Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [86]
In the first weeks after the panzers swept across the Soviet frontier, intelligence revealed that the Russians were suffering colossal losses of men, tanks, planes and territory. Everything the War Office could learn confirmed the generals’ predisposition to assume that Stalin would be beaten. Only two important powers in Britain pressed the case for aid to Russia. The first was public opinion. Beyond the orbit of senior officers, aristocrats and businessmen who disliked the Soviets, Barbarossa unleashed a surge of British sentiment, indeed sentimentality, in favour of the Russian people, which persisted until 1945. Factories and shipyards, where Communist trade unionists had hitherto shown lukewarm support for a “bosses’ war,” were suddenly swept by enthusiasm for Russia. Communist Party membership in Britain rose—not least because frank discussion of the Soviet regime’s barbarity was suspended for the duration. The British people nursed a shame about their own defeats, a guilt that their nation was accomplishing so little towards the defeat of Hitler, which would be ever more stridently articulated in the years ahead.
Then there was the prime minister. In the matter of Russia, as in his defiance of Hitler a year earlier, he embraced a policy which entirely accorded with the public mood: all aid to Britain’s new comrades-in-arms. American military attaché Raymond Lee found it droll to see the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, “almost a pariah in London299 for so many years,” now communing constantly with Churchill, Eden and U.S. ambassador John “Gil” Winant. Churchill’s bigness on this issue emphasised the smallness of most of his colleagues. He perceived that whatever the difficulties, however slight the prospect of success, it must not be said that Russia suffered defeat because Britain failed to do what it could to assist her. At first, following Barbarossa, he pressed the Chiefs of Staff for a landing in northern Norway, to open a direct link to the Red Army. When this notion was quashed, in large part because Norway lay beyond range of land-based air cover, he ordered that every possible tank and aircraft, including some bought by Britain from the Americans, should be shipped to Stalin. There persisted, however, a very long day’s march—much longer than most historians have allowed—between intent and effective implementation. Through the summer of 1941, while Russia’s survival hung in the balance, pitifully little war matériel was dispatched.
As for the United States, the country was at first uncertain what to make of the new situation. Roosevelt sounded almost flippant in a letter to U.S. ambassador Adm. William Leahy in Vichy on June 26: “Now comes this Russian diversion. If it is more than just that it will mean the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination—and at the same time I do not think we need worry about any possibility of Russian domination.” But the isolationist Chicago Tribune asked why the United States should ally itself with “an Asiatic butcher and his godless crew.” The New York Times remained hesitant even in August: “Stalin is on our side today. Where will he be tomorrow?” Senator Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri shrugged, saying, “It’s a case of dog eat dog.” Archisolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana declared his matching contempt for Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt.
The U.S. Chiefs of Staff were even more reluctant to see weapons shipped to Russia than to Britain. Though the president forcefully expressed his determination to aid Stalin’s people, months elapsed before substantial U.S. matériel moved. At the beginning of August, Roosevelt berated the State and War departments for their failure to implement his wishes on aid: “The Russians feel that they have been given the run-around in the United States.” By the end of September, only $29 million worth of supplies had been dispatched. There was a sharp contrast between U.S. financial treatment of