Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [81]
In June 1941, the immediate impact of Barbarossa in Britain was surprisingly muted. The shocks of the previous year had imposed an anaesthetizing effect. Largely due to people’s gratitude at finding themselves still unscathed at their breakfast tables each morning, their island spared from Nazi pillage, many received tidings of this epochal event with surprising insouciance. Edward Stebbing, a twenty-one-year-old soldier whose impatience with the struggle was cited earlier, felt bewildered: “There is nothing straightforward about this war282. In the maze of lies and treachery it is almost impossible to find the truth.” The Financial Times columnist Lex wrote on June 23: “Markets spent the morning trying to make up their minds whether the German aggression against Russia was a bull or a bear … The majority concluded that whatever happened we could hardly be worse off as a result of Hitler’s latest somersault.” Here was another manifestation of Churchill’s “three-inch pipe” theory about human emotions. Amid a surfeit of drama and peril, many people took refuge in the sufficient cares of their own daily lives, and allowed a torrent of world news, good and ill, to flow past them to the sea.
Most of Britain’s ruling class, from the prime minister downwards, regarded the Soviet Union with abhorrence. The Russians had rebuffed all British diplomatic advances since the outbreak of war, and likewise London’s warnings of Nazi intentions. Until the day of the German assault, under the terms of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact Stalin provided Hitler with huge and material assistance. Only a few months earlier Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, bargained with the Nazis, albeit unsuccessfully, for a share of the spoils of British defeat. The extravagance of Soviet demands provided Hitler with a final pretext for launching Barbarossa.
In addressing the history of the Second World War, it is necessary to recognise the huge moral compromises forced upon the nations fighting under the banner of democracy and freedom. Britain, and subsequently America, strove for the triumph of these admirable principles wherever they could be secured—with the sometimes embarrassing exceptions of the European overseas empires. But again and again, hard things had to be done which breached faith with any definition of absolute good. If this is true of politics at all times, it was especially so between 1939 and 1945. Whether in dealing with France, Greece, Iraq, Persia, Yugoslavia or other nations, attitudes were struck and courses adopted by the Allies which no moral philosopher could think impeccable. British wartime treatment of its colonies, of Egypt and, above all, India, was unenlightened. But, if Churchill’s fundamental nobility of purpose is acknowledged, most of his decisions deserve sympathy.
He governed on the basis that all other interests and considerations must be subordinated to the overarching objective of defeating the Axis. Those who, to this day, argue that Churchill “might have saved the British Empire” by making a bargain with Hitler, leaving Russia and Germany to destroy each other, ignore the practical difficulty of reaching a sustainable deal with the Nazi regime, and also adopt a supremely cynical insouciance towards its turpitude. The moral and material price of destroying Hitler was high, but most of mankind has since acknowledged that it had to be paid. In the course of the war, the prime minister was repeatedly called upon to decide not which party, nation or policy represented virtue but which must be tolerated or supported as the least base option. This imperative was never more conspicuous than in Britain’s dealings with the Soviet Union.