Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [151]
Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, arrived in Britain for talks on May 21, 1942. Following his first encounter with the prime minister he reported to Moscow: “Concerning the second front, Churchill made a brief statement560 during the morning session, stating that the British and American governments are in principle committed to mounting such an operation in Europe, with maximum available resources, at the earliest possible date, and are making energetic preparations for this.” After subsequent meetings, however, at which the British made much of the practical difficulties of staging an invasion of the Continent, he told Moscow that it would be rash to expect early action. Molotov was a grey bureaucrat so slavishly loyal to Stalin that during the purges of the 1930s, he signed an arrest order for his own wife. By such means he, almost alone among prominent old Bolsheviks, had escaped the executioners and clung to office. It must have strained to the limits Churchill’s submission to political imperatives to entertain such a man at Downing Street and Chequers, which the Russian remembered chiefly, and contemptuously, for its lack of showers.
If further evidence was needed of Beaverbrook’s mischief-making, Molotov reported on May 27, following two encounters with the press lord: “He advised me to push the British government [for an invasion], and assured me that Roosevelt is a proponent of the second front.” Beyond Russian secretiveness, Churchill was also obliged to contend with Moscow’s susceptibility to fantasies. Stalin appeared sincerely to believe that Japanese aircraft were being flown by German pilots, and that the British had for some unfathomable reason provided Japan with 1,500 combat aircraft.
Molotov’s main business in London was to negotiate a treaty of alliance. He was dismayed by British refusal to meet the demands which Russia had been making ever since entering the war, for recognition of its hegemony not only over the Baltic states, but also over eastern Poland. Stalin, however, was less concerned. He cabled Molotov on May 24, telling him to accept the vaguely worded draft about postwar security offered by Eden: “We do not consider this a meaningless statement561, we regard it as an important document. It does not contain that paragraph [proposed in a Russian draft] on border security, but probably this is not so bad as it leaves our hands free. We will resolve the issue of frontiers, or rather, of security guarantees for our frontiers … by force.” Much more serious, in Russian eyes, was the perceived inadequacy of British arms shipments. Stalin emphasised the need for fighters and tanks, especially Valentines, which had proved best suited, or least unsuited, to Russian conditions. The British, however, remained evasive about increasing the strength of their convoys to Archangel. Joan Beaumont, one of the most convincing analysts of wartime Western aid to Russia, has written: “It is the irony of the commitment to the Soviet Union562 that while … consensus on its necessity grew in the first half of 1942, so also did the obstacles in the way of putting this into effect.”
Grandiose American promises of aid—initially 8 million tons for 1942–43, half of this food—foundered on the Allies’ inability to ship anything like such quantities. By the end of June 1943, less than 3 million tons had been delivered