By far the most spectacular and fateful extension of hands across the Volga
occurred at the very start of the Russo-German war. Winston Churchill, prime
minister of Great Britain, flung himself into the arms of Josef Stalin the
very day the Red premier became involved in war with Hitler, a few hours
after the German attack. Churchill, head of Britain's war coalition government
since May 1940, had managed to achieve two main things since then: the supervision
of an unbroken string of disastrous military defeats, and the dazzling,
if not the gassing, of the English speaking world with an incredible volume
of turgid rhetoric. If l9th century declamatory talk could have won wars,
World War Two would have ended in British victory a few weeks after it began.
On June 22, 1941, Churchill was on the world's radios before the first day's
gunfire had ceased reverberating across Eastern Poland, repudiating over
two decades of ferocious anti-Bolshevik oratory and journalistic writing,
promising unstinted aid to Stalinist Russia and announcing a single war
aim: the physical destruction of Adolf Hitler and his government. In view
of the hapless British wartime performance and its even more dim promise,
it was a desperate moment and Churchill's eager grasping for what was surely
a drowning man's straw can be understood, since he had categorically ruled
out ending the war by negotiation. But this unqualified transfer of the
initiative to Stalin was also the act which guaranteed the swift expulsion
of Britain from its centuries-old key spot in European balance of power
manipulation, precipitated evaporation of its global empire, its reduction
first to the status of a stationary American aircraft carrier off the coast
of Europe, and then to a tottering and precarious second rate status in
a steady forty-year decline upon achieving its most costly "victory"
in its national history.
The tardiness of Stalin and his circle of Red functionaries in responding
to Churchill's generous offer of unstinted support reflected the discount
to which British "aid" was subject, in view of the near-zero impact
of such assistance supplied to Poland in its grave predicament in September
1939. Though Stalin got around to a radio address on July 3, 1941, welcoming
the British to the Communist side in a "struggle" "for democratic
liberties" in a "united front of the people standing for freedom
and against enslavement," which latter should have been grand news
to the many millions in Stalin's slave labor camps, he was too much of a
realist to expect British military help or supplies in any great hurry.
The importance of the flight of Churchill to Stalin's side was not the practical
situation attending immediate material support. It was rather in the effect
of this impulsive action on the sympathetic Roosevelt administration, which
had to become involved under far more obstructive circumstances, namely,
the national non-belligerence of the moment, and the national irritation
with Communist-dominated labor unions and their record of industrial trouble-making
during the period of Russian neutrality since September 1939. This had been
a grave nuisance to the noninterventionist elements during the time. Now,
Soviet eagerness for American intervention was to nag their adversaries,
whether interested in the welfare of British or Russians. On the official
side of the aid-to-the-Soviet question, the President had as close advisors
in favor of such help a goodly collection. It included Secretaries of War
and Navy Henry L. Stimson and Frank Knox; former Ambassador to Russia Joseph
E. Davies, now Special Assistant for War Emergency Problems and Policies
to Secretary of State Cordell Hull; Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau;
Sumner Welles, Acting Secretary of State; Ambassador to Russia Lawrence
Steinhardt; Postmaster Frank C. Walker (as a prominent Catholic layman,
Walker was especially useful in countering general Catholic opposition to
involvement with Communist Russia); Colonel Philip R. Eaymonville, U.S.
Military Attache in Moscow (Davies' principal prop before he was replaced
by Steinhardt); and especially Harry Hopkins, elevated from his job related
to grubby New Deal welfare agencies to the glamorous post of Administrator
of Lend-Lease, the aid-to-Britain program passed by Congress in March 1941
which made the U.S. a de facto participant in World War Two.
To be sure, when Churchill propelled England and the resources of the British
Empire to the succor of Stalinist Russia, he had no political problem. The
influential and powerful supporters of a conciliatory policy toward Germany
in the 1930s associated with The Link, the Friends of Germany and the Anglo-
German Fellowship had gone underground or joined in the "war effort,"
battered by Stalinist propaganda as "appeasers" before and after
the 1939 Pakt. (The British Stalinists had endured some abuse themselves,
between August 1939 and June 1941. They had been particularly incensed at
the gibe "Communazi" in that time.) The supporters of Oswald Mosley's
British Union of Fascists and figures of the implacably anti-communist Right
Club such as Captain A.H.M. Ramsay, a Member of Parliament, had been jailed
by Churchill's Ministry of Home Security headed by Sir John Anderson, under
the terms of Regulation 18B. Anderson had even ordered the arrest and detention
in special concentration camps starting May 12, 1940, of almost 75,000 German,
Austrian, Italian and Czech refugees in England, despite their hatred of
their home regimes and collaboration with the British. A ship, the Arandora
Star, carrying 1200 of these internees to Canada, was torpedoed or struck
a mine and sank off the coast of Ireland on July 3, 1940. Over half the
passengers drowned.
And for a year England had been badgered by a large corps of private intelligence
agents of the Ministry of Information, con- ducting the "Moral and
Social Survey" of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research,
known colloquially as ''[Duffl Cooper's Snoopers," a powerful depressant
on expression of individual opinion. The wonder is that anyone in Britain
opposed Churchill's headlong dive to Stalin's relief. (l2)
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