Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [89]
Beaverbrook returned to London on October 10 in messianic mood. In public, he praised to the skies Stalin and his nation. To the Defence Committee of the War Cabinet, he wrote: “There is today only one military problem—how to help Russia. Yet on that issue the chiefs of staff content themselves with saying that nothing can be done.” So violently did he press the Russian case that Ian Jacob of the War Cabinet Secretariat became persuaded that he aspired to supplant Churchill as prime minister. Beaverbrook urged an immediate landing in Norway, while from Moscow Cripps cabled, proposing that British troops should be sent to reinforce the Red Army. Thenceforward, Beaverbrook became the foremost advocate of an early Second Front, exploiting his own newspapers to press the case. It is sometimes suggested that he made his only important contribution to Britain’s war effort during the summer of 1940, as minister of aircraft production. But his intervention in the autumn of 1941, to demand supplies for Russia, was of even greater significance. At a time when many others in London, commanders and ministers alike, were dragging their feet, the press baron’s intemperate zeal made a difference to both public and political attitudes.
Beaverbrook’s subsequent Second Front campaign, of which more will be said below, was irresponsible and disloyal. He displayed naïveté or worse in his extravagant eulogies of the Soviet Union, ignoring and even denying the bloodstained nature of Stalin’s tyranny in a fashion Churchill never stooped to. Alan Brooke was among those who harboured lasting bitterness about the commitments which Beaverbrook made in Moscow, which he considered irresponsibly generous. Yet as minister of supply, Beaverbrook grasped a fundamental point that more fastidious British politicians, generals and officials refused to acknowledge. Whatever the shortcomings of Russia as an ally, the outcome of the struggle in the east must be decisive in determining Britain’s fate. The North African campaign might loom large in British perceptions and propaganda, but was of negligible importance alongside Stalin’s war. If Hitler overwhelmed Russia, he might become invincible in Europe even if America later entered the war.
Until March 1942, when the Germans awoke to the importance of interdicting Allied supplies and strongly reinforced their air and naval forces in northern Norway, convoys to Russia were almost unmolested, and only two British ships were lost. Churchill appointed Beaverbrook chairman of a new Allied Supplies Executive, to plan and supervise deliveries. Yet even with his support, shipments remained modest. The British dispatched obsolescent Hurricanes, many of which arrived damaged; U.S.-built Tomahawk fighters, which the Russians found unreliable, and for a time grounded; together with tanks and Boyes antitank rifles, which the British Army recognised as inadequate. The second so-called PQ convoy to Russia sailed only on October 18, 1941, the third on November 9. In their desperation, the Russians came as near as ever in the war to displaying gratitude. A Soviet admiral said later: “I can still remember with what close attention305 we followed the progress of the first convoys in the late autumn of 1941, with what speed and energy they were unloaded in Archangel and Murmansk.”
Lord Hankey, however, wrote with malicious satisfaction about the perceived hypocrisy of Beaverbrook’s enthusiasm for arming Russia, when as minister of supply he was responsible for the shortcomings of British tank production: “Now I have to bring to light the fact306 that he is building nothing but dud tanks when he is vociferously appealing to the workers to work all