H-Diplo Review Essay 263- Callahan on Churchill and Stalin: Comrades-In-Arms During the Second World War

H-Diplo H-Diplo Review Essay 263- Callahan on Churchill and Stalin: Comrades-In-Arms During the Second World War

Discussion published by George Fujii on Wednesday, July 29, 2020

H-Diplo Review Essay 263

29 July 2020

Martin Folly, Geoffrey Roberts, and Oleg Rzheshevsky. Churchill and Stalin: Comrades-In- Arms During the Second World War. Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2019. ISBN: 9781781590492 (hardback, £20.00). https://hdiplo.org/to/E263 Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Seth Offenbach | Production Editor: George Fujii

Review by Raymond Callahan, University of Delaware

Some months before D-Day, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill reminded the House of Commons of the basic fact of the European war: the Red Army had nipped the heart out of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s war machine. That fundamental truth was, if not exactly forgotten, then certainly marginalized when the defeat of Germany was swiftly followed by the Cold War. The titanic struggle on the Eastern Front came to be seen in the English-speaking world primarily through the very self-serving memoirs of former Wehrmacht generals and staff officers, accounts that sought both to whitewash the German army’s role in war crimes and emphasize the operational and tactical skills of that army, skills set at naught in these accounts by Hitler’s insane leadership and the “hordes” of inferior troops the Russians were able to hurl at the German army.[1] Meanwhile the history of the relationships between the “Big Three” of Churchill, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, was shaped – largely by Churchill’s memoirs – by the knowledge that on the horizon loomed the Cold War. But time, as it invariably does, passed. The Cold War ended. The archives began to open and historians, as they always do, began to revise this story.

The picture of the wartime alliance, and the Eastern Front, that has emerged over the last thirty years is radically different from the long-dominant Cold War, German-influenced, version. In 1995 David Glantz and Jonathan House publishedWhen Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler.[2] Based on Russian as well as German sources, it told a very different story. Far from dull hordes driven forward by ruthless commissars and overwhelming an army with “a genius for war” (as an American military historian described the Wehrmacht)[3] it was the story of an army paying an incredible price to survive 1941 and then steadily improving in tactical and operational skills, aided by much better equipment (only some of which came from Russia’s Western allies). By 1944-45, the Red Army was a formidable battlefield force that met the Wehrmacht with a comparable level of professional skill, and then beat it.

The Anglo-American War effort was integrated both on the battlefield, in operational commands like Dwight Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. (SHAEF), and on the

Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Review Essay 263- Callahan on Churchill and Stalin: Comrades-In-Arms During the Second World War. H-Diplo. 07-29-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/6275306/h-diplo-review-essay-263-callahan-churchill-and-stalin%C2%A0-comrades Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Diplo civilian side, as well as in the combined Anglo-American boards and effective liaison arrangements that handled matters like raw materials allocation and shipping. By contrast, Anglo-American relations with the Soviets were marked by great wariness of the Russians. Anglo-American issues that never reached Roosevelt and Churchill because they were effectively dealt with by civil and military officials below them had to go to the top where the Soviets were concerned. For that reason, it is not surprising that attention has now focused on the triangular Churchill-Roosevelt-Stalin relationship as recently released material from Russian archives makes possible an in-depth investigation of the interactions of three powerful, complex leaders. A landmark in the study of war at the top is the recent scholarly edition of Stalin's wartime correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt.[4] The book under review can be seen as another analysis, based on both Russian and Western archival sources, of the chemistry at work in this all-important triangle.

Winston Churchill was the crucial link between the other two members of the Big Three. His relationship with Stalin began soon after he became prime minister. Even before the outbreak of the war he had understood the importance of the Soviet Union in a war with Germany. He had urged the forging of an Anglo-Soviet alliance on the Chamberlain government as the only thing that could make Britain’s ‘guarantee’ to Poland effective. Once in Number Ten, Churchill made several overtures to Stalin but without eliciting a response. Then came Barbarossa. Churchill broadcast a speech on the evening of the German attack that promised British support (after famously telling one of his staff that he would offer some supportive words to the Devil were Hitler to invade Hell).[5] A correspondence between Churchill and Stalin began soon thereafter. Churchill had long thought that if Britain survived the summer of 1940 Hitler would turn east. Once the Germans had done so, Churchill was less pessimistic than his military advisors about Russia’s survival prospects. Britain needed Russia to survive; as long as the German war machine fought toward Moscow, Britain was secure from invasion (and Britain’s cities would experience a reprieve from the Luftwaffe’s attentions). But Britain could provide little concrete aid for Russia in 1941 or the following year. Some material aid could reach the Russians through convoys run expensively to Murmansk (and the authors seem a bit too dismissive of the value of the Murmansk convoys as anything more than symbolism). The British could develop a safer alternative to the Arctic convoys via the Persian Corridor, the railroad and road link from Basra on the Persian Gulf to Russia across Iran, that was occupied by British and Russian troops in August 1941. But that route did not hit its stride until 1943. Needing Russia to continue to tie down the bulk of the Wehrmacht and having little concrete to offer in the way of help, personal contact with Stalin seemed to the Prime Minister to be of great importance.

Personal contact was crucial to Churchill’s approach to statecraft. He was, after all, the product of a political system in which most of the key players shared similar backgrounds, educations and assumptions – and not infrequently family ties (even the Labour Party leadership in Churchill’s time included not a few with public school, Oxford/Cambridge backgrounds). In these circumstances, a great deal could be accomplished by personal contact in informal surroundings – clubs or country house weekends. This is the world so memorably preserved in the pages of British diplomat Harold Nicolson’s diaries. Franklin Roosevelt came from the closest thing the United States had to Britain’s landed gentry, and Churchill had set out to create with him the sort of relationship he was accustomed to in British political life.

To a considerable extent he was successful, largely by putting out of mind that Roosevelt wanted to

Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Review Essay 263- Callahan on Churchill and Stalin: Comrades-In-Arms During the Second World War. H-Diplo. 07-29-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/6275306/h-diplo-review-essay-263-callahan-churchill-and-stalin%C2%A0-comrades Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Diplo see not only Hitler’s defeat but an end to the British Empire as well. His efforts to do something similar with Stalin are the focus of this very interesting book. Initially the contacts were epistolary, but Churchill was anxious to make the link with Russia closer (and in his mind stronger) by making personal contact. In August 1942, he added a trip to Moscow to his journey to Cairo to reconfigure the British command structure for the desert war against German General Erwin Rommel. It was the first of four meetings with Stalin (Roosevelt met him twice), all involving lengthy and uncomfortable journeys for the Prime Minister. Stalin simply refused, often with quite transparent excuses, to venture anywhere outside Russian control – even Roosevelt could not wheedle him into a meeting on any turf but his own.

The authors make the point that they cannot trace Churchill’s preparations for this first meeting but of course elaborate position papers were not needed. Churchill had persuaded the Americans of the wisdom of his preferred, Mediterranean centered, strategy – or, rather, had made it clear to the Americans that their plan for a cross-channel attack in 1942 was simply not feasible and that, if any military operation was to be done that year, it had to be ‘Torch,’ the invasion of French North Africa. It was thus necessary to persuade the Russians that this operation, in fact, constituted a second front and to tell them that in order to mount Torch the Murmansk convoys would have to be suspended. It is a tribute to Churchill’s self-confidence that he was sure he could do this; it is an ever greater tribute to his abilities that he did—and came away with the beginnings of the personal connection with Stalin that he wanted. He cultivated this tie assiduously for the remainder of the war. During an interval in the Potsdam conference he told Anthony Eden, his foreign secretary, that he “liked that man,” referring to Stalin.[6] The authors argue that the connection was real, although of course Britain’s waning power after 1943 and Churchill’s consequent declining leverage meant that he could accomplish less than he wished. It was the Americans and the Russians who would shape the future.

The authors’ structure the story by opening with a long introductory chapter that surveys all the Churchill-Stalin meetings. They then walk the reader through each meeting, illustrating their account with documents from both British and Russian sources. For the crucial first meeting in August 1942 their documents provide a more textured account than those in the published Churchill papers.[7] The careful analysis and documentary presentation makes this a very useful account of the Churchill-Stalin relationship, one that acts as a complement to the letters published by Reynolds and Pechatnov.

Churchill knew that his country was weaker than either of its alliance partners and that its massive war effort was daily draining its strength. His aim—he defeat of the Third Reich and the preservation of Britain’s great power status—contained a fatal contradiction. The effort to wage all-out war while retaining parity with the United States in the alliance was simply an impossible task. The British war effort, which is remarkable in retrospect, was burning up the assets that had made Britain a global power. In the end national bankruptcy and the unraveling of empire were the price of victory. Even Churchill’s genius could not avoid that result. This account of his efforts to find a basis for an effective relationship with Russia testifies to his immense efforts to nonetheless pull it off.

Raymond Callahan is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Delaware. His field is military history. His most recent publication,Triumph at Imphal-Kohima: How the Indian Army

Finally Stopped the Japanese Juggernaut(University Press of Kansas, 2017) was runner up for Britain’s Templer Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Notes

[1] B.H. Liddell Hart, The German Generals Talk (New York: William Morrow, 1948).

[2] David Glantz and Jonathan House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).

[3] Trevor Dupuy, A Genius for War:The German Army and General Staff,1807-1945 (Garden City: Military Book Club, 2002).

[4] David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov, The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018).

[5] John Colville, The Fringes of Power (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), 404.

[6] Roy Jenkins, Churchill (London: Macmillan, 2001), 796.

[7] Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents: Vol. 17 Testing Times 1942 (Hillsdale: Hillsdale College Press, 2014), 1059-1089. Much of what Gilbert printed came from the postwar recollections of Churchill, Averell Harriman (who was Franklin Roosevelt’s observer at the meeting) and Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. The book under review here contains more contemporary material.