World War II Behind Closed Doors (64 page)

And then there was the massive problem for Western political discourse caused by the huge, government-supported, pro-Soviet propaganda campaigns in both Britain and America. Describing the NKVD as a police force ‘like the FBI’, for example, only served to make it harder for people to understand what was going on at the end of the war when the relationship with the Soviet Union cracked apart. And the fact that George Orwell could not get his brilliant satire on the Soviet state,
Animal Farm
, published during the war shows how culturally dangerous the situation created by the false propaganda had become. One publisher, who had initially accepted the book, subsequently turned it down after an official at the British Ministry of Information warned him off. The publisher then wrote to Orwell, saying: ‘If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators [Lenin and Stalin], that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are’.
³

The twisting and manipulation of the facts during the war in order to portray Stalin as good old ‘Uncle Joe’ was not just damaging to the public psyche in the West, but also caused difficulties for those in power. Frank Roberts of the Foreign Office memorably remarked that it was ‘a very awkward matter when we are fighting for a moral cause' that the Soviet Union was accused of the war crime at Katyn – especially, one might add, since by then the public perception of Stalin had been so airbrushed by Allied propaganda as to make this kind of action wholly inconsistent with his public persona. Sir Owen O'Malley, who was responsible for the Katyn report that Frank Roberts commented upon, wrote after the war of his own disillusionment: ‘Between 1943 and the autumn of 1945…much more than the sacrifice of Poland was esteemed necessary to keep Stalin in a good temper; and to appease him an indifferent eye was turned upon his destruction and dismemberment of a number of smaller nations. One after another they were seized; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Parts of Finland, a quarter Poland, all Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ruthenia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Albania, a quarter of Austria and a third of Germany. Oh it was grievous to see so many pleasant and diverse communities being herded in a spiritual and cultural gas chamber! What a falling off was here from the bright morning of the Atlantic Charter and the sun-capped waves of the USS
Augusta
's quarterdeck! All this also was trying for the Poles. It was also trying for me too, for I had numerous friends in the countries named. The lucky ones – if they were women – were just raped, of the unlucky ones, one had water poured into his lungs through a rubber tube; another had all his fingertips sawn through with a hacksaw half way up his nails’.
⁴

It was impossible, of course, to reconcile the noble Stalin of ‘Mission to Moscow’ with the crime of Katyn or the tortures that O'Malley describes. But still, there was a middle way which might have been pursued politically during the war – even given the rosy pro-Soviet propaganda that was being churned out – one which recognized the value of the Soviet Union as a fighting ally, but which reaffirmed the policy that, as Churchill put it in January 1942, the Western Allies adhered to ‘those principles of freedom and democracy set forth in the Atlantic Charter and that these principles must become especially active whenever any question of transferring territory is raised’.
⁵

Ultimately, this course of action might have accomplished little in practical terms. Perhaps Stalin would still have exercised control over much of eastern Europe. But for sure, the Western Allies would at least have lived up to the principles that they said they were fighting the war to protect. And it is worth reiterating that to propose that the political leaders of Britain and America should have behaved in this more straight forward way is not to put forward something radical or naive – it is only to suggest that Roosevelt and Churchill should have stuck to the policy that they themselves followed in 1942. Only later in the war did the controversial deals with Stalin truly begin.

There would have been risks in this approach, of course. But the idea that Stalin would, over this issue, seriously have tried to exit the war after the victories of 1943 in some kind of peace deal with Hitler is verging on the fanciful. As a result of the invasion of the Soviet Union, there was no basis of trust left between Stalin and the Nazis, and in any event Hitler – as he told Ribbentrop at the time – would never have countenanced the idea of peace with Stalin.

All of which leaves us with the important question: to what extent was this a ‘moral’ war? Well, obviously Nazism was immoral – one of the most immoral ideologies that has ever existed – so any war conducted by the Western democracies committed to the elimination of that scourge must surely have been fundamentally moral. Equally, the ideals of the Atlantic Charter, with their commitment to free elections and the rule of law, all exude moral content. The problem comes when we add the Soviet Union to the mix. That regime committed any number of horrendous crimes, many perpetrated when it was allied to the West. And particularly in relation to Poland, the immorality of the Soviet Union tainted the actions of the Western leaders. The Western Allies' treatment of the Poles was unworthy: from the cover-up over Katyn to the secret deal at Tehran that eventually shifted Polish borders without the consent of the Poles; from the meeting in Moscow when Churchill accused members of the Polish government in exile of being ‘callous people who want to wreck Europe’, to the exclusion of Polish troops from the Victory Parade in London in 1946. It is a sad catalogue – and one I certainly wasn't taught in school when I was told that we should all only ‘feel good’ about the conduct of the Western Allies in the Second World War.

Ultimately, it is better to consider this conflict not just as a ‘moral’ war, but as a more conventional one as well. Because if we see this war as being about power politics and the attempt to prevent the Nazis controlling Europe, and the Japanese controlling China and Southeast Asia, then it makes a lot of sense. The Western powers wanted to win the war at the least cost possible, and in pursuit of that goal they – to paraphrase Churchill – made an alliance with the Devil.

The central popular myth that surrounds the war, a kind of Hollywood version of the history, is that this is a simple story of an alliance of good people who fought an alliance of bad people. It's an immensely consoling way of looking at the past, and it's sad to let it go. But let it go we must.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I first need to thank Roly Keating, Glenwyn Benson and Emma Swain for commissioning the television series,
WW2: Behind Closed Doors
, which I wrote and produced alongside this book. At the BBC I also want to acknowledge the help I received from Keith Scholey. He was my boss from the beginning of the series to very nearly the end (he left the BBC in June 2008) and was a tower of support and good advice throughout. I owe him a very great deal.

Many other people helped me make the TV series, notably Andrew Williams, who directed the drama sequences; Michaela Liechtenstein, Martina Carr and Simon Baker, the associate producers; Elena Yakovleva, our Russian researcher; Sally Chick, the series researcher; and Giselle Corbett, Patricia Fearnley, Kriszta Fenyö, Cara Goold, Alexei Haigh, John Kennedy, Ivan Kytka, Adam Levy, Anna Mishcon, Julia Pluwak, Basia Pietluch, Kate Rea, Anna Taborska, Rosie Taylor, Frank Stucke and Christine Whittaker. Alan Lygo brilliantly cut the programmes – he is a film editor of genius – and Martin Patmore, the cameraman, and Brian Biffen, the sound recordist, were once again my cheerful companions across the wilds of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as I sought to direct the documentary elements of the series. In addition I want to mention how grateful I am to Samuel West for his work not just on this series but on my four previous projects on the Second World War and the Nazis. Sam has read every word of commentary I have written for television for more than ten years and has done so brilliantly.

I also received a wealth of advice from our academic consultants: Professor Robert Dallek, Dr Natalia Lebedeva, Professor David Reynolds, Professor Robert Service and Dr Sergej Slutsch.

Professor Sir Ian Kershaw, Professor Robert Service and a number of other friends and colleagues read this book in manuscript form, and I thank them all for their comments. I am particularly grateful to Sir Ian (to whom this book is dedicated) for his reflections on the Postscript.

At BBC Books Martin Redfern and Jake Lingwood were a great help, as was my literary agent, Andrew Nurnberg. I have also much benefited from talking to Dan Frank at Pantheon, my American publisher. At KCET in Los Angeles, Megan Calloway, Mare Mazur and Karen Hunt were a joy to work with. At PBS, Sandy Heberer, in particular, made a number of valuable and insightful criticisms of the films.

I also thank all the first-hand witnesses to history who agreed to be interviewed for this project. There are so many of them that I hope they will forgive me for thanking them collectively here – their names, and their immensely valuable testimony, pervade the pages of this book.

I also thank my family, as ever, for their continued loving support. But I end by mentioning my parents. For some reason their memory was very much in my mind over the last three years as I worked on this book and the TV series – which is strange, because both of them have been dead for more than thirty years. Maybe it was because it was their stories of the war that first excited my interest in this subject when I was child. But in remembrance of them, I feel I need to record here that they both died in great suffering and they both died much too young.

BBC Worldwide would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for providing photographs and for permission to reproduce copyright material. While every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright holders, we would like to apologize should there be any errors or omissions.

Abbreviations: t: top, b: bottom, l: left, r: right, c: centre, tl: top left, tr: top right.

Plate Section 1:
1c and 1b: Getty Images; 2t: Roger Viollet/Getty Images; 2b: Popperfoto/Getty Images; 3t: ullsteinbild/TopFoto; 3bl: ullsteinbild/TopFoto; 4t: ullsteinbild/TopFoto; 4b: Hugh Lunghi; 5t: Imperial War Museum (A12022); 5c (overlay): Bettmann/Corbis; 5b: Topfoto; 6: Mary Evans Picture Library/Alexander Meledin; 7tl: Valentina Ievleva; 7tr: National Portrait Gallery, London; 7b: RIA Novosti; 8t: akg-images/ullstein bild; 8b: Topfoto.

Plate Section 2:
1t: George Elsey; 1b: Popperfoto/Getty Images; 2: Reuters/Corbis; 2b (overlay): Popperfoto/Getty Images; 3t: : Nikanor Perevalov; 3b: Topfoto; 4t: Tadeusz Ruman; 4b: Zbigniew Wolak; 5t: Yevgeny Khaldei/Corbis; 5bl: Halina Stopińska; 5br: John Nobel; 6t: Yevgeny Khaldei/Corbis; 6b: Bettmann/Corbis; 7: Imperial War Museum/EPA/Corbis; 8: Topfoto.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1
The ‘Soviet Union’ is the accurate term to describe the country at the time of the Second World War. However, many people used the word ‘Russian’ when they meant ‘Soviet’ (and indeed many still do so today). Stalin would often describe the country he ruled as ‘Russia’, and Churchill, Roosevelt and the Nazis did the same. But it is inaccurate, because during the war the Soviet Union consisted of sixteen republics, of which only one was Russia. Stalin himself was not Russian, but Georgian. Not to use the terms ‘Soviet’ and ‘Soviet Union’ is – not least – to diminish the massive contribution to the war made by citizens from the other fifteen republics.

2
David Dilks (ed.),
The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan OM 1938-1945
, Cassell, 1971, pp. 708–9, entry for 11 February 1945.

3
Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke,
War Diaries 1939–1945
, Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (eds.), Phoenix, 2002, p. 483, entry for 28 November 1943.

4
Alanbrooke,
War Diaries
, p. 608, entry for 15 October, 1944.

5
Alanbrooke,
War Diaries
, pp. 299–300, entry for 13 August 1942.

6
John Lewis Gaddis, ‘Presidential Address: The Tragedy of the Cold War’, p. 4, quoted in Amos Perlmuter,
FDR and Stalin ‘A Not So Grand Alliance’
, University of Missouri Press, 1993, p. 17.

7
Quoted in Ben Pimlott (ed.),
The Second World War Diaries of Hugh Dalton 1940–1945
, Jonathan Cape, 1986, entry for 13 January, 1942, p. 348.

8
PRO FO 371/34577, O'Malley's report on Katyn, 24 May 1943.

CHAPTER ONE: An Alliance in All but Name

1
See General Ernst Köstring,
Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (Memoirs of My Life) 1876–1939
, Verlag E. S. Mittler und Sohn, Frankfurt am Main, Vol. 1, p. 142.