Stalin is Staggered. Chapter Three: Churchill, Defiant and Resolute, Links with Stalin

After long decades of speaking out against Communism, Winston now says he "will unsay nothing," but makes clear that the enemy of his enemy is his friend. His words redouble his courage.

This Chapter: Churchill was torn between small pieces of good news and the reality of what it would mean if Hitler opened the attack on Stalin. The presence of his enormous army on the Russian borders made that certain in his mind. When it occurred that Sunday in late June, he saw that he had to put its meaning in perspective to his people and, more importantly, to Franklin Roosevelt. He delivered a speech on the BBC that placed the moment in importance with three other events that had brought them to this, their moment of maximum danger. He told a few of his advisors that “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would find some good things to say about the Devil.”

Contents of “Stalin is Staggered”:

1. Confused by Reality

2. The Last Day Before War

3. Churchill, Defiant and Resolute, Links with Stalin

Chapter Three: Churchill, Defiant and Resolute, Links with Stalin

Reading time: Eighteen minutes

Churchill was grasping for any kind of success in that month. He hadn’t been bombed since the night of Hess’s mystifying descent into Scotland in early May . That was a great relief, but the steady sinking of the ships his people needed for survival ruined any comfort of it. Waiting for American help brought him not a shred of pleasure. He was a warrior, no less than Hitler. As with Hitler, his appetite for combat carried occasional blindness with its fury.

Lord Beaverbrook, Max Aitken, had made himself so dreaded by his demands in the factories as the master of aircraft production that Winston made him Minister of Supply, where he could infuriate everybody with his insistence on building more and better of everything, and faster, and to hell with their fatigue. Churchill told Jock Colville, “When I’m under pressure, I don’t take drugs. I take Max!” By now, the airplane builders were doing fine on their own, but England needed tanks, too, and better ones than those Rommel was destroying in North Africa. A more patient man would have waited for the better tanks before going on offense in the desert, but a more patient man wasn’t Prime Minister.

The man who was Prime Minister had worked up a slight head of steam from a quick win over the Vichy France forces in Syria. They had used their uncontested position to permit German troops to launch the failed air descent into the Iraq tussle. Churchill didn’t want to engage a war of no consequence with Vichy over the transgression, but then they turned their inconsequential guns on his and DeGaulle’s Free French troops in Palestine and Winston ordered Wavell to drive them out of Syria altogether. Wavell did.

Now, he sent all the tanks he could load on ships to Wavell in Egypt with orders to take them to war with Rommel, who had Libya’s port of Tobruk under siege. He demonstrated the urgency by sending the shipment through the Mediterranean rather than the safer route around the African Cape. When the tanks arrived, Wavell was still hosting the survivors of the Greece and Crete defeats and refitting whatever equipment had come back with them. The British had incurred 12,000 dead, twice that many wounded, and another twice that many captured. Wavell’s largest operational unit was a battalion; he had lots of those. Harriman was there when the tanks arrived.

Wavell told Ave, “We give too much credit to Rommel when we speak of ‘Rommel’s tanks’ and not enough to his tanks. He was here for a month watching the Italians collapse before he went back to Germany to show how desert tank tracks should be made. He has those now and we do not. Ours, even this latest shipment, would be fine if our desert enemy were the Italians and their tanks. Now, knowing the superiority of his equipment, and with the experience his men acquired in France, he has us at a great disadvantage, and he uses it in tactics that we can only offset by disengagement.

“I gain nothing by complaining about this to London. If they had better tanks, they would send them. Also planes to lead the tank assault. But as it stands, I could do more for the greater goal of guarding the Canal if I feinted with Rommel rather than by marching into his teeth. But my orders are to lift the siege of Tobruk, and I am a soldier.”

Wavell had lost Richard O’Connor, the general whose daring had brought on the Italian conquests before Rommel arrived. O’Connor was captured in an April battle with Rommel. Churchill and Wavell had their differences, but on O’Connor they agreed: if he were alive, he would escape. Now, Wavell’s field commanders were either beaten down by Rommel or too recently arrived to know how tricky he was. For two months he had the Australian 8^th Division trapped in Tobruk. The Australian position was denying the port to the Axis against such overwhelming odds that its men called themselves “The Rats of Tobruk.”

On June 15^th, Operation Battleaxe began, and effectively ended. Rommel had cannons hidden in the hills above Halfaya Pass, the only route the British tanks could take. He lured them with his own tanks, biding his time until the Brits filled the valley below him, and then destroyed them all. The next day, Wavell surveyed the field from the air and concluded with his commanders that the battle was futile. He withdrew, leaving a thousand tanks burning, a thousand men dead, and another thousand captured. The survivors renamed the valley “Hellfire Pass.” Wavell lost the battle to Rommel, and his command to Churchill, despite forcefully expressed objections from Winston’s military advisers. The siege continued and the Rats endured.

The dilemma of the democracies as Stalin was invaded by Hitler, especially the democracy of Britain, was rooted in their views of Fascism and Communism. The underlying principle of British appeasement of Hitler was that, no matter how vile his hatreds of Jews and how sinister his ambition for conquest, Hitler was better than Stalin and his Fascism was clearly preferable to Communism. Those arguments weakened as his shells landed closer and closer to home. Churchill had seen early in the decade of Hitler’s rise that he simply had to be stopped, ideology be damned, but in the decade before, he had poured barrels of vile on the principles and people of Communism. Now he had to reach out to them in common cause against the greater danger.

Churchill spent the weekend preceding the attack on Russia at Chequers musing at mealtimes and on strolls of the grounds with his assembled audience of Eden, Winant, Bracken, Beaverbrook, and General Sir John Dill, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Though the mood was apprehension sprinkled with uncertainty, he was one step ahead of the events, making the case in many soliloquies that “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would find enough good things to say about the Devil to open a partnership.”

Chequers was asleep, mostly, at 3:00 in the morning of Sunday, June 22, 1941, when Martin Mulvihill, the Duty Officer, received confirmation of Hitler’s invasion of Russia. After a late dinner, Churchill had retired not long before, telling Jock Colville not to disturb him “until eight o’clock unless the Home Island is attacked.” Mulvihill climbed the darkened stairs in soft steps from the basement to the third floor to convey the news to Colville, 26, the Prime Minister’s Duty Secretary, who was at that very moment in the arms of Mary Churchill, 18, the Prime Minister’s daughter. Mulvihill knocked gently on the door of Colville’s room, but not so gently that Colville wasn’t suddenly stricken with the paralyzing certainty that his career was about to end in humiliation and disgrace.

Colville struggled to tie on a robe and hobbled to the door where he asked, “Who’s there?” hoping against hope that it wasn’t his boss. Mulvihill identified himself and Colville cracked open the door to accept the message he was handed. He returned to bed and told Mary that Germany had opened war on Russia.

She said, “Won’t it keep?”

“Keep?”

“Not the war. The message.”

“I think I should at least see if his light is still on.” He made himself slightly more presentable, but not by a lot, and went down one floor to Churchill’s quarters. Everything was quiet and no light showed from beneath his door. Jock thought that might be due to excellent carpentry, but it was also a bloody good excuse, so he went back to his room. Halfway there he nearly collided with Roosevelt’s Ambassador Gil Winant, 51, whose wife was in New Hampshire, emerging like a cat burglar from the quarters of Sarah Churchill, 26, the Prime Minister’s daughter, whose husband was in New York.

Winant said, “Well, this is awkward.”

Colville tapped him on the shoulder, one comrade to another, and said, “Don’t let it be. Don’t.” And went back to Mary.

*

Churchill was awakened by Colville at 8:00 and presented with the news. He told Colville to inform the BBC that he would speak to the nation that evening at 9:00, and he spent the day preparing for it, interspersing his dictation to his teams of typists with discussions of his thoughts with a wide range of advisers. He told Eden to inform the Soviets and the Americans that he would embrace and support the Russians without qualification.

He saw the event as transcendent, calling it a “climacteric” to Bracken, who said no one knew what that meant. Winston said, “It’s time they found out,” and he began by saying so.

“I have taken occasion to speak to you tonight because we have reached one of the climacterics of the war. In the first of these intense turning points, a year ago, France fell prostrate under the German hammer and we had to face the storm alone.

“The second was when the Royal Air Force beat the Hun raiders out of the daylight air raid and thus warded off the Nazi invasion of our islands while we were still ill-armed and ill-prepared.

“The third turning point was when the President and Congress of the United States passed the lease and lend enactment, devoting nearly two billion sterling of the wealth of the New World to help us defend our liberties and their own.

“Those were the three climacterics.

“The fourth is now upon us.”

He described the Nazi treachery, which came as no surprise to him.

“At four o’clock this morning Hitler attacked and invaded Russia. All his usual formalities of perfidy were observed with scrupulous technique. A non-aggression treaty had been solemnly signed and was in force between the two countries. No complaint had been made by Germany of its non-fulfillment. Under its cloak of false confidence the German armies drew up in immense strength along a line which stretched from the White Sea to the Black Sea and their air fleets and armoured divisions slowly and methodically took up their stations.

“Then, suddenly, without declaration of war, without even an ultimatum, the German bombs rained down from the sky upon the Russian cities. The German troops violated the Russian frontiers and an hour later the German Ambassador, who till the night before was lavishing his assurances of friendship, almost of alliance, upon the Russians, called upon the Russian Foreign Minister to tell him that a state of war existed between Germany and Russia.”

He made it clear that he hadn’t been surprised.

“Thus was repeated on a far larger scale the same kind of outrage against every form of signed compact and international faith which we have witnessed in Norway, in Denmark, in Holland, in Belgium and which Hitler’s accomplice and jackal, Mussolini, so faithfully imitated in the case of Greece.

“All this was no surprise to me. In fact I gave clear and precise warnings to Stalin of what was coming. I gave him warnings, as I have given warnings to others before. I can only hope that these warnings did not fall unheeded.

“All we know at present is that the Russian people are defending their native soil and that their leaders have called upon them to resist to the utmost.

“Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder. Not content with having all Europe under his heel or else terrorized into various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and of Asia. The terrible military machine which we and the rest of the civilized world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing, this machine cannot stand idle, lest it rust or fall to pieces. It must be in continual motion, grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and the rights of hundreds of millions of men.

“Moreover, it must be fed not only with flesh but with oil. So now this bloodthirsty guttersnipe must launch his mechanized armies upon new fields of slaughter, pillage and devastation. Poor as are the Russian peasants, workmen and soldiers, he must steal from them their daily bread. He must devour their harvests. He must rob them of the oil which drives their ploughs and thus produce a famine without example in human history.

“And even the carnage and ruin which his victory, should he gain it — though he’s not gained it yet — will bring upon the Russian people, will itself be only a stepping stone to the attempt to plunge four or five hundred millions who live in China and the 350 million who live in India into that bottomless pit of human degradation over which the diabolic emblem of the swastika flaunts itself.

“It is not too much to say here this pleasant summer evening that the lives and happiness of a thousand million additional human beings are now menaced with brutal Nazi violence. That is enough to make us hold our breath.

“But presently I shall show you something else that lies behind and something that touches very nearly the life of Britain and of the United States.”

He felt the need to explain how the invasion had instantaneously turned his enemy of long-standing into an ally of unexceeded importance.

“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 words 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. 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; 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 protectors.

“I see the ten thousand 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 hideous 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. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, so delighted to find what they believe is an easier and a safer prey. And behind all this glare, behind all this storm, I see that small group of villainous men who planned, organized and launched this cataract of horrors upon mankind.

“And then my mind goes back across the years to the days when the Russian armies were our Allies against the same deadly foe when they fought with so much valor and constancy and helped to gain a victory, from all share in which, alas, they were, through no fault of ours, utterly cut off.”

And then he announced what it meant and what he would do.

“I have lived through all this and you will pardon me if I express my feelings and the stir of old memories. But now I have to declare the decision of His Majesty’s Government, and I feel sure it is a decision in which the great Dominions will, in due course, concur. And that we must speak of now, at once, without a day’s delay. I have to make the declaration, but can you doubt what our policy will be?

“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 people from his yoke.

“Any man or State who fights against Nazism will have our aid. Any man or State who marches with Hitler is our foe. This applies not only to organized States but to all representatives of that vile race of Quislings who make themselves the tools and agents of the Nazi regime against their fellow-countrymen and against the lands of their births. These Quislings, like the Nazi leaders themselves, if not disposed of by their fellow-countrymen, which would save trouble, will be delivered by us on the morrow of victory to the justice of the Allied tribunals. That is our policy and that is our declaration.

“It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and to the Russian people. We shall appeal to all our friends and Allies in every part of the world to take the same course and pursue it as we shall, faithfully and steadfastly to the end.

“We have offered to the Government of Soviet Russia any technical or economic assistance which is in our power and which is likely to be of service to them. We shall bomb Germany by day as well as by night in ever-increasing measure, casting upon them month by month a heavier discharge of bombs and making the German people taste and gulp each month a sharper dose of the miseries they have showered upon mankind.

“It is noteworthy that only yesterday the Royal Air Force, striking inland over France, cut down with very small loss to themselves twenty-eight of the Hun fighting machines in the air above the French soil they have invaded, defiled and profess to hold.”

He said he knew his people were understandably troubled, and for good reason, but he wanted them to know that Hitler was about to receive exactly what he had invited: his undoing.

“But this is only a beginning. From now henceforward the main expansion of our air force proceeds with gathering speed. In another six months the weight of the help we are receiving from the United States in war materials of all kinds, especially in heavy bombers, will begin to tell. This is no class war. It is a war in which the whole British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations is engaged without distinction of race, creed or party.

“It is not for me to speak of the action of the United States, but this I will say: If Hitler imagines that his attack on Soviet Russia will cause the slightest division of aims or slackening of effort in the great democracies, who are resolved upon his doom, he is woefully mistaken. On the contrary, we shall be fortified and encouraged in our efforts to rescue mankind from his tyranny. We shall be strengthened and not weakened in our determination and in our resources.

“This is no time to moralize upon the follies of countries and governments which have allowed themselves to be struck down one by one when by united action they could so easily have saved themselves and saved the world from this catastrophe.

“But, when I spoke a few minutes ago of Hitler’s bloodlust and the hateful appetites which have impelled or lured him on his Russian adventure, I said there was one deeper motive behind his outrage. He wishes to destroy the Russian power because he hopes that if he succeeds in this he will be able to bring back the main strength of his army and air force from the East and hurl it upon this island, which he knows he must conquer or suffer the penalty of his crimes.

“His invasion of Russia is no more than a prelude to an attempted invasion of the British Isles. He hopes, no doubt, that all this may be accomplished before the Winter comes and that he can overwhelm Great Britain before the fleets and air power of the United States will intervene. He hopes that he may once again repeat upon a greater scale than ever before that process of destroying his enemies one by one, by which he has so long thrived and prospered, and that then the scene will be clear for the final act, without which all his conquests would be in vain, namely, the subjugation of the Western Hemisphere to his will and to his system.

“The Russian danger is therefore our danger and the danger of the United States just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe.

“Let us learn the lessons already taught by such cruel experience. Let us redouble our exertions and strike with united strength while life and power remain.”

All that was missing from his moment of great eloquence was the admission that he had no idea how he would get it done.