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minister astounded his Chiefs of Staff by enquiring whether Anglo-American forces might launch an offensive to drive back the Soviets by force of arms. Churchill was enthused by the robust attitude of Truman, whose tone suggested a new willingness to respond ruthlessly to Communist flouting of the Yalta terms. Brooke wrote after a War Cabinet meeting on May 13: “Winston delighted, he gives me1091 the feeling of already longing for another war! Even if it entailed fighting the Russians!” On the twenty-fourth, the prime minister instructed the Chiefs of Staff that, with the “Russian bear sprawled over Europe,”1092 they should consider the military possibilities of pushing the Red Army back eastwards before the Anglo-American armies were demobilised. He requested the planners to consider means to “impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire” to secure “a square deal for Poland.” They were told to assume the full support of British and American public opinion, and were invited to assume that they could “count on the use of German manpower and what remains of German industrial capacity.” The target date for launching such an assault would be July 1, 1945.

The Foreign Office—though not Eden himself—recoiled in horror from Churchill’s bellicosity. One of Moscow’s Whitehall informants swiftly conveyed tidings to Stalin of an instruction from London to Montgomery about contingency planning. Zhukov wrote in his memoirs:

We received reliable information1093 that while the final campaign was still in progress Churchill sent a secret telegram to Marshal Montgomery instructing him carefully to collect German weapons and material and store them in such a way that would permit retrieving them easily in order to distribute among German units with which they would have to cooperate if the Soviet advance had continued. We had to make a harsh statement at the next session of the Allied Control Commission. We stressed that history knew few examples of such perfidy and betrayal of allies’ obligations and duty. We declared that we thought that British government and army leadership deserved the most serious condemnation. Montgomery attempted to refute the Soviet statement. His colleague American General [Lucius] Clay was silent. Apparently, he was familiar with this instruction by the British Prime Minister.

Zhukov’s story was founded in a reality unacknowledged in detail in Britain until the relevant papers were released by the National Archive in 1998. Alan Brooke and his colleagues faithfully executed the prime minister’s wishes, to examine scenarios for initiating military action against the Russians. The report prepared by the War Cabinet Joint Planning Staff required feats of imagination from its creators unprecedented in Churchill’s premiership. In the preamble, the drafters stated their assumption that, in the event of hostilities between the Russians and the Western Allies, Russia would ally itself with Japan. “The overall or political object is to impose upon Russia1094 the will of the United States and British Empire.” Yet the planners immediately pointed out that the scope of any new conflict initiated by the Western powers would not thereafter be for them to determine: “Even though ‘the will’ of these two countries may be defined as no more than a square deal for Poland, that does not necessarily limit the military commitment. A quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will … but it might not. That is for the Russians to decide. If they want total war, they are in a position to have it.”

The planners observed that even if an initial Western offensive was successful, the Russians could then adopt the same tactics they had employed with such success against the Germans, giving ground amid the seemingly infinite spaces of the Soviet Union: “There is virtually no limit to the distance to which it would be necessary for the Allies to penetrate into Russia in order to render further resistance impossible … To achieve the decisive defeat of Russia … would require … (a) the deployment in Europe