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inviolability. Given American primacy in the alliance which was now increasingly explicit, Churchill and Brooke must have known in their hearts that D-Day was almost certain to happen the following summer. But their attempts to suggest otherwise ate deeply into the fretwork of Allied trust. The Americans were wrong in supposing that Churchill’s policy was directed towards ensuring that Overlord never took place at all. The huge and costly infrastructure already being created in Britain to support an invasion of France—not least Churchill’s cherished Mulberry artificial harbours—disproved that allegation. The prime minister’s “inconstancy” related exclusively to timing, but was none the less injurious for that. As for the British public, Surrey court reporter George King was unimpressed by Churchill’s flowered phrases about the Italian campaign: “He says a Second Front is in existence770, but I can’t see it myself.”

King’s impatience with the progress of the war was widely shared. The left displayed astonishing venom towards the government. Communist Elizabeth Belsey, a highly educated woman of notable intellectual tastes as well as revolutionary fervour, remarked in a letter to her husband that the sudden death of Sir Kingsley Wood, the chancellor, “will save a piece of rope later on.”771 In September 1943 she wrote that she and friends “amused ourselves making lists of the people who ought to be shot first when the time for shooting comes … [Walter] Citrine [TUC general secretary], Morrison, Halifax, [Lord] Londonderry, Lady Astor, [Sir James] Grigg and a heap more.” She was disgusted by the hostility towards Russia displayed by the Polish exile government in London, and exulted at the deaths in a Gibraltar plane crash of its leader, General Sikorski, and the Tory MP Victor Cazalet: “No loss … I never did like having that Sikorski person on our side, did you?”772

The Russians, of course, welcomed every manifestation of public dissatisfaction with Allied operations. On August 6, Pravda offered its readers one of its more temperate commentaries:

It would be wrong to belittle the importance of allied military773 operations—the bombing of Germany by British and American air forces, and the importance of supplies and military material being provided to us. Nonetheless, only four German divisions opposed our allies in Libya, a mere two German divisions and a few Italian ones in Sicily. These statistics suffice to show the true scale of their operations as compared to those on the Soviet-German front where Hitler had 180 German divisions and about 60 divisions of his “allies” in the summer of 1942 … The armies of our British and American allies so far have had no serious encounters with the troops of Hitler’s Germany. The Second Front so far does not exist.

What is the Second Front? There is no cause to heed the waffling of certain people who pretend that they don’t know what we are talking about; who claim that there is already not only a second front, but also, a third, a fourth, and probably even a fifth and a sixth front (including the air and submarine campaigns, etc.). If we are to speak seriously about a second front in Europe, this would mean a campaign which, as comrade Stalin pointed out as early as the autumn of 1942, would divert, say, sixty German divisions and twenty of Germany’s allies.

We know all the excuses used to justify delays … for example, arguments about [Hitler’s] mythological “Atlantic Wall,” and the allegedly insoluble shipping problem. The “impregnable Atlantic Wall” exists only in the minds of those who want to believe in such lies … After the success of the big allied landing in North Africa last year, and that of the allies’ operation in Sicily, it seems ridiculous to cite “shipping problems” where a landing in Western Europe is concerned.

Amid the torrent of Soviet propaganda, bombast and insults, it was hard for British and American ministers and diplomats to know what Moscow’s real views were. Long after the war, Molotov conceded to a Russian interviewer that Stalin was much more realistic