Churchill's Third World War (eBook)

British Plans to Attack the Soviet Empire 1945

Jonathan Walker (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
208 Seiten
The History Press (Verlag)
978-0-7509-5160-9 (ISBN)

Infos

As the war in Europe entered its final months, the world teetered on the edge of a Third World War. While Soviet forces hammered their way into Berlin, Churchill ordered British military planners to prepare the top secret Operation Unthinkable - the plan for an Allied attack on the Soviet Union - on 1 July 1945. Using US, British and Polish forces, the invasion would reclaim Eastern Europe. The controversial plan called for the use of Nazi troops, and there was the spectre of the atomic bomb. Would yet another army make the fatal mistake of heading East? In Churchill's Third World War Jonathan Walker presents a haunting study of the war that so nearly was. He outlines the motivations behind Churchill's plan, the logistics of launching a vast assault against an enemy who had bested Hitler, potential sabotage by Polish communists, and he speculates whether the Allies would have succeeded had the operation gone forward. Well supported by a wide range of primary sources from the Churchill Archives Centre, Sikorski Institute, National Archives and Imperial War Museum, this is a fascinating insight into the upheaval as the Second World War drew to a close and former alliances were shattered. Operation Unthinkable became the blueprint for the Cold War.

JONATHAN WALKER is a member of the British Commission for Military History and a former Honorary Research Associate at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of five books for Spellmount: The Blood Tub: General Gough and the Battle of Bullecourt; War Letters to a Wife (as editor); Aden Insurgency: The Savage War in South Arabia; Poland Alone: Britain, SOE and the Collapse of the Polish Resistance, 1944 (which has been translated into Polish to great acclaim); and The Blue Beast: Power and Passion in the Great War. In addition to contributing to other recent military history publications, he has appeared on BBC radio and television programmes. He lives in Devon.

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INTRODUCTION

At 3 p.m. on VE Day, 8 May 1945, Prime Minister Winston Churchill broadcast to the British nation from the Cabinet room in 10 Downing Street. He still used the familiar hand gestures as if he were addressing a public meeting and his voice betrayed little of the massive strain he had endured since 1940. The speech echoed from loudspeakers to vast crowds in Parliament Square, Trafalgar Square and across Britain. It was picked up by wirelesses across Europe and beyond. Churchill announced that the war against Germany was finally over and reminded his listeners of the magnitude of the struggle that they had endured. ‘We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing’, he warned, ‘but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead’. While he reminded his audience that Japan was the devil still to be vanquished, he was well aware of another, more unpredictable peril that lay in wait to the east. He would later recall:

When in these tumultuous days of rejoicing I was asked to speak to the nation, I had borne the chief responsibility in our island for almost exactly five years. Yet it may well be there were few hearts more heavily burdened with anxiety than mine.1

The cause of Churchill’s private agony during the days of celebration was Josef Stalin, and his determination to totally control Poland and Eastern Europe. Not without good reason did Churchill name his account of the end of the war Triumph and Tragedy. By May 1945 he was deeply worried about not only Stalin’s tightening grip on continental Europe, but also his designs on Britain and her Empire. The omens during the last months of the war had not been good.

In the spring of 1945 the Red Army continued its advance towards Western Europe, reaching the Adriatic in the south and approaching to within 100 miles of the River Rhine in the west. Meanwhile Germany was shattered and the great powers of Britain and France were financially exhausted. The United States was already turning its attention to the Pacific region and looked set to evacuate Europe. With such bleak prospects Churchill saw one last chance to save Poland from total Soviet domination. Even Britain herself looked vulnerable, and there seemed only one solution – to push back the Soviet Empire by force. Without delay he ordered Operation ‘Unthinkable’ to be prepared, to examine the possibility of an Allied force attacking the Red Army and regaining the lost ground in Europe.2

Churchill felt isolated. The late President Roosevelt, with his ‘progressive’ advisors, Army chief of staff General George Marshall, Ambassador Joseph Davies, Harry Hopkins and even his own son Elliott Roosevelt, had all sought to accommodate Stalin. Indeed, the president considered himself the best man to deal with Stalin, telling Churchill, ‘I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department.’ Given the capacity of the Soviet leader for devious and brutal behaviour, it was a bold boast and one the US Joint Chiefs of Staff did not, at least privately, endorse. ‘No one in the West’, they admitted, ‘really knows which direction Soviet policy will take.’3

As far as Stalin was concerned, after the enormous sacrifices of his people, the Soviet Union deserved the spoils of war. During ‘The Great Patriotic War’, as the Soviets called the Second World War, in excess of 8.5 million Red Army soldiers had perished, as well as more than 17 million civilians. This total estimate of more than 25 million deaths dwarfed the losses suffered by any other participating power and the war also cost the Soviet Union about 30 per cent of its natural wealth.4 Although the country’s contribution to the Allies’ success was irrefutable, its motives and future agenda in Europe were not quite so clear. Churchill was profoundly concerned about Soviet intentions, and although his angst was not widely shared, even a cursory look at Soviet and Russian history should have alarmed his colleagues. Stalin was, after all, the standard bearer of Marxism, and an avowed enemy of small nations. He clung to the old Russian belief that she was a ‘mother country’ entrusted with the protection of the Slav nations in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, the ultimate victory of the Soviet Union in the Second World War imbued the people with a confidence that they could achieve anything through sacrifice – a confidence that was boosted by Stalin’s ruthless denials of Allied help through Lend-Lease or the Arctic Convoys. The vast outpouring of pro-Soviet articles by the British press during the war must surely have strengthened Stalin’s self-confidence even more. So, as his assurance grew, Stalin believed that there was no future in a post-war partnership with the West, and although he did not relish the prospect, he saw no alternative but conflict with his erstwhile allies.5

If Stalin’s ambitions were to be checked, and diplomacy failed to deliver, the West might have to resort to military means. Anglo-American military strength was at its peak in May 1945, but that would rapidly diminish due to general demobilisation and the re-deployment of forces to the Far East. Churchill felt he would have to act quickly and decisively to combat the Soviet threat. On 12 May 1945 he cabled Roosevelt’s successor, President Truman:

I am profoundly concerned about the European situation, as outlined in my No. 41. I learn that half the American Air Force in Europe has already begun to move to the Pacific theatre. The newspapers are full of the great movements of the American Armies out of Europe. Our Armies also are under previous arrangements likely to undergo a marked reduction. The Canadian Army will certainly leave. The French are weak and difficult to deal with. Anyone can see that in a very short space of time our armed power on the Continent will have vanished except for moderate forces to hold down Germany.

Meanwhile what is to happen about Russia? I have always worked for friendship with Russia but, like you, I feel deep anxiety because of their misinterpretation of the Yalta decisions, their attitude towards Poland, their overwhelming influence in the Balkans excepting Greece, the difficulties they make about Vienna, the combination of Russian power and the territories under their control or occupied, coupled with the Communist technique in so many other countries, and above all their power to maintain very large Armies in the field for a long time. What will be the position in a year or two, when the British and American Armies have melted and the French has not yet been formed on any major scale, when we may have a handful of divisions, mostly French, and when Russia may choose to keep two or three hundred on active service?

An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind. There seems little doubt that the whole of the regions east of the line Lübeck-Trieste-Corfu will soon be completely in their hands. To this must be added the further enormous area conquered by the American Armies between Eisenach and the Elbe, which will I suppose, in a few weeks, be occupied when the Americans retreat, by the Russian power. All kinds of arrangements will have to be made by General Eisenhower to prevent another immense flight of the German population westward, as this enormous Muscovite advance into the centre of Europe takes place. And then the curtain will descend again to a very large extent, if not entirely. Thus a broad band of many hundreds of miles of Russian-occupied territory will isolate us from Poland.

Meanwhile, the attention of our peoples will be occupied in inflicting severities upon Germany, which is ruined and prostrate, and it would be open to the Russians in a very short space of time to advance, if they chose, to the waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic.6

Churchill was always at his most articulate and inventive when faced with a grave situation. As his doctor, Lord Moran, observed, ‘In adversity Winston becomes gentle, patient and brave.’ Even if events did not favour him, ‘he will not spend the rest of his days brooding on the past. Whatever happens, nothing can hold up for long the stream of ideas that rush bubbling through his head.’7 One such idea was Operation Unthinkable.

The remarkable thing about this plan was that it was unique. Churchill, alone among Western leaders, was prepared to consider a pre-emptive strike against Soviet forces in the summer of 1945. President Roosevelt and his successor, President Truman, would not, at first, countenance the Soviet threat, and even when it became impossible to ignore, they would not endorse the first use of arms against the Soviet Union.

The alarming aspect of the attitudes of national leaders in the West during the fast-moving events of the spring and summer of 1945 was their capacity for dramatic mood swings. Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman took it in turns to be either bullish or conciliatory towards Stalin, while he remained resolutely unyielding in his demands.8 Consequently, what seemed an inevitable and logical course of action for the Western Allies one week could well be discarded the next. It is in the light of this frighteningly volatile atmosphere that Operation Unthinkable was born. In his VE Day speech Churchill exhorted ‘Advance Britannia’, but if she did indeed advance, would Poland really stand a chance of recovering her freedom in 1945? And just how close did the world come to a Third World War?

NOTE ON WORD USAGE

The term ‘the Soviet Union’ is always used in the text, rather than ‘Russia’, which is the usual word found in contemporary documents and may appear in quotations. Russia was only one of the fifteen socialist...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.5.2017
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Allgemeines / Lexika
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• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
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• Schlagworte: atomic bomb • Berlin • British • British Empire • british plans to attack the soviet empire 1945 • british plans to attack the soviet empire 1945, winston churchill, british empire, ussr, soviet union, operation unthinkable, ww2, wwii, world war 2, world war ii, world war two, second world war, cold war, eastern europe, nazi troops, atomic bomb, hitler, communists, ww3, world war 3, world war iii • churchill archives centre • Cold War • Communists • Eastern Europe • Hitler • Imperial War Museum • Invasion • IWM • national archives • nazi troops • Operation Unthinkable • Polish • Second World War • sikorski institute • Soviet Union • US • USSR • Winston Churchill • World War 2 • World War 3 • World War II • world war iii|world war three • world war three, berlin, british, polish, US, invasion, churchill archives centre, sikorski institute, national archives, imperial war museum, iwm • World War Two • ww2 • WW3 • WWII
• ISBN-10: 0-7509-5160-5 / 0750951605
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7509-5160-9 / 9780750951609