Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [82]
Between 1917 and 1938, Churchill sustained a reputation as an implacable foe of Bolshevism. Yet in the last years before attaining the premiership, he changed key, displaying a surprising willingness to reach out to the Russians. In October 1938, against Chamberlain’s strong views, he urged an alliance with Moscow, and counselled the Poles to seek an accommodation with Stalin. This line did as much to raise his standing with British Labour MPs as it did to lower it among Tories. In September 1939, he urged Chamberlain to perceive the Soviet advance into Poland as a favourable development: “None of this conflicts with our main interest283, which is to arrest the German movement towards the East and South-East of Europe.” In a broadcast a fortnight later, he said: “That the Russian armies should stand284 on this line [in Poland] was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.” In January 1940, it is true, he became an enthusiastic supporter of Finland, then beset by the Russians. He once enquired about the possibility of bombing Soviet oil fields at Baku, in the Caucasus, to stem fuel deliveries to Germany. Excepting this interruption, however, Churchill showed himself willing to make common cause with the Russians, if they would share the burden of defeating Hitler. This was probably because, even in 1939–40 before France fell, he could not see how else victory was to be accomplished.
He was at Chequers on that June Sunday morning when news came of Barbarossa. He immediately told Eden, a house guest, of his determination to welcome the Soviet Union as a partner in the struggle, then spent the rest of the day roaming restlessly under hot sunshine, refining themes and phrases for a broadcast. He communed with Beaverbrook and Sir Stafford Cripps, the Moscow ambassador who chanced to be in Britain, but did not trouble to summon the Cabinet. When at last he sat before the BBC microphone that evening, he began by acknowledging his own past hostility towards the Soviets: “The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. It is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination. No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it.” But then he asserted, in bold and brilliant terms, Britain’s commitment to fight alongside Stalin’s Russia:
The past, with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies flashes away. I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers tilled from time immemorial. I see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray—ah, yes, for there are times when all pray—for the safety of their loved ones, the return of the bread-winner, of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten thousand villages of Russia where the means of existence is wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play.
I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking Prussian officers, its crafty agents expert from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, delighted to find what they believe is an easier and a safer prey.
I have to declare the decision of His Majesty’s Government … Any man or state who fights on against Nazi-dom will have our aid … We shall give whatever aid we can to Russia and the Russian people … The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free people in every quarter of the globe.
Not for the first time in the war, Churchill’s words received the acclaim of most British people, while inspiring doubts among some Tory