Stalin demands a second front

In mid-March 1943 two threads converged in relations between the Soviet Union and its Western allies. In Washington, Congress was extending for another year the Lend-Lease programme, through which ever greater material aid was flowing to the USSR. In Moscow, Joseph Stalin, newly appointed Marshal of the Soviet Union, was replying to a message from Winston Churchill about plans for 1943, and on 15 March he wrote to him that further delay in opening a second front in France threatened “grave danger” to the common cause. A day later, on 16 March, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt received the same arguments. Mistrust was growing between the allies, and it would deepen in the months that followed.

The extension of Lend-Lease

The Lend-Lease Act, which Roosevelt had signed on 11 March 1941, was in force until 30 June 1943. In the spring of 1943 Congress had to decide whether to extend it. The debate no longer aroused the passions of two years earlier, when isolationists had accused the President of dragging the country into war – now the United States was itself fighting, and the programme was one of the pillars of the coalition. On 10 March 1943 the House of Representatives passed a one-year extension of the act, to 30 June 1944, by 407 votes to 6. The next day the Senate voted unanimously, 82 to 0, and Roosevelt signed the bill that same day, 11 March – exactly two years after the original act had been passed.

Aid had reached the USSR under separate protocols ever since it had been brought into the Lend-Lease programme in the autumn of 1941. The second protocol, signed in October 1942, covered deliveries until 30 June 1943. Edward Stettinius, who ran the Lend-Lease Administration, laid ever-rising figures before Congress: aircraft, tanks, lorries, explosives, food. Over the course of the war the Soviet Union received aid from the United States worth some 11 billion dollars at the prices of the day.

Ambassador Standley’s complaint

The extension went through amid a minor but much-publicised scandal. On 8 March 1943 the American ambassador in Moscow, Admiral William Standley, told a meeting of American correspondents bluntly that the Soviet authorities were hiding from their own people the fact that they were receiving help from outside: “Apparently they want their people to believe that the Red Army is fighting this war alone.” The remark, made without consulting Washington, caused a storm in the State Department and in Congress, where opponents of aid to the USSR gained a new argument. The Roosevelt administration distanced itself from the ambassador’s words, but in the following weeks the Soviet press began to publish more information about the deliveries. Standley lost the confidence of both the Kremlin and the White House and left his post in the autumn of 1943.

Promises and delay

The dispute over the second front – a great invasion of Western Europe that would draw dozens of German divisions away from the Eastern Front – had been going on since the start of the German–Soviet war. In June 1942, after Vyacheslav Molotov’s visit to London and Washington, a communiqué was published announcing “full understanding” on the urgent task of creating a second front in Europe in 1942; during the talks in London, however, the British had made it clear that they were not giving a binding promise. In August 1942 Churchill flew to Moscow to tell Stalin in person that there would be no invasion that year, and that there would be a landing in North Africa instead. After the disaster of convoy PQ 17 in July 1942 the British also suspended the Arctic convoys for a time, which Stalin received with indignation.

At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill decided that once the fighting in Tunisia was over they would strike at Sicily, and that a cross-Channel invasion would take place only if Germany had clearly weakened. To Stalin, who had declined to come to Morocco, they sent assurances of offensives in 1943 and the demand for the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers announced at Casablanca. Stalin replied as early as 16 February, noting with concern that the fighting in Tunisia was dragging on, and demanded a blow in the West no later than the spring or early summer.

Churchill’s message of 11 March

On 11 March 1943 Churchill sent Stalin a detailed explanation of his plans. He wrote that the final destruction of the Axis forces in Tunisia would probably not come until the end of April, and that the invasion of Sicily – Operation Husky – would be brought forward and carried out in June, a month earlier than planned at Casablanca. In several points, which he asked to be treated as secret, he set out Britain’s manpower: of some nineteen divisions in Britain, sixteen were being prepared for a cross-Channel operation in August. He immediately added the proviso, however, that the blow would be struck only if Germany had been sufficiently weakened – a premature attack with weaker forces would end in a “bloody repulse”, Nazi vengeance on any population that had risen, and a great triumph for the enemy. A final decision could be taken only at the appropriate time, and the statement “must not be understood as limiting our freedom of decision”.

To Stalin this meant that the invasion of Western Europe in 1943, promised earlier, might not take place at all. The message arrived at a difficult moment for the Red Army: after its winter victories at Stalingrad and in the Caucasus, Soviet troops were falling back before Manstein’s counter-offensive, and on 14 March the Germans retook Kharkiv.

The replies of 15 and 16 March

On 15 March Stalin replied to Churchill. He acknowledged that Operation Husky was of great importance and welcomed its acceleration, but stated that it “can in no way replace a second front in France”. He recalled that Churchill himself had considered the opening of such a front possible as early as 1942, and in the spring of 1943 at the latest. “Soviet troops have fought fierce battles all winter and are still fighting them,” he wrote, “while Hitler is carrying out important measures to rebuild and strengthen his army for the spring and summer operations against the USSR; it is therefore particularly important for us that the blow from the West should no longer be delayed, and that it should be struck in the spring or early summer.” Acknowledging that he understood the difficulties, he considered it his duty to “warn most emphatically” of the grave danger that further delay posed, and said that the vagueness of the British statements about the cross-Channel operation caused him an anxiety he “cannot conceal”. In a second, separate letter of the same day he thanked Churchill for the information about the raids on Essen, Stuttgart, Munich and Nuremberg and admitted that the Red Army had been forced to abandon Kharkiv.

On 16 March Stalin sent Roosevelt a letter with the same arguments, in large part repeating word for word passages from the message to Churchill, including the sentence about the need for a blow from the West in the spring or early summer.

Did Stalin accuse the Allies of betrayal?

In popular chronicles of the war this event is sometimes summarised as the “ninth” demand for a second front, in which Stalin accused the Allies of betrayal. Both elements need correcting. The figure of “nine” does not emerge from the published correspondence – Stalin and Molotov had pressed for a second front in dozens of messages, conversations and interviews since July 1941, and it is hard to see by what criterion anyone could have counted them. The messages of 15 and 16 March, for their part, are firm but couched in diplomatic language: they speak of “danger” and “anxiety”, not of betrayal. An accusatory tone appeared only in June 1943, when after the Trident Conference Roosevelt and Churchill informed Stalin that the invasion had been postponed to the spring of 1944. Stalin then wrote that what was at stake was preserving confidence in the Allies, which had been put to a severe test.

Its place in the war

Two weeks later relations worsened again. On 30 March Churchill informed Stalin that, because of the concentration of German warships in Norway and the needs of the Atlantic, the Arctic convoys to Murmansk and Archangel were being suspended until the autumn. In his reply of 2 April Stalin called this a “catastrophic reduction” in the supply of strategic raw materials and armaments. In the summer of 1943 Moscow recalled its ambassadors in London and Washington, Ivan Maisky and Maxim Litvinov, which was read as a signal of displeasure.

In the summer of 1943 the Red Army halted the German offensive at Kursk on its own, and in July the Allies landed in Sicily – which Stalin regarded as important but insufficient help. The dispute over the second front was resolved only at the Tehran Conference at the end of 1943, where Roosevelt and Churchill committed themselves to an invasion of France in May 1944. Operation Overlord began on 6 June 1944. Stalin’s conviction that the Western allies had deliberately allowed the USSR to bleed itself white fighting Germany nevertheless outlived the war and became one of the sources of the mistrust that after 1945 turned into the Cold War. Lend-Lease, extended in March 1943 and then once more in 1944, remained in operation until September 1945.