Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [91]
Yet Churchill recognised how fortunate his nation had been thus far to wage war at relatively small cost in lives compared to those lost by Poland and France, not to mention Russia. He marvelled: “In two years struggle with the greatest military Power315, armed with the most deadly weapons, barely 100,000 of our people have been killed, of which nearly half are civilians.” Such a cool assessment of what would, in other times, have been deemed a shocking “butcher’s bill,” helps to explain his fitness for the nation’s leadership. Robert Menzies, when still Australian prime minister, noted this: “Winston’s attitude to war is much more realistic316 than mine. I constantly find myself looking at ‘minor losses’ and saying ‘there are some darkened homes.’ But he is wise. War is terrible and it cannot be won except by lost lives. That being so, don’t think of them.”
Churchill, once more desperate for military theatre, urged the War Office to accelerate plans for raids on the Continent. “The Army must do something317—the people want it,” he told John Kennedy and the director of military intelligence during a lunch at Downing Street. “Surely this [is] within our powers—The effects might be enormous—The Germans engaged in Russia—now [is] the time.” Kennedy wrote: “Winston is in a difficult position318. He is hard pressed politically to take action while Russia is struggling so desperately. He keeps saying ‘I cannot hold the position.’ The difficulty is that with a disaster the position may be harder to hold.” News from the Eastern Front was unremittingly grim. The Red Army’s losses were appalling. A great swath of Stalin’s empire had already fallen to Hitler. Churchill, after a meeting with his generals on October 11, bade them farewell with a mournful headshake: “Yes, I am afraid Moscow is a gone coon,”319 he said, padding off along the Downing Street passage towards his afternoon nap.
The Soviet Union had not the smallest moral claim upon Britain. Even if Churchill had stripped his own nation’s armed forces and dispatched heavier shipments to Murmansk after Barbarossa was launched, the impact on the early Eastern Front campaigns would have been small. As it was, the Chiefs of Staff were dismayed by the impact of aid to Russia upon British tank and aircraft strengths in the Middle and Far East, which were anyway grievously inadequate. Worse, American deliveries to Britain were significantly cut so that Roosevelt could meet his own commitments to Stalin. Given the weakness of British arms in 1941, it was unrealistic to suppose that Churchill could have done much more. In 1942, however, a yawning gap opened between British and American undertakings, and quantities of matériel delivered. It was ironic, of course, that the boundlessly duplicitous Soviets should thereupon have proclaimed, and even sincerely harboured, moral indignation towards Britain and the United States. But the principal reality of subsequent military operations would be that Russians did most of the dying necessary to undo Nazism, while the Western powers advanced at their own measured pace towards a long-delayed confrontation with the Wehrmacht.
For many years after 1945, the democracies found it gratifying to perceive the Second World War in Europe as a struggle for survival between themselves and Nazi tyranny. Yet the military outcome of the contest was overwhelmingly decided by the forces of