• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 740 0

of a pledged 4.4 million. Joan Beaumont again: “Considerable though these achievements and sacrifices were563, they seemed poor in contrast to the promises which had been made … At the time when the Russian need was greatest, the assistance from the West … was at its most uncertain.” There was special Soviet bitterness about British refusal of repeated requests for Spitfires. The most strident of Russia’s propagandists, Ilya Ehrenburg, denounced to his millions of Soviet readers the fact that the Allies were “sending very few aircraft, and not the best they have either.”564 The Russians claimed to be insulted on discovering that some Hurricanes they received were reconditioned rather than new. Given the indifferent quality of planes and tanks provided, Moscow began to focus its demands upon trucks and food.

Molotov flew on from London to Washington, where the White House butler reported to Roosevelt that Russia’s foreign minister had arrived with a pistol in his suitcase. The president observed that they must simply hope it was not intended for use on him. Following a meeting at the White House on May 30, Molotov displayed in his report to Moscow a frustration at Roosevelt’s evasive bonhomie that would have struck a chord with the British. Dinner, the Russian complained, “was followed by a lengthy but meaningless conversation … I said that it would be desirable to engage at least 40 German divisions at the Western front in the summer and autumn of this year. Roosevelt and Marshall responded that they very much wanted to achieve this, but faced immediate shipping difficulties in moving forces to France.” The Russian pleaded that, if there was no Second Front in 1942, Germany would be much stronger in 1943. “They offered no definite information.”565 However, the president said that “preparations for the second front566 are under way … he, Roosevelt[,] is trying to persuade the American generals to take the risk and land 6 to 10 divisions in France. It is possible that it will mean another Dunkirk and the loss of 100,000–120,000 men, but the sacrifices have to be made to provide help in 1942 and shatter German morale.”

Stalin cabled again on June 3, first rebuking Molotov for the brevity of his reports. The Soviet leader said that he did not want to be told mere essentials. He needed trivial details as well, to provide a sense of mood. “Finally, we think it absolutely necessary567 that both [British and American] communiqués contain paragraphs about establishing the second front in Europe, and state that full agreement had been reached on this issue. We also think it necessary that both communiqués should include specifics on deliveries of material from Britain and the USA to the Soviet Union.”

Here were the same imperatives pressing Stalin as had weighed upon Churchill in 1940–41. First, and as the Russian leader acknowledged568 in his cables to Molotov, it was vital to persuade Hitler that there was a real threat of an Allied invasion of France, to deter him from transferring further divisions to the Eastern Front. Second, morale was as important to the peoples of the Soviet Union as to those of the democracies. Every gleam of hope was precious. Stalin nursed no real expectation that Anglo-American armies would land on the Continent in 1942. But, just as Churchill in 1940–41 promoted in Britain much higher expectations of American belligerence than the facts merited, so Stalin wished to trumpet to the Russian people Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s assurances that a Second Front was coming, even though he did not himself believe them. Should the British and Americans later breach such assurances, this would provide useful evidence of capitalist perfidy. For embattled Russia in the summer of 1942, “later” seemed scarcely to matter.

Back in London on June 9, Molotov met Churchill once more, before the signing of a treaty of alliance. If the Russian’s purpose was to promote discord between London and Washington, he was by no means unsuccessful. The prime minister was much disturbed when Molotov told him of Roosevelt’s aspirations