September 25, 2024

Churchill, Stalin, and the Second World War

Finest Hour 201, First Quarter 2023

Page 18

By Sean McMeekin

Sean McMeekin is Francis Flournoy Professor of European History at Bard College and author of Stalin’s War (Basic Books / Penguin, 2021). This essay was first published as “Churchill’s Enigma: The Real Riddle Is Why He Cosied up to Stalin” in the London Spectator, 20 March 2021.

Dresden. Tonypandy. Gallipoli. Bengal. Since his death in 1965, Winston Churchill’s reputation has withstood an array of charges, made by each generation with their own differing prejudices. Whereas in the Seventies it was Richard Burton and Jim Callaghan accusing him of a vendetta against the Welsh miners, today the charge sheet is headed with the crimes of racism, imperialism, and white supremacy.

In February 2021, Cambridge academics held a panel on “The Racial Consequences of Mr. Churchill” in which the country’s wartime leader came in for a barrage of abuse for the “white supremacist perspective’” supposedly underlying his devotion to British empire. One panelist declared that the “British empire was worse than the Nazis,” while another denied Churchill can even claim credit for victory in the Second World War II. “Of course it was the Soviet Union that defeated the Nazis and the Americans who defeated the Japanese,” the panelist confidently declared.

For woke activists and academics to deny Churchill’s most famous achievement— defeating Hitler—and credit the USSR instead, rather misses the point of his premiership. There are, of course, many criticisms that can be levelled at Churchill’s wartime policies. But there is one in particular that, in the rush to paint him as a racist imperialist, has constantly avoided scrutiny: his relationship with Stalin. Churchill, in fact, sacrificed British imperial interests in order to save Soviet communism. Stalin could not have asked for a friendlier British government than Churchill’s.

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Verbal Support

When Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in May 1940, it did not mark a rightward lurch into reactionary imperialism. With his bellicosity vis-à-vis Hitler, Churchill was seen by the British left as a huge improvement over the Conservative Chamberlain, whose wariness of Stalin’s USSR had informed Britain’s “appeasement” policy in 1938. To reassure Stalin, Churchill brought the Labour party into his government with Clement Attlee as his deputy and appointed Labour MP Sir Stafford Cripps as British Ambassador in Moscow.

Months before Churchill entered No. 10, Chamberlain’s government nearly went to war with the USSR over Stalin’s brutal invasion of Finland during the winter of 1939. Churchill, in contrast, went out of his way to cultivate the Soviets: he privately assured Stalin’s Ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, that, in order to weaken Nazi Germany, Britain did not view Soviet expansion into the Baltic region unfavourably.

In the War Cabinet in November 1939, Churchill urged Chamberlain not to make the “mistake” of “trying to stiffen the Finns against making concessions to the USSR.” For this reason Churchill’s arrival in power in May 1940 was warmly welcomed by Maisky and Soviet aligned groups in Britain, such as the Daily Worker and the Russia Today Society. The latter expressed hope that Churchill would reverse “the previous government’s policy of hostility towards the USSR.” Churchill courted Stalin’s favour, too, though less successfully. Loyal to his 1939 pact with Hitler, Stalin refused to answer any of the Prime Minister’s many letters until 18 July 1941—four weeks after Hitler invalidated the Pact by invading the USSR.

Churchill threw all of his support behind Stalin’s armies despite Stalin’s alliance with Hitler during the first twenty-one months of the war—the USSR having invaded the same number of countries as Nazi Germany (seven), having supplied the German Wehrmacht as it invaded France and the Low Countries, and having literally fuelled the Luftwaffe as it bombed London in 1940.

Material Support

This support was more than rhetorical: in a gesture of astonishing selflessness, Churchill responded to news of Barbarossa by sending Stalin 200 brand-new Hurricane Hawker pursuit planes, which had been pledged to defend Singapore against Japanese attack. Churchill then “re-gifted” Stalin 200 Tomahawk fighters and 300 Douglas A-20 Havoc bombers from Britain’s own Lend-Lease consignments, and shipped Stalin 2,000 tonnes of processed aluminium for Soviet warplane factories, despite it being desperately needed at home. As British Air Marshal Sir Archie Sinclair noted in September 1941, these impulsive decisions not only deprived Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia of effective air defence against Japan, but also meant a “long postponement of [Britain’s] hopes of building up an Air Force of overwhelming strength.”

Even more striking was Churchill’s decision to ship Stalin nearly 600 tanks, which helped tip the balance in the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, despite Britain’s motor pool being a fraction the size of Stalin’s tank park. As one Lend-Lease scholar has noted, Stalin’s leaning on Churchill for tanks was “like a bankrupt millionaire turning to a pauper for salvation.” Churchill even agreed to strip Cairo command of hundreds of more tanks in 1942, routing them to Stalin’s USSR via Iran to bail out the Red Army at Stalingrad, which left Egypt vulnerable to Rommel’s Afrika Korps.

Churchill doubled down on his pro-Soviet policies even in areas where Britain had her own clients, such as Yugoslavia. Despite hosting the Yugoslav government in exile in London, in September 1943 Churchill abandoned that government’s commander on the ground and threw his full support behind Stalin’s man, Josip Broz (“Tito”). This was at a time when the Soviets were still unable to arm Tito’s Partisans. Bamboozled by a Soviet smear campaign against Colonel Draža Mihailovic, Churchill cut off Mihailovic’s Chetniks and shipped Tito more than one hundred times more war matériel over the next nine months than Mihailovic had received in the previous two years. Tito thanked Churchill by flying to Moscow, in a regifted American plane, to report to Stalin for instructions.

Diplomatic Consequences

At Tehran and Yalta, Churchill showed more resistance to Stalin’s plans to impose a puppet Communist government on Poland, despite getting no help at all from US President Franklin Roosevelt. Nonetheless, Churchill, in the end, allowed Stalin to sideline the Polish government in exile that Britain was hosting in London. What is more, Churchill pressured Polish leaders to move the country’s borders westward to satisfy Stalin’s designs, including a forcible population exchange.

Churchill eventually summoned up some of his old fire at the end of the war by first trying to get Roosevelt, and then his successor Harry Truman, to resist further Soviet encroachment in eastern Europe. (Churchill first road-tested his “Iron Curtain” phrase on 12 May 1945). By then, however, it was too late to contain the damage wrought by his and Roosevelt’s earlier embrace of Stalin’s regime and its interests.

The painful truth about Churchill’s wartime premiership is that a man who believed in Britain as a force for good carried out policies which sacrificed her relatively liberal and racially tolerant empire. He did so to defeat Hitler’s evil Nazi regime, while enabling the expansion of Stalin’s totalitarian and enslaving communist empire from Berlin to Beijing.

Most Britons—and Americans—today would assert that the Lend-Lease payoff was worth the price. By arming and supplying Red Army troops to do the dirty work in the war against Nazi Germany, fighting almost as western-supplied mercenaries, Churchill likely saved British lives in the war. As many Russians complained then and now, they were paid by the western Allies in “spam for blood.” (They usually forget the trucks, tanks, warplanes, aluminium and so on.) Perhaps there was even a conscious choice involved in Churchill’s decision to throw everything he had behind the Red Army in 1941–42, even if it was never openly expressed: sacrifice the empire to husband precious lives and save the homeland. It is, in any case, hardly fair for people today to blame Churchill for selfish devotion to the beloved empire he sacrificed.