Churchill in Moscow

At about 5 p.m. on 12 August 1942 a four-engined Liberator named Commando landed at a Moscow airfield. On board, having flown in from Tehran, was the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Waiting on the tarmac were the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov. It was Churchill’s first visit to the state he had wanted to strangle in its cradle at its birth in 1917 and whose leaders he had for twenty years called by the worst of names. That same evening he was to come face to face with Joseph Stalin for the first time in his life – and to give him the news Moscow least wanted to hear.

Churchill later described his mission vividly: he felt as though he were carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole. The message was that the Western Allies would not land in France in 1942.

Why Churchill flew to Moscow

From the first weeks after Germany’s attack on the USSR, Stalin had been demanding a “second front” in western Europe that would draw part of the Wehrmacht away from the east. In May 1942 Molotov came to London on this business, signing the Anglo-Soviet Treaty there, and then went on to Washington. The communiqué published on 11 June spoke of “full understanding” having been reached “with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942”. Churchill had at the time handed Molotov an aide-mémoire with the reservation that Britain was preparing for a landing on the Continent but could promise nothing. In Moscow, however, it was the communiqué that was remembered, not the reservation.

In June and July everything went badly for the Allies. While Churchill was holding talks in Washington with Roosevelt, Tobruk fell, and in the east the Germans launched Case Blue: they reached the Don, took Rostov and pressed on towards the Volga and the Caucasus. In the Barents Sea convoy PQ 17 was destroyed, after which the Admiralty suspended the summer Arctic convoys. On 17 July Churchill informed Stalin of this. The reply of 23 July was the harshest letter he had yet received from the Kremlin: Soviet naval experts found the Admiralty’s arguments “untenable”, and the question of the second front, Stalin wrote, was not being treated with the seriousness it deserved; the Soviet government could not acquiesce in its postponement to 1943.

Meanwhile London and Washington had taken a decision that Stalin did not yet know of. The British had rejected a landing on the French coast in the autumn of 1942 (Operation Sledgehammer), and after talks between Roosevelt’s envoys and the British in London the President agreed on 25 July to a landing in French North Africa, soon named Torch (its planning was already under way in August). The ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, warned that Molotov had evidently not passed on to Stalin all the reservations made in May and that the misunderstanding threatened a serious rift. Churchill decided he must deliver the bad news in person. At the end of July he proposed a meeting, and Stalin invited him to Moscow.

By way of Cairo and Tehran

Churchill left Britain in the first days of August and reached Cairo via Gibraltar. There he dealt with the crisis of command in the Middle East: he decided to remove General Claude Auchinleck, to put General Harold Alexander in his place and to entrust the Eighth Army to Lieutenant General William Gott. On 7 August, however, Gott was killed when German fighters shot down the transport aircraft taking him to Cairo, and command of the Eighth Army went to another general. On 10 August Churchill flew to Tehran, and from there, over the Caspian Sea and the Volga, to Moscow.

He was accompanied by the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, and by an interpreter, Major Charles Dunlop. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was represented in the talks by his special envoy Averell Harriman, who had joined Churchill in Cairo. His presence was meant to show that the decision about 1942 was a joint one and not merely British. A second aircraft, carrying the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, General Sir Archibald Wavell and Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, had to turn back to Tehran with engine trouble and reached Moscow only the following day.

12 August: bad news and a crocodile

The first meeting took place in the Kremlin at 7 p.m. and lasted until 10.40 p.m. On the Soviet side, Molotov and Marshal Kliment Voroshilov sat with Stalin; on the Western side were Churchill, Harriman and Clark Kerr. According to the British record, the first two hours were “bleak and sombre”. Churchill began with the worst: Britain and the United States would not land in France in 1942. They did not have enough landing craft to carry across the Channel a force able to hold on ashore, and a landing by six or eight divisions would end in a disaster that would not help Russia and would damage the great invasion planned for 1943. As proof of how seriously that plan was being taken, he spoke of hundreds of thousands of American troops being moved to Britain.

Stalin listened with an ever gloomier expression. He replied that a man who would not take risks could not win a war, that the Germans were not as strong as the British thought, and that troops had to be blooded in battle or they would never learn. Churchill moved on to bombing: the RAF and the growing American air force were to destroy German cities on an ever larger scale. According to the record of the conversation, Churchill said that as the war went on the Allies hoped to shatter almost every dwelling in almost every German city. The atmosphere began to improve.

Then Churchill laid his cards on the table. He told Stalin about Torch – an Anglo-American landing in French North Africa, in October at the latest. According to the record, “Stalin sat up and smiled”. Churchill drew a crocodile and explained that the Allies meant to strike at its soft belly while at the same time attacking its hard snout. It is from this drawing that the later, well-known description of the Mediterranean as the “soft underbelly” of the Axis derives. Stalin – as Churchill admiringly recalled – grasped the strategic sense of the plan within moments and himself listed four advantages: it would hit Rommel in the rear, overawe Spain, produce fighting between Germans and Frenchmen in France, and expose Italy to the whole weight of the war. He also asked whether Torch might not provoke Spain or Vichy into turning against the Allies. At the end he is said to have remarked: “May God prosper this undertaking.”

13 August: a memorandum and taunts

The next morning Churchill talked with Molotov. He told him that Stalin would be making a mistake to treat his Western allies roughly when they had come in good faith. Molotov replied that Stalin was a “very wise” man and that, whatever the arguments, he would understand everything.

At 11 p.m. the second meeting in the Kremlin began, and it proved far worse than the first. Stalin handed Churchill and Harriman a memorandum stating that the organisation of a second front in 1942 had been settled during Molotov’s visit, that the Soviet command had planned its summer and autumn operations with that front in mind, and that the refusal was a “moral blow” to Soviet public opinion and made the Red Army’s position more difficult. Stalin did not stop there. For two hours he accused the British of being afraid to fight the Germans, arguing that if the British infantry fought them as the Russians did, it would not fear them so much. He reproached them for halting the Arctic convoys and for undelivered supplies.

Churchill, according to Harriman, then made the best speech he had heard from him during the war. He reminded Stalin that in 1940 Britain had fought Germany alone for a year while the USSR was bound to it by a pact, and that despite everything Britain had allied itself with Russia. He spoke so passionately that the interpreter forgot to take notes and Churchill had to keep breaking off. Stalin then answered with a smile that the words did not matter; what mattered was the spirit. Even so, he kept to his invitation to dinner the following day. That night Churchill seriously considered leaving without further talks. Clark Kerr and Cadogan persuaded him that an abrupt break would be a catastrophe. Churchill himself later reasoned that Stalin had in this way been voicing the mood of those around him, who had taken the news worse than he had.

On 14 August Churchill replied to the memorandum in writing. He pointed out that in May he had promised nothing binding, and argued that the landing in Africa would be the best second front possible in 1942. That evening Stalin gave a state banquet in the Kremlin for about a hundred guests, with an endless series of toasts. Churchill came, according to members of the delegation, in his one-piece siren suit, which not all the guests appreciated. After midnight, over coffee, Stalin had souvenir photographs taken with Churchill and, as the ambassador noted, escorted his guest through the long corridors of the Kremlin all the way to the door – a gesture which, according to Clark Kerr, had never been seen before.

The soldiers’ talks

The military men were talking at the same time. Brooke, Wavell and Tedder met Voroshilov and Shaposhnikov. The British wanted to find out whether the Red Army would hold the passes of the Caucasus, since the security of Persia, Iraq and the oilfields of the Middle East depended on it. They learned little: their Soviet counterparts repeated the demand for a second front and avoided specific figures. Brooke left Moscow convinced that the Russians would tell their allies nothing about their own forces. Stalin, asked about the Caucasus by Churchill himself, did, however, assure him that the Germans would not get across the mountains.

15 August: dinner until dawn

The last meeting was set for the evening of 15 August. Churchill came with a new interpreter, Major Arthur Birse, who had been born in St Petersburg and spoke Russian like a native. The conversation was calm. Churchill thanked Stalin for his hospitality and said he had come in person to show his sincerity. He also mentioned that in the next few days the British would carry out a large raid on the French coast (four days later this turned out to be the Dieppe Raid).

As Churchill was taking his leave, Stalin unexpectedly invited him to his private apartment in the Kremlin “for a drink”. The drink turned into a dinner that lasted until about 2.30 a.m. on 16 August. Molotov was present, and Stalin’s daughter Svetlana appeared for a moment. They talked about deliveries of lorries for the Red Army, the Napoleonic Wars and the Duke of Marlborough, Churchill’s ancestor. At about 1 a.m. Cadogan brought in a draft of the joint communiqué, while Stalin was busy eating a sucking pig.

One exchange from that night has passed into history. According to Churchill’s memoirs, he asked Stalin whether the strain of the present war was as heavy for him as that of collectivisation. Stalin is said to have replied that collectivisation had been a “terrible struggle” lasting four years, and to have spoken of “ten millions” of people who had had to be dealt with. Many of these kulaks, he reportedly said, had been “wiped out by their labourers”, and others had been resettled in Siberia. Churchill recorded that he kept silent at the table.

A few hours later, at dawn on 16 August, four Liberators took off from Moscow for Tehran. At the airfield General Władysław Anders, who had come specially for the conversation, still managed to approach Churchill. The Prime Minister, kept up late by Stalin, invited him for talks in Cairo. The evacuation of the Polish army from the USSR to Iran, to which Stalin had agreed in July, was already in full swing: between 11 August and 1 September some 45,000 soldiers and several tens of thousands of civilians, mostly soldiers’ families, left via the port of Krasnovodsk across the Caspian Sea for Pahlavi (today Bandar-e Anzali).

The communiqué and the return

The communiqué published after Churchill’s departure stated that the talks had taken place “in an atmosphere of cordiality and complete sincerity” and that a number of decisions had been reached concerning the war against Germany and its allies. It did not say a word about a second front. Churchill cabled London and Washington that he was satisfied: in his view the disappointing news could have been delivered only in person without the risk of a serious rift between the allies, and Stalin now had complete confidence in his good faith.

On the way back Churchill stopped in Cairo again. He met Anders, visited the Eighth Army’s positions at El Alamein, where the British were awaiting a new German offensive, and on the evening of 24 August landed at Lyneham in England.

Place in the war

The Moscow talks did not change Allied strategy. A second front in the sense Stalin understood it came into being neither in 1942 nor in 1943. Operation Torch began on 8 November 1942, and the concentration of forces in the Mediterranean, with landings in Sicily and Italy in 1943, put back the invasion of France to June 1944. Throughout the war Moscow treated this delay as proof that the Western allies wanted the USSR to bleed itself white fighting Germany.

The Arctic convoys resumed in September with the sailing of the heavily escorted convoy PQ 18, but they were suspended several more times later, each time drawing bitter letters from Stalin. When Churchill left Moscow the Germans stood in the great bend of the Don and at the foot of the Caucasus, and a week later their tanks reached the Volga north of Stalingrad. The fate of the war in the east was decided over the following months without the allies taking part on land.

The visit was, nevertheless, the first personal meeting of two leaders who would later decide the shape of post-war Europe. Churchill returned to Moscow in October 1944 and met Stalin and Roosevelt at Tehran in 1943 and at Yalta in 1945. In August 1942 both learned what they could expect of each other: Stalin, that the Englishman would not be intimidated; Churchill, that Kremlin cordiality could at any moment give way to attack, and that the alliance was held together by a common enemy, not by mutual trust.