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

^{CHAPTER 5} A ROUGH, UNCERTAIN WOOING

AS WINSTON CHURCHILL WOULD LATER RECALL, NEWS OF THE Nazi-Soviet Pact “broke upon the world like an explosion.” Secretary of State for War Leslie Hore-Belisha struck a similar metaphor, describing the event as “a complete bombshell.” Strangely, considering their information-gathering prowess, Britain’s intelligence services had provided little suggestion of any imminent Nazi-Soviet rapprochement. Germany’s desire for closer relations with Moscow was known but thought to run counter to Hitler’s instincts and to have found little reciprocity on the Soviet side. Accordingly, a Foreign Office briefing of that very week had judged a Nazi-Soviet pact “unlikely.” If the intelligence community was surprised, the shock for many in Britain beyond those circles was almost palpable. On all sides of the debate, the bitter enmity between the Nazis and the Soviets had been considered a given, one of the fixed points of political life. Now, overnight, it had apparently been consigned to history. The signing of the pact was one of those rare moments in history when the world—with all its norms and assumptions—appears to have been turned on its head.

The specter of those two nefarious regimes now in harness could be a profoundly disconcerting one. For the Anglo-American diarist and politician Henry “Chips” Channon it presaged something like an apocalypse. “Now the Nazis and the Bolsheviks have combined to destroy civilisation,” he wrote, “and the outlook for the world looks ghastly.” Member of Parliament (MP) Harold Nicolson, who had persistently warned of the threat posed by fascism, would have concurred. He confided to his diary, “I fear it means we are now humbled to the dust.” Veteran diplomat Sir Alexander Cadogan was merely exhausted. Sitting down to dinner on the night that the pact was announced, he mused on its significance but found only weariness: “These crises really are too tiresome. We can’t go on living like this in Europe. There’s no point in it.”

Public opinion in Britain was less doom laden and more colored by a popular respect for the USSR, which many still saw in rosy terms as the “workers’ paradise” of Moscow propaganda. A public opinion poll of April 1939 had returned an 87 percent preference for a military alliance with Moscow, and figures had shifted little by the summer. Consequently, after news of the pact broke in the United Kingdom in August, the general public was reluctant to interpret events prejudicially toward the Soviet Union. The opinion most often expressed was that Stalin was merely biding his time, protecting the USSR, and that he would eventually come in on Britain’s side.

Beyond that, there was nonetheless a growing certainty of the imminence of war. One British intelligence officer sent a postcard to his wife on the very day that the pact was signed, warning, “I don’t want to seem alarmist, but I really think that the Germans will invade Poland this weekend or early next week.” He was not far wrong. Hugh Dundas, a Royal Air Force’s (RAF) pilot with 616 Squadron, then stationed at Manston on the Kent coast, summed up the same realization more pithily. When he heard the news of the pact, Dundas was sitting with Teddy St. Aubyn, an old Etonian and ex-Guards officer who had been one of the squadron’s founders. St. Aubyn’s reaction was less than gentlemanly: “Teddy put down his soup spoon and said in a loud, clear voice: ‘Well that’s fucked it. That’s the start of the fucking war.’” “I heard his words,” Dundas later recalled, “and knew they were true.”

For all the justified fears, Britain presented a calm determination to the world in that last week of peace. A leading article in the Times of August 23 was perhaps typical of the stoical mood. It began by withholding judgment on the pact until precise details were known but expressed doubts that “the Nazi-Soviet deal would make any material difference to the balance of power either in peace-time or in war.” Nonetheless, it went on, Britain’s position was clear: as Downing Street had announced, the pact would “in no way affect [Britain’s] obligations to Poland,” which had been “repeatedly stated in public” and which the government was “determined to fulfil.” Furthermore, as if to head off the charge that British negotiators had been too halfhearted in their efforts of that summer to win the Soviets over, the editorial suggested that “the consistency and trustworthiness of Russian and of German diplomacy [had] been thrown into graver doubt than ever before.” The clear implication was that the duplicitous Soviets were not worthy treaty partners and were welcome to their new German friends.

Britain, meanwhile, was busy cementing existing relationships. At 5 p.m. on August 25, Foreign Secretary Edward Wood, Viscount Halifax, met with the Polish ambassador Count Edward Raczyński in his oak-paneled study in London’s Whitehall. Now fifty-eight, Halifax had served as viceroy of India and held a succession of ministerial posts before being appointed secretary of state for foreign affairs early in 1938. He was a striking individual. Immensely tall, with a gaunt frame upon which clothes appeared to hang rather too loosely, he had a starkly receding hairline that appeared to accentuate his height. Calm and rational in character—possessed of an “Olympian manner,” as one biographer put it—he had sad, hooded eyes, a lugubrious expression, and a slight lisp.

His opposite number was of a similar stamp. Raczyński came from a Polish aristocratic family whose ancestors had served in both the Saxon and the Prussian courts. A fluent English speaker who had studied at the London School of Economics, he had been appointed Poland’s ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1934. Ten years younger than Halifax, he had a professorial bearing, with a high forehead and wire-rimmed spectacles perched upon an aquiline nose.

The discussion between Halifax and Raczyński was short, lasting about fifteen minutes. At issue was Britain and Poland’s response to the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, announced barely thirty-six hours earlier. Before the two men was a draft treaty, an Agreement of Mutual Assistance, intended to give permanence to the existing collaboration between the two countries and reiterate British resolve to assist Poland in the event of German aggression. In truth, the agreement had been under discussion for some time, but events in Moscow had given it added urgency. It was only a short document—eight articles totaling around five hundred words—but it would be highly significant, not least in its provision that should either party “become engaged in hostilities with a European Power in consequence of aggression by the latter,” the other party would lend “all the support and assistance in its power.” After the two men read the terms over once more, copies were signed, exchanged, and countersigned; the business was done. The “war of nerves,” Raczyński would later recall, appeared to be drawing to an end. Poland had secured an ally.

An ally of sorts, at least. Although Whitehall was aware that, in the aftermath of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Poles might be reckoning with a Soviet invasion as well as a Nazi one, the guarantee was not extended to include aggression by Moscow. The British Foreign Office viewed the pact as a fundamentally unnatural arrangement, and so—expecting it to prove temporary—was unwilling to close off a potentially vital link to the USSR by prematurely making her an enemy. Thus, though the treaty mentioned only aggression by an unspecified “European Power,” it was appended by a secret protocol, similarly signed by both parties, which provided clarity. By “European Power,” the protocol explained, the signatory parties understood “Germany,” and in the event of aggression by any other power, they resolved only to “consult together” on their response. Although this offer was not especially generous, Whitehall mandarins minuted, Polish “anxiety” was such that Warsaw was expected to be amenable.

Although Halifax and Raczyński could not know it, they were giving a grimly ironic echo of the Nazi-Soviet secret protocol, by which the expected dismemberment of Poland had been agreed two days earlier. For the second time in as many days, a treaty was drawn up whose most significant clauses were contained in an unpublished addendum.

WHEN BRITAIN DECLARED WAR ON GERMANY, SOME NINE DAYS LATER, the nation was calm despite London being rattled by an air raid alert on the very first afternoon. As would become the norm in the months and years to come, the tone was set that day by Churchill, who, though not yet prime minister, nonetheless did much to frame Britain’s war aims and self-image when he spoke in the House of Commons on September 3. Expressing optimism that “a generation of Britons” was “ready to prove itself” in the coming struggle, he outlined Britain’s goals in the war then beginning. “This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland,” he said. “We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man.” A month later, Neville Chamberlain used similar words in outlining British war aims, which were, he said, “to redeem Europe from the perpetual and recurring fear of German aggression, and enable the peoples of Europe to preserve their independence and their liberties.”

Thus, the official British attitude toward Germany—principled and implacable hostility to the evils of Nazi totalitarianism—was made very clear. But, for all the clarity of the British position toward Germany, the attitude—official and unofficial—taken toward the Soviet Union was more complex. As much as the British government would wrestle with the question of how to take the war to Hitler during the “Phony War,” it would at the same time have to consider seriously whether to also go to war against Stalin.

Public opinion was little help. On one hand, there were those, like “Chips” Channon, who saw in Soviet actions that autumn the intrigues of a grand conspiracy. “Our world is committing suicide,” he wrote, “while Stalin laughs and the Kremlin triumphs.” On the other hand, among the general public there was still widespread sympathy for the Soviets and a feeling that Chamberlain’s government had not done enough to woo Moscow into an alliance that might feasibly have halted Hitler. A civil servant from Hampshire who recorded his feelings on the outbreak of war perhaps best expressed this complex of sentiments: “When I come down to dinner, I’m told that we are at war and that Chamberlain has spoken. I’m glad I missed him. I don’t want to hear him say ‘God knows I have done my best!’ I don’t believe it. He could have secured Russian co-operation.” “I’m willing to fight Fascism if necessary,” he concluded, but “if we’d treated Russia decently it wouldn’t be necessary.”

The complexities of public opinion and the apparent absurdity of Stalin’s newfound friendship with Hitler were a boon for the cartoonists of the British press, who captured the mood rather well that autumn. A common visual theme, adopted by Bert Thomas in the Evening Standard, was to depict Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as a gorilla and a bear. On September 18—the day after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland—Thomas showed the two squeezed uncomfortably into a single bed, the bear hunched unhappily while the gorilla leans over the side to surreptitiously reach for a dagger. At the end of the following month, Thomas returned to the theme, showing the Nazi gorilla bathing in a pool of “mud and blood”—symbolic of war and the Nazi “new order” in Europe—and beckoning the Soviet bear to join him, shouting, “Come on in—it’s fine!”

Perhaps the most famous cartoonist of the period was David Low, a London-based New Zealander whose satirical representations of Hitler and Mussolini led to his work being banned in Germany and Italy and who would earn the honor of appearing on the SS special arrest list in 1940. Adept at baiting the Nazis, he would score a number of hits that autumn, including “Uncle Joe’s Pawnshop” on October 2, which shows a furtive Hitler and Ribbentrop asking Stalin what he will “give them” for Nazism, and “Someone Is Taking Someone for a Walk,” which depicts Stalin and Hitler arm in arm, tied at the ankle, in a three-legged walk along the “Eastern Frontier,” each holding a pistol behind his back. With such striking images, Low summed up the confusions, fears, and absurdities of the age with a visual clarity that few others could match.

Low’s most famous cartoon of the period was “Rendezvous,” published in the Evening Standard on September 20. It shows Stalin and Hitler meeting amid the war-torn ruins, bowing deeply and doffing their caps to one another as they exchange pleasantries. “The scum of the earth, I believe?” says Hitler, while Stalin retorts with, “The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?” At their feet, meanwhile, lies the prostrate figure of “Poland.” The iconic image neatly sums up the prevailing British attitude—that the pact was little more than a cynical short-term arrangement between ideologically opposed enemies.

In British government circles, a more nuanced view prevailed: a clear-eyed realization of the need to keep channels of communication open with Moscow, tempered by a visceral fear of Soviet intentions. That ambivalent position was given its first serious test when Soviet forces marched into eastern Poland on the morning of September 17, thereby making a nonsense of the USSR’s professed position of neutrality in the war. An editorial in the Times was as damning of Moscow as it was uncharacteristically verbose. “Russian troops crossed the Polish border along the whole front yesterday,” it announced. “Only those can be disappointed who clung to the ingenuous belief that Russia was to be distinguished from her Nazi neighbour, despite the identity of their institutions and political idiom, by the principles and purpose behind her foreign policy. The Germans certainly knew better when they judged that the self-denying objects of a peace front would prove pallid and uninviting beside the offer of two Polish provinces at no immediate cost. Germany was to do the murder and Russia was to share the estate.” The editorial concluded on a grimly defiant note: “Public opinion here is revolted though not in the least dismayed by these cynical exercises in lower diplomacy. Sympathy for Poland, which was warm and eager yesterday, is aflame today. We look out upon a world that now has fewer disguises. Across the world the line between civilisation and the jungle is drawn.”

In Whitehall, meanwhile, the enquiry was made whether the Soviet invasion of Poland would trigger a British declaration of war against Moscow, as the German invasion had done with regard to Berlin two weeks earlier. Viscount Halifax reminded the cabinet, however, of the terms of the secret protocol to the Anglo-Polish agreement and of the “understanding” that British assistance would only be triggered in the event of German action. “On this interpretation,” he noted, “Great Britain was not bound by treaty to become involved in war with the U.S.S.R. as a result of their invasion of Poland.” For good measure, he added that “the French Government took the same view.”

Indeed, rather than declaring war on the Soviets, the British were keen to build a connection with Moscow so as to forestall the specter of a full-blown German-Soviet alliance. To this end, one bright spark in the cabinet even suggested a nonaggression pact, until it was pointed out that such arrangements “stink somewhat since August 23.” Instead, trade was to be employed as the icebreaker. In the first week of October, an agreement was made for the exchange of £1 million of Soviet timber in return for rubber and tin. Other commodities were also considered, including lead, copper, cocoa, and machine tools. Yet, though not without success, the negotiations were shot through with paranoia regarding Soviet motives and actions. Talks were linked, for instance, to the fate of some sixteen British ships then detained in Soviet ports, and the British side raised concerns that the Soviets might be acting in bad faith and might arrange for their outgoing shipments to be torpedoed by German submarines.

Paradoxically, in the same week that the trade agreement was signed, a memorandum by the British Chiefs of Staff gave a remarkably prescient appreciation of the new strategic situation created by the Nazi-Soviet Pact. It made for sobering reading. Not only could the USSR “do serious harm to the Allied cause while remaining nominally neutral,” it argued, but it could also render “the maximum economic assistance” to Germany, thereby slowing the effects of the British economic blockade. In addition, the Baltic states and Finland would be “helpless” in the face of Soviet aggression, and the occupation of Bessarabia was “quite possible.” The memorandum concluded by reminding the British cabinet that “Russia’s abiding aim is to spread world revolution” and suggested that the Nazi-Soviet Pact provided Moscow with a “golden opportunity” to extend “Communistic activities throughout the world.”

This schizophrenic ambivalence—a fear of Soviet ulterior motives entwined with an even greater fear that a lack of engagement might drive Moscow definitively into Hitler’s arms, resulting in a full-blown Nazi-Soviet alliance—characterized British government attitudes toward the Soviet Union that autumn. Against this complex background Winston Churchill coined one of his most famous phrases. In stark contrast to the unequivocally critical attitude struck toward the Germans, in a speech broadcast by the BBC on October 1, Churchill was sympathetic toward the Soviets, despite growing evidence that they were rivaling their Nazi allies in their aggressive intentions toward Poland. Soviet actions in invading Poland, Churchill told his listeners, were driven by “a cold policy of self-interest” but were “necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.” Far from criticizing, Churchill was emollient, as indulgent of his potential Soviet ally as he was damning of his German enemy. “Russia,” he concluded, was “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Moscow’s invasion of Finland at the end of November 1939, however, would shake profoundly any fragile equilibrium. Given that it destroyed any remaining illusions among Western ruling elites about the true nature of Soviet intentions, the Winter War made a decision on the British position toward the Soviet Union all the more pressing. Already a month before, while Moscow had been ratcheting up the pressure on Finland, some in the British cabinet had begun to consider firmer action toward the Soviets. At the end of October, therefore, at the urging of the British ambassador in Helsinki, Foreign Secretary Halifax had requested a report from the UK Chiefs of Staff on the merits and demerits of a British declaration of war on the USSR.

That report returned with a definitive recommendation not to declare war on the Soviets, but still the idea did not die. In mid-December, during a discussion about the possibilities of sending material aid to the Finns, it was raised once more, with Halifax again informing the cabinet that he “had been examining broadly the implications of a conflict between ourselves and Russia” but conceding that he was “not sure how the matter should be handled.” Halifax certainly faced a conundrum. His intention, as he had stated to a colleague, was to “drive a wedge” between the Soviets and the Germans, to disrupt the economic and political relationship between them. Yet, trade with Moscow had not served its ulterior purpose of bringing about a moderation of Soviet actions, as the Soviet invasion of Finland had demonstrated dramatically. Moreover, it was not in Britain’s interest to supply a state that was “benevolently neutral” toward the Reich, as it was feared that “exports to the USSR were probably tantamount to exports to Germany.” However, a declaration of war did not make military or strategic sense, as it would only increase the number of Britain’s enemies while potentially serving only to further cement the German-Soviet relationship.

In time, a course of action between those two extremes emerged. While neither of the previous options was discarded entirely, it was suggested that Britain might look to frustrate the relationship by involving the Soviet Union in strategic and economic difficulties so that she would in turn be “less able to help Germany.” One strand of this policy consisted of hampering Soviet international trade so as to prevent vital raw materials from falling into German hands, thereby, in effect, extending the British blockade of Germany to include the Soviet Union. Thus, British authorities began intercepting and detaining Soviet vessels such as the Selenga, which was stopped at Hong Kong in January 1940 with a cargo of tungsten, antimony, and tin, bound for Vladivostok.

If nothing else, such actions certainly brought the Soviets back to the negotiating table. In March, the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, asked in a meeting with Halifax whether the British government would be willing to resume stalled trade negotiations and, if so, whether a first step might be the halting of the interceptions of Soviet ships. Halifax responded coolly, referring disparagingly to the Soviet government’s policy of keeping “the war between the Allies and Germany going, to their own advantage,” but he did later raise the question in cabinet as to whether—as part of any possible agreement—the Soviets might be persuaded to restrict their deliveries of oil to Germany. Evidently, the irritant of intercepting Soviet shipping might yet bear fruit.

At the same time as these talks were taking place, the British and French were planning something altogether bolder. For a number of years, the vulnerability of the Soviet Union’s primary oil-producing region, centered on Baku in the Caucasus, had been well appreciated in the West. Given that it produced fully 75 percent of the USSR’s oil and was only around two hundred kilometers from the Turkish border, Baku was rightly seen as Stalin’s Achilles’ heel.

Thus, when schemes were being considered in London and Paris, in the winter of 1939–1940, by which pressure might be brought to bear on Moscow, the idea of targeting Baku came to the fore. The plan had a curious complex of motivators. In the first instance, those responsible for drawing it up could point to the region’s vulnerability to air raiding and speculate on the possible impact that such an attack would have not only on the Soviet economy but also, crucially, on that of Nazi Germany. Indeed, the collusion between Moscow and Berlin appears to have triggered a fundamental reappraisal of British geostrategic priorities. Aware that Germany would be virtually immune to the traditional British tactic of the blockade because of its economic relationship with the USSR, British planners perceived an urgency to strangle the new joint entity—“Teutoslavia,” as the hawkish diplomat Robert Vansittart dubbed it—in its crib. “We should strike at Russo-Germany,” Vansittart told the cabinet in the spring of 1940, “before it gets too strong.”

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.

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.

Finland so hardened Roosevelt’s attitude that he increasingly shared the critical view of his Moscow embassy and began to warn of the perils of joint “Soviet-German” domination of Europe. In a speech to a pro-Soviet audience in February 1940, for instance, he angrily described the USSR as “a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world,” which had “allied itself with another dictatorship” and had “invaded a neighbour so infinitesimally small that it can do no conceivable harm to the Soviet Union.” Despite boos and catcalls from his audience, Roosevelt persisted with his attack, ridiculing the idea that the USSR might evolve into a “peace-loving, popular government” as “unadulterated twaddle based on ignorance.” For the moment, at least, Washington evidently viewed the Soviet Union not as part of the solution but—like Hitler’s Germany—as part of the problem.

Such assessments were to change, however. By the summer of 1940, with Britain and France facing the real prospect of defeat at German hands, the American attitude toward Germany hardened still further, while that toward the Soviet Union grew a little more relaxed, with Roosevelt instructing Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to open discussions with the Soviet ambassador, Konstantin Oumansky. Although the talks achieved little of substance, their importance as a gesture should not be underestimated. Roosevelt was beginning to prepare the ground for a possible British collapse and was feeling his way toward a necessary rapprochement with Moscow.

The British, meanwhile, required something more than gestures. On May 15, Churchill—newly installed as prime minister—had sent a message to Roosevelt describing Britain’s need for US ships to help secure her Atlantic supply lines as a matter of “life and death.” Two months later, he was even more imploring. “Mr President,” he wrote, “with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now.” The French were similarly insistent. In June 1940, with his forces buckling under German pressure, Premier Paul Reynaud made a final appeal to Roosevelt, requesting that American troops be sent to assist France in her hour of need.

Roosevelt’s response was less than immediately dynamic. In an election year, he preferred to steer a moderate course, keen not to be outflanked by his Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, on foreign policy. His reply to Reynaud, therefore, was a study in emollient reserve. Although he declared himself “deeply moved” by Reynaud’s message and lauded the “magnificent resistance” of British and French forces, Roosevelt made no firm commitments beyond the assurance that his government was “doing everything in its power to make available to Allied governments the material they so urgently require.” Those efforts would bear fruit in time—in the Destroyers for Bases Agreement of September 1940 and ultimately in the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941—but from the perspective of the summer of 1940, America was still some distance from becoming the “arsenal of democracy” that it would later declare itself to be. For the time being at least, Britain was alone.

Against this background Britain faced a rather curious episode, one that neatly demonstrated the strangely altered circumstances in which the world found itself in 1940. Although most on the right of British politics had hurried to confirm their patriotic credentials on the outbreak of war in 1939, a few hardened anti-Semites around the disbanded Right Club had continued their clandestine efforts to secure a negotiated peace with Nazi Germany. As part of that effort, contact had been made with a young cipher clerk at the American embassy in London, Tyler Kent, who had begun to take a particular interest in the correspondence passing between Churchill and Roosevelt. The FBI suspected Kent—an “isolationist” who had worked in the US embassy in Moscow—of harboring sympathies for the Soviets; yet, in the curious new constellation of 1940, he soon found himself assisting those who were profoundly pro-Nazi in their outlook. Through a White Russian intermediary, Anna Wolkoff, Kent made contact with the Right Club and began passing them details of the secret correspondence by which Churchill was attempting to bring Roosevelt into the war, in the hope that publicizing such contacts would embarrass both parties, and American involvement in the European war could be prevented. Pro-Soviet interests, it seemed, had momentarily meshed perfectly with those of the pro-Nazis.

Unfortunately for Wolkoff and Kent, this unholy liaison had already attracted the attention of the British Security Service, MI5, and the conspiracy was swiftly wound up when both were arrested in May 1940, a search of Kent’s flat revealing 1,500 secret documents that he had copied from American diplomatic correspondence. Tried in London for violating defense regulations—Kent’s diplomatic immunity was waived by his superiors—the two were duly found guilty and sentenced, Wolkoff to ten years imprisonment and Kent to seven. In the aftermath, fears of the existence of a pro-German fifth column in Britain led to the extension of the powers of internment without trial—the infamous Defence Regulation 18B—and the arrest of many of those on the extreme right, including Oswald Mosley and the Right Club leader Archibald Ramsay.

Defense Regulation 18B was a typically British compromise. Part of a raft of over a hundred emergency regulations decreed in late August 1939 in response to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the imminence of war, it essentially updated the Defense of the Realm Act of 1914, allowing for preventative detention of those thought to be a danger to national security. Its wording specified those who might be considered as suspects, including those “of hostile origins or associations,” those who “had acted prejudicially to public safety or the defence of the realm,” and those who were members of organizations subject to “foreign influence or control” or whose leaders had “sympathies with the system of government” of an enemy power.

Of course, such a broad definition could theoretically apply just as much to Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) as to Harry Pollitt’s Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Yet, in practice, Regulation 18B was applied almost exclusively to those on the right; indeed, of the 1,600 or so British subjects interned under the ruling, about 75 percent were from the BUF, representing almost the entire active party membership. The only CPGB member so interned was a Yorkshire shop steward, John Mason, who was arrested in July 1940 for allegedly attempting to undermine industrial production. This asymmetry was noted at the time, and Mosley himself cried foul, insisting that the extended application of 18B in the summer of 1940 was a direct consequence (and condition) of the Labour Party’s entry into government. Whatever the truth of that accusation, many in British government circles were manifestly well aware of the potential risk to national security posed by the hard Left but were unwilling to act for fear of the hostile public reaction that any such clampdown might provoke, as was demonstrated by the furious public response to a BBC decision in February 1941 not to employ British Communist Party supporters. Clearly, while the Soviets were being courted abroad, it made little sense to persecute their supporters at home.

In these trying circumstances, with American support not yet secured, a return to a policy of negotiation with the Soviets must have appeared sensible in Whitehall, and the man chosen for the task was Sir Stafford Cripps. A rather humorless socialist MP and a devout Marxist, Cripps had been expelled from the Labour Party for his advocacy of a “Popular Front” against fascism and had publicly defended the Soviet Union’s invasions of both Poland and Finland. Consequently, he must have appeared to the British establishment as the ideal candidate to sweet-talk Moscow. He also had a promising track record: he had visited the Soviet Union for impromptu talks with Molotov in February 1940, during the course of which he had gained the impression that the Soviets were apprehensive about their relationship with Germany and were keen for some rapprochement with Britain. So, though doubts were expressed in the cabinet about his political reliability, Cripps was duly dispatched to Moscow in late May 1940, with a narrow remit for trade negotiations, before being swiftly upgraded to ambassador following Soviet accusations of lèse-majesté.

Cripps’s optimism swiftly wilted, however. His first interview with Molotov was decidedly chilly, and he was obliged to report that, despite his requests, no further meeting was granted for another ten days thereafter—the classic diplomatic snub. Moreover, the realization began to dawn on him that the Soviets were minded to maintain their benevolent relationship with Germany, and instead of being keen on a realignment of their foreign policy, they were apparently only interested in securing a few additional supplies and using the prospect of British negotiations as a lever on Berlin. Back in London, Foreign Office mandarin Sir Orme Sargeant was grimly realistic:

Cripps’s left-wing convictions, far from endearing him to his Soviet hosts, may also have proved an obstacle. As Churchill confessed after the war, “We did not at that time realize sufficiently that Soviet Communists hate Left Wing politicians even more than they do Tories and Liberals. The nearer a man is to Communism in sentiment, the more obnoxious he is to the Soviets, unless he joins the Party.” Cripps, it seems, may have been the wrong choice after all. As the Foreign Office noted, it would have had more success in Moscow if it had sent “a rather rude duke.”

Nonetheless, Cripps persevered, and on July 1, he was granted an audience with Stalin to present a personal message from Churchill. France having now fallen, Churchill was anxious to reiterate Britain’s position and to ask Stalin to reconsider his. “Germany became your friend almost at the same moment as she became our enemy,” Churchill wrote. Now that the military situation had changed, he wanted to make it plain that it remained Britain’s policy to save herself from German domination and to liberate the rest of Europe. And, while he conceded that only the Soviet Union could judge whether Germany’s bid for hegemony constituted a threat to its interests, Churchill reassured Stalin that the British government was prepared to discuss any of the problems created by German aggression.

Stalin’s response gave little away. He was said to have been “formal and frigid” during the meeting, ignoring Cripps’s tentative probing and delivering no direct reply to Churchill’s message. If concerned by the strategic shift that Hitler’s defeat of France had clearly caused, he certainly did not let it show. Indeed, during this “severely frank discussion,” Stalin made his clumsy comments about opposing Britain’s desired preservation of “the old equilibrium” in Europe, thereby appearing to welcome the seismic impact that Hitler’s aggression had wrought. Far from mourning France’s fall, therefore, Stalin seemed to celebrate it.

Cripps was left in little doubt that Stalin was wedded to his German alignment and that there would be no major shift in Soviet foreign policy without substantial concessions from the British side. This, he feared, was most unlikely, not least because he believed that Britain in truth had “not the slightest desire to work with Russia” and that ingrained British hostility to the USSR had in fact contributed to driving Stalin into Hitler’s arms. As if his task were not difficult enough, Cripps’s faith in it was tested still further by the release of documents captured by the Germans in Paris relating to Operation Pike, the aborted Allied plan to bomb the Soviet oilfields. Britain’s embarrassment, it seemed, was complete.

In an attempt to break the resulting impasse, Cripps’s next approach sought to add some genuine substance to the well-meaning rhetoric, in what he saw as a “last opportunity” to shift Moscow in London’s direction. Building on conversations both with Molotov and with his political masters in Whitehall, Cripps presented a revised proposal on October 22 that amounted in many ways to a mirror image of the arrangement that the Soviets had come to with Hitler the year before. Under its terms, Britain offered what might be called a reset of its relationship with Moscow. It promised to treat the USSR on a par with the United States, consulting with the Soviet government on questions of postwar organization and ensuring Moscow’s participation in the future peace conference. In addition, Britain pledged to refrain from entering into anti-Soviet alliances, on the condition that Moscow abstained from hostile action either directly or by internal agitation. Furthermore, the British government agreed to recognize the de facto sovereignty of the USSR over those areas gained under the pact with Hitler: the Baltic states, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and eastern Poland. Also, trade between the two countries was to be developed to the widest possible extent, with particular emphasis on supplying those items that the USSR required for its defense. In return, the Soviet Union was obliged to maintain the same “favorable neutrality” in its relations with Britain that it did with Germany. Lastly, London and Moscow would sign a pact of nonaggression.

The Soviet response was less than enthusiastic, stymied no doubt by the fact that Molotov was in Berlin in mid-November 1940 to discuss a possible reset of the eminently more fruitful Soviet-German relationship. Matters were also not helped by the fact that details of the British approach were leaked to the international press, and the story duly appeared—to profound embarrassment in Whitehall—in the News Chronicle on November 16, 1940, and in the Times two days later. Although Cripps angrily suspected the Foreign Office as the source of the leak, it had actually come from the Soviet embassy in London, doubtless timed to put maximum pressure on the Germans by highlighting Moscow’s ongoing discussions with the British.

In the absence of any formal Soviet reply, it was left to the veteran ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, to articulate Moscow’s concerns. In his view, the proposals aroused “surprise and irritation.” Surprise because he believed that the British position lacked any realistic foundation: Britain simply had little of any value to offer, he said—even recognition of Soviet sovereignty in the Baltic and elsewhere was scarcely a novel development. His irritation, meanwhile, stemmed from the perceived arrogance of the proposal, the idea that Britain could somehow dispense its postwar benefices to a grateful world. “Does the British Government imagine itself to be something like the Apostle Peter,” Maisky asked mockingly, “who holds in his hands the keys to Paradise?”

Clearly, London would have to work substantially harder, offer much more of substance, or think more laterally if it were to win Moscow over. As Maisky put it to Halifax some days later, “Believe me we are tired of your good intentions, we can only be convinced by your good deeds.” The British proposal would be formally rejected on February 1, 1941.

With that, many in Whitehall were content to concede that there was little mileage to be gained through further overtures. Britain had made its best offer and been rebuffed; “it was up to the Russians,” said one mandarin, “to make the next approach.” Yet Cripps was undeterred, and in early April he submitted a memorandum to Molotov’s deputy, Andrei Vyshinsky, hinting at the new direction he thought British policy might take, raising the specter of London making peace with the Germans. Cripps, formerly a hardened apologist for Soviet actions, had begun to doubt that the Soviets were entirely honorable in their negotiations and worried that they, too, were merely playing with the British. His experience of negotiating with Stalin and his acolytes, it appeared, had convinced him that the best way to deal with the Soviets was to take a firm line—more rude duke than devout Marxist. And much to Whitehall’s amusement, he was now pushing London to adopt a policy of toughness toward Moscow rather than conciliation. In his memorandum to Vyshinsky, therefore, Cripps indulged in some mealymouthed saber rattling of his own, warning that “it was not outside the bounds of possibility, if the war were protracted for a long period, that there might be a temptation for Great Britain to come to some arrangement to end the war on the sort of basis which has again recently been suggested in certain German quarters.” Whether or not Vyshinsky fully grasped his meaning, Cripps evidently believed that one way of exerting pressure on Stalin was to threaten to negotiate with Hitler.

For all its fantasy and verbosity, Cripps’s memorandum certainly had an effect. For one thing, the chilly reception that he was already receiving in Moscow cooled still further. Generally snubbed by Molotov and forced to deal with his deputy, Vyshinsky, Cripps now found himself cast out altogether. His memorandum, it seemed, had so irritated the Soviets that they were now terminally distrustful of him, seeing him as unpredictable and unorthodox, lacking the delicacy required for the task. Such was Moscow’s rejection of him, indeed, that the Soviet ambassador in London, Maisky, became the preferred channel for subsequent communication. Despite his commitment and endeavor, Cripps appeared to have failed entirely. By his own admission, he was left with “nothing to do no chance of influencing events one way or the other.”

THUS, BY THE SPRING OF 1941, BRITAIN WAS AS ESTRANGED FROM the Soviet Union as it had been in the autumn of 1939. Negotiation had failed; trade talks had failed; flattery had failed; even flagrant, if unrealistic, saber rattling had failed. Stalin was sticking by his pact with Hitler, and Churchill’s Britain was alone in a geopolitical wilderness.

Part of the reason for that failure, of course, was that Britain had precious little to offer that might tempt the Soviets away from their tactical accommodation with the Nazis. Platitudes, good will, and vague expressions of future support could scarcely compete with the very real territorial and material benefits that Stalin had already accrued courtesy of his relationship with Berlin. In addition, the Foreign Office made sense of its failure to woo the Soviets with the reasoning that the distrustful, unnatural relationship between Stalin and Hitler was so riven by mutual suspicion that neither party would be brave enough to disavow it. “Neither dictator,” one memorandum noted, “dare[d] turn away lest the other stab him in the back.” The image might have come from a David Low cartoon.

Whatever the truth of Whitehall’s assumptions, there was clearly a fundamental ideological obstacle—on both sides—to any sort of rapprochement. As numerous asides and marginal comments in the British files show, the political establishment in Whitehall never seriously saw the USSR as a possible ally, only as a potential enemy to be guarded against and tactically exploited if possible. This fundamental inability to seriously contemplate an amicable arrangement with Moscow had arguably led to flights of fantasy such as Operation Pike.

For their part, the Soviets were similarly blinkered by their own ideology. Unwilling to view Britain as anything other than the archimperialist, their long-term ideological opponent, they would be fundamentally unable to seriously contemplate any arrangement with London, even had the latter been able to offer anything of substance. To a large extent, therefore, and despite the efforts of Stafford Cripps and others, the story of Anglo-Soviet relations prior to the summer of 1941 was very much one of “never the twain.”

Most seriously perhaps, the suspicion and paranoia resulting on both sides from these failed negotiations made the Anglo-Soviet relationship almost as difficult as it could have been and in practice achieved little beyond propelling Stalin further into Hitler’s embrace. Cripps fully appreciated this counterproductive aspect at the time: “It was all so mad,” he said, to see the Soviet Union “literally being pushed into the arms of Germany.” It would take the catastrophe of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941 to alter that self-defeating dynamic.