Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [169]
Stalin had always displayed intense curiosity about Churchill, for a quarter of a century the archfoe of Bolshevism. In June 1941, the Russian leader was surprised by the warmth with which Britain’s prime minister embraced him as a cobelligerent. In the intervening fourteen months, however, little had happened to gain Stalin’s confidence. Extravagant Western promises of aid had resulted in relatively meagre deliveries. The Times editorialist waxed lyrical on January 6, 1942, about the flow of British supplies to support the alliance with the Soviets: “The first result of this collaboration has been the splendid performance of British and American tanks and aeroplanes on Russian battlefields.” This was a wild exaggeration of reality, based upon sunshine briefings of the media and Parliament by the British government. Not only were targets for shipments of aircraft and tanks to Russia unfulfilled, but much of the material dispatched was being sunk in transit.
Convoy PQ16 was the target of 145 Luftwaffe sorties, and lost 11 of its 35 ships. In July, when 26 out of 37 ships carrying American and British supplies were lost with PQ17, 3,850 trucks, 430 tanks and 250 fighters vanished to the bottom. Following this disaster the Royal Navy insisted on cancelling all further convoys for the duration of the Arctic summer and its interminable daylight. Churchill, pressed by Roosevelt, reinstated the September convoys and began moving supplies through Iran, where the British and Russians now shared military control. But the only important reality, in Moscow’s eyes, was that aid consignments lagged far behind both Allied promises and Russian needs. Even more serious, the British had vetoed American plans for an early Second Front.
It is implausible that Stalin would have displayed a sentimental enthusiasm for his British allies, any more so than for any other human beings in his universe. He would never have acknowledged that his nation’s predicament was overwhelmingly the consequence of his own awesomely cynical indulgence of Hitler back in 1939. But Russia’s sense of outraged victimhood was none the less real for being spurious. The Soviets sought to bludgeon or shame the British and Americans into maintaining supply shipments and landing an army in Europe at the earliest possible date. Russia was counting her dead in the millions while the British cavorted in North Africa, paying a tiny fraction of the eastern blood sacrifice. In August 1942, Rostov-on-Don had fallen, Germany’s armies were deep in the Caucasus and almost at the gates of Stalingrad. Posterity knows that Hitler had made a fatal mistake by splitting his principal summer thrusts in pursuit of the strategically meaningless capture of Stalin’s name-city. The tide of the eastern war would turn decisively by the year’s end. But Russians at the time could not see beyond cataclysm. They knew only that their predicament was desperate. They could no more regard Churchill’s people as comrades-in-arms than might a man thrashing in a sea of sharks look in fellowship upon spectators cheering him on from a boat.
The prime minister wasted no time, at his first meeting with Stalin, before reporting the decision against a landing in Europe in 1942. He said that any such venture must be on a small scale, and thus assuredly doomed. It could do no service to Russia’s cause. The British and American governments were, however, preparing “a very great operation” in 1943. He told Stalin of Torch, the North African invasion plan, observing that he hoped the secret would not find its way into the British press—a jibe at Ambassador Maisky’s notorious indiscretions to journalists in London about operations to which he had been made privy. He spoke much about the RAF’s bombing of Germany, describing the beginnings of a long campaign to systematically destroy Hitler’s cities, with a ruthlessness he assumed the Soviet leader would applaud. “We sought no mercy,” said the prime minister, “and we would show no mercy.”
The substance of this first encounter, which