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By Root 871 0

the contents302 of a telegram from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of England dated 18 August this year addressed to the English ambassador to the USA. Contents of this telegram have been obtained by the Intelligence Department of NKVD of the USSR in London using our agents. “In response to Paragraph 3 of your telegram No. 3708 of 8 August. Our attitude towards Russians will be determined entirely on the principle of reciprocity. We must make them open their military installations and other objects of interest to our people in Russia. So far we have shown Russians almost nothing. In the near future they will be shown factories producing standard weapons. They will not, however, be admitted to experimental plants. Chiefs of staff have established the general principle for all institutions, whereby Russians can only be given such information or reports as would be useless to the Germans even if they gained possession of them … We hope that American authorities will not exceed the limits to which we adhere.

Such privileged insights into British thinking did nothing to persuade the Russians to lift the obsessive secrecy cloaking their own military and industrial activities.

For all Churchill’s professions of enthusiasm about dispatching war matériel from Britain, precious little was happening. Within his own government, the policy commanded wholehearted support only from Eden and Beaverbrook. Lord Hankey was among those who openly opposed aiding Stalin, urging instead a higher priority for the Atlantic battle. Churchill declared in a BBC broadcast on September 9 that “large supplies are on the way” to the Soviet Union. Three weeks later he told the House of Commons: “In order to enable Russia to remain303 indefinitely in the field as a first-class war-making power, sacrifices of the most serious kind and the most extreme efforts will have to be made by the British people, and enormous new installations or conversions from existing plants will have to be set up in the United States, with all the labour, expense and disturbance of normal life which these entail.”

Yet the Chiefs of Staff’s objections delayed even a shipment of two hundred U.S.-built Tomahawk fighters and a matching number of Hurricanes promised to Stalin by the prime minister. These planes reached Russia at the end of August. Otherwise, Britain’s main contribution by autumn was a consignment of rubber. Churchill’s people were as bemused as Moscow was angered by Britain’s failure to employ its own forces in some conspicuous emergency action to distract the Germans. Surrey court reporter George King wrote on September 16: “Hitler is throwing all he has got into the Eastern battles304. I think we all wish here we could strike him somewhere in the West, but I suppose we are not ready yet.” And again a few weeks later: “The marvellous Russians are still holding the enemy.”

Late in September, the British government undertook an important initiative. Lord Beaverbrook, now minister of supply, sailed for Russia with a twenty-two-member British delegation including Ismay, Churchill’s chief of staff, and accompanied—remarkably, given that the United States was still a nonbelligerent—by eleven Americans led by Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s emissary. “Make sure we are not bled white,” Churchill told Beaverbrook on parting. But Beaverbrook was determined to stretch out a hand to Stalin, to demonstrate a goodwill and generosity beyond anything the British government and Chiefs of Staff had mandated. In three meetings with Stalin, at which the Russian leader displayed insatiable curiosity about Churchill, Beaverbrook deployed all his charm and enthusiasm. He swallowed Stalin’s insults—“What is the use of an army if it does not fight? … The paucity of your offers shows you want to see the Soviet Union defeated.” The press lord sought to amuse as well as encourage the warlord. A civil servant observed cynically that Beaverbrook and Stalin achieved a rapport because they were both racketeers. The British promised tanks, planes and equipment—explicitly 200 aircraft and 250 tanks