pray—for the safety of their loved ones, for the return of the breadwinner, of the champion, of their protector. I see the 10,000 villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play. I see advancing upon all this, in grim onslaught, the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents, fresh from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of the Hun soldiery, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts.

British policy, Churchill went on with characteristic flourish, was simple: “We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us. Nothing. We will never parley; we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until, with God’s help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke. Any man or state who fights against Nazidom will have our aid.”

It was stirring stuff, and deliberately so—“a masterpiece,” according to Harold Nicolson. Churchill had given a decisive line—making a moral case for support of the USSR, yet stopping short of advocating alliance—which would satisfy not only his domestic audience but also his potentially fractious cabinet and, most importantly, his would-be American ally. In private, he was less gracious, but the message was broadly the same: “If Hitler invaded Hell,” he told Jock Colville, “I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil!”

If Churchill’s aim had been to rally the nation around his vague offer of assistance to Stalin’s Soviet Union, he succeeded. His speech attracted widespread praise for its deft handling of a ticklish situation. Only a few, it seems, expressed doubts about his sincerity or railed against his supposed hypocrisy. Even British communists—though no friends of Churchill—were assuaged. As the Communist Party’s only MP, Willie Gallacher, noted, Churchill’s speech had been “agreeably surprising,” and though it did not go quite far enough, he said, “it went further than [he] expected.”

Indeed, the British Communist Party was a natural beneficiary of the speech. Previously confined to a rather uncomfortable, unpopular position of opposing the war on the political fringes, British Communists were now, at a stroke, swimming with the mainstream, almost in tune with the Churchillian zeitgeist. In London, the party’s Central Committee decreed that the “imperialist conspiracy against the working class” had become a “global crusade against fascism.” Loyal shop stewards were ordered to ban rather than foment strikes. In due course, Harry Pollitt would leave the East London shipyard where he had been working and resume his position as general secretary of the party, his principled position of 1939 vindicated, the squabbles with Rajani Palme Dutt forgotten, if not wholly forgiven. The Communist Party, once again, had the benefit of a clear, concise, defensible line: waging war “side by side with the Soviet Union” against fascism. The embarrassing ideological gymnastics of the previous two years now over, the party’s membership would soon rise to record levels.

The Americans were a little harder to bring on board. President Roosevelt had long wrestled with America’s isolationist instincts, seeking to balance his own domestic approval ratings with his personal conviction of the necessity of involvement in the war against Hitler. Consequently, though he had promised American mothers in October 1940 that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” he nonetheless persistently nudged American opinion toward outright intervention. By the summer of 1941, he had made considerable strides: the Lend-Lease Act had been signed into law in March of that year, making the United States the self-proclaimed “arsenal of democracy,” and American forces had occupied Greenland the following month to protect Atlantic sea lanes from German attack. In June, all German assets in the United States were frozen, and German consular officials were expelled en masse on charges of espionage.

But, whereas the German attack on the Soviet Union ushered in a moment of clarity in London, it did nothing of the sort in Washington, loosing instead a storm of controversy and infighting. While the interventionists around Roosevelt saw it as an opportunity to decisively get behind Churchill against Hitler, others were vehemently opposed to the implication that doing so meant supporting Stalin. Future president Harry Truman, for instance, then a senator for Missouri, voiced a somewhat Machiavellian suggestion: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.” Despite Churchill’s high-flown rhetoric, Roosevelt’s urgings, and the unspeakable slaughter of the new eastern front, Americans did not yet see World War II as their fight. It would take the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to fully free them from their isolationist scruples.

ON JULY 5, 1941, AN UNUSUALLY STRAINED MEETING WAS HELD AT THE British Foreign Office in Whitehall. Arrangements had been so sensitive that intermediaries had been used, and a neutral venue had been found. It was even claimed that one of those attending had let it be known that he would be arriving precisely three minutes later than his negotiating partner, so as to clearly demonstrate the difference in their ranks. It was not merely a clash of egos or the raking over of historic injustices that caused the tension, though both undoubtedly played a part; rather, it was the fact that the government of one of those present had recently sought to erase the other’s country from the map. But with the sea change occasioned by Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union and the Polish exile government were now tasked with restoring something like diplomatic relations.

For its part, the Soviet Union was facing the worst crisis in its history. Hitler’s forces had swept all before them that summer, so much so that the USSR itself appeared to be heading for collapse. By the first week of July, when the diplomats sat down together in the comparative comfort of London, most of the western Soviet Union was already in flames. The losses suffered by Stalin’s Red Army in the opening two weeks or so of the war were staggering: over 10,000 tanks, 19,000 artillery pieces, 4,000 combat aircraft, and fully 750,000 soldiers. In addition, almost all of the lands gained in concert with the Germans had already been lost—eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Bessarabia—with only Estonia still in Red Army hands. More seriously yet, Byelorussia had been occupied, along with much of Ukraine, and the invaders had already advanced six hundred kilometers along the road to Moscow. Those meeting in London would have been forgiven for wondering if the USSR would still exist by the time the negotiations were completed.