The Anglo-Soviet Alliance: Comrades and Allies During WW2 9781526776587, 1526776588

Citation preview

THE

ANGLO-SOVIET

ALLIANCE

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 1

29-01-2021 01:20:57

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 2

29-01-2021 01:20:57

THE

ANGLO-SOVIET

ALLIANCE

COMRADES AND ALLIES DURING WW2

COLIN TURBETT

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 3

29-01-2021 01:20:57

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by PEN AND SWORD HISTORY An imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd Yorkshire – Philadelphia Copyright © Colin Turbett, 2021 ISBN 978 1 52677 658 7 The right of Colin Turbett to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing. Typeset in Times New Roman 11.5/14 by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India. Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Ltd. Pen & Sword Books Limited incorporates the imprints of Atlas, Archaeology, Aviation, Discovery, Family History, Fiction, History, Maritime, Military, Military Classics, Politics, Select, Transport, True Crime, Air World, Frontline Publishing, Leo Cooper, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing, The Praetorian Press, Wharncliffe Local History, Wharncliffe Transport, Wharncliffe True Crime and White Owl. For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED 47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk Or PEN AND SWORD BOOKS 1950 Lawrence Rd, Havertown, PA 19083, USA E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.penandswordbooks.com

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 4

29-01-2021 13:57:55

Contents

Acknowledgements������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ vi Abbreviations�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������viii Introduction������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ ix Chapter 1 The USSR, World Revolution and the British Communist Party, 1917–1941�������������������������������������������� 1 Chapter 2 Keeping Communism at Bay: Home and Abroad, 1917–1941������������������������������������������������������������������������ 25 Chapter 3

The Wartime Alliance������������������������������������������������������� 44

Chapter 4 Unity in Action: Front-line Co-operation between the Red Army and the British������������������������������������������� 74 Chapter 5

The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945������������������������������������ 107

Chapter 6 The Anglo-Soviet Alliance and the Struggle for Socialism in Britain�������������������������������������������������������� 130 Chapter 7 Communists at War: Opportunity and Activism in the Armed Forces������������������������������������������������������� 154 Chapter 8 Why Die for Stalin? Peace, the Onset of Cold War and the End of ‘Really Existing Socialism’������������������� 173 Appendix 1

Some Lead Characters���������������������������������������������������� 205

Appendix 2

Memorials to the Anglo-Soviet Wartime Alliance��������� 209

Appendix 3

Wartime Awards Between Britain and the USSR����������� 212

Bibliography�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 220 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 228

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 5

29-01-2021 01:20:58

Acknowledgements

Thanks must go to the following who helped with preparation for the book: my Ukrainian assistant Valentina Kudinova for Russian language researches and translations; Katzel Henderson for the photograph of her late husband, Hamish Henderson; Jessie Clark for memories of life in the ‘Little Moscow’ mining village of Douglas Water, South Lanarkshire; Rosa Branson for memories of her parents Noreen and Clive, and permission to use some of her father’s pictures; Teresa Topolski for memories and licence to use some images of her father’s wartime sketches; Bruce Hudson of the Arctic Convoy Museum in Aultbea, Wester Ross; Dr Dan Paton of the RAF Montrose Museum and Heritage Centre; Christos Koliakis from Greece for notes about the Battle of Athens; Natalia Ponomareva of the online forum www.sammler.ru for information about awards. For assistance with images and associated information: Timothy Neat, Andrew Webb of

Above left: The author. Above right: Valentina Kudinova.

vi

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 6

29-01-2021 01:20:59

Acknowledgements

the Imperial War Museum, the staff of the Mitchell Library Glasgow, the North Lanarkshire Heritage Centre and the Dundee City Archives. My mother: wartime WRNS Visual Signaller Pamela Sinclair Turbett – who, through the findings of this book, was able to apply for an Arctic Star medal on behalf of my late father and wartime RN veteran, Desmond Turbett. Finally, Claire Hopkins of Pen & Sword for her support for the project and Chris Cocks for his enthusiastic copy-editing.

vii

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 7

29-01-2021 01:20:59

Abbreviations

ABCA AEU BWP CO CPGB CWP DEMS EAM ELAS ILP IWM JCSA JPC KGB KKE NCBSU NCO NKVD POW RAF RN SIS TGWU USSR VE YCL

Army Bureau of Current Affairs Amalgamated Engineering Union British Way and Purpose Commanding Officer Communist Party of Great Britain Common Wealth Party Defensively Equipped Merchant Ship National Liberation Front (Greece) People’s Liberation Army (Greece) Independent Labour Party Imperial War Museum Joint Committee for Soviet Aid Joint Production Committee Committee for State Security Communist Party of Greece National Council for British Soviet Unity non-commissioned officer People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs prisoner of war Royal Air Force Royal Navy Secret Intelligence Service Transport & General Workers Union Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (CCCP in Russian) Victory in Europe Young Communist League

viii

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 8

29-01-2021 01:20:59

Introduction

Early twentieth-century history was characterized by global conflict, and a shared capitalist ideology that justified competition between nations for resources and the amassing of concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. Standing out against that were the emergence of socialist and communist ideas that sought to organize global co-operation on a different basis – that of sharing power and wealth amongst the mass of the people and running society for common benefit. Crisis, as the First World War led to stalemate and continuing mass slaughter, saw the emergence in Russia of a group of revolutionaries who were able to seize power in 1917 with enough popular support to withstand internal and external attempts to overthrow them, and establish a regime that they hoped and planned would lead to the nirvana of communism. Thus, the Bolsheviks, led by a hitherto tiny group of professional revolutionaries scattered in exile, were launched onto an international stage with a clear agenda that threatened the established order throughout the developed world. Their early commitment to spreading their revolution presented a danger that could only be dealt with by vigorous opposition to their ideology. The legacy of the Russian empire meant that the new regime (the USSR – or Soviet Union) Meeting Over Berlin, from Spirit of the Soviet was established across a huge Union, 1941. (Author’s collection) ix

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 9

29-01-2021 01:20:59

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

geographical area of the world, more or less bordering on all the powers and would-be powers in the northern hemisphere from Europe to Asia and the Far East. In the UK, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was met with horror by the establishment, but some sympathy amongst the working population that its supporters sought to build upon. British troops were involved in attempts to unseat the Bolshevik government and, when that failed, communist ideology was opposed by less openly aggressive means both at home and abroad. By the end of the 1930s the international situation was in crisis again and war loomed. The forces by that time that most threatened the established order internationally were centred on far-right ideologies that were the antithesis of everything that communists and socialists stood for. Nazi Germany’s aggression in the face of disunited and economically weak neighbours in Europe was underpinned by its leader Hitler’s determination at some point to mount an assault on the USSR. Whilst his ideological justification lay in wanting to preserve European values and racial purity, this was openly driven too by a wish to grab the Soviet Union’s natural resources. The scene was set for a new world war but quite who this might involve, in terms of sides and alliances, had yet to be determined. When war came in 1939, the USSR staved off immediate involvement (although few thought this was not eventually inevitable) by agreement with their arch enemy, Nazi Germany. By the autumn of 1940 Hitler’s armies had successfully overrun most of Europe, defeating its armies, and now threatening invasion of the UK. For the inhabitants of Britain’s cities, ‘phoney war’ changed to awful reality as bombs fell and invasion threatened. By this stage it was clear that only further alliances with the remaining free great powers of the world could prevent Britain’s defeat and the imposition of fascism. Germany’s invasion of the USSR in the summer of 1941 therefore brought immediate and unhesitating AngloSoviet alliance as in the obvious interests of both, ideological differences were pragmatically set to one side. By the end of the year the die was set when Hitler declared war on the United States who promptly joined the alliance against him, an alliance that was already enjoying practical American support. The three powers of the Grand Alliance from then on worked together with the common aim of defeating fascism. In the meantime the war began very gradually to turn in the Allies’ favour: through its determination as it stood alone in 1940, Britain was able x

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 10

29-01-2021 01:21:00

Introduction

to act as a military base for the eventual defeat of Hitler’s armies in the West, whilst in the East, at enormous cost, the Red Army fought continuously and relentlessly to throw back the invasion: total war was embarked upon through a combination of early British courage and tenacity, American dollars, and, most of all, Soviet blood on the battlefield. Underlying tensions and machinations ensured that the alliance would crumble once Hitler’s defeat was secured in 1945. Against this background, this book looks at the Anglo-Soviet alliance, and, in particular, at its impact at the level of the ordinary British citizen. The common people were the target of propaganda from successive UK governments about the threats presented by communism from 1917, and also from agitation by members of the British wing of the international Communist movement who wished to see revolutionary change at home. These competing influences combined in alliance between 1941 and 1945, but not without somersaults in policy that would have amazed the pre-war observer of British politics. The Soviet people lived in a world that was closed off to the West, so the wartime alliance brought some limited interaction between ordinary citizens of the USSR and the UK. All this ended in 1945 and it was back to mutual suspicion and the characterizations associated with competing ideology that were maintained throughout the Cold War, with echoes today. However, the experience of war for those fighting in the armed services was one of collective endeavour that brought people from various backgrounds together, leading to inevitable discussion about what type of country they were fighting for: radical ideas were popular and, together with those who experienced hardship on the home front, the British people elected a Labour government in 1945 committed to socialist transformation. The seventy-fifth anniversary of the victory of the alliance over fascism in 1945, was the rightful cause of celebrations in 2020. However, there are few monuments in the UK to the Soviet Union’s enormous and decisive contribution to our freedom, and little popular understanding of the history that lies behind it. That story includes a genuine feeling of solidarity and international friendship in the face of adversity. The generation that did have some direct knowledge, ranging from the popular Aid for Russia fundraising throughout the UK, to the highly dangerous and often fatal contribution of seamen on the Arctic convoys, is now passing. The purpose of this book is to lend some understanding to the period in the hope that its history of international co-operation to xi

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 11

29-01-2021 01:21:00

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

overcome an overwhelming threat to humanity, reflected in activity both at government and institutional, as well at a very local level, can teach us something about how we might engage and organize to take on the dangers to the world that we face today. Many contemporary histories discuss the USSR and its demise as the welcome result of victory by sensible market-force capitalism. However, that same basis of unfettered capitalism brings on continued wars for diminishing resources and very real threats of climate change catastrophe. The USSR experienced its own human and environmental disasters – some self-imposed by its leaders, from absurd irrigations schemes that made rivers run backwards, to Chernobyl – but it was nonetheless grounded on ideas that still resonate because of their differences to the ones that seem to be leading us towards our own self-destruction. The wartime alliance, at the time, represented for many, the hope of a better, peaceful and more secure future that still seems distant all these years later – and indeed the National Health Service and welfare state provisions in Britain that followed upon victory, have been under sustained attack in recent years. Cynics might sneer, as some did at the time, but aspirations for a better world will shine through this book in the chapters to follow. This is not intended to be an academic history – much of its content is drawn from wartime and other publications written in the

Exhibition of Toys For Russia at St Martin’s School of Art, London, 1942. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

xii

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 12

29-01-2021 01:21:00

Introduction

period they describe, histories and accounts published since, and images of the period that lend some feel to what was thought and experienced at the time. Unfortunately, any historian of this period has to pick their way through narratives written soon after the event – the 1950s in particular saw a deluge of memoirs written by participants – usually former British officers, which are coloured by Cold War perceptions of events that cast the other side in an unfavourable light. Whilst this is true of western accounts it can also be said to be the case with ones from the Soviet side, all of which had to pass the censorship of the state to ensure that their line was the correct one. This account will therefore try and rescue accounts written before that period, whilst the war was still underway, and lend some transparency to ones written since. Sources are generally only cited in the narrative if direct quotations are borrowed, but all are listed in the bibliography.

xiii

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 13

29-01-2021 01:21:00

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 14

29-01-2021 01:21:00

Chapter 1

The USSR, World Revolution and the British Communist Party, 1917–1941

Our task is to generalize the revolutionary experience of the working class, to purge the movement of the corroding admixture of opportunism and social-patriotism, to unify the efforts of all genuinely revolutionary parties of the world proletariat and thereby facilitate and hasten the victory of the Communist revolution throughout the world. Founding manifesto of the Communist International, Moscow, March 1919

The 1917 Revolution Few outside the closed circles of European monarchy mourned the toppling of the Tsar of Russia in February 1917. His unsophisticated absolutism had brutally oppressed his own people and resulted in disastrous military loss, even by the standards of those engaged in the seemingly endless carnage of the Great War that had begun three years earlier. The instability that followed was finally laid to rest when the Bolsheviks seized power in October of the same year on a programme of land, bread and peace that won the support of the masses. Their revolution only found favour abroad with socialists who shared the communist vision of a world freed from the destructive competition that had condemned millions to poverty, exploitation and war. The Bolshevik programme threatened the great powers, not just because of its immediate impact on the war, but through its message to ordinary people that another world was possible if they could wrest power from 1

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 1

29-01-2021 01:21:00

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

their rulers. Bolshevik leaders like Lenin and Trotsky made no secret of their belief that the success of their own revolution rested on similar developments in other countries, particularly the advanced nations of Western Europe and North America. Without such developments their revolution would be strangled. The actual reaction of their counterparts in Great Britain will be discussed in Chapter 2. Prior to 1914 socialist parties had met across the globe as the Second International – an organization that included huge parties like the German Social Democrats. The Second International effectively collapsed as most of its members, including the Labour Party in the UK, fell prey to national chauvinism, supporting their respective sides as war broke out in 1914. A conference to bring together those who had stood out against militarism was held in Zimmerwald in Switzerland in 1915: thirtyeight delegates attended including Bolsheviks and members of other organizations from Russia. The three British delegates from the British Socialist Party (BSP) and Independent Labour Party (ILP) were refused passports and so could not attend. Despite disagreements reflecting different political positions, there was unity around a strident anti-war ‘Zimmerwald Manifesto’, although its impact at the time was minimal. The supporters of the Bolsheviks internationally were those socialists who had opposed the war from its beginning in 1914. They were a minority – most of those who had previously described themselves as socialists, like those in the British Labour Party, dropped their internationalism overnight to support their governments and rulers as the battle lines were drawn up. In the United Kingdom, socialist opponents of the war were organized in small organizations like the BSP, ILP and Socialist Labour Party (SLP). Their numbers included the former suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst. Anti-war agitation was a risky business and many political and shop floor trade union revolutionaries found themselves imprisoned when their activities were considered to have fomented unrest amongst workers and troops. Amongst these were the Glasgow school teacher and Scottish republican socialist John Maclean whose speech from the dock prior to his five-year prison sentence for sedition in May 1918, exhorted workers to tear down the capitalist system: ‘I am not here as the accused, I am here as the accuser of capitalism, dripping with blood from head to foot.’ By this time Maclean had been appointed Bolshevik consul in Glasgow (a position never recognized by the UK government). 2

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 2

29-01-2021 01:21:00

The USSR, World Revolution

British Bolsheviks Socialists in Britain (most of whom would join the Communist Party) were quick to advocate support for the Bolsheviks after the 1917 October Revolution. Their influence was a factor in the opposition to government attempts to undermine the revolution that will be discussed in Chapter 2. At the war’s end Europe was in ferment as old empires crumbled – revolutionary change, fomented by adherents of the Communist International, was in the air. In the wake of the carnage of the Great War the Labour Party opposed, although not actively, interventions against the new Soviet state. In January 1919, 500 delegates from 350 organizations formed the Hands Off Russia campaign which determined action to force withdrawal of British forces from Russia. In May 1919 British left-wing socialists argued for support for a European-wide general strike against anti-Bolshevik interventions. This was watered down by Labour leaders, who opposed Bolshevism but supported the right of the Russian people to determine their own future. The climate for change was reaching a crescendo. That summer, strikes in Glasgow and Liverpool were met with military force due to their insurrectionary character. In May 1920, militants amongst the London dockers – notably Harry Pollitt who was to become a leading member of the Communist Party of

Trial in Glasgow of left-wing leaders following the January 1919 strike. Willie Gallacher is second from left. (Wikimedia Commons)

3

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 3

29-01-2021 01:21:00

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

1970 Soviet postage stamp celebrating Harry Pollitt and the Jolly George incident. (Wikimedia Commons)

Great Britain (CPGB) – discovered that a cargo ship, the Jolly George, was being loaded with a consignment of weapons for the Polish Army who were at that time involved in an aggressive war against the young Soviet state. They successfully sought official support for this boycott and the Jolly George eventually sailed for Danzig without the offending arms. A National Council of Action was formed by the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to counter the threat of further military intervention against Russia. Over 300 local councils were created but these were far from pro-Bolshevik – some refused Communist Party affiliation after the formation of the Party in July (see below). Others were more left wing – sixty-six added the call for British military withdrawal from Ireland to their demand concerning Russia, but the call for a general strike was reduced by the national leadership to one of demonstrations on 22 August. By October 1920, the councils had all but disappeared as the threat of military action by the UK government receded.

The Comintern In March 1919 the new Soviet government in Russia called together delegates from across the world in Moscow to declare a Third International. Although attended by fewer delegates than Zimmerwald, its influence based on the prestige and success of its hosts, was considerably more profound. In order to ensure that it represented truly revolutionary socialist aspirations rather than the reformist ones that dominated its predecessor, the Executive (influenced by Lenin) laid down twenty-one conditions for membership which were formally adopted at the second congress in 1920. The character of these can be judged by the third condition: 4

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 4

29-01-2021 01:21:00

The USSR, World Revolution

In almost every country in Europe and America the class struggle is entering the phase of civil war. Under such conditions the communists can place no trust in bourgeois legality. They have the obligation of setting up a parallel organizational apparatus which, at the decisive moment, can assist the party to do its duty to the revolution. In every country where a state of siege or emergency laws deprive the communists of the opportunity of carrying on all their work legally, it is absolutely necessary to combine legal and illegal activity.* A number of mass socialist parties in Europe felt able to meet these and affiliate, bringing the organization real strength and purpose. Britain’s left socialists were not among the best-supported exponents of Bolshevik-style revolution: the BSP, SLP and other individuals united to form the Communist Party of Great Britain in July 1920. Membership amounted to only about 3,000 and this reduced in the first few years. The Third International advised the CPGB to seek affiliation to the Labour Party, a mass umbrella organization with growing representation and influence. The aim was to affiliate but remain organizationally independent so that revolutionary socialist principle could be adhered to and argued within the wider labour and trade union movement. Affiliation was rejected (repeatedly and with a hardening of attitude in ensuing years) but would remain an issue for the CPGB with recurring revivals throughout its history, including, particularly, in the closing years of the Second World War. However, at this early stage few doubted the wisdom of such a move and seven candidates were put forward for the 1922 general election, two of whom, Walter Newbold in Motherwell, and Shapurji Saklatvala, in Battersea North, were elected with Labour endorsement (the LP at this time was an umbrella organization rather than a self-contained political party). During their brief spell in parliament (under a Tory government) they worked together to raise issues about unemployment and housing, but only Saklatvala was accepted into the Labour Party parliamentary caucus. Both lost their seats in the general election in 1923 but Saklatvala was re-elected in the 1924 general election (without Labour support) and sat until 1929 as the only Communist MP. * The Second Congress of the Communist International, Minute of Proceedings pp. 304-309.

5

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 5

29-01-2021 01:21:01

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Left: Communist International newssheet, 1919. (Wikimedia Commons) Below: Lenin and other world Communist movement leaders at the 2nd Comintern Congress, 1920. (красная панорама April 1924/ Wikimedia Commons)

6

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 6

29-01-2021 01:21:01

The USSR, World Revolution

Early CPGB leaflet against intervention in Russia, 1920. (Wikimedia Commons)

7

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 7

29-01-2021 01:21:01

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Communists in the Period of the General Strike The period between the two world wars saw capitalism lurch from crisis to crisis and politics polarized as a consequence: fascism emerged in a number of countries, notably Germany and Italy, whilst Soviet Russia remained the only survivor of the socialist revolutions that took place at the close of the Great War. Industrial unrest in the UK formed a good breeding ground for communist ideas and the CPGB grew in influence, if not in size, within working-class areas – particularly those dominated by heavy industry and coal mining where there were strong traditions of trade union militancy. Communist influence in the trade unions was centred on the Minority Movement, an organization formed in 1924 to challenge the right-wing leaderships, and within a year or two it represented almost a million workers. Labour’s rejection of Communist affiliation was based on fear of left-wing takeover, but that did not prevent them from expressing admiration for the achievements of the Bolsheviks in Russia. This caused establishment fears when Labour won a general election for the first time in late 1923. A further general election was required after the collapse of the Labour government in October 1924: a few days before the election the Daily Mail published a letter from the Comintern leader Zinoviev advising the CPGB of the opportunities for sedition that a Labour victory would bring (see Chapter 2). Labour consequently lost the election, the letter itself being eventually revealed as a forgery. However, the lesson was clear: Labour needed to maintain a distance from Communism and its British representatives. The CPGB’s big chance came with the General Strike of 1926: in support of Britain’s 1.2 million miners who had been locked out by their united employers, the TUC called all workers out on strike in May. The response was massive and the country ground to a halt for nine days. However, fearful of the repercussions of such a challenge to the state, the TUC General Council called off the strike and the miners were left to fight on CPGB banner at a Hyde Park rally during the alone until eventually starved back to work. The CPGB, with 1926 General Strike. (Wikimedia Commons) 8

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 8

29-01-2021 01:21:01

The USSR, World Revolution

only 5,000 or so members, and despite valiant efforts (with other left activists) to fight on to the finish, was simply too small to countermand the capitulation of the movement’s leaders in which it had placed great and misplaced faith. Many CPGB leaders, such as Pollitt, Willie Gallacher from Glasgow, and J.T. Murphy from Sheffield, were already out of circulation having been imprisoned the previous year for seditious libel under the Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797 (see Chapter 2). The defeat of the General Strike was a major setback for British Communism, and one from which it never entirely recovered due to the deliberate ongoing effort of the mainstream labour movement to keep it on the side-lines.

The USSR After the Death of Lenin Meanwhile great changes were taking place in Russia. Lenin, whose leadership and tactical skills were quite unrivalled, suffered a massive stroke in 1922 and was largely incapacitated from then until his eventual death in 1924. Leadership, by means of cunning and bureaucratic manoeuvre, was gradually assumed by Joseph Stalin, until his position as Secretary of the Communist Party, with all powers, became quite impregnable. Opposition was dealt with mercilessly (and as time went on by means of trial and execution) until by the early 1940s, he alone was still alive out of all the principal Bolshevik leaders of 1917. Stalin’s main quality was a recognition that the USSR would only survive if it developed its industrial capacity and economic growth within its own borders – ‘Socialism in one country’ – and that it had to do this quickly and at whatever cost to its population. This was achieved, we now know beyond any doubt, by forcing large numbers of people into slavery through unfounded criminalization, and by policies that seemed to be the very opposite of the Bolshevik ideals of Lenin and his comrades. The Soviet Constitution, redrawn in 1936, looked a model of rights and equalities, but offered nothing except hardship and even death to those who were deemed to have become enemies of the state – an easily gained status in the 1930s. At the time much of this was hidden from view and the USSR, with industrial growth and no unemployment whilst the rest of the developed world suffered depression and despair, seemed a beacon of hope to many, and offered continued attraction for the world’s Communist parties. Stalin, meantime, in a deliberate policy based on 9

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 9

29-01-2021 01:21:01

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

the backwardness of the Russian people, was accorded godlike status at home, with echoes amongst his supporters abroad. One of the main implications of the changes in the Soviet Union was an implicit turn away from the idea of fomenting world revolution, the cornerstone of the Third International (Comintern). Increasingly the Comintern was used as a tool of Soviet foreign policy whose activities were more about consolidating the power and authority of the socialist motherland, than in achieving change in the countries in which the various affiliates organized. This was not obvious to activists, and their leaders were expected to perform somersaults to keep up with changes in Soviet policy and tactics. The most obvious example of this is in relation to the rise of fascism in Germany. The Nazis under Hitler were quite explicit about the fact that amongst the main enemies they wished to destroy were the Communists. At the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in 1928, delegates were told that with the coming crisis of capitalism, their time had come and that their main enemies were those who spread illusions about reformist possibilities for change. Paradoxically, this ‘left turn’ termed ‘Class Against Class’ suited the Soviet economy, whose growth projections were based on trade with capitalist countries: the marginalization of Communist parties reduced their influence and freed the rulers of these countries to bargain with the USSR. The reduction in their influence also helped consolidate Stalin and his supporters against opposition in the mother country; with Trotsky in exile, Bukharin, another giant amongst Bolsheviks, became isolated and his differences with Stalin’s policies nullified. The presence of the Comintern as a true expression of collective thought and endeavour was reduced to that of being a mouthpiece for Stalin: having initially committed to meet at least every two years on its formation, after 1928 the next Comintern Congress did not take place until 1935 and that was to be its last. The prestige of the USSR on the world stage was to take precedence over the fortunes and progress of the various national Communist parties.

British Communist Activity, 1928 to 1939 The result of the sectarian line of the Comintern was that CPGB members in the UK turned on all those they regarded as reformist, refusing to work with others in the trade union and labour movements in a policy of blatant sectarianism that only pushed them further to the sidelines. In Germany, 10

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 10

29-01-2021 01:21:01

The USSR, World Revolution

their castigation of the social democrats as enemies of the working class (‘social fascists’) and a refusal to unite with them against the Nazis, saw the latter grow until they were able to destroy the Communist Party entirely, along with all democratic institutions, after Hitler’s election to power in 1933. As early as 1924 Stalin had described social democracy as the moderate wing of fascism – sowing the seeds for a fatal blunder. For some, like the exiled Bolshevik leader Trotsky, this was an unforgiveable error and placed Stalin and his Party beyond redemption as they had effectively paved the way for the Nazis to assume power. By 1930 CPGB membership (which had Harry Pollitt National Minority Movement risen to over 10,000 in 1926) had pamphlet 1930. (Author’s collection) slumped to 2,500. Communists however, given the right circumstance, could still provide leadership and influence: in 1931, 1,000 Royal Navy sailors of the Home Fleet went on strike at Invergordon in one of the only large-scale (if short-lived) mutinies in British military history. Its two principal leaders, Len Wincott and Fred Copeman, were discharged from the Navy and joined the CPGB (see Chapter 2). The disastrous class-against-class policy that followed the 1928 Comintern Congress was summarily overturned at the Seventh Congress in 1935. This determined an exactly opposite policy of unity with all and any progressive forces in order to strengthen the left in general and by that means move the working classes of the world towards socialism and communism. The turn was a recognition by Stalin that the rise of fascism in Europe now represented the greatest threat to the USSR and unity was required to oppose its growth. This meant unambiguous support for the Labour Party in elections in the UK; only two candidates were put up in the 1935 general election, one of whom, Willie Gallacher, 11

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 11

29-01-2021 01:21:02

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

was successful in West Fife where the CPGB was especially strong. Faced with a fascist military revolt leading to civil war in Spain in 1936, the Comintern were quick to organize support for the beleaguered Popular Front government. They were instrumental in organizing solidarity across the political spectrum as well as military support in the form of the International Brigade. In the UK young Communists were pressured into going out to Spain with many enthusiastically volunteering, a lot of whom were to die. Popular unity at a local level led to successful opposition to the rise of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, including the East London Cable Street battle of 1936 where the fascists were effectively swept from the streets. Communists were also involved in tenants’ activity around demands for improvements in housing and sanitation. The CPGB enjoyed a rise in membership to 18,000 by the end of 1938, and a resurgence of influence as ‘people’s front’ politics enveloped the left of the political spectrum. During this period the CPGB sought to extend its influence in the official trade union movement and seek affiliation to the Labour Party – moves that were systematically rejected. Prominent trade union leaders Ernest Bevin and Walter Citrine (who visited the USSR in 1925

How British fascists saw the Battle of Cable Street. The reality was that they never recovered. (Wikimedia Commons)

12

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 12

29-01-2021 01:21:02

The USSR, World Revolution

British volunteeers in Spain 1937. (IWM/ Wikimedia Commons)

and 1935) remained resolute in their opposition to Communism and the Comintern whilst maintaining that the Soviets should enjoy the freedom to pursue their experiment. The weekly print-run of the Party’s paper, the Daily Worker, rose to 425,000 in 1937 and pamphlet sales topped a million. From 1936 the CPGB also had its own publishing house for books by members and sympathizers, Lawrence & Wishart, which continues its radical publishing role to this day. The Left Book Club of Victor Gollancz published various works by CPGB leaders which went out to its 46,000 members. By 1939 it had published fifteen books sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The emphasis on education and literature was very much a part of the Communist tradition: in the 1920s the CPGB obtained the worldwide publishing rights to John Reed’s classic account of the October Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. However, Stalin’s influence was brought to bear on even this, and its first edition in 1926 was later replaced by one that removed reference to Trotsky who had become the Soviet leader’s sworn enemy. Unity, which fell short of Labour affiliation, was certainly achieved in terms of antifascism alongside anyone who agreed with this aim regardless of other political conviction. The dictatorship of the proletariat and revolution, whilst remaining an aspiration for the future, was officially taken off the agenda by the CPGB Central Committee in September 1937 as not 13

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 13

29-01-2021 01:21:02

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

being in keeping with the issues facing the working class. CPGB members enjoyed great support and influence in particular communities in the UK between the wars. This was highly localized and based around the leadership and respect of particular individuals who were often leading local trade union activists. Some communities came to be known as ‘Little Moscows’ (a phrase apparently disliked by Communists at the time): mining villages such as Lumphinnans in West Fife, Chopwell in Durham and Maerdy in South Wales were examples. In these places Communists were Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed, elected to Parish Councils where 1926. (Author’s collection) they agitated against the Means Test system of providing financial support to the poor, and organized more effective relief than would otherwise have been made available. Visits were organized from these localities to the Soviet Union and links made with similar communities there: the Maerdy miners received a banner made by women from the Красная Пресня engineering works in Moscow, the Lumphinnans miners one from Donets miners, and the Vale of Leven Friends of the Soviet Union, a banner from the Amo automobile factory outside Moscow. The Vale of Leven assumed great importance to the CPGB: lying to the west of Glasgow and badly affected by unemployment, it was an area based on linen dyeing among other industry and, in the words of Harry Pollitt, an example to other localities. In 1935 a popular front approach saw the Vale of Leven elect six Communist and five Labour members and one ILP member to the County Council and gain a majority in the District Council – where member Hugh McIntyre symbolically replaced the local landowner Sir Iain Colquhoun as chair. Communists were also prominent in the unemployed agitations of the 1930s – not the passive protest of the 14

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 14

29-01-2021 01:21:03

The USSR, World Revolution

Jarrow Hunger March, but the more militant and angry unemployment marches led by Wal Hannington and Harry McShane. In urban areas CPGB members, like Phil Piratin in Stepney, enjoyed popularity for their fierce support over rent struggles and anti-Means Test campaigns. The Little Moscows were often small tight-knit communities surrounded by more traditionally thinking ones so their influence did not necessarily extend into parliamentary representation. However, in the mining constituency of West Fife, leading CPGB member Willie Gallacher was elected Member of Parliament in 1935 and remained in the House of Commons until 1950. Seventeen-year-old Lanarkshire miner Alex Clark’s gradual conversion to communist politics was spurred by the death of his 16-year-old brother in a pit explosion in 1939. When Alex went to pick up

Follonsby Durham miners’ banner, 1920s, now restored. (Author’s collection)

15

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 15

29-01-2021 01:21:03

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

his brother’s wages for the family (they were the oldest of ten children), he was given payment for half a shift – the point at which the explosion occurred. Alex later transferred to Douglas Colliery in the remote Little Moscow of Douglas Water where he was soon recruited to the CPGB, going on to play a leading role in one of the largest CPGB branches in Britain. The Ponfeigh Miners’ Union Branch (whose members worked the Douglas pit) had gained notoriety in 1917, when, influenced by socialists like John MacLean, it had militantly defied conscription of its members. The Pit was sunk on ancestral land owned by Sir Alec DouglasHome, a prominent Tory politician and later Prime Minster: the Homes took as rent 1/- for every ton of coal produced by miners who earned about 9/- a day, producing about five tons of coal each per week. Alex Clark went on to work full time for the CPGB and was later a leading official for Equity, the actors’ trade union; a cultured singer and selftaught individual who devoted his life to the Communist causes of peace and progress. Douglas Water was a proud community of 1,100 people which could boast a pipe band, silver band and two choirs; hired buses would run from there to operatic performances in Glasgow. The pit shut many years ago and today the village barely exists. In the 1930s the appeal of the Soviet Union and the ‘People’s Front’ activities of the CPGB led to the emergence of Party sympathizers – often prominent individuals who were happy to praise Stalin and the USSR but who were never card-carrying members. An example was Hewlett Johnson, the Church of England ‘Red’ Dean of Canterbury who authored numerous books and pamphlets that slavishly promoted the Soviet Union throughout the Thirties and Forties. Johnson believed quite sincerely that the USSR was the only truly Christian country on earth. Others, like the veteran Labour Party Fabian Society founders (who believed in gradual rather than revolutionary transformation of society) Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and the writer George Bernard Shaw, visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s and then lavished it with praise. H.G. Wells wrote of Stalin in 1934: ‘I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest.’ Whilst criticized prior to the war, such writings and opinions took on a new life after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Popular festivals led by the Party attracted mass audiences and provided platforms for an impressive array of speakers: whether on the situation with Spain or the need for friendship with the USSR. The Congress of Peace and Friendship with the USSR, held in London in December 1935, 16

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 16

29-01-2021 01:21:03

The USSR, World Revolution

was attended by over 700 delegates representing more than a million and a half people; its speakers included Lord Listowel, Robert Boothby MP (a Tory), Viscount Hastings and George Bernard Shaw, alongside prominent CPGB members and Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky. Neither were CPGB members or their supporters put off by the trials and purges of the late 1930s through which Stalin systematically disposed of all his actual, imaginary and alleged political opponents. Most were prepared to accept the accounts and newsreel films of courtroom ‘confessions’ of the more prominent victims at face value. As the process started in 1936, Harry Pollitt, CPGB General Secretary, announced in the Daily Worker that ‘The trials in Moscow represent a new triumph in the history of progress.’ However, the following year a prominent feminist and former CPGB member, Rose Cohen, who had gone to live in Moscow with her Russian husband, was picked up in the wake of his arrest and charged with spying and other matters. News of her case reached Britain and was taken up by CPGB leaders Harry Pollitt and Willie Gallacher MP with the Comintern leadership when they visited Moscow. Secretary Dmitrov apparently told them not to interfere, at which point they dropped all protests. Pollitt’s inaction may have been determined by a warning that he had already been denounced and was himself under suspicion – he was said to be deeply troubled by the case as he and Rose had been very close. Others on the British left continued to pursue her plight, including the Webbs, but were ignored by both the CPGB and the British government. A letter about her case appeared in the New Statesman signed by a few on the left, but Communists and those close to them would not sign as they had been assured of the reliability of Soviet justice, and also told (falsely) that Rose was a Soviet citizen. After a brief and closed trial in which she was not permitted legal representation, Rose Cohen was secretly executed on 28 November 1937, the British authorities not making any protest until the following year. She had in effect disappeared – the Soviet position being that she had been sentenced to ‘ten years’ hard labour without right of correspondence’ – a euphemism for execution, but rumours that she might still be alive persisted for many years. In 1956 Rose’s case was reopened by the Soviet authorities and dismissed as lacking evidence and she was posthumously rehabilitated along with thousands of other victims of Stalin’s repression. It was only at this point that Pollitt’s enquiries to Moscow in the wake of Krushchev’s ‘secret speech’ about 17

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 17

29-01-2021 01:21:03

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Stalin’s atrocities, were responded to and details of her fate made known to him. Neither he nor the CPGB made this public and the myth of her disappearance continued. Rose’s husband, David Petrovsky (rehabilitated in 1958), was shot in September 1937 and their 7-year-old child Alexey spent three years in an orphanage as a ‘son of enemies of the people’ before being adopted by a relative in 1940. With little if any knowledge of actual events in the Soviet Union, the CPGB attracted many intellectual and middleRose Cohen and son Alyusha, 1932. class idealists in the 1930s, as well as (Wikimedia Commons) working-class activists. Well known are the ‘Cambridge Five’ graduates, Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Cairncross and Blunt (see Chapter 2). Another example are the Bransons – Noreen and Clive – who operated more openly. They met in 1931 and being of like minds married quickly and, having joined the CPGB, resolved to devote their lives to the communist cause. Noreen came from a landed and titled aristocrat background: her father had been killed in the Great World War and her mother had died of tuberculosis when Noreen was young. Her early experiences converted Noreen to pacificism and atheism but her conversion to socialism followed her marriage – she had already ‘come out’ as a society debutante but was to put all this behind her. In the 1930s she acted as a Communist organizer with Clive in Battersea and travelled abroad as far as India as a Comintern agent and courier. Clive, who came from less auspicious but solidly middle-class origins, went to fight in Spain and was captured soon after arrival – his release a year later was apparently secured though a relative of Noreen’s who was a member of the Spanish royal family, although this was never made public. Clive was an accomplished artist, making the lives of Communists and working people in Battersea the subject of his paintings. We shall meet him again in Chapter 7. Noreen went on to work for the Labour Research Department and in her later years completed the history of the Communist Party started by another intellectual convert to communism, James Klugman. 18

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 18

29-01-2021 01:21:03

The USSR, World Revolution

Communist Activity in Battersea, 1939, by Clive Branson. (Rosa Branson)

Life in the CPGB became increasingly undemocratic during the 1930s as Stalin’s vice-like grip took hold of Communist Parties worldwide. The only way to deal with the twists and turns of policy was through an unswerving and religious-like belief in Stalin’s leadership. Harry McShane, a Clydeside activist and CPGB member throughout the 1920s and 1930s, recalled these years in his memoirs: But generally, it got so that inside the party it was impossible to speak out against decisions. Harry Pollitt would put the line, and if you disagreed, he would simply say: ‘Comrade you are attacking Stalin.’ The worship even spread to Lenin. At one stage some branches had ‘little Lenin’ corners in their meeting rooms, like secular shrines.*

The Second World War Begins The outbreak of war in September 1939 was greeted by the CPGB as the latest chapter in the anti-fascist crusade which they were happy to * McShane and Smith: No Mean Fighter pp. 212-213.

19

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 19

29-01-2021 01:21:03

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

support along with whatever allies could be mustered. A pamphlet by Harry Pollitt titled How to Win the War was rushed out within days, declaring, ‘We are in support of all measures to secure the victory of democracy over fascism … The Communist Party supports the War, believing it to be a just war, which should be supported by the whole working class and all friends of democracy in Britain.’ However, later that month details emerged of the hitherto secret treaty between the USSR and Nazi Germany – the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 which had not only forestalled war between the two countries but had carved up territory in Poland and the Baltics, and increased trade. An acrimonious CPGB Central Committee meeting on 24 September thrashed out the Party’s position: those who followed the Moscow line and argued a rather hollow, if fine-sounding, revolutionary internationalism clashed with those, like Pollitt, who argued from the anti-fascist popular front position the Party had followed with some success over the previous four years. The result inevitably went in Moscow’s favour. Pollitt’s pamphlet was withdrawn. he was forced to stand down from the leadership (only temporarily) and his pamphlet replaced by one authored by R. Palme Dutt, entitled Why This War, which explained things very differently. The Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland was now ‘an extension of the boundaries of world socialism’ and the UK’s declaration of war on Germany was a precursor to a future conflict between British imperialism and the Soviet Union. Readers were also told that the Soviet Union’s actions in securing peace with the Nazis had ‘spiked’ the aggressive war plans of both Hitler and British Prime Minister Chamberlain. Quoting the German socialist Liebknecht’s 1915 slogan that ‘The enemy is at home’ (made under entirely different circumstances in 1915), the pamphlet urged workers to step up their actions against the Tory government, their collaborators in the Labour Party, and the boss classes who stood to profit from the war. The new line saw a loss of support – the Left Book Club’s platform for the Party evaporated as did that of intellectual sympathizers like Labour MP John Strachey. Former CPGB stalwarts like Tom Wintringham and Fred Cope used skills learned in the Spanish Civil War to respectively train Home Guard volunteers and develop more effective air raid precautions. The question of inadequate air raid shelters in target areas such as the East End of London was a matter of public disgrace: as the Blitz took hold towards the end of 1940, the woeful preparations by the government to protect working-class people caused bewilderment and anger – seized 20

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 20

29-01-2021 01:21:03

The USSR, World Revolution

Above left: Pollitt’s hastily withdrawn pamphlet of September 1939. (Author’s collection) Above right: … and Palme Dutt’s Moscow line replacement. (Author’s collection)

upon by the CPGB. Stepney CPGB Councillor Phil Piratin led agitation concerning the unsatisfactory refuge which had been unofficially sought by thousands under the Tilbury railway arches in his borough. Similar activity took place elsewhere in London and in badly bombed cities like Coventry. On 15 September 1940 Piratin organized a demonstration during an air raid to highlight class difference when he led seventy East Enders into the plush shelter organized for the patrons of the Savoy Hotel. The police were called, but as an air raid was underway, could hardly remove the men, women and children taking part; they had already won the sympathy of the waiters who were bringing them tea and cakes. When the all-clear sounded, the demonstrators left quietly having made their point. Such efforts to seek proper deep shelters were met by official panic and covert as well as overt police activity, but eventually the government took action to improve conditions and provision in London’s tube stations. In October the CPGB published the pamphlet Bombers Over London which made connections between the profit 21

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 21

29-01-2021 01:21:04

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

motives of cement manufacturers and the inadequate provisions for workers and their families. The efforts of Party members to extend sales of the Daily Worker during these hard times, outside tube stations as raids began, paradoxically contributed to the sense of popular defiance associated with that period. The machinations between Germany and the Soviet Union in the wake of their pact, such as the annexation of the Baltic states in June 1940, or the handing over of 400 German Communists who had sought refuge in the USSR to the Gestapo, were either explained away or ignored. Until June 1941, Party agitation and The popular 1940 CPGB pamphlet calling for literature focused on the needs better air-raid shelters. (Author’s collection) of working people – whether for better wages, or as we have seen, for better air-raid protection – and called for a ‘People’s Government’ to meet the threats of fascism at home and abroad. The People’s Convention of January 1941 brought together over 2,000 delegates to hear addresses from CP leaders alongside ‘housewives … soldiers … and trade unionists’ who made brief and broad statements that attracted huge applause. On this occasion the friends in high places that had spoken at such gatherings before the war were absent in numbers although the meeting heard D.N. Pritt, an independent Labour MP recently expelled from the Labour Party for his pro-Soviet views (see below). Prior to the Convention the BBC had put pressure on some of its well-known contributors (like Michael Redgrave and Vaughan Williams) by advising then that they would be denied broadcasts if they persisted with supporting the Convention – in the face of stand-off from some including the writer E.M. Forster, the BBC backed down. The Convention was also addressed by Indian nationalists whose aspirations for independence were being stifled 22

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 22

29-01-2021 01:21:05

The USSR, World Revolution

by the British imperialist power. A few weeks later the Daily Worker was banned, although the Party itself, along with other publications supporting an anti-war pacifist position, remained legal. The campaign for support to reinstate the paper became an obvious focus for Party activity. Party membership was said to have reached 20,000 by March 1940, so its arguments, however flawed they may seem in hindsight, clearly had some resonance amongst militant workers suspicious about the war and its aims. The idea of a ‘People’s Peace’ as advocated by the Party won sympathy amongst people battered by the blitz, just as did the ‘People’s Convention’s’ call for an emphasis on deep shelters rather than munitions. When the Soviet Union went to war with Finland in late 1939, because the latter had refused to redraw their boundaries in the Soviets’ favour, their case was taken up by D.N. Pritt MP, who was promptly expelled from the Labour Party – Britain having encouraged the Finns to resist. The CPGB’s supporters continued to argue the Soviet Union’s case through the efforts of the Russia Today Society, a front organization whose pamphlets included at this time one by the Dean of Canterbury arguing for trade and better relations; he also argued against British military incursion in the Arctic region of northern Norway which was in effect a battle with the Nazis over mineral resources in a border area of obvious interest to the USSR. It must be borne in mind that the USSR at this time was supplying Nazi Germany with supplies such as oil for its war effort. Soviet arguments did not meet with a popular resonance. Agitation around pay, conditions, undemocratic and class-ridden structures, also took place within the armed services. These, along with industrial interventions around bread-and-butter trade union issues eventually led to government action as we shall see.

Conclusion The early commitment of the new regime in Russia to foment worldwide revolution through the Comintern began to fade by the end of the 1920s. This was due, in no small part, to Stalin’s decision that socialism could be built in one country – the USSR. Such an ideology was contrary to the teachings of Lenin and the early Bolsheviks but accepted as a recognition of the realities of the time. In Britain, Communists driven by ideals 23

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 23

29-01-2021 01:21:05

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

concerning change needed at home, struggled at times to marry their beliefs with the diktats of the Comintern leadership whose main purpose now was to serve the Soviet Union’s foreign policy requirements. By the end of the 1930s, news about some of the harsher realities of life in the USSR was tempered for CPGB loyalists by the awful consequences of capitalism at home, and the notion that the Soviet Union provided a bulwark against the rising threat of fascism. Contradictions were only accentuated by the outbreak of war in 1939 and the neutral stance adopted by the Soviet Union. All this was to change dramatically on 22 June 1941 when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. That story will be picked up again in Chapter 3.

24

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 24

29-01-2021 01:21:05

Chapter 2

Keeping Communism at Bay: Home and Abroad, 1917–1941

Judged by every standard which history has applied to governments, the Soviet government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. Winston Churchill’s speech in Edinburgh, 25 September 1924* In the previous chapter we saw how the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the coming to power of the Bolsheviks inspired a movement for worldwide revolution under the leadership of the new Communist International (Comintern). In Britain this saw the creation of a Communist Party, the CPGB, affiliated to the Comintern. Such developments presented a challenge to the British state and empire from which its wealth and prestige rested: in theory at least, the thousands of CPGB members who were active in British politics and whose goal was the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism were agents of the Soviet Union. This fact was not necessarily realized by most CPGB members themselves but certainly was by the USSR, and by the organs of the British state. This chapter will examine the responses made by government to the USSR as a foreign power, and to its supporters at home. Such an understanding is important so that the changes that occurred once the Soviet Union entered the war can be placed in a true perspective.

The British Government Responds to the October 1917 Revolution The new Bolshevik government’s promise to deliver peace to the war-weary Russian people was greeted with dismay by the Allies (Britain, France and * Quoted in Bell, 1990.

25

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 25

29-01-2021 01:21:05

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

the United States). A separate peace would release the German Kaiser’s Eastern Front armies for service on the Western Front where the stalemate was precarious. Britain also had considerable financial interests in Russia and these were under threat both by the Bolsheviks, and by the Germans if the new government collapsed and they stepped in to fill the void. This was of little interest to the Bolsheviks who were anyway hoping that their revolution would spread and that any imperialist designs by either the Germans or the Allies would be seen off by successful insurrection at home. In March 1918 Trotsky concluded negotiations with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk which gave the Germans control of the Baltic states, Poland and the Ukraine and which renounced historical claims to Finland. Three days later, with Bolshevik permission, 130 British Marines landed at Murmansk to guard British military supplies previously landed for the Tsarist army. In the meantime, in the capital Moscow, British agents working for the Secret Intelligence Service were conspiring, under the official auspices of ensuring that the Germans could not realize their ambitions through invasion of Russia, to overthrow the regime. This involved plots to destroy the Russian Baltic fleet, flood mines and blow up munitions dumps. For some of the British officers involved, there was little about anti-German activity that was not actually anti-Bolshevik in nature, character and intent. In August 1918 an assassination attempt on Lenin by the Social Revolutionary Dora Kaplan (a rival leftist party banned by the Bolsheviks) in which the British were almost certainly involved, resulted in an armed incursion into the British embassy by the Cheka (the Bolshevik Secret Police) in which the military attaché, Captain Francis Cromie, was shot and killed. Others like ‘Ace of Spies’ Sidney Reilly escaped whilst senior diplomat Robert Bruce-Lockhart was arrested and later exchanged for his Soviet London counterpart, Max Litvinov. Russia by this time, was in ferment with White armies in several areas fighting to defeat the Soviet regime. In June the British had increased their force in Murmansk by 600, an action seen as aggressive by the Bolshevik government, especially after the Kaplan plot. With troops still badly needed on the Western Front, the British persuaded Czech troops who had been fighting for the Tsar to join them in Murmansk and the Far East, along with some US troops. A further British force landed at Archangel in August where they fought briefly against Red soldiers who retreated. Yet more were deployed to Vladivostok where they formed a sizeable force alongside Japanese and US forces. Up until now all such incursions were 26

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 26

29-01-2021 01:21:05

Keeping Communism at Bay

on the official basis of defending British and other foreign interests against the Germans. However, the Allied August offensive on the Western Front, together with mounting revolutionary feeling in Germany that led to the armistice in November, brought this pretence to an end. By the end of 1918 there were 180,000 foreign troops in Russia and the territory controlled by the Bolshevik government was dwindling. The British Cabinet were openly discussing the possibility of sending divisions to march on Moscow with the White armies to depose the Bolsheviks entirely. There were Bolshevik leaflet to British troops in Murmansk, 1918. (British Library/Wikimedia Commons) many against this, including Prime Minister Lloyd George, but chief amongst the hawks was Winston Churchill who was about to be appointed Minister for War. Churchill correctly assessed that the new Russian regime constituted a threat to the British Empire and particularly its interests in areas of historical dispute with the old Russian Empire such as Persia, Afghanistan and India. With his long-standing antipathy to militant working-class organization in the UK – he had sent troops against striking miners in Tonypandy in 1910 – he also recognized the threat at home that Bolshevik ideas represented. As the revolution continued to be besieged throughout 1919 the British prevaricated, lurching between determination amongst some to defeat the communist menace, and a wish amongst others to leave the Russians to decide matters for themselves. Further trooops were sent to northern Russia and support would be sent to the south of Russia where General Denikin was leading the White forces. Churchill chose to interpret Cabinet directives as an anti-Bolshevik crusade: tanks, artillery and air force units were sent to support Denikin whilst a British naval squadron in the Baltic (aided by British troops) helped secure independence in Finland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania by attacking and 27

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 27

29-01-2021 01:21:05

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

British troops in Baku, August 1918. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

Officers from HMS Suffolk, Vladivostok, January 1919. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

neutralizing the Soviet Baltic fleet. However, the foreign interventions were generally half-hearted and the White armies riven with division and desertion to the Reds; by mid-1919 the counter-revolution was heading towards defeat. With mutinous attacks by disaffected troops against 28

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 28

29-01-2021 01:21:05

Keeping Communism at Bay

British officers, and a general lack of success, the British under General Ironside withdrew from the south in September 1919, taking with them the remnants of Denikin’s army.

Inter-War Relations with the Soviet Union By 1921 the Civil War was over and the Soviet Union, minus the newly independent Baltic states, Poland and Finland (which had all been part of the old Tsarist Empire), but including Eastern Ukraine, was able to begin its recovery from long years of war and destruction. The British government remained cool in its attitude but did strike a trade agreement in 1921, after which Soviet diplomats were present in London. The Soviet Union had embarked on its New Economic Policy (NEP) in the same year: whilst primarily aimed at increasing food production from the countryside by reintroducing the market, the policy also tried to make foreign investment attractive – all as a temporary expedient until the economy was strong enough for renewed socialist measures. The British government under Labour recognized the Soviet Union formally in 1924, a measure that upset many in the establishment. The Comintern of course was still advocating revolution and in effect determining the Soviet regime’s attitude to foreign governments through its support for left-wing parties who were not in power but who shared its views and ideals. The Labour government of 1924, in power through a hung parliament having won fewer seats than the Tories in the December 1923 general election, was moderate in its activity. However, as the first-ever Labour government, it was regarded by the establishment with great suspicion and its attempt at rapprochement with the Soviet Union only served to increase such sentiment. After a successful no-confidence motion, an election was called for October 1924. Just four days prior to the general election, the Daily Mail published the ‘Zinoviev Letter’: this forgery purported to give direction from the top of the Comintern to the CPGB to engage in seditious activity using opportunities created by the presence of a Labour government. This helped defeat Labour at the polls and continued to stoke anti-Soviet feeling. One long-term outcome of this incident was an immovable belief within the Labour Party that the CPGB were agents of Soviet Russia: whilst at times, unity of purpose and action inside the trade unions or within popular movements was 29

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 29

29-01-2021 01:21:05

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Punch cartoon, September 1924, showing Labour’s admiration of the USSR but rejection of links with the CPGB. (Topfoto UK)

desirable and acceptable, affiliation to Labour, a policy fought for on and off by CPGB members and sympathizers for many years, was not. In May 1927 the British Secret Services raided the offices of the Soviet Trade Delegation in London on the basis of intelligence suggesting that they were handling secrets stolen from the British military. British Intelligence had actually planted an obsolete but secret RAF handbook on a Soviet agent and believed this would be found. The USSR Trade Delegation was a large enterprise employing over 400 staff, the majority of whom were Soviet citizens. Intercepts of messages had led to strong suspicion that this was a centre for subversive activity and the knowledge of the RAF document suggested proof was available. The Conservative government Home Secretary, after sounding out Prime Minister Baldwin, agreed to the raid on its eve, having received assurances that as the premises were shared with ARCOS Ltd (All Russian Co-Operative Society), a UK-registered company, questions of diplomatic immunity could be avoided. At 4.25 p.m. on 12 May, 100 uniformed police officers, fifty Special Branch officers and some interpreters launched an armed 30

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 30

29-01-2021 01:21:06

Keeping Communism at Bay

invasion of the building. The suddenness of the raid was not enough to prevent the occupants from sealing off a central room in the building within which two men burned documents, amongst which may have been the RAF handbook (which was never located). Other strong rooms were also eventually breached and a large quantity of documents removed, some of which were said to contain details of trade union and other contacts in the UK and abroad. Arms were also found which the Soviets claimed were hunting rifles intended for shipment to Moscow. On 26 May the British broke off diplomatic relations with the USSR and publicized information to justify this, all of which was probably known prior to the raid – including that discovered through separate telecommunication interceptions, a huge blunder as it tipped off the Soviets who then changed all their ciphers and communication methods. The Holy Grail of seriously incriminating and revealing documents was never discovered, no one was arrested or charged, and when balanced against its repercussions, the raid was not judged in hindsight as a British success. Formal relations were resumed with the election of a British Labour government in 1929 but stalled when, spurred on by the Tory opposition, insistence was made that Tsarist debts were repaid in full. The stand-off and diplomatic strain continued until 1932 when the Soviets appointed Ivan Maisky as ambassador in London – a move designed to help improve relations. Maisky was a cultured individual who had spent time as an exile in London: he spoke English well, had many contacts and friends, and understood British politics at the same time as having proved his commitment to Soviet interests through previous diplomatic postings. He was a pragmatic individual who managed to avoid fatal confrontations with those he served despite having been a Menshevik (a rival Party dissolved by the Bolsheviks after the revolution) in his youth. He was to survive in this post in London until 1943 and will feature in future chapters. His diaries, which have only fairly recently surfaced, are quite unique amongst those of his generation because of the personal danger they posed, and offer a useful insight into those times in the London embassy and relations between the two countries. In 1928 the Soviet Union embarked upon its first ‘Five-year Plan’ aimed at speeding up the pace of industrialization. The spread of electric power was crucial and the hiring of specialists from advanced capitalist countries necessary to substitute for the absence of technical expertise within the USSR. Amongst the foreign specialists who went to the Soviet 31

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 31

29-01-2021 01:21:06

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Union on a contractual basis was a group of engineers from the British company Metro-Vickers. In early 1933 Stalin made a speech in which he warned against the presence of counter-revolutionary wreckers whose aim was to undermine the Five-year Plan. This was classic Stalin – the fostering of an atmosphere of paranoia within which mistakes and setbacks could be blamed on class enemies who would be created if they did not exist. There seems little doubt that the dramatic arrest of six MetroVickers officials alleged to have organized disruption to power supplies throughout the country fitted this scheme. Evidence for the charges that brought them to a public trial in April 1933, were based on confessions made under duress alongside speculation about motives and connections between events. The case caused interest worldwide and put international relations generally under pressure. After a week-long trial, four of the six received prison sentences with two receiving no punishment. It seems that the case after all had not fitted with Soviet interests: in June, at the World Economic Conference in London attended by Max Litvinov, Soviet People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, a meeting with British Foreign Secretary Lord Simon, resulted in the lifting of British economic measures against the USSR, and the freeing of the imprisoned engineers. A formal agreement involving mutual tariff reductions and trade followed in 1934; the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations in 1935. Relations, however, remained strained through the 1930s as both countries tried to deal with the rising Nazi threat in Germany. Hitler had long declared communism as a mortal enemy to be destroyed, his desire to create living space for the German people being clearly directed towards the resourcerich territories of the USSR. The idea that some in the British establishment saw Hitler as a bulwark against communism was not misplaced – as the Soviets suspected. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, which was made without the approval of the Soviet Union or even European allies such as France (and which breached the Treaty of Versailles), gave Germany permission to increase its navy and commence battleship construction – so long as their fleet was no more than a third the size of Britain’s (a gross miscalculation as would be learned when the war came). There would have been many within the burgeoning bureaucracy in the Admiralty, a few years after the Invergordon Mutiny, who saw a larger German navy as a counter to communism.* Britain seemed more concerned with protecting its imperial * Deighton 1993.

32

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 32

29-01-2021 01:21:06

Keeping Communism at Bay

interests than stopping German territorial ambitions in Europe and the East. This was also borne out by attitudes to the Francoist rebellion and civil war in Spain – the Soviet Union actively supporting the democratically elected left leaning government but the British supporting a neutrality that simply gave space to the rebel right wing nationalists. The British government, repelled by the purges that decimated the Red Army in 1937/8 and believing that the Soviets would be useless as a military ally, excluded them from negotiations over Czechoslovakia in 1938 which ended with the Munich agreement. Stalin advised after this that the gift of Czechoslovakia to the Germans was ‘a prize for her undertaking to launch war on the Soviet Union’. In 1939, the Soviets made offers on international conferences to discuss what would in effect be anti-German alliances: these were rejected, ostensibly because the British wanted guarantees of independence for Poland, Greece and Rumania, but also because they were afraid of the implications of being tied in too closely with the USSR. AntiSoviet speeches in the House of Commons only served to isolate the USSR further and in May, frustrated by lack of progress, Stalin began tentative diplomatic discussions with the Germans whilst at the same time keeping the door open for the British and French. From different perspectives, but from the sidelines, the Tory backbencher Churchill and the Labour trade union leader Bevin were both advocating alliance with the USSR against the Nazi threat, but this did not influence Chamberlain’s government view. Ambassador Maisky wrote in his diaries of a September 1938 of a private meeting when Churchill agreed that at some point in the future, they would drink a special bottle of vintage wine together when ‘Great Britain and Russia beat Hitler’s Germany!’ In August 1939, in a final move to seek security on its borders, the Soviets concluded the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Germany, a deal which neither side expected to last for long. Within days the Second World War began with the German Molotov signs the pact with Ribbentrop, August invasion of Poland. 1939. (Wikimedia Commons) 33

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 33

29-01-2021 01:21:06

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

The Intelligence Services and the CPGB up until 1941 Covert activity by the Secret Service agencies against the Soviets and their associations with friends in the CPGB got seriously underway after the arrival of the first envoys in 1921. Some of this was farcical. In April 1924 the speakers at a CPGB conference discovered ‘burglars’ directly underneath the main platform of a hall in which they were meeting; they called the police who arrested the suspects: Detective Sergeant Hopley and colleagues from Scotland Yard. After the publication of the Zinoviev Letter such surveillance and activity went up a gear: in October 1925 the police raided the CPGB main London offices in King Street, the Young Communist League (YCL) offices in Great Ormond Street and the Workers’ Weekly office in Fleet Street, hauling away a massive amount of material – letters, leaflets and other publications. Ten prominent Party leaders were arrested: Albert Inkpen (CPGB Secretary), Ernest Cant (London organizer), William Rust (YCL Secretary), Tom Wintringham (Assistant Editor of the paper), Harry Pollitt (Comintern Executive member), Willie Gallacher (later an MP for West Fife), Tom Bell (CPGB Executive member), John Murphy (delegate to the 1924 Comintern Congress), Robert Arnot (Director of Labour Research), Wal Hannington (CPGB Executive member) and Arthur McManus (CPGB Executive member). After a well-publicized eight-day trial in November 1925, all twelve were found guilty of seditious behaviour and incitement to mutiny: the five who had previous convictions were imprisoned for twelve months and the rest to six months’ imprisonment. Although this took these top leaders of the Party out of circulation, including during the General Strike of the following May, it failed in its task of proving that the CPGB was run by ‘Moscow gold’ despite evidence given of six years’ worth of surveillance by Special Branch. However, similar allegations were to re-emerge during the General Strike, and indeed did so at propitious times right up until the demise of the Soviet Union over sixty years later. Communism was an international cause and the British Empire a target for agitation around the right of nations to freedom and selfdetermination. Throughout the 1930s the Foreign Office in London received weekly intelligence briefings (titled ‘Communism in the Colonies’) from the High Commissions in each of the Commonwealth countries which were then analysed and shared back with the 34

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 34

29-01-2021 01:21:06

Keeping Communism at Bay

administrations in each country – who were encouraged to link with one another to counter the threats from communist-inspired nationalist movements. The CPGB enjoyed strong links, fostered by the Comintern, with Indian nationalists amongst whom they tried to enhance the influence of the Indian Communist Party. As mentioned, Noreen Branson was sent to India in 1934, when, as a new recruit and British debutante from an aristocratic family, she was able to evade efforts to identify the Comintern agent known to be active in Bombay (Mumbai). Whilst such British intelligence-gathering was not a crucial factor during this period, it was stepped up after 1945 with the onset of the Cold War. Up until the General Strike in 1926, both British Intelligence and the far right (in the form of various organizations including some associated with the mainstream Conservative Party) regarded the threat of communist revolution as very real. The growth and influence of the CPGB alongside widespread industrial militancy was almost continuous even though those on the left might not have shared the view of their opponents about their real chances of success in those years. British Intelligence (MI5) was underfunded due to post-war spending cuts and operated through the intelligence activities of independent far-right groups like the secretive organization ‘K’ which was associated with the British Fascists organization. ‘K’ was involved in street fighting and destructive raids on CPGB premises – in 1925 they broke into the Glasgow offices three times within the space of a few weeks –but through tacit manipulation by MI5 provided a great deal of useful intelligence. Fascist organizations at this time were robustly anti-Communist and pro-Empire rather than, as became the case in the 1930s, supportive of a specific programme based on antisemitism and German Nazi militarism. One of the leading members was the eccentric and enthusiastic anticommunist Maxwell Knight, who had originally infiltrated ‘K’ on behalf of the British Empire Union, a rather more conservative and less-militant right-wing organization led and funded by some wealthy industrialists. On the basis of his experience, running agents within ‘K’, Knight became absorbed by MI5 to the point where he ran their CPGB infiltration operations in the inter-war period. This was after the debacle of the 1927 ARCOS raid and at a time, after the Wall Street crash of 1929 when the potential for the CPGB seemed to have grown again. However, this resurgence of popularity for the left also resulted in the election of a Labour government, one of whose first moves was to seek to normalize 35

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 35

29-01-2021 01:21:06

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

relations with the USSR, banning further anti-Soviet activity by the intelligence services. Treading a fine line with government directives, surveillance of the CPGB was actually stepped up through the tapping of phones and opening of mail, and attempts at infiltration which were not always successful. In March 1932 the CPGB publicized, through the Daily Worker, an approach Special Branch made to one of its followers who had told her comrades, and advised its members and supporters to be vigilant against state spying activity. Knight’s first real success in his MI5 role was to recruit and infiltrate Olga Gray, a young clerical worker, into the communist movement. Olga, although later described as a ‘glamorous blonde’, was socially isolated, quiet and unassuming, and therefore suitable as a spy because of her ability to blend into the background and not draw attention to herself. On Knight’s instructions she began attending Friends of the Soviet Union meetings in 1931, these being a front organization for the CPGB (which actually had branches worldwide) whose aims were simply to foster better understanding and sympathy towards the Soviet Union. By 1933, she and other agents had worked their way further into the British Communist movement but not yet into its innermost echelons where it was felt proof could be found about Moscow’s funding and control of the organization, and its subversive and treasonable activities. In May 1934 Harry Pollitt invited Olga to become a Comintern courier, carrying papers and money abroad on its behalf – in similar fashion to Noreen Branson although their paths do not seem to have crossed. After her return to the UK from Bombay, and a mission seen as successful by both the CPGB and her MI5 paymasters, Olga spent a period away from her previous work (she was suffering from nervous exhaustion). However, she was soon approached by Pollitt and asked to become his private secretary in the King Street headquarters of the CPGB; after conferring with Knight, she agreed to the new job. This really took MI5 to the heart of British Communism and gave them access to information that they had previously only dreamed about. This double life soon took its toll on Olga and she suffered a complete breakdown and hospitalization in July 1935, leading to her complete withdrawal from service to both the CPGB and MI5 – to the great regret of both. Despite her genuine intent she was drawn back into spying when a British-born Kremlin NKVD agent, Percy Glading, who had been recruited from within the CPGB, approached her for a new role, looking after a safe 36

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 36

29-01-2021 01:21:06

Keeping Communism at Bay

house which would be used for clandestine operations. Her involvement was again steered by Knight for MI5. The Soviet plot centred on the ‘borrowing’ of secret documents from the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich engaged on the development of naval armaments. The safe house would be used to photograph them overnight, and the film then smuggled to Moscow to aid Stalin’s intent to build the Red Navy. One run, closely monitored by MI5 who failed to intercept at the right time, resulted in the successful transfer to Moscow of secrets concerning a new 14-inch gun for the Royal Navy. Finally, in January 1938, the police intercepted a handover of documents from a Woolwich worker involved in the ring, to Glading at Charing Cross Station. The successful operation resulted in a widely publicized trial in which Olga Gray, known as ‘Miss X’, was the main witness. She was then spirited away to start a new life. Olga Gray was not the only individual Knight organized to infiltrate the CPGB in the 1930s, but she was by far the most successful at that time. However, her efforts, as it later emerged, were more than overshadowed by the highly successful penetration of MI5 and particularly MI6 by the ‘Cambridge’ ring of Soviet spies: Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt, whose activities lasted until the early 1950s, passing secrets and neutralizing British intelligence activity concerning the Soviet Union. Like Glading and his comrades, they were driven by an ideological commitment to Soviet ideals that overrode all other considerations – something never quite understood by their counterparts. Their story lies outside the remit of this book.

Diplomatic Relations, 1939–1941 After the outbreak of war, and the annexation by the USSR of eastern Poland, relations between Britain and the Soviet Union sunk to new lows as Britain offered support to the Finns who were under attack from the Soviets. In December 1939, the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations, and the British ambassador departed from Moscow, not to be replaced for six months. However, through Maisky, attempts at an Anglo-Soviet trade agreement were examined but foundered, partly because the USSR was abiding by the letter to trade agreements already made with Germany that were of course against British interests. 37

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 37

29-01-2021 01:21:06

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

During this period the Soviets supplied materials to the Nazis, such as oil, that were contributing to their war effort, and at one point provided an icebreaker to lead a German warship through the northern sea route to the Pacific: however, they made no direct interventions to support German aggression and did not encourage others to do so. Their own military actions and annexations of territory were, in the Soviet view, aimed at securing their borders from the type of invasions that had dogged Russian history – from the Swedish invasion of the early eighteenth century, the French invasion under Napoleon a hundred years later, and then the First World War – all of which were devastating in terms of destruction and lives lost. Discussions with the British resumed in June 1940 after the German invasion of Belgium, Holland and France – rapid victories that upset the Soviets because of the likelihood that Hitler would now turn his attentions eastward. In a gesture of conciliation Britain appointed as ambassador to Moscow Sir Stafford Cripps who was a known admirer of the Soviet system. However, Soviet annexation of the Baltic states who had each rejected an ultimatum about the reform of their governments and the right of passage of Soviet troops, led to further tensions. There were further discussions into 1941 but these failed to strike agreements on either trade or territorial integrity despite a worsening of relations between the USSR and Germany. Soviet suspicions of British motives were further raised when Hitler’s deputy Rudolph Hess landed in Scotland in May 1941: Stalin persisted in a belief until at least 1944 that this was engineered by the British to bring about peace and an antiSoviet alliance. In fact, Hess, whatever his intentions might have been or who might have been involved, was cut adrift entirely by Hitler and locked up by the British for the duration of the war after which he was placed on trial along with other Nazi leaders at Nuremburg. Between 1939 and 1941 the Soviet ambassador Maisky found himself generally shunned and isolated by the British government and establishment figures who had courted his opinions and influence in the pre-war period. However, he maintained his efforts to promote Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to the UK 1932–43. (mil.ru/Wikimedia Commons)

38

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 38

29-01-2021 01:21:06

Keeping Communism at Bay

understanding of the Soviet position and good relations. This did not always find favour back in Moscow either, and his diaries suggest that having survived the purges of 1937/8, he was forced to tread a fine line to ensure survival. Britain warned the USSR of intelligence concerning Nazi war preparations in the east but Stalin chose his own interpretation of this and other strong evidence provided by his own agents of German intentions, believing they were merely putting on pressure to win concessions surrounding trade and territory. On 22 June 1941 the die was cast for complete change with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

Intelligence Activities and the CPGB, 1939–1941 Once the Party’s line had been clarified, CPGB members were officially bound to condemn the war as one between capitalist nations in which workers had no interest (see Chapter 1). This Comintern position (although it had never met to discuss it) was broadly in line with the position socialists had adopted in the First World War but most CPGB members preferred to concentrate on economic matters as well as issues like air-raid protection. None argued the Party position to the extent of calling for the defeat of their own rulers – as many had during the previous war. However, the intelligence services were keen to find any evidence they could of communist involvement in seditious activity. In the first year of the war a number of activists were arrested for the content of their public speeches and convicted over such matters as ‘using insulting language’; in June 1940 alone there had been fortyfive such cases with only two acquittals and some defendants receiving maximum sentences. In May 1940 with Churchill now Prime Minister and the ‘phoney war’ over, an Emergency Powers (Defence) Act was passed that was immediately used to detain without trial Sir Oswald Mosley and 700 members of the British Union of Fascists. Regulation 18B could be similarly used against the CPGB and its members if it was felt that its activities were seditious. With war coming ever closer to the British people, and a threat of invasion now real, the CPGB amended its position from opposition to war to a call for a new ‘People’s Government’ that might defeat both the Nazis and those at home who were responsible for appeasement and pro-Nazi views. This was less 39

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 39

29-01-2021 01:21:06

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

overtly challenging to British national interests in the war but the CPGB was still regarded as a threat. The CPGB published a leaflet entitled The People Must Act in June 1940 calling for a new government that would represent the interests of workers. This attracted the attention of the authorities: in July 1940 the War Cabinet received a report from the Home Secretary advising that the CPGB were trying ‘to discredit the government’ and ‘foment opposition to the successful prosecution of the war’. Argument took place about whether the leaflet itself should be banned or whether the Daily Worker too should also be proscribed. In the end it was resolved that the leaflet should be suppressed and that the paper should be warned about its future content. In July 1940, the previous actions against speakers at public meetings and rallies was extended to CPGB members in their homes – ostensibly to search for The People Must Act leaflets but removing other materials and books. Some people were detained and their employers contacted with a view to dismissing them from areas of work considered as war production. The matter was taken up by the National Council for Civil Liberties as a free-speech issue and the CPGB published a pamphlet advising members how they might defend themselves. At the same time Defence Regulation 18B was brought in to play, although only against a small number of CPGB activists and usually for very short periods. One of these was John Mason, a steelworker detained on 15 July 1940. Mason, a shop steward and Secretary of Mexborough Trades Council in West Yorkshire, was alleged to have been involved in activity designed to slow down production although evidence was never made public. His case was taken up across the country but detention in an internment camp lasted until 12 June 1941. It may be that Mason was used as a test case and the opposition his detention provoked ensured that his case remained an exception. Towards the end of 1940 the CPGB stepped up its agitation amongst armed forces personnel. With a young membership many of its members were being called up for service but remained keen to be active. In October 1940 a shopworker’s delegate to the TUC who had been conscripted, appeared in uniform: Harry Berger, a London Communist, spoke with descriptive vividness to a motion demanding better pay and conditions for armed forces personnel. This was well received whilst his intervention concerning the war in Finland, where he advocated the CPGB position, was most certainly not – resulting in a question 40

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 40

29-01-2021 01:21:06

Keeping Communism at Bay

in the House of Commons. Up until this time CPGB members who had been called up were tacitly advised to go undercover and exercise caution about revealing their allegiances. This was often ignored and Party members proudly argued their position, especially on economic issues, to their fellow servicemen. They also lent one another strength by meeting up unofficially, recruiting new members and sending in reports to the Daily Worker. In November 1940 the paper began a regular ‘soldier’s page’ which gained enough popularity to become ‘Our Page for Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen’, appearing at least weekly. Some of the more ridiculous traditions and practices in the Services were highlighted in letters and articles signed with initials. All this of course did not go unnoticed: in late December the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison put to the War Cabinet that Defence Regulation 2B should be invoked and the Daily Worker banned. Whilst admitting in a memorandum written a few days previously that there was no evidence that the CPGB’s paper was engaged in direct attempts to undermine the war effort through sabotage or refusal to handle munitions, it had ‘striven to create in the reader a state of mind in which he will be unlikely to be keen to assist in the war effort’. Morrison also sought to ban The Week, a paper aimed at an intellectual audience edited by Claud Cockburn but advocating the same positions as the daily paper. Again, the question of ‘Moscow Gold’ was raised but no evidence was found to substantiate rumours of Soviet finance for these papers and associated Party publications. The proposal went on to be approved at a Cabinet meeting on 13 January 1941 – the day after the People’s Convention. However, things did not proceed to plan and a leak of government intentions was published in the Sunday Express prior to planned implementation of the ban on 21 January, allowing the Daily Worker to publish a defiant reaction prior to its closure. The Cabinet also decided to set up a Committee on Communist Activities to look at possible action against the CPGB. This met on several occasions until a final decision on 5 February 1941 that no action would be taken against the Party – there was no evidence of actual sabotage of the war effort and any attempt at using the law against Party leaders could be used by them in the courts and elsewhere as propaganda exercises (as demonstrated in the Mason case). A decision of the committee to ban certain CPGB leaflets was never invoked and the Party continued to distribute material including those calling for a lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker. 41

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 41

29-01-2021 01:21:06

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

The Case of George Armstrong In the neutral USA, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) was operating quite beyond the law of either its own or its host country, with its anti-German operations. Using a combination of sophisticated surveillance and violence, SIS agents terrorized and murdered German agents in American Atlantic seaboard ports who were suspected of sabotage against British shipping taking food and vital supplies back across the Atlantic. In late 1940 it apparently picked up that a 39-yearold British merchant seaman, George Armstrong, had made contact with German agents in order to pass on details about British convoys that would be useful to U-Boat operations. Armstrong was subsequently arrested and detained by the US authorities and deported back to Britain in February 1941. The story goes (as related by British writer Nigel West) that he was a CPGB member from Newcastle who was influenced by Soviet foreign minister Molotov’s call to Allied seamen to desert their ships in neutral ports – in line with Comintern policy that this was a capitalist war. Armstrong was alleged to have argued this at meetings up and down the USA after leaving his ship in Boston earlier in 1940. He had then allegedly offered to go back to Britain to spy for the Germans. After his return to the UK under arrest he was further interrogated, tried and executed for treason on 10 July 1941, one of sixteen alleged Nazi agents to suffer this consequence – but the only one said to have been driven by Communist beliefs and support for the USSR. There are some odd factors about this story that rather undermine its premise and suggest a gross miscarriage of justice – or so it is argued by socialist historian Ray Challinor who investigated the matter. Molotov never made any call for Allied seamen or servicemen to overtly undermine their national war efforts, and this interpretation of his calls for peace twisted reality to extremes. The Soviets were at this time, as we have seen earlier, trying not antagonize anyone on either side of the ‘capitalist war’ at the same time as trying to defend their own interests. There is also no evidence that Armstrong was a CPGB member – in fact he was in all probability an unattached socialist influenced by the ILP. When he spoke at meetings in the USA, as he certainly did after his ‘desertion’ from his ship (merchant seamen at this time were free to depart their ships on arrival in port as they were contracted for single voyages), this was to make calls against the war that were echoed 42

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 42

29-01-2021 01:21:06

Keeping Communism at Bay

amongst many American Socialist Party members. Disaffection amongst British merchant seamen (as we shall see in Chapter 5) was well founded: their wages and conditions were poor, and pay stopped entirely if, and as soon as, their ship was sunk through enemy action no matter how long they might spend in a lifeboat awaiting rescue. Armstrong’s politics were more in line with that of Stalin’s nemesis, the exiled Trotsky, than with the Communist Party or the Soviet Union. His alleged contact with German agents may have been innocent on his part and some of the evidence offered strangely suggests that he made contact with the Germans after his detention by US authorities – when he would have been under strict surveillance. However, in the feverish atmosphere of 1941 there was no one to publicly defend him: his appeal was dismissed on 23 June, the day after the German invasion of the USSR.

Conclusion We have seen that the British establishment, through its main political parties, organs of government, the wider labour and trade union movement, and the press, remained ideologically hostile to the Communist regime throughout the inter-war period. Whilst covert activity continued, overt means to change the regime in the USSR ended once the state had stabilized after the end of the Civil War in 1920/21. Through the 1930s, despite news from the Soviet Union about the purges and other acts of terror, many in the British establishment came to see the USSR as a potential ally against the growing threat of war posed by the Nazis in Germany. These included Churchill, at one time the most implacable opponent of communism. When war came, the Soviet Union remained neutral due to a last-minute pact with Germany, but no one expected this to last. When all these things changed in June 1941, they did so both dramatically and with great speed.

43

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 43

29-01-2021 01:21:06

Chapter 3

The Wartime Alliance

No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies and its tragedies, flashes away. Winston Churchill, BBC broadcast, 22 June 1941

Operation Barbarossa and the Invasion of the USSR The German-led Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, began on 22 June 1941. Despite the pretence of a pact with the USSR, planning had commenced the previous July and involved the deployment of three million troops, including a vast air force, along an 1,800-mile front on the western borderlands. This was the largest invasion force in the history of warfare designed to overwhelm what was expected to be piecemeal and poorly organized opposition. German war aims were based on Hitler’s notion that his country’s destiny was to rule the world and establish its racially superior people over all others. Conquered nations would be enslaved, depopulated and exploited. Racially and genetically inferior peoples would be eliminated and this would begin with the systematic murder of Jews, Gypsies, and minorities such as LGBTs, along with the mentally ill and the chronically disabled. In the east the aim was clear: to destroy communism by the murder of its active elements, enslave a greatly reduced population, open up the depopulated lands to German settlers, and exploit the oil and mineral wealth of the country. The translation of such aims into a military strategy involved a scale of murder, brutality and destruction never previously experienced anywhere. After four years of constant battle the Red Army 44

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 44

29-01-2021 01:21:06

The Wartime Alliance

finally pushed into Berlin in May 1945, ending the war with the death of Hitler and his insane Third Reich project. The war on the Eastern Front can be crudely divided into two main phases: German-led military success, with notable setbacks that consistently demonstrated the Red Army as no pushover, until late 1942; Soviet victory in Stalingrad early in 1943, and then a gradual advance across the USSR and Eastern Europe to Berlin over two years later. The great majority of the fighting in the Second World War after June 1941 took place on this front. The Allies made a huge contribution elsewhere but even the effort involved in finally opening and extending the longcalled-for ‘Second Front’ in Western Europe after D-Day in June 1944, must be kept in perspective when considered alongside the much greater military effort and sacrifice of the Red Army. These are facts that have become blurred over the years because of the Cold War and political need in the West to negate the importance of the Soviet Union’s role in winning the war. During the war such facts were more widely accepted and this coloured the relationship between Britain (and its people) and the Soviet Union during those years. Whilst the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was no surprise to the British, it was apparently so to the Soviet regime itself. Whilst Stalin was stunned into silence and made no public statement for several days (when he did, it was masterful), Prime Minister Winston Churchill was quick to publicly record his solidarity with the Soviet government and people, and began making plans to forge what he would later, when joined by the USA, describe as the Grand Alliance. From a pragmatic viewpoint Britain now had a formidable ally – even though British military estimates of the Red Army’s ability to defend the USSR were not hopeful. This pessimism was borne out as German-led armies conquered much of Ukraine and the Baltic countries within weeks, in the process almost destroying the Soviet Air Force and neutralizing much of the country’s military capacity. What, however, was apparent from the outset was the tenacity with which the Red Army Winston Churchill, 1941. (Wikimedia Commons)

45

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 45

29-01-2021 01:21:07

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

fought back, even when overwhelmed and facing defeat: inspirational stories of courage began to flood the British media almost immediately. The Soviet embassy, the CPGB and its allied organs (such as the Russia Today Society) also began to pour out news and propaganda that confirmed the fighting will of the Soviet people and their leadership, and the need for a united effort involving maximum assistance to the beleaguered USSR. This chapter will concern itself with the alliance between the governments of Britain and the USSR and how this worked itself out in terms of relations and assistance at an official level. Chapter 6 examines the level of mutual support at the level of ordinary citizens and the part played by the CPGB in both garnering solidarity with the USSR, and building its own influence and authority.

June to December 1941: Early Days of the Alliance Relations between Britain and the USSR changed overnight on 22 June 1941. Stalin may not have been fully prepared for the Nazi invasion, but Churchill was, and having been informed when he awoke at 8 a.m., spent the day working on a broadcast to the British people that was made at 9 p.m. that night. This involved typical Churchillian rhetoric: I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. I see them guarding their homes; their mothers and wives pray, ah yes, for there are times when all pray for the safety of their loved ones, for the return of the breadwinner, of the champion, of their protectors … It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and to the Russian people. We shall appeal to all our friends and Allies in every part of the world to take the same course and pursue it as we shall, faithfully and steadfastly to the end … We have offered to the government of Soviet Russia any technical or economic assistance which is in our power and which is likely to be of service to them. We shall bomb Germany by day as well as by night in ever-increasing measure, casting upon them 46

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 46

29-01-2021 01:21:07

The Wartime Alliance

month by month a heavier discharge of bombs and making the German people taste and gulp each month a sharper dose of the miseries they have showered upon mankind.* The message was absolutely clear: Britain was no longer alone on the battlefield and, as such, the need for formal alliance with the USSR was clear and unambiguous. Under the surface however, many of Churchill’s colleagues and generals, some of whom knew the Soviet Union well, doubted their capacity for a long-lasting defence. Underestimation of Soviet military and economic potential, based on unreliable and poor sources of information, dogged the British (and later the USA) both before and throughout the war despite their intelligence-gathering efforts. The assault on the Soviet Union diverted forces from western Europe, reducing the threat of invasion across the English Channel as well as the burden of the blitz that had been suffered by British cities over the winter of 1940/1. Whilst some cynically welcomed this and the prospect of the Germans and Russians devouring one another to Britain’s advantage, Churchill, recognizing the potential of this alliance for the eventual defeat of Germany, was keen to offer immediate support and launch an incursion on the European mainland; he was immediately warned off this by military experts who knew, even a full year after the defeat at Dunkirk, that British forces were not ready for such actions and disaster would be a certainty. Through Ambassador Maisky, Stalin pressed from an early stage for military action of any type including a commitment to an assault on mainland Europe, increased aerial bombing of Germany, military support in the Arctic region, twenty-five to thirty divisions to prop up Soviet forces in the Balkans/Southern Russia region, and military supplies of a quality and quantity that would, by any analysis, have been impossible to deliver. Under pressure, including by those especially sympathetic in Britain like Lord Beaverbrook, and against the advice of others, Churchill committed to supplies on as large a scale as was possible. Having considered the matter and taken advice, he turned down flatly the suggestion of large-scale troop actions due to the need to win the war in the Mediterranean and North Africa where there was ongoing engagement with outcomes that were far from certain. At that stage of the war Britain had scored no major land victories and was * Winston Churchill, BBC broadcast, 22 June 1941.

47

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 47

29-01-2021 01:21:07

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

besieged in the Atlantic to the extent that food supplies were seriously endangered by successful U-boat sinkings of merchant vessels. Stalin seemed to finally accept this but made it clear that the Soviet Union expected the Second Front in 1942. The Soviets initially demanded 3,000 fighter planes, 3,000 bombers, 20,000 light aircraft guns, and sundry other equipment, clothing and food supplies. Amidst gasps of incredulity given British shortages of all types of equipment (as well as a reluctance to share details of the latest), it was agreed to send at first 200, and then another 200 fighter aircraft (American Tomahawks that were not wanted by the RAF), and various other supplies including three million pairs of boots. In addition, it was agreed to send two squadrons of Hurricane fighter aircraft to Murmansk to help secure the northern supply route (their story is told in Chapter 4). These promises were made on the expectation of increased American aid – at that stage the Americans were still officially neutral in the war but the Atlantic Charter, signed in August 1941, had committed them to supporting the forces of democracy and resulted in a ‘LendLease’ agreement concerning military as well as general supplies and trade (see below). After this, Beaverbrook, on behalf of the British government, went to Moscow in September with senior American diplomat Avril Harriman who remained there as US ambassador. The four-day conference with Stalin and Molotov resulted in formal agreement over supplies to the USSR which included 500 tanks and 400 aircraft a month, as well as another twenty-two items ranging from cocoa beans to diamonds.

Tanks for Russia at Liverpool Docks, 17 October 1941. (IWM/ Wikimedia Commons)

48

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 48

29-01-2021 01:21:07

The Wartime Alliance

The Moscow conference had been preceded in August by a hastily agreed secret protocol regarding intelligence: it was agreed that all subversive activity by both sides on one another’s territory would cease, and that there would be co-operation in the sharing of intelligence and the physical deployment of agents in occupied countries (Operation Pickaxe is described in Chapter 4). Mutual spying, however, continued and the sharing of information was always limited and regarded by both sides with suspicion.

The Grand Alliance By December 1941 the area of German occupation was extensive but their offensive had effectively stopped for the winter. Hitler’s original and overambitious plan, based on the invincibility of his armies, had assumed Soviet collapse within eight weeks, the capture of Moscow and Leningrad, and advance as far as the oilfields of the Caucasus. The Red Army had lost a massive amount of men and equipment but had regrouped in sufficient force, with divisions moved from the Far East, to throw the Germans back from the outskirts of Moscow, and prevent them from achieving their summer and autumn objectives. However, Leningrad was under siege (that would last until early 1944) and all of the Baltic states, Byelorussia and most of the Ukraine were under Nazi control. A large proportion of the Soviet population, along with many important industrial areas, were under occupation. The world war, on all fronts, was still in the balance but this shifted when, on 7 December, the Japanese attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack brought a double advantage from a Soviet viewpoint: war in the Far East and Pacific now made it very unlikely that the Japanese would attack the Soviet Union, and when this was followed by a German declaration of war on the USA, Stalin had another very powerful military ally. Stalin’s confidence about eventual victory, some four years before the actual end of the war, drove him in late 1941, even before the USA joined, to pursue discussion with Churchill about the settlement that would follow victory. Whatever other motives might be ascribed (and were, by most western historians during the post-war period), his foremost aim was to secure Soviet borders from future attack by assurances about recognition of its 1941 boundaries (i.e. including eastern Poland and the 49

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 49

29-01-2021 01:21:07

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Baltic states), but this was regarded with great suspicion. Maisky recalls in his diary a terse exchange in a private meeting on 11 November when Churchill angrily accused his allies of wanting to create a communist state in Britain after the war, something he wanted to emphasize would never happen. Such tensions over the post-war settlement would only grow over time – the borders issue and fear of the spread of communist ideology being the causes on the western side, and the idea that the other allies really wanted a separate peace settlement with Hitler, on the Soviet side. In August 1941 Churchill and US President Roosevelt had signed the Atlantic Charter which set out some broad principles for the kind of world both countries wanted to see post-war. This included the right of nations to self-determination – a matter interpreted by Churchill as inclusive of Russia’s annexation of the Baltic states, but this was only partially recognized by Roosevelt, and not fully, until 1944. Beaverbrook, the Cabinet member who was most in favour of working positively with the Soviet Union, had warned Churchill of the consequences of the Atlantic Charter for his relationship with Stalin, but Churchill felt he could satisfy the aspirations of both partners. When the German summer offensive started in May 1942, the clamour from the Soviets for a Second Front began anew. It was felt that a diversionary attack by the British in Europe would divert Axis forces and relieve pressure on the Red Army who looked to some observers as being on the point of total collapse. This was resisted and priority instead given to military and food supplies. Agitation for a Second Front had started earlier in the year, helped along by Maisky, but promoted mainly by Beaverbrook and Cripps (as well as the CPGB and other activists on the Left – a story that will be taken up in Chapter 6). Against this background Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, flew to Britain on 20 May 1942, landing at the RAF station at Tealing, Dundee. Molotov first met with Churchill before he and Anthony Eden, as respective foreign ministers, signed a formal treaty on 26 May. This was a very general agreement committing both countries to mutual aid during and after the war, and to commitments including opposition to any separate peace treaty with Germany, ‘territorial aggrandisement’ and interference in the affairs of other nations at the end of the war. This formed the basis of the continued wartime alliance but neither side would go on to honour the agreement post-war. Thorny issues concerning the Soviet Union’s borders were avoided in detail – Churchill in effect acknowledging that 50

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 50

29-01-2021 01:21:07

The Wartime Alliance

Molotov and Eden, flanked by Churchill and Maisky, sign the Anglo-Soviet agreement, 26 May 1942. (IWM/ Wikimedia Commons)

Britain’s views on such matters would be determined by the views of the more powerful USA. Molotov travelled onwards to meet with Roosevelt. Huge public rallies held during the summer of 1942 heard Maisky, Beaverbrook, Cripps and others call for a Second Front that year. By this time Axis armies were making rapid advances on the South-Western Front towards the Caucasus and the Volga. In August 1942 a mainly Canadian force of 6,000 troops raided the French port of Dieppe. The objectives of the raid were to seize and hold the port, destroy its defences and installations, prove a commitment to the Second Front and raise morale. The Germans forces succeeded in holding off the attack, forcing an early retreat of the Allied forces, with the loss of half their numbers. Having failed in all the set objectives which demonstrated how difficult an invasion of German-occupied territory in Northern Europe would be, plans for the Second Front were put on hold. In North Africa, German advances that threatened Egypt and control of the Suez Canal, were brought to a halt by the success of Commonwealth forces at El Alamein in early November 1942. Soon after this British and American armies established a Second Front of sorts with a landing in French Morocco which began a pincer movement against the Axis forces leading to their defeat and ejection from the African continent in May 1943. Meanwhile in Russia a main thrust of the German advance in the south-west was focused on Stalingrad – a city which Hitler was as determined to capture as Stalin was to defend. The battle there become 51

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 51

29-01-2021 01:21:07

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Left: Churchill’s and Stalin’s first meeting in Moscow, August 1942. (NMUSN/Wikimedia Commons) Below: Victory in Stalingrad, early 1943, from a CPGB pamphlet. (Author’s collection)

52

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 52

29-01-2021 01:21:08

The Wartime Alliance

a pivotal focus as the Red Army suffered huge losses whilst it fought for every inch of ground in one of the most decisive military encounters of the war. Eventual German defeat in early February 1943 marked a turning point: from then on, with allied victory a certainty in North Africa, an end to war seemed inevitable even if somewhat far off. As victory by the Allies now seemed assured, meetings between the three leaders, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt, became an imperative. The first of these took place in Tehran in November 1943. Stalin saw this as a further opportunity to ask for more supplies; the Soviet Union was still, after all, bearing the brunt of the war. North African victory was followed by a British and American invasion of Sicily in July and then a landing in force on mainland Italy in September, where fierce resistance was encountered from German forces, Italy having capitulated that same month. No one really saw the invasion of Italy as the Second Front that Stalin and others had sought for so long, welcome though it was. Rather it was a logical extension of the long-fought and gradually successful campaign in the Mediterranean, where German forces still occupied most of Southern Europe. Stalin was still pressing for a front in Northern Europe that would draw enemy troops away from the Eastern Front where the majority of German divisions were still fighting the steady Soviet advance after the Stalingrad victory. In the summer the Soviets had outmanoeuvred a serious German counter-offensive that culminated in the Battle of Kursk, from which they emerged battered, but in a stronger position than their opponents. Whilst Stalin had his goals for the Tehran conference, the main one being the assurance of a Second Front, his allies were still pre-occupied with his possible post-war aims: would Red Army incursions into Eastern Europe as Nazi Germany unravelled bring communism in their wake? Stalin sought to reassure his allies on this question from the outset. In May 1943, the Comintern (see Chapter 1) had been wound up without ceremony (it had not met since 1935), formally ending the latent threat it posed to stability in the capitalist west. At the same time the anthem that summed up the dream of world communism, The Internationale, was replaced with a typically nationalistic song that could be identified only with the USSR. Stalin could point to these gestures to prove his case. More concretely he also agreed to attack Japan within three months of victory over Germany (a promise he kept). On the potentially difficult question of post-war borders, Churchill and Roosevelt, with no mandate 53

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 53

29-01-2021 01:21:08

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

from either the leaders or populations of the countries concerned, conceded the Baltic states to the USSR and were prepared to go even further than Stalin wanted (he turned down the offer of Finland which was still in theory on the Nazi side). Churchill and Roosevelt also promised an invasion of Northern Europe in 1944 – the long-awaited Second Front was to become a reality at last. By the summer of 1944 the outcome of the war looked certain and comparatively close. On 6 June the western allies landed in Normandy and started their steady drive north towards Germany. Taking obvious advantage, the Soviets launched Operation Bagration later that month, taking back Byelorussia and destroying twenty-eight out of thirty-four divisions of German Army Group Centre. Other offensive operations drove deep into occupied territory in Ukraine. By August Soviet troops had advanced hundreds of miles and were approaching Warsaw in Poland. The advance stopped at this point, all operational objectives having been achieved. In October, although much of France and Belgium were now liberated, the operation to outflank the Germans through parachute landings at Arnhem had failed to make the breakthrough northwards that had been hoped for. At this point Churchill visited Stalin in Moscow for several days of talks, intended to look at some of the detail of what would happen in Europe after the war, with any agreements made requiring later ratification by the Americans who were not present. This became known for its notorious ‘Percentages Agreement’. Apparently at one point, having shared private thoughts about the over-influence of the Americans on events, Churchill passed Stalin a sheet of paper on which he had scribbled down the various countries of Eastern and Southern Europe which had been under German occupation (some of them had fought on the Axis side) with percentages concerning the influence of the Soviets and British in the future of each. Stalin neatly ticked it and handed it back. Churchill, expressing guilt about having determined the fate of millions on an impromptu scribbled piece of paper, offered to burn it but Stalin told him to keep it – which he did. In the days that followed senior diplomats ironed out issues surrounding this tacit agreement. As examples, Hungary was to be 90-per cent Soviet, whilst Greece, with all its British interests, would be 90-per cent British-influenced. Although this agreement was never ratified by the Americans, and so never became official alliance doctrine, it turned out, as we shall see in Chapter 8, to be accurate in many of its manifestations. 54

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 54

29-01-2021 01:21:08

The Wartime Alliance

There were further meetings of the ‘Big Three’ powers, at Yalta in early 1945, and Potsdam in July of the same year. These take the story beyond the exigencies and needs of wartime and will be discussed in the final chapter of the book. Red Army victories in 1945, brought at a cost much greater than that made by the UK and Americans as they fought their way into the western areas of Germany, were decisive, culminating with entry into Berlin at the end of April. Victory with German capitulation on 8 May came after a week of intense street fighting and the suicide of Hitler on 30 April. Supplies from the British and Americans had been crucial to the Red Army’s success over four years of war – some detail will be given in the following chapter.

Furthering the Alliance on the Home Front After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June the UK government had to bring round public opinion to the idea of support for a country whose ideals and policies had so recently been regarded as contrary to the views and aspirations of ordinary British people. As far as workingclass people were concerned this proved surprisingly easy – there being an instinctive recognition of shared hardship and the immense suffering of the Russian people, but amongst other social classes this had to be worked upon. At this time there were numerous prominent politicians and establishment figures who were more than sceptical about the alliance and really wanted the defeat of the communist enemy. This influential group was associated with the ‘Clivedon Set’ (named after the residence of Lady Astor), a group of prominent individuals including Conservative politician Lord Halifax, who had held pro-German views before the war – their influence had to be neutralized and quashed. The government had re-established the Ministry of Information (MOI) in 1939 (it had been in place through the years of the First World War) as the conduit of propaganda and information concerning the war and the war effort. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the MOI established a unit to deal with issues concerning the new alliance. The MOI also had a Home Intelligence section that sought to measure public opinion on issues so that its output cut with public feeling whilst at the same time channelling it in a direction that suited war aims. The MOI was largely in control of the media output so used its position to promote 55

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 55

29-01-2021 01:21:08

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

the right type of pro-Russian BBC programmes, newspaper articles and newsreel films in the cinema. Churchill’s magnanimous broadcast of 22 June seemed to set the tone for winning over general support for the Soviet war effort, but a balance was required between promoting support for a strategy that would bring victory, and not promoting communism. Censors were initially instructed that the USSR should be regarded as ‘an associate, not as an ally’, and that criticism for ‘the behaviour of the Soviet up to yesterday’ was acceptable as was criticism of communism, but ‘very insulting’ messages were not to be permitted. There was a dilemma due to the fact that government circles were concerned that almost any portrayal of the Soviet Union was likely to show its attempts to create a different type of society in a favourable light. The BBC were told to begin including general information about Russia and its history and culture, into their programme schedule and were to begin this with a school broadcast by the Soviet press attaché on life in the country. This caused controversy and a ban because of its politically pro-communist ideological content that was anathema to the establishment figures who ran the BBC; the idea that Latvian workers had welcomed annexation of their country a year earlier and that Belorussian collective farms were an outstanding success, could not be aired to schoolchildren in Britain. There was also controversy about the playing of The Internationale, the Communist anthem. All the anthems of the Allies were broadcast after the much-listened-to 9 p.m. news on Sundays but Churchill refused to countenance the inclusion of The Internationale. The matter was only resolved when the BBC replaced this slot with the playing of ‘national airs’ rather than anthems in mid-July 1941. Meanwhile, at this early stage, the ban on the CPGB’s Daily Worker newspaper remained in place. From September 1941 cinemas showed Soviet films and newsreels and the effort to achieve the sought-after balance was effectively abandoned. One sticky question that it was felt might arouse continued animosity was the official Soviet attitude towards religion and reports of British mainstream church leaders lending support to the Russian allies. To bolster support at home from all sections of society, the government sponsored trips to the USSR by those who might influence the views and, more importantly, the efforts of ordinary citizens. Walter Citrine, the TUC General Secretary known for his anti-communist views before the war, visited with a TUC delegation on one of the first North Russia 56

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 56

29-01-2021 01:21:08

The Wartime Alliance

convoys in late 1941 and wrote a book of their experiences praising the Soviet allies and finishing with enjoinders to increase and share productive effort so that the war could be successfully concluded and friendship maintained in the peace that would follow. Also officially encouraged were the publication and wide distribution of books and pamphlets aiding understanding of a country which so recently had been regarded as an enemy. Several books written during the course of the war by the academic expert on Russia, Bernard Pares, were published by Penguin in popular ‘Special’ editions – even today these offer a better balanced and informative insight than much written since. Pares did his best to reassure readers that the Soviets had effectively dumped the ideals of communism in favour of state ownership some time previously, and were certainly no longer interested in world revolution. Another in this genre, written soon after the Nazi invasion in June 1941, was the popular pamphlet by the ILP left-winger Jennie Lee. RAF Officer Hubert Griffith, who was in Murmansk with the Hurricane squadrons described in Chapter 4, wrote a popular account in 1943 describing the life and spirit of the Soviet people. One of Beaverbrook’s early initiatives to build public support for the industrial effort required to assist the Soviet Union was ‘Tanks for Russia Week’ in September 1941. He launched this to coincide with the trade mission to Moscow which he headed, which itself had a propaganda purpose for the British people. Tanks for Russia Week involved newspapers (especially Beaverbrook’s own Daily Express), newsreel films and a much-publicized visit by Maisky to a tank factory in Smethwick, Birmingham. Beaverbrook made a statement (apparently toned down by Churchill) that began: From Monday next, and for the space of seven days, the work of your hands will be sent to the Front Lines defending Leningrad, Kiev and Odessa. There will be no delay. The tanks you build will go forthwith into action to play their part in the battle.* The resultant effort reportedly resulted in a 20-per cent rise in production of Valentine and Matilda tanks for the Soviet Union. * Quoted in Bell, 1990.

57

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 57

29-01-2021 01:21:08

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Maisky visits a Birmingham tank factory during Tanks for Russia Week. September 1941. (MOI /Wikimedia Commons)

Upon his return from the Moscow conference, Beaverbrook made a broadcast to the nation on 23 October after the 9 p.m. news bulletin which commanded a mass audience: in this he described the help agreed for the Soviets (or ‘Russia’ as it was now described) and the commitment and sacrifice he expected from the British people in order to deliver this promise. The MOI published a lavish illustrated booklet, Comrades in Arms: this included a long extract from Beaverbrook’s broadcast along with descriptions of the supplies and assistance being provided, and the use to which they were being put defending the Soviet Union. This publication is notably different from other MOI publications published during the war: whilst all had a clear morale purpose, this one is arguably more strident in the raw edge of its propaganda. Information put out by the CPGB, its sympathetic organizations and others on the left will be examined in Chapter 6, but worth saying at this stage that much of their content was not very different from this official government publication, which was distributed to factories 58

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 58

29-01-2021 01:21:08

The Wartime Alliance

Right: Cover of a Soviet embassy publication, 1941. (Author’s collection) Below: Pages from the MOI publication Comrades in Arms. (Author’s collection)

59

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 59

29-01-2021 01:21:08

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

and workplaces. In addition, photographic exhibitions were shown throughout Britain but this proved problematic and an attempt was made to stop them because of the difficulty of devising captions that did not praise communist achievement; the exhibitions, though, proved too popular to stop and continued into 1943. The MOI also issued ‘speaker’s notes’ about the Soviet Union in February 1943 that were very complimentary about the system and its achievements whilst stressing that communism was “not a malignant Marxist bogey but a Russian answer to a Russian problem”.* They also passed newsreel films for general showing in cinemas that described Soviet military successes but also praised the society that enabled them. As the war progressed the clear strategy became to lavish praise on the Soviet Union from a mainstream viewpoint and by doing so drown out the propaganda of the CPGB that potentially sought change at home. Whilst MOI activity was government-directed and -controlled, its day-to-day operations were in the hands of civil service appointees, many of whom were very sympathetic to Communism. Amongst them significantly was Peter Smollett, a journalist, who was in charge of the Russia section. Smollett was an Austrian refugee who had come to Britain in 1933 and changed his name from Hans Smolka by deed poll when he became a British subject in 1938. Material turned out by his section and distributed to workplaces and civic centres throughout Britain to popularize the Soviet case was of high quality and effective. Smollett was later unmasked as having been a Soviet agent. Awarded the OBE for his efforts, it seems unlikely that any of Smollett’s activities were especially subversive, although he is credited with being behind a decision not to publish George Orwell’s Animal Farm, when it was first written in early 1944, because of its clear anti-Soviet sentiment. From 11 July 1941 the Soviet embassy in London put out daily bulletins, Soviet War News, which continued until the end of the war. These contained articles translated from the USSR press concerning the war as well as speeches and activities of the Soviet ambassador and delegation to Britain. These bulletins were propaganda sheets – defeats were glossed over and victories magnified. However, they included reports written by Soviet war correspondents who were amongst the best writers of their generation, including Vasily Grossman, Ilya Ehrenburg, * Ibid.

60

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 60

29-01-2021 01:21:08

The Wartime Alliance

Konstantin Simonov and Mikhail Sholokov. Their reports brought the battles and struggles on the Eastern Front vividly to life and were widely read and quoted. They also dealt with the Soviet view on such matters as religion and other aspects of life, in the hope that reassurances might be given to British readers. Articles from the Soviet press concerning the British people were also reprinted. The Soviet Embassy also produced, through the Hutchinson publishing house of London, a number of books that gave longer accounts of the war on the Eastern Front. The British embassy in the USSR published an approximate equivalent to Soviet War News: This weekly paper was titled британский союзник (British Ally) and contained only war news about the western allies and fairly uncontentious articles about British life. Probably by agreement with the Soviets, nothing was included that could be construed as overtly procapitalist propaganda. The paper began life in 1942 and continued until 1950 when the Soviets ordered its end as Cold War tensions mounted. Initial circulation was 25,000 but wartime circulation rose to 50,000 after the allied D-Day invasion of France.

Soviet War News first edition cover story, 11 July1941. (Author’s collection)

61

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 61

29-01-2021 01:21:09

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

British Ally 9 November 1944 edition celebrates the sinking of the Tirpitz. (Author’s collection)

Maisky, the Soviet Union’s ambassador until late 1943, had many contacts in the UK and used these to promote his country’s cause quite successfully. Having been shunned during the period prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union, he became almost a darling of the establishment: in October 1941 he was invited to address the Livery Club (described by him as the city’s ‘holy of holies’) and soon after this was elected for membership to the prestigious and very establishment Athenaeum and St. James’s clubs. The embassy organized visits around the country of Red Army heroes: one of the most publicized, in November 1942, involved the woman sniper Lieutenant Ludmilla Pavlichenko, who was credited with over 300 enemy ‘kills’. Pavlichenko’s feisty responses to the press drew positive attention both in the UK and during her earlier visit to the US: on one occasion addressing a large crowd and arguing for the Second Front, she stated ‘I am twenty-five years old and I have killed 309 fascist invaders by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?’ 62

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 62

29-01-2021 01:21:09

The Wartime Alliance

Soviet War News, 12 October 1942. (Author’s collection)

The Soviet sniper Ludmilla Pavlichenko on tour in the UK. (Alamy Sputnik)

63

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 63

29-01-2021 01:21:10

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

In early 1943, victory at Stalingrad promoted huge celebratory events to celebrate Red Army Day (20 February) throughout Britain – an occasion marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of its foundation and a fitting way of marking the achievement at Stalingrad. These were attended by thousands and involved marches and rallies featuring notable establishment figures from the arts as well as political world. In Bristol, troops and audience sang The Internationale in front of the Lord Mayor and other dignitaries. The biggest event was The Salute to the Red Army staged in the Albert Hall, London, on 21 February 1943. The poet Louis McNeice composed a piece that was set to music by Sir William Walton that involved the bands of the Life Guards, the Royal Horse Guards and the RAF, with Sir Malcolm Sargent conducting. The event ended with a speech from Anthony Eden and then a rendition of The Internationale alongside God Save the King in front of a giant red banner that had unfurled as a backdrop. All this was broadcast on the BBC and followed up with the release by Decca Records of an album of Red Army songs. A fascinating short British Pathé newsreel Salute to the Red Army shows footage of the parades and speeches held in Bristol, Cardiff, Manchester and Sheffield, as well as the Albert Hall; this captures the mood of the time as well as the government’s determination to portray the Soviets as glorious allies. The newsreel even included a muted call for a Second Front in Europe. The Stalingrad victory resulted in a deluge of other pro-Soviet media including repeated broadcasts of The Internationale anthem and the showing of newsreels and films in cinemas that praised the Soviet Union and Stalin as well as the Red Army and the Russian people. British people had particular sympathy with the plight of the residents of Leningrad, trapped in their city whilst the Germans pounded it with bombs and shells whilst doing their utmost to starve them from 1941 until 1944, when the siege was finally lifted. During this period, although about one-third of the pre-war population of over three million were evacuated, over one million soldiers and civilians were killed: in early 1942 about 100,000 a month were dying, mostly of starvation as the city’s food supplies dried up. The celebrated composer Dmitry Shostakovich had lived in Leningrad in the early days of the siege and dedicated his Seventh Symphony to its people. This was broadcast by the BBC on the occasion of the first anniversary of the German invasion in June 1942, a memorable event that, as intended, had an emotional impact on listeners. 64

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 64

29-01-2021 01:21:11

The Wartime Alliance

Above: Ludmilla Pavlichenko with British nurses, from a National Union of Students pamphlet 1942. (Author’s collection) Right: Salute to the Red Army, Royal Albert Hall, London, 21 February 1943. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

65

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 65

29-01-2021 01:21:11

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Above and below: Artist Feliks Topolski’s first-hand depictions of shared hardship in the bomb-shelter subways of London and Moscow. 1941. (Estate of Feliks Topolski)

66

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 66

29-01-2021 01:21:13

The Wartime Alliance

The wish to support the people of the USSR resulted in mass responses to appeals for practical aid as well as the industrial effort that concerned ‘Tanks for Russia Week’ in 1941. In towns and cities across the UK, hundreds of Anglo-Soviet Unity or Friendly committees were set up (fifty-six in London alone by early 1942), and co-ordinated by a national body, the National Council for British-Soviet Unity (NCBSU) which was established at a national conference in London on 14 February 1942 when representatives from local committees met together for the first time. The NCBSU put out a guide on how to establish local committees and organize friendship events. These committees raised money through shows, dances, exhibitions, film showings, flag days, pageants, rallies and demonstrations that in their turn involved thousands of people. In Tyneside entertainment was organized for visiting Soviet sailors, and a Red Army Shop was established. Throughout the UK, towns and cities held official ‘Russia Weeks’ and other celebratory events to raise money and support for the Russian war effort. The Stockport Anglo-Russian Friendship Week took

Letter from the Secretary of the Stoke-on-Trent Anglo-Soviet Friendship Committee.

67

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 67

29-01-2021 01:21:14

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

The Stockport Soviet Friendship Week programme, January 1942. (Author’s collection)

place from 3 to 6 January 1942 with an ambitious series of events (see illustration) supported by the Town Council and across the community. One notable campaign which was very mainstream and directly government supported was the Red Cross Aid for Russia appeal whose driving force was Clementine Churchill, wife of the Prime Minister. This was officially launched at an event hosted by the Ministry of Information on 7 October 1941, in which Mrs Churchill was introduced as President. According to Winston Churchill, Mrs Churchill became involved at his suggestion when he told her that her wish for an early Second Front could not be met. Within twelve days £370,000 had been raised and by early December the target of £1 million had been reached. By the end of the war in 1945, over £7 million (over £285 million in today’s terms) had been raised with donations from royalty and the aristocracy, from across the British Empire, and from ordinary British schoolchildren and citizens. This came from workplace and public collections, and various fund-raising activities including the proceeds of sports and cultural events at national and local level. The money was used to send medical supplies, from ambulances to bandages and, in the case 68

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 68

29-01-2021 01:21:15

The Wartime Alliance

of Stalingrad in 1943, an entire hospital. Mrs Churchill remained active throughout the war to the extent of personally responding to donations that were sent to her direct. In May 1945 she was invited, along with the Secretary of the Aid to Russian Committee, Mable Johnson, and her personal secretary Grace Hamblin, on an official visit to the Soviet Union during which she was decorated with the Order of the Red Banner Clementine Churchill presents an Aid to of Labour. The three women were Russia Badge to her husband, 1941. (IWM/ Wikimedia Commons) showered with gifts from ordinary citizens wherever they went in gratitude for their work. Churchill in private seems to have been somewhat sceptical about all this: in early 1942 he told Maisky that his wife had become ‘totally sovietized’, and in

Handwritten letter sent out by Mrs Churchill acknowledging a donation to the Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund. (Author’s collection)

69

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 69

29-01-2021 01:21:15

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

1945 he contacted her during the USSR visit to demand her early return home due to the deteriorating political relationship with the Soviet Union – she refused. When she finally returned (after six weeks) she wrote a pamphlet My Visit to Russia to raise further funds, which was translated into Russian for sale in the Soviet Union. After the victory at Stalingrad in early February 1943, King George VI came up with the idea of having a jewel-encrusted and gold-handled sword cast in honour of the people of the city and having this presented on his behalf to Stalin. Inscribed in Russian and in English the Sword of Stalingrad was exhibited like a holy icon in Westminster Abbey, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Coventry. Over thirty-three days almost half a million people queued up to reverently file past the sword. It was handed over to Stalin with great ceremony at the Tehran Conference in November. Stalin, regarded before June 1941 as an evil dictator, was now popularly characterized as ‘Uncle Joe’, a kindly and benign father figure. The first major potential rift in the Anglo-Soviet relationship came in May 1943. German troops in the Smolensk region of western Russia uncovered the graves of thousands of Polish officers who had been murdered at sites in the Katyn forest and elsewhere. An accusation was made that they had been executed by the Soviet NKVD in 1940 – and this was seized upon as highly probable by the Polish government in exile in London as accounts clearly placed the missing as having last been seen in Soviet custody in 1939. Naturally this was used for propaganda by the Nazis in an attempt to create rifts in the Allied camp. The Soviets denied the claim and instead purported that the whole story had been concocted by A concert programme to raise funds for Aid the Poles in conjunction with the Nazis, who they claimed to Russia. (Author’s collection) 70

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 70

29-01-2021 01:21:16

The Wartime Alliance

were actually responsible for the murders. However, nothing could be conclusively proved either way and the dispute lingered on in the background without apparently impacting too much on British public opinion and support for the Soviet Union. The Soviets broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government in exile and the British government sat on the side-lines: when it came to power and influence the need for a positive wartime relationship with the USSR and Stalin far outweighed the rights and wrongs of the Polish case, this even though thousands of Poles were A Russian child examines the Stalingrad fighting with British forces and Sword, 1951. (Mchpv/Wikimedia Commons) had been bravely doing so since the early years of the war (including a decisive contribution by their pilots in the Battle of Britain in 1940). In 1990 the government of the USSR finally admitted Stalin’s and the NKVD’s responsibility for this barbarous massacre. The cause of the Polish people again created ripples on the Allied side in the summer of 1944. With the Red Army just across the River Vistula, the Polish Home Army in Warsaw, under orders from their exiled government in London, but in co-operation with the smaller proSoviet resistance, launched the Warsaw Uprising to free their city from German occupation. Having been tacitly encouraged by Stalin, they fully expected assistance from Soviet forces. This was not forthcoming in the force required to make a difference and, having moved troops into the city, including murderous SS brigades, the Germans gradually, but decisively and brutally, put down the uprising. Recriminations started almost straight away: the Soviets argued that they were at the very limit of their rapid advance that had commenced in June and could go no further; Stalin also suggested that the timing of the uprising was premature and adventurous. Beneath all this was a suspicion on the Polish Home Army side (whose allegiance was to the exiled government 71

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 71

29-01-2021 01:21:16

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

in London) that Stalin wanted to see the Germans destroy it before their armed presence became a problem to the would-be Soviet occupiers who would soon be entering the city. Equally, on the Soviet side there was a belief that the sacrifice their forces were making to liberate Poland was being opportunistically undermined by political opponents who wanted Poland to return to its pre-war anti-Soviet nationalism. In the event Polish units of the Red Army did try to cross the Vistula to help, but were beaten back. Some supplies were dropped by parachute but too little and too late to really help. Attempts by British and American air units to drop supplies and arms were hindered by an apparent lack of co-operation by the Soviets (see following chapter). The debate about the Warsaw Uprising has never ended but at the time placed the British and Americans in an embarrassing and difficult position. The surrounding tensions contributed to the end of the alliance and the start of the Cold War as we shall see in the final chapter. British government attitudes were largely driven by the lack of progress made in their attempts to seek reconciliation between the London Polish leaders and the Soviets following the Katyn revelations. They blamed the Poles for their intransigence on this, and on balance had to continue showing favour to their greatest ally despite the efforts of Allied Polish forces at the 1944 Monte Cassino battle in Italy and their bravery elsewhere. The BBC was accused of downplaying the Warsaw Uprising in order to dampen public knowledge and sympathy. Press coverage tended to adopt a neutral position on the arguments and machinations behind the scenes despite some suggestions that the Polish people, to whom there was sentimental attachment, were being betrayed by a lack of action – as they had been in 1939. The Poles were victims of global power politics which Churchill and the British government were still keen to influence – as evidenced by the Percentages Agreement in Moscow in October, soon after the final quashing of the uprising. The Soviet advance, in the form of the Vistula–Oder Offensive that took the Red Army into Germany, finally liberated Warsaw in January 1945 by which time the city was little more than rubble and thousands of its inhabitants dead.

Conclusion This chapter has focused on the course of the Grand Alliance and the official efforts made by the British government to support the Soviet 72

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 72

29-01-2021 01:21:16

The Wartime Alliance

Union’s war on the Eastern Front from the defeats and defensive battles of 1941, through the turning point at Stalingrad, and on to victory in 1945. Churchill recognized the importance of such assistance from an early stage and his government’s policies towards the Soviet Union were supported enthusiastically by the British people. Under the exigencies of wartime, governments will always try and steer public opinion, and in this case, attempts were made to differentiate between admiration and support for the Soviet people and their war leaders including Stalin, and communism as a cause and ideal. The extent to which this was successful will be examined in Chapter 6. From an early stage there were suspicions based on competing ideologies about the war aims of both eastern and western allies, and these flavoured discussions between the respective leaders as the war took its course. From the outset in 1941 there were calls for a ‘Second Front’ to relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union but this was not to come in its most meaningful form until the cross-Channel D-Day invasion of France in June 1944, by which time the Soviet advance was almost unstoppable.

Wartime posters celebrating the Anglo-Soviet alliance. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

73

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 73

29-01-2021 01:21:16

Chapter 4

Unity in Action: Front-line Co-operation between the Red Army and the British

The Russians seem to be doing the fighting – and to be doing it pretty well. Let that suffice for the moment. And that alone is some claim on our good temper and gratitude. RAF officer Hubert Griffith briefing British servicemen en route to Murmansk, August 1941 Right up until the end of the war when the two armies met in Germany in April 1945, the Red Army and British forces fought on different fronts and only occasionally crossed paths or fought together. The Eastern Front stretched at the easternmost limit of German advance in the summer of 1942, from the Caucasus Mountains in the south to the borders with Norway and Finland just west of Murmansk in the north – a distance of 2,500 miles. This is where most of the Second World War took place: the Eastern Front never involved less than 60 per cent of all German and Axis forces (at its height in the summers of 1941 and 1942, this rose to 80–90 per cent). Allied assistance consisted of the almost continuous supply of military and other aid that was significant in both amount and impact. Of importance also was the indirect impact of the heavy bombing of Germany’s cities and industries by British and American air forces (the Soviets never developed such military air capacity). There were some joint military operations, the most important and problematic surrounding the Arctic convoy route from Britain and North America to the ports of Murmansk and Archangel (which will be discussed in the next chapter). The War Office did attempt to inform British troops about their Soviet allies beyond the level of basic public propaganda: several editions of Short Notes were published that described Red Army 74

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 74

29-01-2021 01:21:17

Unity in Action

structures, the first of which also offered some detail on equipment. A number of the fortnightly Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) pamphlets for troop education (see Chapter 7) covered the Eastern Front and the Red Army. This chapter will concern itself with examples of front-line co-operation between British and Soviet forces and will also describe the scope and immensity of the formal aid effort.

The Joint Invasion of Iran Iran was a large country that bordered both the USSR to the north, and to the east and west countries that were either part of the British Empire (India) or under its occupation (Iraq). Iranian oil was contributing to the British war effort through the British-owned Abadan oil refinery but growing German influence in officially neutral Iran threatened this supply. German advances into the Soviet Union also threatened British India as well as Soviet oil production in the Caucasus. The Soviets wanted to absorb Iranian Azerbaijan and Turkmen Sahra. The new alliance and the agreement to transport British supplies to the USSR spotlighted the potential for the Trans-Iranian railway as a route. Diplomatic pressure was applied by both Moscow and London on the ruling Shah which increased tensions. Eventually the Iranian refusal to expel German nationals resulted in a surprise attack in a joint operation between the British and Soviets on 17 August 1941. This involved overwhelming force on the part of the two forces although there was little actual military co-ordination – neither side was said to know what the other was doing. Iranian resistance was quickly overcome through a combination of armoured advance, aerial bombardment and British-led naval attack. By the end of August Iran was under British and Soviet control. The Soviets initially occupied Tehran, the capital, but withdrew from it in October 1941. The Shah was Soviet and British troops meet in Iran, August deposed and replaced by a 1941. (Wikimedia Commons) 75

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 75

29-01-2021 01:21:17

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

new one more favourably disposed to the Allies with whom he signed an agreement in January 1942. The country was to remain under partitioned British and Soviet control for the duration of hostilities, guaranteeing the interests of both countries and securing the supply route (described later in this chapter). The military campaign involved the first actual meeting of British and Soviet troops since the Civil War, this time on a friendly basis, but there were no joint actions. However, suggestions by Stalin that British divisions could move by that route into the Caucasus to help the fight against the advancing Germans were turned down, as was a counter-proposal by Churchill that British troops replace the Soviets in northern Iran.

Operation Gauntlet, August 1941 Far to the north in the Arctic Circle there was a fear that the Norwegianowned island of Spitzbergen might attract a German invasion from occupied Norway so it could be used as a base to disrupt the northern supply route to the ports of Murmansk and Archangel. Spitzbergen had a small population of about 1,000 Norwegian citizens, most of whom were there because of the coalmines – the productive output being shipped regularly back to Norway where it was obviously of use to the occupiers; additionally, about 2,000 Russian miners in a separate settlement sent coal back to the Soviet Union. The Norwegian settlement also included a weather station that broadcast open weather reports that might be useful to the Germans. After discussion between the Norwegian government in exile, and the British and Soviets, it was agreed that a force of mainly Canadian troops, but including some Norwegian infantry and British Army engineers, would be sent to the island – Operation Gauntlet. Their purpose was to destroy the mines and any infrastructure that might be useful to the Germans, evacuate the population and then withdraw – the Russian miners to Murmansk and the Norwegians to Britain. The original plan was also to leave a small armed force that would maintain a naval supply base for the refuelling of British ships. This was abandoned when the Royal Navy decided the site was unsuitable for such operations. The landing was made on 24 August 1941 by a large force consisting of a merchant vessel, the Empress of Canada, carrying the 645 troops, 76

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 76

29-01-2021 01:21:17

Unity in Action

two cruisers and three destroyers in escort. The Russian miners (many of whom had gone on a drunken spree having discovered a consignment of Eau de Cologne) were then transferred onto the Empress of Canada with their removable equipment, and taken to Murmansk, the ship then returning to Spitzbergen. Meanwhile the Canadians set about destroying the mines and their associated equipment. This was also not without issue, apparently being accompanied by looting and the unnecessary destruction of the Norwegian village at Longyearbyen. The Norwegians were then taken back to the UK by the Empress of Canada along with several ships that had been in the anchorage at Spitsbergen including two laden with coal. The mission was regarded as a success: its objectives were all met without any casualties and on the way home the escorting naval vessels engaged with a German convoy and sank one enemy ship. Spitzbergen was to be re-occupied by the Norwegians the following year and the subject of further military action by both sides after that. In 1945, after Norway was liberated, the 1941 evacuation was celebrated in an MOI booklet The War in the Arctic – perhaps because there was not much else to celebrate about the war in 1941; needless to say, facts were not allowed to get in the way of a good story.

Operation Gauntlet, the evacuation of Spitzbergen, August 1941. (MOI Arctic War, 1945)

77

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 77

29-01-2021 01:21:17

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Mission 131 to Baku From late July 1941 there were Allied concerns that the Germans might meet their major objective of capture of the vast oilfields in Baku in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea. So worried were the British about the value of this oil that prior to the invasion they had secretly considered bombing Baku from the air in order to ensure none of its supply finished up in German hands – a proposal that was rejected internally. As the British had expertise in demolition it was suggested that a team could be sent to Baku to pass on their knowledge and supervise the destruction of the facilities. To the surprise of the British who expected suspicion and rejection, the idea was welcomed by the Soviets and Mission 131, as it was known, set off for Baku in September 1941. The team was welcomed in Baku by a senior official of the NKVD and knowledge of demolition was duly shared with the Soviet hosts. However, a successful Soviet counter-offensive at Rostov (the first of the war) removed the immediate threat. The Soviets also managed to move equipment and facilities from the smaller oilfield at Maikop which was on the western side of the Caucasus Mountains and more vulnerable, proving that they could neutralize oil production without totally destroying it for the future. The British were told that this would be the preferred option if further threat occurred. The Baku oilfields therefore remained intact. The following year the German offensive, including equipment for oil companies already awarded contracts for Baku oil, retook Rostov and for a period occupied Maikop. However, resistance across the Caucasus Mountains proved an insurmountable obstacle to the German advance, as did the growing focus on the decisive battle further north at Stalingrad. The Germans withdrew to defensive positions on the Taman Peninsula, a base for a future campaign but from which they were eventually ejected in September 1943.

British Supplies to the Soviet Union In March 1941 the US government agreed to a policy that was designed to secure American interests – Lend-Lease – the supply of materials to nations who were fighting German and Japanese aggression. This effectively breached previous non-intervention policies and neutrality in the world war as America did not become a direct party to the conflict 78

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 78

29-01-2021 01:21:17

Unity in Action

until after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year. The biggest initial consequence was the supply of aid and equipment to Britain (some, notably fifty old naval destroyers, had already been given in return for bases on British territory in 1940), but after the meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt in August, and the signing of the Atlantic Charter (see Chapter 3), supplies were also forwarded to the Soviet Union. All this of course increased in volume after December 1941. As we saw in Chapter 3, Britain committed to sending supplies to the Soviet Union from the outset in June, impetus being provided by its inability to provide the Second Front immediately demanded by Stalin. British aid and LendLease from the USA effectively combined after America’s entry to the war. There were three principal potential supply routes to Russia: the first was by sea through the Mediterranean and Suez Canal (or round the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa in order to avoid the Mediterranean battle zone) to the Persian Gulf and Iran, and then overland to Azerbaijan within the USSR. This involved unloading from ships and a long overland journey by rail or truck with consequent bottlenecks. The ‘Persian Corridor’, not really operational until 1942, was developed through the war and eventually became an important

A British locomotive ferrying goods to Russia, Iran, 1943. (NMUSN/ Wikimedia Commons)

79

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 79

29-01-2021 01:21:18

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

route for all manner of Lend-Lease aid, including aircraft flown in from the USA via Brazil and North Africa. Reassembly plants in Iran for shipped-in equipment were also established for onward road and rail transit, or in the case of aircraft, flight. All this involved a good deal of co-operation between the Allies and in all, 27 per cent of supplies to the Soviet Union went by this route. The second route was the longest but safest – by sea across the Pacific to Vladivistok in the USSR’s Far East, and then by rail across the entire length of the country to the war zones of the Eastern Front. This involved a seven-week journey from the USA, and was affected throughout the war against Germany by the neutrality between the USSR and Japan – officially allowing only non-military supplies to be delivered. Some 50 per cent of Allied supplies however, went by this route. The third route was the shortest but most dangerous: direct sea access to Russia’s Arctic ports of Archangel and Murmansk passing Germanoccupied Norway and traversing some of the worst sea conditions imaginable. This will be described in detail in the next chapter. The Arctic route was responsible for 23 per cent of all aid. In the summer, convoys were routed to the well-appointed port of Archangel in the White Sea. However, this iced up in the winter months and convoys were forced to use Murmansk in the Kola Inlet. Although the latter was an ice-free port and closer for convoys to reach, it was rudimentary and lacked proper port infrastructure – a British crane-ship had to be used to unload heavier cargoes. Murmansk was also only a short trip for German aircraft based in northern Norway and was heavily bombed, destroying most of its wooden buildings early in the war. There was an additional air route used mainly for supplying US aircraft, via Canada and Alaska to Siberia, involving a network of bases, with the final stage being conducted by Soviet airmen. This grew in importance from 1942 and eventually resulted in the delivery of 40 per cent of all British and US aircraft supplied (57 per cent of American ones). Air cargoes and passengers also travelled by this route across vast unpopulated areas, and 113 Soviet pilots were lost. This route was associated with limited use of the sea route round northern Russia from the Pacific which required ice-breaking ships and was used to supply fuel to bases for the air bridge. Lend-Lease was in four distinct phases that followed formal agreements about supplies in 1941, 1942, 1943 and 1944. The first of 80

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 80

29-01-2021 01:21:18

Unity in Action

these was determined at the Moscow meeting attended by Beaverbrook, Stalin and Molotov in September 1941, supplies commencing in October. British materials included those produced in Canada and sent direct from there to the Soviet Union. By June 1942 these included 2,000 fighter aircraft (300 of which were lost en route), 2,500 tanks (500 lost through sinking) and various other vehicles and items of equipment.* The Royal Navy also supplied a number of minesweeping trawlers (another two were sunk in passage to Russia): HMS Stefa, HMS Shera, HMS Shusa, HMS Shika, HMS Sulla, HMS Sumba, HMS Svega and HMS Silja. The Shera, Shusa and Sulla were all sunk in 1942, but the Stefa, Sumba and Silja remained with the Red Navy in the Arctic until after the war. The tanks supplied were mostly Matilda models, a type not especially liked by the Red Army in action and mostly expended by the end of 1942. Also included in numbers were Valentines, which although also considered inferior to some of the Soviet models, were supplied up until the end of the war – about an eighth of total production of his model going to the Soviet Union. In this early phase of the war however these tanks were crucial – in the successful Battle of Moscow, newly delivered British tanks were in action, possibly (this is disputed) up to 40 per cent of total Red Army tank numbers. The amount of equipment supplied in this first phase of aid was controversial: many military leaders in Britain complained that they were being deprived of necessary equipment because of the high-level political commitment to aid for the Soviets, but Churchill was adamant that this was crucial. The second phase of aid followed discussions in the summer of 1942 was more of a joint agreement involving the USA. By this time Stalin was applying maximum pressure for a Second Front and viewed what was offered as a poor and not very adequate substitute. The British contribution eventually fell short of what was even promised and some items being cancelled by the Soviets: actual delivery included 2,200 fighter aircraft (out of 2,400 promised) and 1,800 tanks (out of 3,000 promised). Most of the aircraft were US-supplied Airacobra and Kittyhawk fighters that were deemed unsuitable for much RAF use but which suited the low-level roles required on the Eastern Front. Also included were the Albermarle transports (described elsewhere in * Figures from official sources vary about the precise extent of supply of the various items so those given in this chapter are all approximate.

81

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 81

29-01-2021 01:21:18

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

this chapter) and the Hampden bombers that were left at Vaenga by the RAF, having flown to bases in northern Russia in September 1942. Two were lost to enemy action en route (see elsewhere in this chapter). The third phase was between July 1943 and June 1944 and involved another 1,000 tanks, most of which arrived safely, and 450 aircraft. The latter were updated Hurricanes, some Spitfire fighters and a large number of American Airacobras and King Cobra fighters that were backlog deliveries from the 1942 commitment. By this time the USA was also supplying direct large numbers of fighter and medium bomber aircraft as well as tanks and other military supplies, including millions of boots and tins of meat (known as ‘Second Fronts’ in the USSR). Although the Soviets were later accused of downplaying such an enormous aid effort, Stalin did say at the time that all this was crucial to eventual victory. The third phase also involved the supply of naval ships, prompted by Stalin’s demands for a share of the Italian Fleet captured on its surrender in late 1943. The Allies were unwilling to comply with his request for battleships but eventually offered, and Stalin grudgingly agreed, to the loan of some of their own ships to the Northern Fleet which took place in the spring of 1944. The British ships involved (there was also an old American cruiser, the Milwaukee) were, apart from four submarines, Sunfish, Ursula, Unbroken and Unison, old and obsolete. The nine destroyers were ones supplied by the Americans to the British in 1941 under the terms of the Atlantic Charter: the Lincoln, Chelsea, Leamington, Richmond, Georgetown, Roxburgh, Brighton,

Bell King Cobra supplied under Lend-Lease, 1944. (USAAF/Wikimedia Commons)

82

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 82

29-01-2021 01:21:18

Unity in Action

St. Albans and Churchill: they had been used effectively over the past three years but dated from the First World War. The substitute for one of the modern Italian battleships was the old battleship HMS Royal Sovereign that had been launched in 1915 and was considered past its useful Royal Navy life by 1944. This was renamed Archangelsk. Russian crews (amounting to several thousand personnel) arrived in secrecy on the east coast of Scotland via a returning convoy from Murmansk, spending a few months familiarizing themselves with their new charges alongside British crews prior to ceremonial handover and return under the Red Flag. There is little recorded about their presence in Dundee and Rosyth (and possibly elsewhere) apart from accounts regarding the Royal Sovereign in the book by Smith (1988) which offers stereotypical pejorative views of the Soviet sailors and officers. This may of course reflect the views of some naval officers at the time: there was amusement for instance at transporting the Soviet crews for the last part of their journey to Scotland in an old liner named the Empress of Russia. There were tensions and mutual suspicions that were founded on reality – the British, for instance, making sure that their latest radar equipment was stripped out of the vessels prior to Soviet inspection. In contrast and within the same publication, is an account by a Royal Navy wireless telegrapher who sailed for communication purposes on the voyage back to northern Russia in July 1944: this, the recollection of an ordinary sailor, is far more respectful and complimentary. There were sincere efforts by German U-boats and aircraft to sink the Archangelsk on this trip – this

HMS Unison prior to handing over to the Soviet Navy, 1944. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

83

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 83

29-01-2021 01:21:18

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

would have been a considerable propaganda coup at this stage of the war when the Germans were facing defeat on all fronts – but she arrived in Polyarnoe safely. The Sunfish (renamed B1) was accidentally sunk by the RAF on its journey back to Russia, and the Churchill (renamed Deiatelnyi) was sunk through enemy action in January 1945. The Archangelsk was a potent deterrent to German incursion in Murmansk but saw no real action and was eventually returned to Britain, along with the other ships, in 1949, all being scrapped soon afterwards.

Left: A Soviet sailor at the handover of HMS Royal Sovereign, 1944. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons) Below: The newly renamed Archangelesk flies the Red Flag, Scapa Flow, 1944. (IWM/ Wikimedia Commons)

84

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 84

29-01-2021 01:21:19

Unity in Action

The final supply agreement took in the last phase of the war from July 1944, the last deliveries being made in October 1945, and several months after the victory over Japan. This involved various items of military, including naval, equipment and, significantly, 1,050 Spitfire fighters.

Murmansk Hurricanes One of the first concrete examples of assistance offered by Churchill for the Soviet War effort was the supply of an RAF unit of Hurricanes for the defence of the vulnerable port city of Murmansk. From 1940 the Germans were just across the border in Norway and able to bomb the city at will, as well as disrupt the efforts to create the supply route from Britain to Murmansk and Archangel. The aim of Operation Benedict was to send across a fighting wing of Hurricanes, pilots and ground support included, who could provide self-contained operations in conjunction with the Soviets, and also train Soviet pilots who would eventually take over and to whom further mass supplies of Hurricane fighters were intended. The unit, 151 Wing, consisted of 81 and 134 Squadrons made up of newly trained as well as some experienced pilots. A number of unit members were chosen because of their knowledge of the Soviet Union and their language skills. The Wing Adjutant, First World War Royal Flying Corps veteran Flight Lieutenant Hubert Griffith, had visited the USSR several times pre-war and spoke the language. He later wrote enthusiastically about the mission in a 1942 book, RAF in Russia. The squadron personnel and aircraft left Liverpool on the very first Arctic convoy, Operation Dervish, on 12 August 1941 (see Chapter 5). Also aboard were a number of official visitors to the USSR including the sketch artist Feliks Topolski whose images of the war were published regularly in the very popular Picture Post magazine, and two journalists – apparently their inclusion was at Churchill’s suggestion. During the voyage the passengers on the elderly liner Llanstephan Castle, which included most of the air personnel and others numbering some 500, attended lectures, including one from Hubert Griffith on life in the Soviet Union. In this he advised: Ninety-nine percent of everything that anybody will have read will have been biased – either exaggerated adulation 85

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 85

29-01-2021 01:21:19

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

from writers who pretend that everything in modern Russia is an earthly paradise – or else exaggerated detraction, pretending, in past years, that Russia is largely governed by fanatics and incompetents … We are going to what was up to twenty-five years ago – a single generation ago – the most backward country in Europe by some two or three or four hundred years.* If only others who visited over the next few years had received such wise preparation. On arrival fifteen disassembled Hurricanes were unloaded with the personnel at Archangel (because of the heavy bombing of Murmansk port) whilst a further twenty-four were flown direct from the aircraft carrier HMS Argus to the Vaenga airbase near Murmansk in early September. The personnel disembarked in Archangel joined them a few days later, and the assembled aircraft a few weeks later. The Hurricanes ready for action were soon in combat – shooting down their first German plane on their day of arrival. Over the next five weeks before the winter weather stopped most operational flying on both sides, the RAF flew 365 sorties, shooting down fifteen enemy aircraft with the loss of one aircraft and pilot. They reported excellent relations with their Soviet counterparts involving good co-operation over strategic and operational matters, as well as warm friendships made on the ground and in the air. The airfield had crude but adequate facilities but quarters were primitive (although warm) and latrines ‘indescribable’. Vaenga was about seventeen miles from Murmansk on very poor roads so visits there were infrequent. The port town itself had been badly bombed and had few comforts; as with other British visitors to the Soviet Union in wartime, the visitors found the number of women in uniform or undertaking heavy traditionally men’s work, remarkable. Entertainment in Vaenga consisted of a twice-weekly cinema and whatever could be arranged by the personnel themselves. Once the winter set in, work began to train Soviet pilots on Hurricanes, and the ground crews with their maintenance. This all went well and gradually aircraft and their responsibility were passed over to the hosts, whose attitude and abilities certainly impressed the British flyers. This was reported upon in the Soviet press, Soviet War News in the UK, and in a British newsreel, * Griffith 1942.

86

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 86

29-01-2021 01:21:19

Unity in Action

Flight Lieutenant Gittins and RAF sentries at Vaenga, late 1941. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

Above left: Hawker Hurricane at Vaenga, Murmansk, October 1941. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons) Above right: British poster showing Soviet and British aircraft fighting together in northern Russia, 1941. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

87

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 87

29-01-2021 01:21:19

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

all to lend substance to Britain’s claims to be providing real help to the Soviets at this early stage of the alliance. It was felt impractical to keep the British squadrons in Murmansk and, job done, they were all home by Christmas 1941. The Soviets acknowledged the skill and contribution of 151 Wing by awarding its senior officer, Wing Commander Henry Isherwood, with the high-ranking Order of Lenin, along with three of his pilots, Squadron Leaders Rook and Miller and Pilot Officer Haw: these were presented in March 1942 by Ambassador Maisky in London in the presence of Clementine Churchill.

Royal Navy in Murmansk The Soviet Union hosted a number of British and other Allied Military Mission personnel, mostly officers, during the war, just as Britain did for them. Their presence, attached to the respective embassies, was to liaise at the highest operational levels. At operational level itself there were a few examples (as with the Hurricane pilots) of staff based in the Soviet Union, but the most lasting was the small presence in Murmansk, Archangel and the Polyarnoe naval base (near Murmansk), whose role was to support the Royal Navy escorts for the convoys that came and went, with breaks, from 1941 through until 1945. They were there to provide communication, basic repairs, replenish supplies and look after wounded servicemen. As we shall see this was all organized on a basis for Royal Navy personnel that seemed to be lacking for their Merchant Navy colleagues. The shore presence in Murmansk and Polyarnoe amounted to about 100 men under the command of an admiral whose job was to liaise with the admiral in command of the Soviet Northern Fleet over convoy operation at the southern Arctic ports end. Initially incoming British naval vessels were not normally permitted to berth at the Polyarnoe base but this had relaxed by 1943 and from then on they were constant visitors in large numbers. An exception to the initial berthing embargo was made for Royal Navy submarines – the Tigris and Trident, based there for a few months in the early autumn of 1941 to work with the Soviet Navy’s own submarines and improve liaison. They were replaced with two other submarines, the Sealion and Seawolf, in November and December, and the following summer the Trident and Sealion spent another three 88

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 88

29-01-2021 01:21:19

Unity in Action

months on similar duties. During the 1941 mission the submarines sank eight enemy ships between them, and damaged another – the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. A number of minesweepers and smaller naval ships were based at Polyarnoe, mostly for short periods before they were rotated back to their UK bases with outgoing convoys. Their role was to provide communication with incoming British ships and support the Soviets with minesweeping and escort duties within the Kola Inlet where Murmansk was located, and on the approaches to Archangel further east. One ship, the anti-submarine trawler HMS Chiltern (a requisitioned fishing vessel), was based there for some time and the crews rotated. The role of Royal Navy ships supporting Soviet ones became of great importance towards the end of the war when U-boats developed a successful tactic of attack within the supposedly safe waters of the Kola Inlet. Shore-based naval staff were also located at a hospital and survivors’ camp (for crews of ships that had been sunk) at Vaenga Bay; others were based at Archangel on the White Sea for liaison duties with incoming British ships in convoy. In 1942 Catalina flying boats of RAF 210 and 413 Squadrons were based at Lake Lakhta and Krasnoye village at the mouth of the Kola Inlet and were involved in the rescue of Convoy PQ17 survivors and air cover for PQ18 (see Chapter 5). The British commanding officer, Rear Admiral Archer, apparently had to get involved when Soviet customs officials refused to allow carrier pigeons to be brought into Russia as livestock imports were subject to a blanket ban. These were carried by the Catalinas so that help could be used in the event of their ditching in the sea. The Soviet obsession with bureaucracy, a trait that has outlasted the Soviet Union itself, resulted at one point in a number of medical staff being returned home without landing due to their not having the correct entry visas. There was also a small British army unit based near Archangel whose role was to unpack and reassemble military equipment. The numerous accounts of life for Royal Navy crews visiting or based in the Arctic ports vary according, it seems, to when they were written. Most wartime writings, like those recorded from survivors in more recent years, are favourable and very sympathetic to the plight of the Russian people who resided in these bleak northern outposts. They describe and offer abundant examples of good relations, co-operation and appreciation. Cold War-era accounts, in contrast, tend to dwell on negative stories concerning the locals and characterize them as at 89

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 89

29-01-2021 01:21:19

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

best victims of persecution and oppression, or persecutors themselves. Russian people are portrayed as uncultured, brutal, ungrateful, unhelpful to the point of being obstructive, and barely interested in the supplies that were being brought to them at such great cost. It must be borne in mind of course that most such accounts were written by officers from backgrounds that reflected Britain’s class divides: they were hardly likely to be sympathetic to a regime who had removed their like from power and influence a generation previously. A 1957 account in the semiofficial Naval Review Journal describes Soviet soldiers’ willingness to sacrifice their lives as consequent on having so little to live for – poor taste if intended in humour, and quite insulting and ignorant if meant seriously. Such portrayals are in great contrast to those, for example, found in recent accounts in Walling (2012), RACM (2013) and Gunn and Reynolds (2016). The negative narratives did however help form a postwar view that the efforts and sacrifices of service personnel were neither useful nor appreciated – issues that are discussed in other chapters. Friendships with local servicemen and civilians would have fallen under the suspicious eyes of the NKVD security police but nonetheless seem to have developed. Naturally men who endured the hardships of

Murmansk during a bombing raid, 1941. (murman.ru/Wikimedia Commons)

90

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 90

29-01-2021 01:21:20

Unity in Action

life at sea in those times, sought female company when ashore. This was available in the places where recreation was sought, but Soviet women did not make themselves easily available, although some close relationships were formed. Unlike most ports frequented by sailors in the West, there were no brothels where a comfort of a sort could be purchased, but some hard-up Russian women did engage in private prostitution to augment their meagre incomes – accounts do not describe them in glamorous terms. Soviet appreciation of the Royal Navy expressed itself in some unusual ways. The crew of the submarine Trident were gifted a young reindeer during their first stay in Polyarnoe. This lived under the captain’s bed and in the officers’ mess for six weeks including the trip back to the UK: once its barrel of moss had been used up, Polyanna, as the reindeer was named, was fed on scraps from the galley. She apparently thrived to the extent that getting her out of the submarine once back in Blythe, Northumberland, was problematic and she had to be squeezed out through a torpedo tube with the aid of a broom. Polyanna went to live in London Zoo until she died in 1947. Similarly, the crews of HMS Kent and HMS Belfast were also gifted reindeer: whilst the Kent’s (named Olga) ended up in Edinburgh Zoo, the Belfast’s was an unfortunate victim of the German battleship Scharnhorst’s sinking in November 1943. She reacted badly to the noise of the battle and had to be shot by a crewmember. Soviet medals were awarded for bravery to British service personnel and this was reciprocated (see Appendix 3). These included Commander Ernest Hinton, aboard HMS Harrier, who was in charge of the British 6th Minesweeper Olga the reindeer arrives in Scapa Flow, October Flotilla based in Murmansk 1943. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons) 91

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 91

29-01-2021 01:21:20

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

HMS Harrier, 1942. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

in early 1942. In late April, with news that the Cruiser HMS Edinburgh was returning to port under tow by a Soviet ship having been damaged escorting Convoy QP1, he sailed from the Kola Inlet to ensure her safe passage. On 2 May, whilst the Edinburgh was still under threat from U-boat attack, Hinton’s ships approached the cruiser at the same time as three German destroyers intent on finishing her off. Disobeying an order from the admiral on Edinburgh to seek safety under a smokescreen, Hinton aimed the Harrier straight at a much larger and better-armed German destroyer. His actions broke up the German attack and although the Edinburgh had been totally disabled in the action (she was sunk by the Harrier having been abandoned), no other ship was damaged. Hinton was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in recognition of his actions and the bravery of his crew.

The Anglo Soviet Intelligence Agreement and Operation Pickaxe The August 1941 Anglo-Soviet secret agreement concerning intelligence and subversive operations reflected the high-level importance the British attached to such activity. Churchill had instigated the establishment of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) by Minister for Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton in July 1940 – the purpose being (in Churchill’s words) to ‘set Europe ablaze’ by means of sabotage and disruption. 92

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 92

29-01-2021 01:21:20

Unity in Action

SOE was highly secret and few knew that it existed. It was given a huge amount of leeway and virtual permission to undertake work that could never have received official approval – on the basis that it could be disowned if unpalatable detail ever became public. SOE ignored British social conventions, for instance, using women and known criminals in the front line: its agents were taught to be unscrupulously lethal. SOE’s propensity to do whatever was necessary in order to fight the enemy lent itself to mutual help with the Soviets at a time when many senior military officials found the whole idea anathema and quite distasteful. The opposite number of the SOE was the NKVD (an abbreviation which fully translates as the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), a very large multi-functional organization whose role included subversive and intelligence activity. The NKVD had notoriously been the organization used to conduct the purges of the 1930s as well as activities against perceived enemies abroad: this included the murder of the former Bolshevik leader Trotsky in his home in Mexico City. The weapon used for this was an ice-pick, and this might have influenced the choice of title for the main Anglo-Soviet example of intelligence co-operation that will now be described. Operation Pickaxe was the name given to the operations between 1941 and 1944 to smuggle Soviet agents into occupied Europe. These agents, many of whom were men and women who had gone into exile in the USSR from their home countries in the 1930s, were brought to Britain, given some additional training in parachuting, and then dropped into occupied territory by British planes used for SOE missions. Whilst many were dedicated Communists, others were not and were using this as an opportunity to return to their home countries. The NKVD attempts to infiltrate their agents into Europe were bound up with their vast organization of agents in Europe (particularly in Germany) that had started in the 1930s. This was not, as it is sometimes described, a tight organization under one leadership, but a number of groups, some officially linked to the NKVD and others not, but essentially loyal to Moscow. The Nazi Gestapo police were intent on breaking these groups during the war and gave them the collective title Die Roto Kapelle – The Red Orchestra. Operation Pickaxe was an attempt by the NKVD to contact, co-ordinate and ultimately control the activities of these groups. It largely failed due to the success, both by chance and clever surveillance, of the Gestapo in discovering many of its agents, forcing many to 93

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 93

29-01-2021 01:21:20

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

turn against their former masters and play a double game that ended in almost immediate entrapment for a number of agents landed by the RAF. The British were never given much information by the Soviets about the agents and their planned activities but did all they could to land them where requested. It must be remembered that at this time the Soviets had no such naval or air capability to do this themselves far from their own territory. The SOE and the NKVD established offices in Moscow and London to liaise over intelligence matters and these were generally felt to have worked well to cement Anglo-Soviet relations during the war. There is also information to suggest that the Nazis realized when they saw the level of co-operation that lay behind British help in placing Soviet agents, that their attempts to split the Allies by exploiting their mutual distrust, was unlikely to work. The original intelligence agreement was a two-way one and the Soviets did supply the Allies with some valuable information and cooperation, but British motivation to facilitate Operation Pickaxe was driven by a desire to be seen to be co-operative and helpful to the Soviets in the absence of the Second Front. There was a suspicion, especially late in the war, that the planting of agents was as much to do with post-war Soviet designs as with immediate war against Nazi Germany. Initially these activities were so secret that neither the US nor the exiled governments of the countries concerned, were told of British help to infiltrate Communist agents into Western Europe. A decision that in most cases these governments should be told contributed to the end of Operation Pickaxe in 1944. The arrangements were not without problems: Soviet agents, undercover and in other guises, firstly had to make the dangerous journey to Britain on returning Arctic convoy ships, and once there, sometimes had to wait for long periods to be taken by aircraft or ship to the destinations considered practical and safely deliverable. Whilst in the UK they were looked after by the SOE in various safe houses, often requisitioned stately homes, until taken into occupied Europe. These were brave and mostly very committed people and many, sadly, did not survive the war. The NKVD had originally intended to send 200 agents into Europe via Britain, but numbers were whittled down for various reasons and in the end thirteen successful landings were made, mostly by parachute drop, involving twenty-eight agents: four to Germany, five to France and one each to Belgium, Austria and Italy. Only six are believed to have survived the war. 94

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 94

29-01-2021 01:21:20

Unity in Action

The intelligence agreement also saw other secret co-operation involving aircraft: in March 1943 the Vaenga airbase was used by RAF Halifaxes and Stirlings to fly Soviet and British agents into Eastern Europe and Norway. Again, this was because of the lack of equivalent air capability and experience on the Soviet part. However, Soviet advances rendered it unnecessary after only a short period.

The Red Air Force in Scotland The Lend-Lease agreement included the supply to the Soviet Union of a large number of aircraft as described later in this chapter. One requirement that the USSR had in the middle of the war was for transport planes that could move troops. In 1942 the RAF were bringing into service a new type of aircraft, the Armstrong Whitworth Albermarle and it was agreed that some should be sent to the Soviets. These twinengined planes were unusual and complex in design: the first Britishbuilt aircraft to feature a tricycle undercarriage, and built using a steel frame and plywood body to avoid the use of scarce aluminium. Originally designed as a medium bomber, the Albermarle was quickly relegated to transport and glider-towing duties. It was apparently difficult to fly and was not a popular aircraft. Contrary to previous practice with any of the other planes supplied it was agreed that Soviet aircrew, including specially trained civil pilots, should secretly come to the UK to learn how to fly the Albermarles. The first three aircrews from the 1st Air Transport Division arrived by air from the Soviet Union on 11 January 1943. They commenced training on the aircraft almost immediately at the new RAF base at Errol, Perthshire, which was dedicated to ferrytraining (thousands of Allied aircrew passed through Errol between its opening in 1942 and the end of the war). The first return flight with an Albermarle to the Soviet Union, taking a northern route to Vnokovo, Moscow, took place on 3 March. From then on new groups arrived to train and take back further aircraft. By the end of April 1943 fourteen had flown back to Vnokovo, two of which were lost en route. A further order of 100 was agreed, leading to a continuous throughput of Soviet pilots and crew during the spring and summer of 1943. Twenty pilots had been trained by 1 May. Tragedy occurred on 29 May 1943 when one crashed, killing all three Soviet crew and a Czech passenger, just beside 95

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 95

29-01-2021 01:21:20

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Soviet aircrew at Errol Airfield, Scotland 1943. (Montrose Air Heritage Centre)

Albermarle aircraft at Vnukovo Airfield, Moscow. (Montrose Air Heritage Centre)

the village of Fearnan on Loch Tay. The experienced and decorated pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union Major Aleksander Gruzdin, is credited with saving lives by manoeuvring his plane away from houses as it crashed. By June it was considered that the northern flight route was too dangerous and a circuitous route via North Africa and Iran to Baku, was devised and agreed, the UK departure point being on the south coast of England. Meanwhile an Albermarle was being thoroughly evaluated by the Red Air Force in the Soviet Union. This resulted in the presentation to the 96

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 96

29-01-2021 01:21:21

Unity in Action

British manufacturers of a long list of faults and required modifications. Whilst these were underway some 50 Soviet aircrew spent an extended period in Scotland, apparently visiting Dundee for recreation including dancing. Some crews attended a garden party at Holyrood House in Edinburgh, and others watched a Cup Final football match at Hampden Park in Glasgow. One group was flown to York to watch a large bomber group leave for its target in Germany. In general memories on both sides for this period seem to be happy and positive but wartime secrecy prevented public knowledge of this Soviet presence in Scotland. Three more aircraft went to the Soviet Union in December and a further ten were in process. However, in early 1944, a decision was made to cancel the further supply of Albermarles altogether; by this time the larger and very successful Douglas C-47 was being supplied from the US via Alaska in sufficient number to meet all needs. Pilot training continued until April 1944 and ended with the trained crews being shipped back to the Soviet Union by various routes – but not by Albermarle. Credit for revealing this story must go to Anna Belorusova whose grandfather, Petr Kolesnikov, was a Soviet pilot trained in Scotland.

Sink the Tirpitz! The massive and powerful German battleship Tirpitz was one of the most successful warships of the Second World War –without ever having engaged in a naval battle or having sunk a ship. Its guns could fire upon most Allied escort ships from a distance far outside their own weapon capabilities. Its very presence for much of the war in Norwegian fjords presented a latent threat that resulted in the Allies going to great expense and trouble to maintain the Arctic supply route – and at times suspending its use entirely. This is not to mention the abandonment of Convoy PQ17 by its naval escorts and the loss of many of its ships because it was believed (erroneously) that the Tirpitz had put to sea (see Chapter 5). The efforts made to neutralize and destroy this ship were a major Allied obsession, often expressed by Churchill in terms of it being a priority, and one which resulted in some front-line Anglo-Soviet co-operation. Thirty-three air raids were launched against the Tirpitz between its launch in 1939 (the first were in 1940) and its demise in November 1944, involving over 700 British bombers and 250 fighter escorts in 97

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 97

29-01-2021 01:21:21

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

direct action, and many more in diversionary attacks. Prior to the Tirpitz’s move to Norway in 1942 there was a successful commando raid to destroy the dry dock facility at St Nazaire, France, which was designed to force exposure to the Home Fleet should it or large naval ships require heavy repair which would consequently have to be undertaken in Germany. There was also a Soviet attack by fifteen aircraft in April 1944. Although naval engagements by surface ships were planned, none took place, but two manned torpedoes made an unsuccessful attack in 1942, and four midget submarines scored extensive damage in an attack in 1943. On 5 July 1942, the Soviet submarine K21 launched an unsuccessful torpedo attack at the entrance to Altenfjord as the Tirpitz headed a small battle fleet out to the Barents Sea to intercept the scattered Convoy PQ17 and the inbound Convoy QP13. Also in the area was the British submarine P54. The Germans, fearing further attack, cancelled their plans and returned home, not perhaps realizing (as detailed in Chapter 5) how successful their efforts had been. Over all these years success of sorts was maintained by keeping the ship idle in the safety of Norwegian fjords. In fact, unknown to the Allies, Hitler had decided that the warship was something of a white elephant and had relegated it to a reserve role by the time it was finally fatally damaged in late 1944. One of the reasons for this was the immense cost of using the vessel: during one of her rare sorties in 1942 the Tirpitz used up 8,000 tons of fuel oil – one month’s entire supply from the oilfields of Rumania. Her big guns were only used in action once – to bombard the shore facilities in Spitzbergen in September 1943. The first mission involving Anglo-Soviet joint effort took place in August and September 1942, soon after the PQ17 debacle. In August the US cruiser Tuscaloosa took out ground crew and equipment from 144 and 455 RAF squadrons, to Murmansk. Their torpedo-equipped Hampden bombers then flew in two main groups on 2 and 5 May, to Afrikanda airbase south of Murmansk, providing air cover for Convoy PQ18 on the way. They then flew onto to Vaenga outside Murmansk where they regrouped. Twenty-four Hampdens and four reconnaissance Spitfires had made it to Russia successfully, two being lost. From 14 September two missions against the Tirpitz were attempted from Vaenga, both falling foul of bad weather and eventually aborted. A decision was made to bring the crews back to Britain by sea and leave the Hampdens for the Soviets. By 29 October all personnel involved were home along with their torpedoes – which were not left for Soviet use. 98

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 98

29-01-2021 01:21:21

Unity in Action

By 1944 the Tirpitz had survived numerous large-scale torpedo bombing missions by the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm the previous year as well as virtually suicidal mini-submarine attacks. The task of sinking it once and for all was now passed back to the heavy bombers of the RAF. By this time the ‘Tallboy’ bomb had been developed which was capable of penetrating heavy structures impermeable to normal aerial bombardment. The first such mission, known as Operation Paravane, was flown from the Yagodnisk base near Archangel, northern Russia. A total of thirty-seven Lancaster bombers from 9 and 617 Squadrons flew there from Britain using updated nineteenth-century maps that failed to show borders such as that of neutral Sweden. Nonetheless, thirty-one landed successfully around 12 September 1944 along with two transport Liberators with equipment and ground crew, and a Mosquito reconnaissance plane. The weather delayed the mission so the RAF personnel spent several days in Yagodnisk. They were well looked after by their hosts and treated to cinema shows, lectures, a dance where Soviet women personnel were present, and a visit to nearby Archangel. There was a football match where a Soviet team roundly beat a scratch

British Lancaster bomber over Kaafjord during Operation Paravane, 1944. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

99

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 99

29-01-2021 01:21:21

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

RAF one to the accompaniment of a band who played loudly on the frequent occasions the home side scored a goal; one RAF participant later recognized the Soviet goalkeeper as one who appeared with the post-war Moscow Dynamo team. All the RAF aircrews were presented with red star/hammer and sickle badges – but were later instructed that these could not be worn on uniforms. The mission took place on 15 September with surprise achieved, no losses on the raid itself, but six aircraft crashing on Russian territory. The Soviets were remembered as being very helpful in locating, rescuing and returning the crashed aircrew. All were soon returned to Britain, one Lancaster being lost with its crew on the way. Damage to the Tirpitz had been sustained by at least one direct hit, but it took a further two similar raids in October and November to finally put it out of action. These were both launched from British airfields.

Poltava US Bases Although the Poltava operation never directly involved British forces, it offers telling and contrasting comparisons with other examples of the mutual placement of respective British and Soviet aircrew on one another’s territory described in this chapter. By 1943, British and US Army Air Forces were engaged in massive efforts to bring Germany to its knees through heavy bombing: British raids were conducted at night, involving raids on targets that could not be precise and therefore resulted in large numbers of civilian casualties. The US Army Air Forces developed its resources for daylight raids that took a heavy toll on men and equipment, but which were arguably more accurate and destructive of industrial and logistical targets. The largest US heavy bomber, the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, also had a slightly longer range than the most effective British heavy bomber, the Avro Lancaster. As the Red Army began its slow advance after Stalingrad, the hitting of war manufacturing in eastern Germany, nearer to the Soviet front lines, became important to Stalin and his generals. The USSR had developed its own air force very effectively as a support to ground troops but at this time had no meaningful heavy bombing capability. In 1943 discussions began about using newly liberated Ukrainian bases for American long-range bombers. Eventually Stalin himself lent approval 100

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 100

29-01-2021 01:21:21

Unity in Action

to the idea of ‘shuttle bombing’: this would involve B-17s and their longrange fighter escorts flying missions from Italy or England, bombing carefully chosen targets in eastern Germany or Poland, and then landing on Soviet soil before turning round to do the same on a homebound trip. It would necessarily involve deploying US personnel and supplies to the Ukraine. The plan, known as Operation Frantic, eventually got underway with enthusiasm on both sides in the late spring of 1944, involving three airbases in the Poltava region of central Ukraine. The initial missions were a great success and pomp and ceremony surrounded the first landing of some 200 B-17s and their P-51 Mustang fighter escorts on 2 June 1944. The second mission, however, was followed to the Ukraine by a German reconnaissance plane, and for the next three nights the Luftwaffe very effectively bombed the Poltava bases destroying dozens of planes and killing a number of US servicemen. This led to recriminations but the Soviets, perhaps out of pride, refused to allow the Americans to bring in more effective air defences. The last of the few achieved missions under Operation Frantic concerned the attempts to get supplies to the beleaguered Poles who were fighting to free Warsaw. As described in Chapter 3, the Soviets were initially reluctant to aid what they saw as an adventurist uprising and prevaricated before eventually allowing the Americans to fly shuttle operations in September 1944, that were largely unsuccessful. By this time relations on the ground were souring in the bases: just as had been

Soviet and US aircraft at Poltava, 1944. (USGOV-PD/Wikimedia Commons)

101

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 101

29-01-2021 01:21:22

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

experienced in the UK, the thousand-odd US service personnel in the Ukraine were better paid, better uniformed, better equipped and far more attractive to the local Ukrainian women. This caused resentment amongst Soviet forces, who were anyway suspicious of fraternization. The Ukraine had been occupied by the Germans and many people, including some of these same women, had conducted relationships with German personnel, preferring them and the Americans to the Russians. That area of Ukraine had historically been an area of nationalistic antiSoviet feeling, and had also suffered greatly in the famine of the early 1930s. Clumsy attempts were made to stop relationships forming, and more official but secret efforts were made to recruit local women to spy on their American boyfriends. By the autumn the shuttle missions were no longer required due to the Soviet advance and they were ended in a climate of acrimony. A smaller US presence was maintained at Poltava until almost the end of the war to provide liaison flights and recovery missions for downed US aircraft. By early 1945 a prime American concern was the return home of US prisoners of war liberated by the Red Army in Eastern Europe – a matter considered a priority as the POWs were regarded as heroes. The Soviets had an entirely different attitude – regarding Soviet POWs as traitors at worst, and unworthy of any special attention at best (see Chapter 8). They automatically transferred such feeling, or lack of it, to US POWs and refused to allow the Poltava airbase to be used for the collection and return home of POWs, having established a route of sorts through the port of Odessa. This resulted in tension and argument at the highest levels and in the view of some writers (e.g. Plokhy, 2019) such stark differences in culture that this all contributed to developing the climate of Cold War. There was a smaller-scale and short-lived equivalent to Operation Frantic involving Soviet planes being located at the Allied airbase in Bari, Italy, in the summer of 1944. The 12 C-47s of the Sokolov Group completed over 800 sorties to deliver food supplies and weapons to Tito’s Yugoslav National Liberation Army. Also based at Bari in this period were a dozen Yak-9 fighters which were also involved in escorts and support work for Tito’s partisans. During this period the Operation Frantic shuttle was emulated on at least one occasion by Soviet A-20 medium bombers which flew from Balti, Moldova, to Yugoslavia to drop supplies and then on to land at Foggia Main in Italy, before returning within a few 102

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 102

29-01-2021 01:21:22

Unity in Action

days to Moldova. British Foreign Secretary Eden was concerned that the Soviet base in Italy would be used to bolster Communist influence there, and initially opposed the suggestion, particularly as the Soviets had been, in his view, quite uncooperative over reciprocal arrangements. However, in the event the Soviet presence never amounted to more than 200 personnel, along with a further 190 Yugoslavs, and was without controversy – activities being solely focused on the agreed military task.

The Channel Islands Occupation and Help to Soviet POWs The only part of the UK to suffer Nazi occupation in the war was the Channel Islands group that lies just off the French coast. The islands were turned into armed fortresses with a very large German garrison in the expectation of eventual invasion. The British never made any attempt to either defend or take back the Channel Islands and it remained under occupation from 1940 until the very end of the war – by then far behind Allied lines. The British also officially discouraged resistance, but it did take place at various levels, and a number of islanders escaped to join British forces on the mainland. In retaliation for the illegal internment by the British of German civilians in Iran, Hitler ordered the deportation to Germany of British mainland-born Channel Islanders (amounting to about 2,100 men women and children). Jews and anyone transgressing the laws (which included owning a radio) were also deported and a number died in Nazi concentration camps. Towards the end of the war food became short as communication with the liberated mainland France was cut off. By this time the remaining occupiers included renegade Red Army POWs who had gone over to German units, and other low-grade soldiers who resorted to criminal acts to get food. The islanders certainly suffered severe hardship. The engineering works to build complex coastal fortifications were undertaken with slave labour, usually Soviet prisoners of war, who were brutally treated. Some islanders chose to help escaped Soviet POWs and provide them with shelter: one such was Albert Bedane, a physiotherapist and Frenchman by birth (but a naturalized British subject), who successfully sheltered a Jewish woman and three escaped Soviet POWs on Jersey until the end of the war. Bedane received a gold watch from the USSR government in 1966 along with some others who 103

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 103

29-01-2021 01:21:22

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

helped escaped POWs. Twenty-three-year-old Russian pilot Feodor Buryi from Siberia had been captured in 1941 after a period underground behind enemy lines following the shooting down of his plane. He was sent to Jersey where he twice attempted escape. On the third attempt in September 1942 he was helped by locals and then taken in by René le Mottée whose children named him ‘Bill’. René was denounced but he managed to evade capture and seek shelter with Louisa Gould, a shopkeeper in the village of La Fontaine, Millais, St Ouen. Gould had recently lost one of her sons who was serving in the Royal Navy and decided she would look after ‘some other mother’s son’ (the name of a 2017 movie that tells her story). She took in Feodor/Bill and kept him safe for eighteen months until she was betrayed in June 1944. Searching German soldiers found no trace of Feodor/Bill except a present label addressed to him along with a Russian-English dictionary. This was enough to secure the arrest and conviction of Louisa and some relations and friends. She was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and sent

German proclamation on Jersey concerning an escaped Russian prisoner, October 1944. (Manvyi/Wikimedia Commons)

104

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 104

29-01-2021 01:21:22

Unity in Action

to Ravensbruck concentration camp where she was gassed to death on 13 February 1945. Feodor/Bill remained in hiding, survived the war and returned home to the USSR; he attended an unveiling of a monument to Louisa in St Ouen in 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the islands. Resistance activity on Jersey was also organized by the fledgling island Communist group. The group had dissolved at the start of the occupation but reformed to engage in anti-occupation activity, growing from five to seventeen members by the end of the war. They were instrumental in forming the main united resistance group, the Jersey Democratic Movement. The Communists also made contact with antifascist German soldiers, and with others including slave labourers, planned an armed insurrection towards the end of the war, that would have overthrown the occupiers along with their collaborators in the island parliament, and set up a true people’s government – a commune. This was overtaken by events, but evidences the same spirit and leadership from Communists as seen elsewhere in Europe within the resistance movement (see chapters 7 and 8).

Conclusion This chapter has provided evidence of the extent of military co-operation that followed the Anglo-Soviet agreement for mutual aid soon after the Soviet Union’s entry to the war in 1941. As the Red Army, throughout the war, was doing most of the fighting on the ground, it follows that the principal contribution from Britain was in the form of military and other aid, provided at great cost and sacrifice through the efforts of ordinary British people. Most of the joint naval activity was associated with the maintenance of the northern Arctic convoy route. There were also some other examples of co-operation, some linked with the contribution the British and Americans made to heavy bombing operations in order to reduce Germany’s war effort – a capacity that the Soviets lacked through the course of the war. Others concerned intelligence-sharing and co-operation. Escaped Soviet prisoners of war in occupied Europe played a significant role in resistance and partisan activity; such possibilities would have been limited on the German-occupied British territory in the Channel Islands, but there was some interface with resisting Channel Islanders. 105

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 105

29-01-2021 01:21:22

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Poster depicting British and Soviet troops fighting together, by artist Rowland Hilder. (HMSO/Wikimedia Commons)

All official co-operative wartime activities were viewed then, and have been regarded since, according to the attitudes of the observers or historians concerned regarding the Soviet Union, its ideals and its regime. This has rather distorted the historical narrative and clouded facts and their interpretation. However, there seems enough evidence from first-hand accounts of good relations at ground level, despite cultural differences and the sheer hardships of life in the USSR during the war, to cast some doubt about the veracity of some of the more negative accounts. These are themes that will be returned to in the next chapter.

106

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 106

29-01-2021 01:21:22

Chapter 5

The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945

Even in peace, scant quiet is at sea; In war, each revolution of the screw, Each breath of air that blows the colours free, May be the last life movement known to you. John Masefield, ‘For All Seafarers’ Britain’s contribution to the supplying of the Soviet Union’s needs through the shipping of materials by the shortest route to her northern ports was and remains one of the most controversial aspects of the war effort. This was bloody and highly dangerous work that involved taking ships in awful conditions through hazardous seas where the enemy had concentrated forces to sink as many as possible. The toll is staggering: in all 104 British and American merchant vessels were sunk and 829 merchant sailors of various nations died. Royal Navy losses amounted to eighteen warships along with nearly 2,000 naval personnel. Soviet losses included twenty-nine merchant ships with nearly 2,000 crew and an untold number of aircraft, naval vessels and personnel. Many British survivors believed that their role was neglected and negated in their home country, resulting in a campaign in relatively recent years for official recognition and a campaign medal similar to those awarded for participation in other theatres of operation. This will be discussed, along with the main story of the convoys, in this chapter. As with so much else in relation to the Anglo-Soviet alliance, the facts have been obscured by partisan views on both sides: exaggeration that suited a particular narrative was accepted as reality but light is now shining through some of the murk of the Cold War.

107

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 107

29-01-2021 01:21:22

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

An Overview of the Northern Arctic Sea Route to Russia The Arctic convoy route was used to supply Lend-Lease materials and food to the Soviet Union between August 1941 and May 1945. The favoured port of destination was Archangel (or Archangelsk), an ancient city that straddles the mouth of the River Dvina as it enters the White Sea some 800 miles north of Moscow. Scottish and English traders sailed there in the sixteenth century after a trade deal was brokered between ship’s Captain Richard Chancellor and Ivan the Terrible. They were soon replaced by the Dutch as the main traders into the White Sea. By the 1940s the port was well developed as a timber-exporting centre, and enjoyed good communications by rail and (further to the west) the newly built White Sea Canal, with Moscow and the populated areas of Russia and the Soviet Union. Archangel was planned to be the northern limit of the German advance eastwards but in the event was never threatened. The problem with the port was that it iced up in the winter months and the icebreakers of the day, few in number, struggled to keep it open, especially in the early stages of the war. One veteran, Francis Lee, who was a 17-year-old in 1944, recalls his ship, the Empire Ploughman, making its way up the Dvina with traffic police stopping pedestrians crossing to let the leading icebreaker force a way through, and after passage looking back to see the ice form again within minutes and people crossing again.* The other principal developed port in the White Sea was in Molotovsk (now Severodvinsk) about twenty-five miles west of Archangel. Although the summer access to the White Sea involved better weather conditions, the long daylight hours brought problems of their own: ships were more vulnerable to attack when they could be easily seen and located. As German forces were in northern Norway, convoys had to negotiate a sea lane between an enemy-held coast and the Arctic icepack. The only answer to such problems was to use, in the winter months, the port of Murmansk in the Kola Inlet. This was at least a day’s sailing closer to the North Atlantic, but also had its own issues. Murmansk was hastily developed (with British assistance) in 1915 for the supply of equipment to the Russian armies who were also at war with Germany. Its facilities were, in modern terms, primitive, it lacked heavy lifting cranes and its wharves were wooden and few in number. However, it did have a railhead – the Kirov railway had * RACM, 2013.

108

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 108

29-01-2021 01:21:22

The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945

been completed in 1935 and provided useful access direct to the besieged city of Leningrad. Murmansk was also subject to regular bombing raids as it was only thirty minutes’ flying time from German bases – by early in the war its wooden houses had all been destroyed and the town’s mainly military inhabitants led an uncomfortable existence. Murmansk was also close to the Soviet Northern Fleet base at Polyarnoe, but Royal Navy ships were generally denied access there until 1943. The naval oiler used to refuel RN ships was located at Vaenga Bay just east of Murmansk and it was there, where a small wooden pier was situated, that the escorting destroyers and other ships anchored in the Kola Inlet until open access was granted to Polyarnoe. Vaenga was also the location of a small hutted camp which was used to look after the wounded and survivors picked up from torpedoed ships. Whilst in very general terms the summer convoys tended to go to the White Sea, and the winter ones to the Kola Inlet, in practice many divided, and ships used both ports from the same convoy. This was especially the case from the end of 1942 when summer convoys were stopped due to the attrition rate, only starting again in August 1944 when the route in the open sea became safer from attack.

Arctic convoy routes. (Arctic Convoy Museum Trust)

109

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 109

29-01-2021 01:21:23

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

There were in total seventy-eight convoys to northern Russia, involving 1,400 merchant ships escorted by naval ships and submarines from the Royal Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, US Navy and Soviet Navy. The Germans realized that one torpedo sinking one ship could destroy as much equipment as might be achieved by an advancing army on the battlefield suffering much greater loss to achieve the same result. They therefore concentrated air and sea forces around Norway to disrupt this supply route as much as possible. This cost them dearly too: the Germans lost five surface ships including two battleships (the Scharnhorst and Tirpitz), thirty-one U-boats and a very large number of aircraft. From that perspective it looks as if the Germans, with fewer losses, came off best, but such an equation is meaningless: the amount of equipment that did get through helped the Soviet Union succeed on the main battle fronts in the east. Although this chapter will focus on the experience of British crews in northern Russia the involvement of Soviet vessels in the convoys resulted in visits to British ports by Soviet seafarers (men and women). These, however, do not seem to have been recorded anywhere and so are difficult to research. Comment can be found in wartime literature that in London the uniforms of all the Allies could be seen all the time – with the exception of the Red Army, so Soviet personnel were a mystery to most UK citizens. Some snippets have come down – friendly memories of Soviet sailors at the base at Lyness on Hoy in the Orkney Islands, or the visits of merchant ships to the Tyne. In late 1944 the Newcastle upon Tyne People’s Theatre put on a pageant celebrating the Arctic convoys, and as recorded earlier, efforts were made there to welcome Soviet seafarers.

Britain’s Royal Navy and Merchant Fleet in Wartime In 1939 Britain had the largest merchant fleet in the world – amounting to approximately 20 million tons of shipping serving trade routes to every port in the world, but primarily meeting the needs of the British Empire whose territories covered 30 per cent of the world’s land mass and 25 per cent of its population. Its task was to bring in raw materials and food, and take out manufactured goods to the Empire – a role crucial to the economy. The next biggest fleet belonged to the USA with 12 million tons of shipping. By contrast Germany had 3.68 million tons and the Soviet Union (with its limited ice-free ports) 1.19 million tons. There was no 110

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 110

29-01-2021 01:21:23

The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945

British Merchant Navy as such but an array of privately owned shipping companies of different sizes. Some of these were ruthless in exploiting their crews, others were elitist and paternalistic. These ranged from large ships with smartly uniformed crews who sailed timetabled passenger and cargo routes, down to small companies whose typically older and smaller ships ‘tramped’ from port to port collecting cargoes and covering routes as they went. Staffing this vast network were 144,000 merchant seamen (rising to 185,000 during the course of the war). Of this number many came from overseas and represented many races: there were 45,000 described as ‘Indian’, 6,000 described as ‘Chinese’ and a large number of seamen of Middle Eastern origin who traditionally served as firemen working under awful conditions in the bowels of their vessels. During wartime the British merchant fleet also included under its direction some 50,000 seamen who served under their own flags and laws. Wartime saw recruitment of former merchant seamen as well as new ones so the age range of a ship’s crew might be from 15-year-old cabin boys to old men in their seventies. The service appealed to those who resented the discipline and mindless routines of the Royal Navy, bound as it was with tradition. Class differences were present but not so starkly: officers and skilled engineers typically came from educated but ordinary origins on the larger ships, and would have worked their way up to get a Master’s ticket on smaller ones. Crews were from all sorts of backgrounds, including criminal ones, and the dirtiest jobs would often be undertaken by seamen from Britain’s Black communities on the Tyne and Cardiff, as well as from the Empire and beyond – roles neglected in many of the histories. British merchant seamen – all, with a handful of exceptions, were male during wartime as women were refused even limited entry as ‘stewardesses’ – would sign on for the duration of a single voyage and became unemployed as soon as it was over, unless signed on again straight away for another voyage. This happened not just on docking in port, but a contract would also cease the moment a ship was torpedoed, leaving surviving crew literally adrift on zero pay. All this changed in May 1941 when the Emergency Work (Merchant Navy) Order, Notice No. M198 was passed by parliament to address the national crisis in food provision that only the Merchant Navy could address. The ‘Pool’ as it became known, guaranteed registered seafarers work and pay whether or not at sea. Whilst registered seafarers not signed up for a voyage would be directed to a ship where they were needed, leave was accrued from time 111

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 111

29-01-2021 01:21:23

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Comparative international merchant fleet sizes, 1939. (Hurd’s Britain’s Merchant Navy, 1943)

at sea, and pay awarded regardless. This did not reduce the danger of life in the Merchant Navy, but it made it a little less like slavery. Merchant Navy men were however still regarded as of lowly status and lacked the instant recognition and respect that their Royal Navy colleagues enjoyed. 112

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 112

29-01-2021 01:21:24

The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945

Wartime merchant crews included DEMS (Defensive Armed Merchant Ship) personnel who were recruited to man anti-aircraft guns mounted on vessels of all sizes. These were usually servicemen who were either young Royal Navy ‘Hostilities Only’ ratings, or Royal Artillery Maritime Service soldiers, and in both cases sometimes older experienced men brought back from retirement. They were typically commanded by an experienced naval petty officer or Royal Marine sergeant, and on a larger and well-armed ship, a junior naval officer. Some 38,000 personnel were involved as DEMS gunners, and all British merchant ships were armed by 1943. The graves of British seafarers in northern Russia include some of these seagoing army personnel (see Appendix 2). In 1942, when convoys seemed at their most vulnerable, a number of merchant ships were fitted with catapults on the forward deck from which Hurricane fighters could be launched to attack German aircraft, particularly the reconnaissance planes that tracked and shadowed convoys. This was a dangerous one-way journey, the hoped-for end of which would be running out of fuel and ditching beside a friendly ship that would then pick up the pilot. There was some success despite the use of worn-out, outdated aircraft, but the need for such suicidal practices became unnecessary as increasing numbers of hastily built escort aircraft carriers were brought into service. The casualty rate for merchant seamen in the war was high: numbers of deaths are not certain because they were not counted automatically (as were servicemen and -women in the armed forces): it is estimated that 27 per cent of all serving British merchant seafarers in the Second World War died – about 35,000 individuals, and in proportional excess of those who died in armed forces service. In addition to the dead some 5,000 were injured and 6,000 became prisoners of war – a total of around 47,000 casualties. It is to Diversity amongst merchant seamen. (MOI Merchantmen the credit of rescue efforts at War, 1944) 113

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 113

29-01-2021 01:21:24

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

DEM gunnery course bus for merchant seamen, Immingham. (NMM/Wikimedia Commons)

that more did not perish in Arctic waters – especially as ships in convoy were not allowed to stop to rescue those from sunken neighbours. For a period in 1941 losses from U-boat attacks in the Atlantic were outpacing building and repair, putting the nation in real danger of starvation. By late 1943 tonnage had reduced to 13.5 million. However, this period passed and the Merchant Navy finished the war as still the largest fleet in the world despite the loss of 54 per cent of its ships (2,828 in total); this was due to rapid replacement of vessels by shipyards on both sides of the Atlantic using the most modern of methods. The Royal Navy was Britain’s ‘Senior Service’ when the war started. With over 200,000 officers and men serving on approximately 375 warships ranging from battleships (of which there were fifteen) down to submarines (sixty). It drew the largest budget of any of the armed forces, tasked as it was with protecting Britain’s trade routes and food supplies. The protection of merchant shipping was therefore the Navy’s prime task as it entered the war and one for which it made the greatest commitment. Most large-scale naval engagements, such as the sinking of the German battleships Bismark and Scharnhorst, were to protect merchant shipping. Although in a process of modernization many of the ships available at the start of the war were old and relatively obsolete. This changed quickly as the war progressed and lessons were learned – for example, about the importance of anti-submarine capability and of aircraft carriers. At the start of the war some 600 trawlers from the country’s fishing fleets were requisitioned for minesweeping 114

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 114

29-01-2021 01:21:24

The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945

Adrift after his ship was torpedoed. (Hurd’s Britain’s Merchant Navy, 1943)

A ship on Convoy RA64, February 1945. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

115

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 115

29-01-2021 01:21:25

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

HMS London on Arctic convoy escort duties, 1943. The author’s father is fourth from right bottom row. (Author’s collection)

Norwegian deck boy on a ship sailing to Murmansk, autumn 1943. (Norway National Archive/ Wikimedia Commons)

116

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 116

29-01-2021 01:21:25

The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945

and anti-submarine work. With their civilian crews and naval reserve officers they became very important components of convoy protection. His Majesty’s trawlers were regarded rather jokingly by the regular Navy with their traditions of elitism and class snobbery. Naval officers were usually public school-educated and typically had little in common with the men on the lower decks who were managed through a hierarchy underpinned by strict discipline. There was though a tradition of bravery and determination that united crews and gave them immense pride in their ships and fellow crewmembers. The threat of insurrection that was briefly seen during the Invergordon Mutiny of 1931 seemed a distant memory. By mid-1944 there were 800,000 men serving in the Royal Navy, along with 73,000 shore-based WRNS women (during the war, by way of comparison, the British Army increased in size from 225,000 regulars in 1939 to 2.9 million serving soldiers in 1945). The contrast between the smart and relatively well-equipped Royal Navy and the hotch-potch that was the Merchant Navy is important to recognize when looking at the Arctic convoys. Woodman, whose full and factual account stands out from the many that have been written, regards this difference as significant: the Arctic Convoys were to provide a catalyst which bred its own tragic consequences in a widening of this difference, which affected the Merchant Navy for a very long time.* There were also differing but equally lethal dangers that each had to negotiate, but on balance, Merchant Navy personnel were the poor and not very well-respected relations despite bravery, sacrifice and importance to the nation.

The Convoys Towards the end of the First World War experience had shown that the most secure method of ensuring the vital transportation of food and supplies to Britain was by concentrating ships in large groups with escorting naval vessels to defend against enemy submarines and surface vessels. By 1939 the rapid development of aerial bombing added air attack * Woodman (1994) p. 19.

117

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 117

29-01-2021 01:21:26

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

to enemy methods. Germany, realizing that Britain’s main vulnerability was her dependence on imported food and other materials, concentrated her naval capability on building a massive U-boat fleet – some 1,154 were commissioned before and during the war itself. Although not fail-safe, the U-boats developed strategies to attack convoys; however, in turn the Royal Navy and its associate forces developed their own defensive capabilities that were increasingly successful as the war continued to its close in 1945. Convoy operations involved passage at the pace of the slowest ship, and strict maintenance of the convoy pattern unless ordered to ‘scatter’. There could be no altering of course to rescue the survivors of a torpedoed neighbour however close it might be – that had to be left to naval ships or, later in the war, designated rescue ships that might be some distance away. Convoyed ships had to sail straight past wounded, drowning and dying men and ignore their desperate cries for help. The first British convoy to the Soviet Union, Dervish, left Hvalfjord, Iceland, for Archangel on 21 August 1941. This involved seven ships

Refuelling an Arctic convoy warship as seen by artist Feliks Topolski 1941. (Estate of Feliks Topolski)

118

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 118

29-01-2021 01:21:26

The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945

and a number of escorts, some of which were to remain in northern Russia on anti-submarine and minesweeping duties. This was regarded as a trial and helped identify and sort out logistical issues in relation to oiling (refuelling) and other matters. Dervish and its return convoy QP1 passed off unscathed, as did the convoys that followed until the end of the year. These, as with all winter convoys, had to contend with the ferocious and unpredictable weather conditions found in those northern waters. This included the extremely low temperatures and ‘icing up’ of ships, all of which presented great danger to sailors on deck; the threat of top-heavy capsize if ice was not removed was an unpleasant and hazardous operation in itself. The seas themselves could be highly destructive: during Convoy JW53 in February 1943, six ships bound for Russia had to return to Iceland with damage; these included the cruiser HMS Sheffield which lost the armour plate from the turret of one of her forward big guns, and the carrier HMS Dasher which lost a number of aircraft overboard before sustaining a huge gash in the one side as welds tore apart. Dasher limped to Dundee for repairs and whilst working up out of harm’s way to return to service at the end of March, mysteriously blew up in the Clyde with the loss of around 380 crewmembers. 1942 saw the convoys maintained on a monthly basis with participating ship numbers now in double figures as supplies to the beleaguered Soviets were stepped up. Attacks by U-boats and aircraft based in Norway now became a regular feature of every convoy. With the improvement in the weather and better visibility, convoys could be sighted by reconnaissance aircraft who would call in the submarines. The first sinking in January took place in the entrance to the Kola Inlet – just as the last did in 1945. By March 1942 attacks were increasing in intensity. From February British minds were also focused on the presence of the battleship Tirpitz. Whilst experience grew of the most effective methods of anti-submarine Able Seaman Thomas Day on an and anti-aircraft defence as the war iced-up HMS Belfast, November 1943. continued, there were terrible tragedies. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons) 119

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 119

29-01-2021 01:21:27

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

The most notorious was Convoy PQ17 which sailed from Iceland in late June 1942. This was the largest convoy up until that date, with thirty-six merchant ships laden with vital arms and supplies and heavily defended by a potent force of warships. On the basis of intelligence that the Tirpitz and other German warships had sailed from Norway to intercept PQ17, and having no equivalent ships with the gun range of the Tirpitz, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, First Sea Lord of the Admiralty in London, took the decision to avoid catastrophe to his Home Fleet by withdrawing the escorts and ordering the convoy, which was now in Arctic waters, to scatter. This took place immediately and it was not long before the Germans realized that the convoy’s ships were now sitting ducks for air and sea attack. Over the next few days twenty-five virtually undefended merchant vessels were sunk by air and U-boat attack. Effectively disobeying orders, the commander of the converted trawler HMS Ayrshire rounded up three ships and led them north into the Arctic icepack, camouflaged them with white paint from a cargo destined for Russia, and then lying as low as possible in the ice for several days. At this time of year daylight was constant and evasion from the eyes of the enemy almost impossible, but these ships succeeded and sailed safely into Archangel sometime later. Such was the attrition that some other crews abandoned ship before attacks had even commenced. PQ17 was a disaster and the worst episode of the war for the Royal Navy. Naturally there were recriminations and soul-searching but the general conclusion was that this had been a ghastly mistake. The disaster also accentuated the inferior position felt by Merchant Navy seafarers in relation to their Royal Navy comrades – it seemed like some lives were more important than others. After PQ17, summertime convoys ceased on British orders taken at the highest level, none taking place between March and November 1943, and between April and July 1944. This reduced the capacity of the supply route very significantly and opened up immediate criticism from the Soviets and, later, post-war, analysis that this had all been contrived as an excuse to reduce aid and the fighting effectiveness of the Red Army. Even after the Cold War PQ17 remains a controversial subject for historians. By late 1944 German air and surface fleet power had been diminished but the U-boat threat remained high despite improvements in anti-submarine measures. Convoys in fact continued in order to try and meet aid agreements made, until the summer of 1945 and the end of the war. They remained 120

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 120

29-01-2021 01:21:27

The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945

Map showing enemy threats to Arctic convoys. (MOI Merchantmen at War, 1944)

HM trawler Ayrshire, 1942. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

121

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 121

29-01-2021 01:21:27

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Torpedo explosion from an air attack, 1942. (USLC/Wikimedia Commons)

vulnerable to the end with U-boats changing tactics as Allied defensive ones improved. Four merchant ships were sunk in Convoy RA65 as late as March 1945 through air and submarine attack. The final victim was an escort ship, the frigate HMS Goodall on 8 March 1945, sunk by torpedo during a fierce air and sea battle with U-boats at the mouth of the Kola Inlet as the last wartime convoy sailed home from Russia.

Survivors’ Stories Like most personal accounts that emerge from wartime, those concerning the Arctic convoys are dramatic and poignant, leaving the reader wondering how any human being could survive such experiences. Those British accounts that were written in the immediate post-war period, however, tend to have low regard for the Soviet people whilst those written either at the time or more recently offer a different and more positive perspective. Soviet narratives that went beyond propaganda have been harder to access but those that have emerged are surprisingly similar to the more positive British ones. Typically, western Cold War accounts talk glowingly about British and American efforts and sacrifice to get aid to Russia despite misgivings about the regime. This is contrasted with Soviet lack of appreciation, petty thieving, absence of effort 122

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 122

29-01-2021 01:21:27

The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945

and assistance, waste, and the poverty, primitive nature and ugliness of life in Murmansk and the northern ports (including remarks about the women encountered), and of course the insanity of the communist system. With their superiority in terms of naval as well as merchant shipping it was natural that the British should be in overall command of the convoys which of course caused Soviet resentment when they were suspended after PQ17. However, the Soviets contributed their own merchant ships which sailed in almost every convoy from the very first, and also escort vessels from their own fleet. They also contributed air support within the limitations of availability (given the constant bitter fighting on the fronts in which they were engaged) and icebreaking for the winter convoy ships that went to the White Sea ports. This resulted in much liaison and contact between personnel of the two countries, and the development generally of mutual respect. Typical of the awful experiences suffered by torpedoed merchant vessel survivors is the story of the SS Induna, a 5,000-ton tramp steamer owned by the small Glasgow shipping company Maclay & McIntyre, seven of whose twelve ships were lost in the Second World War. The Induna was part of Convoy PQ13 that sailed from Reykjavik, Iceland, on 20 March 1942. Four days into the passage a severe storm set in which, in freezing conditions, caused the sinking of the escort trawler Sulla and the dispersal of the convoy. Breaks in the weather saw the beginning of German attacks on the now scattered ships, firstly from the air, during which the Empire Ranger and Raceland were sunk; the Ballot suffered damage and was abandoned by some of her crew, who were picked up first by a trawler and then transferred to the Induna. Elsewhere British and Soviet escort ships were engaged in battle with German surface ships which had already sunk another vessel, the Bateau, with six survivors (from a crew of forty-three) picked up by a German destroyer. During these engagements the British cruiser HMS Trinidad managed to inflict severe damage on itself when heavy seas caused the reversed direction of a torpedo fired at a German destroyer. The El Estero managed to survive air attack and an encounter with a minefield before it was found and escorted into Murmansk by a Soviet naval ship. Other ships including the Induna were getting stuck in ice floes and running out of fuel. The Induna, with the trawler Silja in tow, got free but the two lost contact in rough seas when the tow parted. The next day, 30 March 1942, the Induna was torpedoed by a U-boat. The forty-one survivors 123

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 123

29-01-2021 01:21:28

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

took to lifeboats but by the time they were located by a Soviet aircraft and picked up by a Soviet vessel on 2 April, eleven had died from the freezing and stormy conditions. In all twenty-seven crewmembers and DEMS gunners had been lost from the Induna, as well as nine from the Ballot. This included the master who was last seen on the bridge of his sinking ship. The survivor accounts from the overcrowded lifeboat ordeal are harrowing: describing the terrible deaths of shipmates from wounds, frostbite, madness and despair. Once in Murmansk the survivors of PQ13 were far from safe: a further three ships were sunk by bombing in the docks. Bill Shorts, the Induna’s engineering officer was badly wounded and in the hospital in Murmansk, an old school that was under constant aerial bombardment that was simply ignored by the overworked but committed doctors and nurses. Despite the absence of equipment and medicine and using the crudest of techniques, dedicated attention saved Bill’s life: gangrene was spreading through his smashed and frost-bitten legs and in a crude operating theatre, with no anaesthetic, they were cut off. After delirium lasting three days Bill awoke amidst continued mayhem; he later recalled how the Soviet doctors, nurses and volunteers had tried their best to offer comfort and distraction to the wounded. Another survivor of the New Westminster that had been bombed in Murmansk was Morris Mills, who also had both legs amputated without anaesthetic. He was transferred later to HMS Edinburgh and recalled the kindness of Red Army soldiers encountered in the bombed-out city so near the front line as this was in process. One of them sung to the gathered wounded whilst an air raid was underway all around them, then presented him with the balalaika. Once aboard HMS Edinburgh, Morris received medical attention that contrasted starkly with the crude facilities of the Murmansk hospital. This was not the end of his ordeal; a few days later the Edinburgh was torpedoed and sunk, Morris making a dramatic escape from the sinking ship to the minesweeper HMS Harrier that had swung alongside. He was then taken back to Murmansk and back to the same hospital he had so recently left. Morris describes the upset expressed by the Russian nurses at the plight of the few who had been discharged to the Edinburgh.* In 1944 facilities for looking after survivors in need of care were improved with the establishment of a British-run facility at Vaenga. * The accounts of Bill Shorts and Morris Mills are amongst a number within Walling, 2012.

124

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 124

29-01-2021 01:21:28

The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945

Life Ashore in Northern Russia The suspension of summer convoys in 1942 meant that ships entering the northern Soviet ports at the end of the convoy season had to remain there for the entire summer until the dark days of winter heralded the next round. Life ashore for months on end in Murmansk and Archangel was experienced by thousands of Allied merchant seafarers. Whilst remembering the hardships and simplicity of Soviet life many veterans have fond memories of these times. David Craig, a young radio officer aboard the SS Dover Hill spent most of 1943 in North Russia. After arrival in Murmansk in February his ship was bombed at the anchorage in nearby Mishukov, an unexploded device buried deep in the coal bunker being expertly defused and removed by a small party in which David was included, but led by a Soviet bomb disposal expert. His ship was then moved to the relative safety of Archangel. After the war David retained his links with the people and places he had become fond of and visited Murmansk on numerous occasions after it was reopened to visitors in the 1980s.* Francis Lee, the 17-year-old cabin boy aboard the SS Empire Ploughman, went to a dance in Archangel where he was accosted by some local youngsters who took his passbook – an essential identity document on Soviet soil – and demanded payment of 200 roubles to get it back.** Not all encounters at the dancing were so intimidating and naturally relationships developed between seafarers and local girls and women. These were certainly regarded suspiciously by the Soviets but do not seem to have been explicitly condemned at the time. However, such relationships could have tragic consequences: in the 1990s Murmansk resident Valentina Ivleva told the Russian TV documentary Blood in the Snow about her relationship with an unnamed American seaman. At the age of 15 in 1943 she already knew some English language and, being keen to improve it, befriended a 20-year-old radio officer from the Thomas Hartley that had arrived with Convoy JW53 in February. She fell in love with him and the couple spent a lot of time together until his ship left in November 1943. By this time, she had offered to take their relationship to the stage of sexual intercourse, but, being a devout Christian, her lover declined and sailed away never to be seen or heard of again. In 1946 * RACM, 2013, Gunn & Reynolds, 2016. ** RACM, 2013.

125

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 125

29-01-2021 01:21:28

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

The quayside at Archangel, 1941, as seen by artist Feliks Topolski. (Estate of Feliks Topolski)

Women loading trucks at the Murmansk dockside. (MOI Merchantmen at War, 1944)

Valentina was arrested by the security services and accused of spying, the main evidence, she said, being her relationship with the American seafarer; she was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. 126

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 126

29-01-2021 01:21:29

The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945

In contrast to the organized arrangements made for recreation for Royal Navy personnel, nothing equivalent seems to have been laid on for Merchant Navy seafarers who were left in these remote ports for long periods. Accounts talk of the boredom and hardship, the access to whatever Soviet facilities there might be, but little else. The absence of smart uniforms also led to lack of recognition and respect from the Soviet authorities and people. This again seems to underline the difference between Royal Navy and merchant seafarers. There were certainly problems and tensions for the British seafarers stuck in northern Russia, particularly in 1943 when the Soviets resented the suspension of convoys for the summer. Two British merchant sailors were arrested on fairly minor charges and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The Soviets also refused to issue new visas at this time so army and naval shore-based staff could not be replaced. Most of these issues were resolved amicably when the foreign ministers met in Moscow in October 1943 amidst an atmosphere of goodwill with a resumption of convoys for the winter.

Royal Navy and Soviet sailors from Red Navy submarine L15 on the Clyde, February 1943, en route from Vladivistok to Murmansk. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

127

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 127

29-01-2021 01:21:29

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

The Myth of Soviet Ingratitude One of the most striking and oft-repeated aspects in the Cold War British accounts of the Arctic convoys is the idea that the Soviets were ungrateful for the help provided, and that their motives were dishonest and cynical. This can be found, for example, in Campbell and McIntyre (1958) and is reported uncritically in Woodman (1994). Hopefully the evidence in this and previous chapters will have dispelled such views and put them in the context of the times in which they were written. During the war itself admiration and thanks for the convoy work was made by Maisky the Soviet ambassador and Soviet War News carried regular articles demonstrating the gratitude of the Soviet people and acts of friendship and mutual appreciation surrounding the convoys. A number of British service personnel received Soviet decorations (as recorded in Chapter 4 and Appendix 3). A ceremony took place in London on 20 April 1943 when Maisky presented decorations to Royal and Merchant Navy personnel, when he again made a speech praising the efforts of the convoy crews. Contrary to the Cold War narratives suggesting that Soviet personnel were held in low esteem by the British whom they encountered, many were decorated with British gallantry and civil recognition awards (Appendix 3). A flavour of the respectful way British sailors were regarded by Soviet personnel in the northern ports at the time can be found in the popular Soviet-era novel Two Captains by Veniamin Kaverin: ‘reserved ... but easy going’. After the war the Soviets erected monuments to the sacrifices made long before there was talk of any recognition in the UK. A number of British veterans who maintained links with the Soviets were presented with the veterans’ medals awarded to their own survivors on the 20th, 25th, 30th and 40th anniversaries of the war’s end. In recent times such awards have continued and veterans have also been honoured with the Ushakov medal, a naval award which carries great prestige. During the Cold War it was a different story in most written accounts – British pejorative opinion being matched by reduced accounts of the Monument to the Arctic convoys at Severodinsk. (A. Victorovich/ Allied contribution in Soviet popular histories of the Great Patriotic War. Wikimedia Commons) 128

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 128

29-01-2021 01:21:29

The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945

Above left: Russian commemorative coin to the Arctic convoys, 1992. (Central Bank of Russia/Wikimedia Commons) Above middle: Ushakov Medal awarded to British twenty-first-century Arctic convoy survivors. (Wikimedia Commons) Above right: The author’s mother with his late father’s belatedly awarded Arctic Star medal, June 2020. (Virginia Turbett)

Conclusion The Arctic convoys offer an example, at base level, of necessary collaboration and mutual aid in the face of a common enemy: Soviet blood on the battlefield in return for Allied supplies to maintain the Soviet people and the Red Army’s fighting ability. Their operation involved incredible hardship for all, with everpresent danger and risk of death. They also offer demonstration of courage, commitment and comradeship at personal levels despite differences in culture and expectations concerning material comfort and standards of living. Arms for Russia, a British poster by Frederick Blake. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

129

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 129

29-01-2021 01:21:30

Chapter 6

The Anglo-Soviet Alliance and the Struggle for Socialism in Britain

What is this – the sound and rumour, what is this that all men hear, Like the wind in hollow valleys when the storm is drawing near, Like the rolling on of ocean in the eventide of fear: ’Tis the people marching on. William Morris, in CPGB May Day 1942 pamphlet Into Battle This chapter brings us away from the front line, back to wartime Britain and the attempts of ordinary people to build for Soviet victory in the east. It also links this with how perceived Soviet achievements on the social front and actual ones on the military front, were used to bolster arguments for a socialist society at home once the war had finished. This involved the CPGB, but also, because the conflict was seen by

CPGB street posters 1941. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

130

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 130

29-01-2021 01:21:30

The Anglo-Soviet Alliance

many as an anti-fascist ‘people’s war’, the Labour Party and those who wanted to see an end to the poverty and despair of the 1930s. The unity seen between governments within the Grand Alliance was not always replicated on the ground – class conflict, within which communist and socialist ideas flourish, was not entirely suspended and the CPGB found itself in a position riddled with contradiction. During the period of the war the CPGB’s fortunes rose as admiration grew rapidly for its Soviet mentors; this did not lead to post-war electoral breakthrough due to the organization’s ongoing isolation by Labour Party and trade union leaders and their confused direction.

The Growth of the CPGB and the Call for a Second Front The German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 saw a complete U-turn by the CPGB. Overnight, scepticism about the war and its causes changed to patriotic fervour as the mutual defence needs of both countries drew Britain and the USSR together in a formalized alliance. No longer was there any doubt about the nature of the conflict: this, they argued, was not a war between capitalist nations for trading supremacy, it was a people’s struggle against fascism in which the immediate task of Communists was to drive forward and maximize the war effort. Whilst mistrust between the two countries had to be broken down quickly, and was through the intensive efforts of Churchill, Beaverbrook and others, at home it was a different story with the CPGB who had for so long been regarded as the enemy within. The Daily Worker remained under ban until August 1942. Its role on resumption became to report on industrial and war matters rather than act as an agitation tool for CPGB activists. That gap had long been filled by the regular pamphlets the CPGB produced in large numbers which were sold by members. These covered political topics of interest to working people: wages and conditions, the call for the Second Front and the post-war future. Their aim of these was recruitment and the growth of Party influence, particularly in workplaces. Some publications were devoted to the Soviet Union, but by and large that task was left to the Russia Today Society. This was an organization formed in 1927 with the aim of furthering friendship and links between the two countries at a time when relations were at an all-time low. Naturally Communists were behind its activities as a ‘front’ organization, but its 131

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 131

29-01-2021 01:21:30

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

public face and publications gave prominence to individuals such as George Bernard Shaw, the Dean of Canterbury, the Webbs and others who were sympathetic to the Soviet Union and its ideals without being directly associated with the CPGB. During the war the Russia Today Society substantially increased its activities, selling hundreds of thousands of pamphlets that provided information about the Soviet Union and its fighting forces, as well as calls for the Second Front. The organization also put on exhibitions, film shows and other public events. With the prestige of the Red Army’s heroism behind them and leading the popular call for the Second Front, the CPGB grew in membership from 22,000 at the end of 1941 to 56,000 by the end of 1942 – its high-water mark and far in excess of its recruitment target for the period. The Party promoted competition between branches over pamphlet and publication sales: in 1944 this was won by the London District who sold over a twelve-month period some £5,500 worth; given that most pamphlets sold for sixpence or less, this amounts to about 300,000 individual items. New recruits were encouraged to participate in basic communist education and were expected to support

Various CPGB pamphlets. (Author’s collection)

132

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 132

29-01-2021 01:21:30

The Anglo-Soviet Alliance

Russia Today pamphlets selection. (Author’s collection)

From The Story of the Russia Today Society, 1942. (Author’s collection)

and promote activity. The CPGB was very different from the Labour Party, where activity was purely voluntary and usually centred on elections, and paper membership entirely acceptable. The CPGB, as an 133

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 133

29-01-2021 01:21:31

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

organization with its roots in the semi-secret revolutionary movements of pre-First World War Europe, expected a high level of loyalty and commitment of members. This resulted in a very tight-knit organization whose membership, whilst not always uncritical of their own Party, maintained a common public face and a high level of activism. This form of organization – Leninist democratic centralism – characterized the fundamental difference between the CPGB (and others on the far left) and mainstream political parties. The impact of such discipline and unity of purpose could result in influence far beyond actual numbers. Given as we saw earlier, that the mainstream media were extolling the virtues of the new ally in order to boost commitment to aid, it was not difficult for CPGB members to popularize their efforts. Second Front activity took prominence through 1942 and became intensely irritating to Churchill’s beleaguered government (the war was not going well at this point), especially as it was supported by a number of mainstream establishment figures such as Lord Beaverbrook (who resigned from the government over the issue), as well as traditional fellow-travellers on the Left. In May 1942 a demonstration for the Second Front,

Harry Pollitt addresses workers in Whitehall, London, late 1941. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

134

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 134

29-01-2021 01:21:32

The Anglo-Soviet Alliance

Right: CPGB internal organizing pamphlet, November 1943. (Author’s collection) Below: Enthusiasm for the USSR at a Birmingham tank factory during Tanks for Russia Week, 1941, from NCBSU ‘Alliance for Victory’. (Author’s collection)

135

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 135

29-01-2021 01:21:32

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

held in Trafalgar Square, London, attracted 60,000 people who cheered the speakers as each made the call. The slogan was daubed on walls and pavements everywhere. In London, Marian Everall, a young film actress, was arrested and taken to court for painting a wall: on learning that she was the fiancée of the famous Polish artist Feliks Topolski, the magistrate advised her that he would not jail or fine her, but let her go with a caution. With opposition from Churchill, and faced with military victories through 1943 that suggested the tide was turning in favour of the Allies, the popularity of the Second Front demand began to recede by 1944. In fact, many people had realized much earlier that the costly Dieppe Raid on the coast of France in 1942 was an indicator of just how hard an invasion in Northern Europe would be. By 1944, enthusiasm for the heroic Soviet ally was also decreasing, the period of ‘Russomania’ was coming to an end and doubts about Soviet post-war intentions, based especially on the Polish situation, increasing. This was reflected in a falling off of recruitment and membership retention by the CPGB. Suspicions about the motives of British Communists were not helped by the case of Londoner Dave Springhall, a prominent activist and paid organizer who had spent time in Moscow as a Comintern representative in the late 1930s. In 1943 he was arrested and charged with spying offences in connection with information he had obtained from a female Air Ministry worker which he had intended passing to Moscow. This concerned highly secret jet engine development, which despite the alliance, the British had no intention of sharing with the Mass-produced CPGB leaflet calling for the Soviets. The CPGB immediately disowned Springhall, expelled Second Front. (Author’s collection) 136

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 136

29-01-2021 01:21:33

The Anglo-Soviet Alliance

him from the Party, and stood by when, after a trial held in secret, he was jailed for seven years. This really characterized the Party at the time – all efforts were being made to court respectability and confidence by the British establishment and be seen to be more patriotic than anyone in pursuit of increased production and intensification of the war effort.

Aid to Russia and the Left In Chapter 3 we saw how the Red Cross Campaign for Aid to Russia, with the Prime Minister’s wife as its very active sponsor, engaged in popular activity across Britain, raising huge sums of money. Communists threw themselves into these local campaigns and friendship committees out of genuine conviction as well as to win respectability by being better supporters of the Soviet allies than anyone else. This was often considered more important than popularizing communist ideas. It did result in some odd scenarios: popular pro-Soviet demonstrations on anniversary dates where Communists carried Union Jacks and Red Flags alongside portraits of Churchill and Stalin. The pro-Soviet left also had their own Joint Committee for Soviet Aid (JCSA) which was under the chairmanship of the Dean of Canterbury and the patronage of the Soviet ambassador – this was an amalgam of a number of smaller committees, some of which evolved around specific projects such as a hospital for Stalingrad in the wake of the devastating battle there. The 1942/3 report shows that in their first year the JCSA and its constituent organizations raised some £600,000 (the equivalent of over £30 million in today’s terms). There seem to have been tensions when it was first set up in 1941 as the JCSA was seen as a possible rival to the Red Cross Campaign. However, its members were vehement that they had their own role to play alongside the Red Cross, to whom they initially pledged all sums raised, and the Dean wrote a letter to the Times newspaper to this effect on 13 October 1941. Although officially approved and embodying some very establishment figures, the NCBSU (see Chapter 3) was also something of a vehicle for pro-Soviet propaganda that went beyond the needs of the Anglo-Soviet alliance – reflecting the activity of CPGB members in the local committees. Minutes of meetings* evidence concerns about anti-Soviet propaganda * Available online through the Haldane Collection of the Wellcome Foundation.

137

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 137

29-01-2021 01:21:33

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

(e.g. surrounding the Katyn affair) and the need to counter this through the Russia Today Society, and by their own means. The NCBSU also distributed its own literature, very similar to that of the Russia Today Society explaining the Soviet case as well as immediate wartime needs and news. The inaugural meeting of the NCBSU Committee in April 1942 decided to focus solely on the Soviet Union and rejected a suggestion that it be broadened to include other allies. It also resolved to approach local education authorities to get members into schools to tell children about the Soviet Union – this must have been a gift to local The pro-Soviet JCSA annual report, 1943. CPGB activists – if it actually (Author’s collection) happened. In Communist households throughout the country, Aid for Russia was taken up enthusiastically by women. In the ‘Little Moscow’ of Douglas Water, Jessie McCulloch (later Clark) recalls her mother fundraising through the local Co-operative Women’s Guild. A local Anglo-Soviet Friendship Committee was formed in which Jessie’s mum, who soon joined the CPGB, played a prominent role. The call for the Second Front resulted in widespread painting of the slogan on local roads. On leaving school in 1941 at the age of 14, Jessie worked as a domestic servant a few miles away but only got to visit home one day a month. By the end of the war, and having joined the CPGB herself, she was working in the Douglas Colliery canteen where she met her husband Alex Clark, a fellow Communist and future organizer for the Party. Communist activists in local friendship organizations took aid activity a step further in some cases by promoting the formation of links with cities and communities in the Soviet Union. This was reported at the time as involving forty-one towns and cities across the UK and included Birmingham with Kiev, and Manchester with Kharkov – both 138

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 138

29-01-2021 01:21:33

The Anglo-Soviet Alliance

The Coventry Tablecloth. (Culture Coventry Trust Archives)

Ukrainian cities that had suffered huge loss and devastation as a result of war and occupation. In Coventry women made up a large tablecloth with the embroidered signatures of the names of 830 contributors (each of whom paid 6d.) and the words, ‘Little help is better than big sympathy’; this was presented in 1943 to the women of Stalingrad in tribute to their struggle and bravery. The following year 36,000 Stalingrad women signed an album that was sent to Coventry and the cities formerly ‘twinned’ – the first such in the world and a link that remains live today (see Appendix 2). Airdrie and Coatbridge were large industrial communities at the other end of Lanarkshire from rural Douglas Water. Women there, inspired by the Communist Agnes Maxwell, organized an album in 139

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 139

29-01-2021 01:21:34

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Above: Page from the Leningrad Album showing Soviet women at work. (Glasgow Life Collection) Left: Poster for the Stalingrad Hospital appeal, 1943. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

140

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 140

29-01-2021 01:21:35

The Anglo-Soviet Alliance

1942 containing photographs of their community along with messages of support, and sent this via the Soviet ambassador to the women of Leningrad. Leningrad Communist Party women reciprocated and returned an album from their city in 1943. Unfortunately perhaps, the Soviets were unable to differentiate between the Scottish towns that had made this gesture and the nearby City of Glasgow, to whom the ambassador ceremoniously presented the Leningrad Album. This beautiful symbol of friendship remains in the care of Glasgow where it can be viewed in the city’s Mitchell Library whilst the Airdrie and Coatbridge Album is held in the St. Petersburg State Museum in Russia. Correspondence involving Agnes Maxwell, held in North Lanarkshire Council’s archives, demonstrates just how much effort the Women’s Committee there made, apparently outshining the efforts made by their vast neighbours, Glasgow. Intriguingly there is a reference suggesting that Agnes was keen to start a new campaign for the families of Soviet prisoners of war similar to one she was involved with at home for British POWs. Although she was invited to London to talk about this at the National Committee, it seems to have gone no further: Agnes would not have known that in the USSR POWs were generally regarded with suspicion, a very different attitude to the one taken in the UK and western nations. The Airdrie and Coatbridge women went on to raise funds for the Stalingrad Hospital.

Wartime Workplaces The CPGB’s strength in comparison with their Labour Party counterparts on the left had always been their ability to organize in the workplace. Their members were usually the best fighters in the shipyards, factories and mines for better wages and conditions, and in defence of these when they were under attack. Even those who would not vote Communist in an election would recognize the abilities of Party members in these areas and would support them accordingly, even though the actual numbers of Party members in any workplace might be few. This was even recognized by the government whose Home Office grudgingly conceded the fact in a secret memorandum in 1941. During the First World War the militants who went on to found the CPGB reached national prominence (and notoriety as far as the government and owning classes were concerned) 141

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 141

29-01-2021 01:21:35

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

as a result of their organizational activities at that time. These individuals opposed the war and their agitation was conducted on the basis that it was not in the interests of the people they represented. This provided motivation to make economic demands backed by the threat of strike action without concern about the consequences for the conduct of the war. Now, after June 1941, things were a very different matter for their successors in this people’s war against fascism. The CPGB threw itself into ensuring industrial output was maximized and that workers’ grievances were dealt with at a level that avoided any disruption to production. According to Noreen Branson’s insider history of the CPGB, ‘problems of output became a major concern’ effectively replacing ‘building up workplace organization, improving wages and conditions, and protecting rights already won’.* The main discussion at the CPGB Annual Conference in 1942 was how to increase production in the war industries and those upon which it depended like shipbuilding, coalmining and steelmaking; in this way the weapons and supplies necessary for the opening of the Second Front would be available. To further this aim, the Party threw its weight behind calls by the Shop Stewards National Council (in which its influence was strong) for the establishment of Joint Production Committees (JPCs) at factory level. This government-led initiative would involve management and worker representatives whose task would be to avoid production difficulties, reduce inefficiency and absenteeism, and deal with any causes of friction between management and workers in order to avoid strikes. Whilst the CPGB saw this as a vehicle for democratizing industry and proving that workers could run things well if given the opportunity, others, including many shop stewards and workplace activists, saw it as a means of incorporating workers’ representatives into management structures. Despite this scepticism and their unpopularity amongst rank and file workers, there were an estimated 4,500 JPCs by June 1944, although these varied widely in structure and influence. By the end of the war the majority of large workplaces had some sort of consultative committee but their actual influence reached a peak in late 1942 and started to decline after that – more traditional bargaining methods involving directly elected shop stewards remaining the norm in most large workplaces. * Branson 1997, p. 8.

142

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 142

29-01-2021 01:21:35

The Anglo-Soviet Alliance

The failure of the JPC movement can be seen in the number of days lost through industrial stoppages during wartime. Major strikes took place throughout the war and reached a peak in 1944 when 2,194 strikes were recorded involving the loss of more than 3,700,000 working days. Unlike the strikes of the First World War, the majority of those involved, including their leaders, were in support of the war and its aims. However, with production targets being pushed ever higher, workers felt exploited as they saw the profits of private owners increasing in inverse proportion to their own efforts and hardship. This all took place despite wartime laws Shop Stewards’ National Council report on that virtually forbade strike action. the Engineering and Shipbuilding Union Conference, 1944. (Author’s collection) The CPGB was generally against downing tools but supported workers’ demands for better wages and conditions; indeed, agitation was sometimes led by their activists. They supported, for instance, demands for equal pay by women workers who had been recruited in large numbers to replace men who had gone into the armed forces. In July 1941 the People’s Convention, under the direct influence of the CPGB, had organized a Women’s Parliament session in London. This was followed by other sessions and the emergence of a movement throughout the country led by CPGB women activists who began to play more of a role in the Party. Equal pay became a prominent agitational demand and five women were elected to the CPGB Executive at the August 1943 Congress. Agnes McLean went to work in the Rolls-Royce engineering plant in Hillingdon, Glasgow, at the end of 1939 at the age of 21. She was from a family of socialists – her father had been a disciple of John Maclean. By 1943, the women members of the AEU had become dissatisfied with the slow progress of their demand for equal pay – women earned an average of 43/- per week whilst the male average was 73/-. Led by 143

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 143

29-01-2021 01:21:35

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Agnes, who had been recruited to the CPGB within the plant in 1942, the women walked out on strike, withstanding public abuse when they demonstrated outside the plant. Their organization was good and eventually their male colleagues came out in support, with a total of 16,000 on strike in the Clydeside Rolls-Royce plants and many more idle as a consequence. After public pleas from the government, the workers returned after a week’s stoppage. Immediate negotiations secured, not equal pay, but substantial increases and the action was seen as having made significant CPGB equal pay pamphlet. (Author’s collection) progress. CPGB shop stewards elsewhere were more backward, reflecting the strikes against dilution in the First World War (this was the practice of breaking down skilled jobs into a series of tasks that could be undertaken by unskilled workers on less pay): a CPGB steward in the North British Locomotive works in Glasgow threatened strike action if women were brought into the tankerecting shop. There was a series of very large strikes during the war which involved workplaces where the CPGB was active. The first of these concerned shipyard apprentices on the Clyde in early 1941 – led by Young Communist League (YCL) members, against which Order 1305 (the wartime proscription on strikes) was used to force a return to work, although no prosecutions took place. When the Luftwaffe heavily bombed Clydebank on the Clyde in March 1941, there were official concerns that the serious dislocation of the area’s civilian population would be used by the CPGB to foment further unrest: this did not happen and in fact all sections of the workforce rallied despite their dispersal to emergency accommodation many miles distant, to continue shipbuilding 144

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 144

29-01-2021 01:21:36

The Anglo-Soviet Alliance

and other war manufacture. The unofficial apprentices’ movement, however, spread from the Clyde to Lancashire and elsewhere, YCL members taking the lead in forming a nationwide umbrella organization. By the time this reached a peak later in the year the world had changed with the invasion of the USSR: demands were modified and strike action avoided. The influx of workers into factories with full order books gave Clydeside woman shipyard worker, 1944. impetus to the growth of shop floor (IWM/Wikimedia Commons) organization everywhere – AEU figures showing the election of new shop stewards reaching a peak in 1943. With the war going in favour of the Allies, that year saw a further strike wave: on Tyneside workers struck for six weeks against the refusal of five men to join the newly rebuilt engineering union, the AEU, in the Neptune Ship Repair Yard. They were successful in achieving a ‘closed shop’ agreement, setting a precedent that would be followed elsewhere. The largest and most significant strike of the period took place in the Vickers Shipyard in Barrow. Flexing their industrial muscle for the first time in a generation, the entire workforce in this one-industry town came out for an increase of wages – there had been none for twenty-nine years. The CPGB locally and nationally tried to quell the strike – two members were barred from strike committee meetings for ‘trying to make it political’, i.e. arguing against the strike for ‘political’ reasons. AEU National Organizer and CPGB member George Crane was threatened when he spoke against the strike in its earliest days, but eventually managed to negotiate a deal which brought about a return to work after three weeks’ total stoppage. The strike caused tensions within the AEU and the CPGB, both of which were considered by many to have sided against the strikers. The following year, 1944, trouble broke out in the still privately owned coal industry. Coal was desperately needed for the war effort and production targets were being met through practices considered dangerous by the miners. By 1944 injury to coalminers was a greater likelihood than through enemy action as a serviceman. The miners’ 145

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 145

29-01-2021 01:21:36

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Clydeside shipyard apprentices, 1944. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

trade union asked for a new minimum wage and when this was refused unofficial stoppages spread throughout the industry, starting in Lancashire and South Wales but spreading to Kent, Durham, Yorkshire and Scotland, with 180,000 miners on strike. The strike was quickly won despite the TUC and the CPGB describing the participants as having been influenced by ‘Trotskyist elements’ (nemesis for CPGB members) intent on fomenting unrest, for which there really was very little evidence. Desperate efforts to increase coal production also saw the introduction of the ‘Bevin Ballot’ in early 1944, an extension of the scheme introduced the previous year for all male conscripts to the armed forces. This affected all boy apprentices – 10 per cent would now be diverted to coalmining. The move was bitterly opposed and resulted in an unofficial strike which started on Tyneside and spread throughout Britain’s main industrial areas, involving 26,000 apprentices. Again, the official trade union movement, with the active participation of CPGB members, were immediately busy persuading the boys to stop their strike. After a week the Tyneside apprentices were isolated and soon began to drift back to work. Again ‘Trotskyists’ were blamed and this time some arrests 146

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 146

29-01-2021 01:21:36

The Anglo-Soviet Alliance

Bevin Boys at Ollerton Colliery, Nottinghamshire, February 1945. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

were made on Tyneside under wartime regulations and four individuals imprisoned before their sentences were quashed on appeal. Not for nothing was the CPGB now known to critics on the left as ‘His Majesty’s Communist Party’.

The Labour Party and the CPGB in Wartime With Labour Party leading figures in Churchill’s coalition government, there was no doubt about their commitment to the Anglo-Soviet alliance. This did not extend however to any dampening of hostility to the CPGB. Labour leaders were concerned at the rise of popularity of the Communists and as early as July 1941, rejected (along with their TUC allies) an offer of ‘associated action’ by the CPGB leadership. However, at local level this was frequently disregarded and Labour Party members became enthusiastic members of the Anglo-Soviet friendship groups, usually initiated by CPGB members that emerged across the country. These typically involved local dignitaries such as the mayor as well as political representatives from across the spectrum including Conservatives. The Labour Party’s attempts to control such unity were 147

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 147

29-01-2021 01:21:37

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

targeted against Communists and never Conservatives (with whom they were in coalition in Westminster), but went unheeded at local level. With such unity in action on the ground, the time seemed right for the CPGB to seek affiliation to the Labour Party and attempts commenced at the end of 1942, by which time membership was a quarter of that of Labour. This was rejected on the same basis as it had been in earlier years – that the loyalty of the CPGB lay with the interests of the Comintern and not Great Britain. The Labour leadership published their position in quite sectarian terms (considering the need for unity in the context of the war), in a vitriolic pamphlet for members titled The Communist Party and War – A Record of Hypocrisy and Treachery to the Workers of Europe, in March 1943. It contained no ambiguity on the matter, the following typifying its tone: ‘Never in the history of British politics has any organized group calling itself a national party been guilty of such a shameful record of disloyalty to the nation, treachery to the working class, and discredit to itself.’ Some of the argument against affiliation disappeared overnight in May 1943 when the Comintern was dissolved by its Moscow bosses. Resolutions were already in for the July 1943 Labour Conference and the arguments from the right-wing leadership persisted: that Communists believed in dictatorship not democracy, that their position on the war in 1939 would have led to defeat if it had been realized, that they would take over the Labour Party at every level if allowed into meetings and that total disruption would result. It was argued that if the CPGB really wanted unity they would dissolve and join Labour as individuals. Based on the huge block votes of the trade unions, the main motion for affiliation was lost: 712,000 votes were cast in favour, but almost two million against. The following month the CPGB annual congress voted through some small changes to their constitution that were designed to project themselves as a more open and British-based party rather than a branch of an international organization. It was on this basis that they began to look to the post-war future as a separate political organization that would compete for votes. The CPGB’s efforts to unite in struggle with those to their political right did not stop them viciously attacking those to their left. Socialists who stood against coalition candidates in elections were as vilified as trade union militants who dared organize strikes. Labour’s attitude to the CPGB was only outdone by the Party’s attitude to those on its 148

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 148

29-01-2021 01:21:37

The Anglo-Soviet Alliance

Graphic from the CPGB pamphlet Clear Out Hitler’s Agents, 1942, targeting leftist critics. (Author’s collection)

left: an extraordinary pamphlet, Clear Out Hitler’s Agents, published in August 1942, was aimed at ‘Trotskyist’ disrupters, a term of invective stretched to include ILP members and MPs. In a clear incitement to violence it invited readers who encountered a Trotskyist to ‘treat him as you would treat an open nazi’. The pamphlet enthusiastically quoted evidence from the 1937 Moscow show trials to prove that Trotskyists were in league with the Nazis. This was rich indeed considering that only a year previously this very same organization had supported the Soviet Union’s pact with Nazi Germany that included the supply of materials used in its war effort.

The Party Looks Forward As victory looked more of an eventual certainty from 1943, the CPGB began to focus its propaganda on the post-war future. In 1942 the government had published the Beveridge Report in a deliberate effort to map out a better future for the country so that the people would know 149

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 149

29-01-2021 01:21:37

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

what they were fighting for, and not just what they were fighting against. Beveridge, a Liberal, produced an outline plan which would address the ‘five giants’ that had stalked the land in the 1930s: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Beveridge was not a socialist: his plan for social insurance envisaged a Britain where government agencies would take responsibility for guaranteeing minimum levels for the population so that private enterprise, upon whom much of this burden had (he contended) previously fallen, could be freed to pursue innovation and competition. The proposals were widely discussed and provided a useful platform for Communist agitation. The CPGB set up a number of working committees and brought their findings together in a document published in May 1944 titled Britain for the People: Proposals for PostWar Policy. This outlined plans to build on the relative prosperity that had been achieved in wartime through full employment: work for all, social security, a self-contained flat or house for every family, no return to low wages and under-nourishment, a comprehensive health service, universal rights to education, widest access to culture, democracy and a lasting international peace. State planning and public ownership of land, transport, coal, power, steel and the banks were suggested as a natural development of the wartime control that had ended the pre-war anarchy of competition. The document was particularly important in that it dropped the CPGB’s previous insistence that socialism could not be realized through the institution of the British parliamentary system; it was now argued that change would come through reform not revolution and the process began of ending democratic centralist organization within the Party. The problem with all this was that the CPGB programme was little different to the one on offer by the much larger Labour Party. By the beginning of 1945, Communist Party membership, whilst still high by pre-war standards, had dropped to about 45,000. Labour Party individual membership (excluding trade union affiliated membership) meanwhile had risen steadily to about 700,000. On international matters, however, the CPGB had a different outlook and one based on a mixture of loyalty to Moscow, socialist internationalism and opposition to colonialism. The Party were strident in their support for Indian independence and produced material supporting the demands of Indian Communists and nationalists. Loyalty to Moscow though had consequences. As discussed in Chapter 3, the question of Poland that had dogged international relations in the pre-war period, and 150

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 150

29-01-2021 01:21:37

The Anglo-Soviet Alliance

led to Britain’s declaration of war in 1939, emerged in 1943 with the discovery of the Katyn graves, and again in 1944 with issues surrounding the Warsaw Uprising. The CPGB were slavish in their support for the Soviet position on Katyn and its attack on the demands of the Polish ‘London’ government generally, issuing pamphlets through the Russia Today Society that do not stand the test of time very favourably. These revive old enmities and accuse the Polish government, whose followers had fought effectively and bravely with British forces against fascism from the war’s earliest days, of collusion with the Nazis to foment anti-Soviet A 1943 CPGB pamphlet explaining away attitudes. Whilst Churchill and Stalin’s crimes. (Author’s collection) other wartime leaders such as Roosevelt were guilty of at best compliance with the Soviet position, and at worst suppression of the probable facts, nobody else went this far.

Wartime By-elections Although the coalition government was in place for the duration of the war in Europe, by-elections that tested the mood of the people took place throughout the war as required. The Conservative, Liberal and Labour parties were all involved in the coalition government and agreed between them that they would support the party of the outgoing coalition-supporting MP in any by-election. These could have unusual outcomes: the war saw the emergence and brief zenith of the Common Wealth Party (CWP), a socialist organization who disagreed with the involvement of the Labour Party in the governing coalition. Standing outside the coalition gave 151

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 151

29-01-2021 01:21:38

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

the CWP an advantage – it was able to criticize the establishment and advance its views about the future of the country once the war was over. Its arguments chimed with the times and its left socialism was not tinged with the suspicions that surrounded the motives of the CPGB. One of its leaders, Tom Wintringham, who had been a leading CPGB member, narrowly lost the North Midlothian by-election to the Tories in February 1943. The new Party won its first by-election in May of that year when John Loverseed, a Battle of Britain pilot and Spanish War Republican veteran, standing in the rural and traditionally Tory Cheshire constituency of Eddisbury, narrowly beat the Conservative. This was followed by other by-election victories, but the Common Wealth Party, with a mainly middle-class active base, disappeared soon after the war and many of its members joined the Labour Party. Wartime polls and opinion studies (through the government’s Mass-Observation surveys) saw support slip away from the Conservatives even though Churchill enjoyed confidence as a war leader. The CPGB decided that they would always support coalition candidates resulting in their active campaigning for Conservative candidates against independent and Common Wealth left wingers in several by-elections. In Wallasey in May 1942 this saw the CPGB offices decorated with red, white and blue posters whilst the independent Labour candidate, who won resoundingly, adorned his committee rooms with red flags. The CPGB broke with this stance after the unpopular release from prison of British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley in late 1943. So opposed were they to this government decision that they (and the Common Wealth Party) supported an independent Labour candidate in the West Derbyshire by-election in February 1944 against the aristocratic Tory whose family had held the seat for generations. Charles White, the independent socialist, overturned a huge Tory majority to win by over 4,000 votes. It seemed clear that the wartime consensus around the coalition was beginning to disintegrate and that a new dawn was emerging.

Conclusion Through prestige gained by their implicit association with the Red Army and the Soviet people, the CPGB managed to launch themselves into very effective solidarity activity from the summer of 1941 onwards. Their calls for the Second Front were popular and their reputation as good 152

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 152

29-01-2021 01:21:38

The Anglo-Soviet Alliance

workplace organizers led to massive recruitment. The passion, discipline and commitment of CPGB activists (a requirement of membership) was unrivalled, and respect from non-communists was earned through hard work. However, the popularity of the CPGB began to wear off by 1944: by this time, they were disassociating themselves from any notion that the British state must be overthrown by revolutionary means. The CPGB’s workplace activities, whilst often in the clear economic interests of workers, were also characterized by an earnest belief that in this people’s anti-fascist war, production had to continue whatever, placing a curb on potential militancy. This left British Communists, in terms of their programme and aspirations for the British people, with little difference in political programme from the much larger Labour Party who continued, at national level at least, to treat them with hostility and derision. The 1945 election was approached cautiously by the CPGB, who were anxious not to be seen as contributing to splits that would allow the Tories to hang onto the power they had so abused in the 1930s. Their continued isolation from Labour resulted in their marginalization – the heady days of growth and success in 1942/3 seemed to be over.

Communist figures adorn Caird Hall, Dundee, November 1941. From left: Molotov, Pollitt, Stalin, Gallacher and Vorishilov. (Dundee City Archives)

153

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 153

29-01-2021 01:21:38

Chapter 7

Communists at War: Opportunity and Activism in the Armed Forces

The dhobi-walla – or laundry man – has just brought our clean clothing. So out on the verandah is the shouting, bawling, threatening which invariably signifies that a white sahib is talking to a wog – showing him the true meaning of British ‘democracy’. Clive Branson, Royal Armoured Corps, India, 12 October 1942 Armies engaged in warfare have to strike a balance between discipline and unity of purpose on the one hand, and promoting the values and aspirations they are fighting to defend and uphold on the other. In the Soviet Union’s Red Army this was the task of political commissars (their formal role was abolished in 1942 but taken over by regular officers) attached to each unit, whose job was to maintain fighting spirit as well morale and general welfare. In the British Army it had always been assumed that patriotism based on notions of ‘King and Country’ were motivation enough and little attention was paid to education or morale – shirkers and dissidents were dealt with through disciplinary measures rather than concerted attempts to address issues about their motivation to fight. The First World War had ended in disillusionment for many who had participated – much of the slaughter had seemed pointless. For this new war against very stark fascist aggression the idea that patriotism in itself might not be enough, particularly when so many had bitter memories of life in 1930s Britain, promoted official notions that morale was important and attention would need to be paid to educating people about the causes for which they were being asked to make sacrifices. The British armed forces, however, were institutions ridden with class prejudice and notions of British (white) supremacy and disdain 154

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 154

29-01-2021 01:21:38

Communists at War

of foreigners. How these contradictory positions were accommodated (or not) is the subject of this chapter. It also describes the activities of Communists who found themselves in the armed forces.

Class and the Anti-Fascist War Chapter 1 described briefly the contribution of the CPGB and the left in Britain to the international struggle against fascism that continued through the 1930s. At that time physical action to confront fascism, whether at home against Mosley, or abroad in Spain, had been the preserve of the left. The declaration of war in September 1939 changed all that and brought anti-fascism out of the margins and into the mainstream of British life. The historical role of Britain’s armed forces had been to extend and defend the Empire and this, in the eyes of many, had been its role in the First World War, even though this was dressed up as a war in defence of ‘little Belgium’ and against German aggression. The Second World War may have been, in the view of establishment figures (and the CPGB prior to 1941) also a war in defence of Empire, but it certainly became a popular struggle for freedom and against fascism. Tom Wintringham, the ex-CPGB leader who inspired the formation of the Home Guard, described it as a ‘People’s War’ and whilst historians might dispute the claim, it was a slogan that resonated at the time. Class permeated the armed forces. In October 1940, in answer to criticism about the proliferation of privately educated officers in the British Army, figures were released that showed that 26 per cent of new officer commissions had gone to public school- (i.e. private school-) educated entrants; as pointed out at the time this actually meant that a state school-educated applicant was fourteen times less likely to become an officer. The perception amongst many of the old school (described as ‘Colonel Blimps’) was that the officer class was being diluted by lowermiddle and working-class admission. Contrastingly, about 95 per cent of the army were actually recruited from social classes three, four and five – the people most affected by the pre-war depression. Although the more intelligent in the military establishment realized that a different type of leadership was required in this war – one that could inspire by means other than breeding and accent – the privileges of rank continued to characterize Britain’s forces. This included free first-class rail travel, having servants and very different mess arrangements. Selection and 155

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 155

29-01-2021 01:21:38

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

promotion might also depend on the answers to questions on such matters as ‘What does your father do?’ and ‘What pack do you hunt with?’. After 1941 this was replaced with more psychologically based testing but the perception of most ‘other ranks’ was that officers were of a different class and not necessarily very bright or able to offer leadership. There was also a widespread belief that the war aims of the ruling classes in Britain (including many officers) were not shared by those they led. There were of course exceptions – throughout the war there were officers who offered inspiration and leadership and this is recorded by even their most severe left-wing critics. Whilst hierarchical relationships were usually maintained between officers and other ranks, this could get confused: in the RAF the crew of an aircraft were always led by the pilot who might be an NCO whose crew might include commissioned officers. The fact that officers expected to provide leadership, might lack combat experience in comparison with NCOs, was always an issue in all the armed services. The question of class and the possibility of class tensions between other ranks and officers is stated here because most of the latter were not sympathetic to the ‘people’s war’ premise that the peace being fought for, must address the social issues of the 1930s. These, it was argued by left wingers, had created the conditions for the Nazis to flourish and the war to break out in the first place. In a letter to the Labour-supporting Tribune newspaper in 1943, an anonymous ‘Desert Rat’ (Eighth Army) discussed the levels of understanding of social and political issues emerging in the Middle East amongst troops and their officers: Those [officers] that I have been in close contact with, and really known on a man-to-man footing haven’t got further at best than the Conservative with awakening conscience stage. But how far they are typical remains to be seen. The Beveridge Plan has been well received on the whole but mostly on the basis of the very brief summary in the papers. The criticism aimed at it has been mostly due to lack of understanding of its intended scope, and is, to the effect, that it does not go far enough. There is a surprisingly widespread fear that it is all eyewash, and that ‘they’ think it is just about enough to keep us quiet.* * Quoted in Kisch (1985) p. 13.

156

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 156

29-01-2021 01:21:38

Communists at War

The feeling amongst troops that had already made sacrifices was that their hardships were not shared by the establishment. This found expression in the spring of 1943 when a Conservative MP was addressing a large number of British and Commonwealth troops at Mersa Matruh in Egypt – the site of a battle the previous year where the Eighth Army was defeated by the Germans as a result of poor leadership and tactics, leading to the capture of some 6,000 Allied soldiers. To heckles, catcalls and whistles, Sir Malcolm Robertson tried to argue that King George VI was also making sacrifices as he received the same number of clothing coupons as everyone else.

Army Education and Citizenship After the withdrawal of troops from France in June 1940, the army hierarchy became concerned at secret reports describing a lowering of morale amongst troops. The enlightened Sir Ronald Adam, who was Adjutant-General at the War Office, appointed staff to look into the matter and make proposals for change. This resulted in a focus on welfare and morale, and reorganization under Major-General Willans, of selection processes for officers and other ranks. These sought to use psychological methods to filter out unsuitable types and appoint officers who would be trained to lead by example and attend to the welfare needs of the soldiers in their charge. Another important outcome was the establishment, under the direction of the educationalist W.E. Williams, of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA). Until that point education in the military had been the function of the Army Education Corps – a group so run down by 1940 that they were able to offer little more than basic map-reading courses. The notion behind ABCA was that morale and education were intrinsically linked – troops needed to know who they were fighting, who their allies were, and what sort of world they were fighting for. This would primarily be the responsibility of their officers who would be issued with material to aid the task which would involve compulsory half-hour discussions each week. ABCA would issue weekly bulletins with basic notes: these alternately would cover ‘Current Affairs’ relating to home issues and discussions about post-war plans, and ‘War’ topics that would look at strategy and important events on all the fronts. ABCA would also publish maps to aid education, and a Play Unit would put on 157

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 157

29-01-2021 01:21:38

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

ABCA lectures advice from a 1943 instructional pamphlet. (Author’s collection)

158

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 158

29-01-2021 01:21:39

Communists at War

shows that would help put across important messages through drama. Alongside ABCA there would be classes in citizenship entitled British Way and Purpose (BWP). All this was very controversial and has remained so since. The individuals who drew up the bulletins were from state-educated backgrounds and held progressive views. Even though the content of many, especially the war bulletins, were factual and politically neutral, there were accusations of left-wing bias. Churchill himself was alarmed at developments. When he stopped circulation of a bulletin devoted to the findings of the Beveridge Report on social insurance in late 1942. there was an outcry in the House of Commons. Churchill argued that the proposals had not been subject of parliamentary debate at that stage but eventually agreed to their reissue in June 1943 on the basis that his statement, offering a cautionary note, was also included. What his critics believed was that Churchill and his Conservatives were opposed to the socialist aspirations that Beveridge had opened the door to, and certainly did not want his troops fighting for socialist transformation. Whilst some of his supporters considered that BWP classes were safer because of their narrower premise, they were heavily censored to eradicate any socialist bias: the idea of whose country it actually was and whether it was the Britain of the 1930s or something new and better, were bound to enter discussions about citizenship – as was Britain’s empire. The tensions here were clear: on the one hand Adam and his subordinates recognized from history that this was a different type of war to previous ones and that something akin to Cromwell’s seventeenth-century New Model Army of motivated and educated soldiers, was more The controversially rewritten ABCA pamphlet appropriate to an anti-fascist war on social security, 1943. (Author’s collection) 159

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 159

29-01-2021 01:21:40

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

From ABCA notes on community centres, March 1945. (Author’s collection)

An ABCA session underway in 1945. (Sgt J. Mapham/IWM/ Wikimedia Commons)

160

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 160

29-01-2021 01:21:40

Communists at War

BWP notes on the individual and society 1943. (Author’s collection)

than the imperial army of the nineteenth century. Adam and Willans were supported by progressives and socialists such as Tom Wintringham, who was trying to incorporate such ideas into Home Guard training. On the other hand were Britain’s traditional ruling class representatives who were terrified of change and the spread of socialist ideas amongst armed men who would be coming home at some point. It is interesting to note that although there was considered attention in the Soviet Red Army to matters of morale and education, the comparison was not drawn at the time by the advocates of ABCA, perhaps because little was known about Soviet methods. It was though, a matter that gave sleepless nights to some in the establishment. ABCA education was well received and classes generally popular. Guidance issued at the end of 1943 advises that sessions should be participatory and informal (see illustration on page 158). Issues surrounding the Soviet allies were covered regularly in the War bulletins and described not only the progress of the conflict but also some background about the USSR and its people. These typically glowed with admiration – reflecting the sympathies of their authors, and probably 161

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 161

29-01-2021 01:21:41

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

allowed through under the ownership strategy adopted by the government early in the alliance described in Chapter 3. The ABCA Play Unit was primarily made up of former members of left-wing theatre groups such as the Unity Theatre Company, and so content of productions reflected this. Current Affairs bulletins covered topics relating to post-war reconstruction: No. 90 from March 1945 discusses in terms that still seem of relevance today, the notion of publicly run community centres and the benefits they might bring (see illustration). There was a lessthan-comfortable attitude to women, of whom there were 470,000 in the services by the end of 1943: patriarchal attitudes by male commanding officers often led to opposition to their involvement in general education, limiting them to vocational matters such as cookery and needlework. In general terms ABCA and BWP were useful mediums for progressives and Communists who were agitating for post-war change from within the armed services. Their keenness to become involved could lead to them being chosen to lead discussions and once given a platform it was not difficult to turn them to advantage.

ABCA War educational notes on the Russian allies from different ends of the war, but with equally positive messages. (Author’s collection)

162

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 162

29-01-2021 01:21:42

Communists at War

ABCA large wall map to accompany lecture notes, April 1945. (Author’s collection)

Communists and Socialists in the Armed Forces Once they had clarified their attitude (see Chapter 1) the Communist Party started in 1939 by characterizing the war as a capitalist one upon which workers should take a neutral if not opposing stand. CPGB members called up for the forces were advised by the Party to keep their heads down and draw no attention to themselves. After the end of the Phoney War and Dunkirk, some of them recalled later that they had come to regard this as a war against fascist aggression that they should now support. However, with the Soviet Union still regarded with suspicion as a consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, it was still a time to keep quiet. This changed after June 1941 and the U-turn that produced unambiguous CPGB support for the war and demands to step it up to relieve the Soviet Union. This was a much more comfortable position for conscripted Party members whose arguments now cut 163

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 163

29-01-2021 01:21:42

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

with the mainstream. The authorities continued to regard them with suspicion. Some well-known leaders like Phil Piratin were never called up, having been through selection and medical processes, and others with potentially useful fighting experience from the Spanish Civil War were side-lined into non-combat home-based roles to apparently neutralize their influence. As the King’s Regulations determined that serving soldiers, air personnel and sailors could not engage in the active affairs of a political party, the CPGB ordered that Party cards be left behind. They also refused membership applications from serving personnel that were made directly, although some joined through local recruitment by existing members. When the CPGB grew in 1942/3, branches were asked to support serving members by paying their subs and stamping their cards, as well as sending them literature. The Middle East was the principal area of military involvement in the period from 1941 to 1943, and as a staging post, maintained a large concentration of troops and air personnel in the Cairo area until the end of the war. A number of CPGB members were sent to this theatre to participate in the North Africa campaign and fought as part of the Eighth Army – the ‘Desert Rats’. Montgomery, the commanding officer of the forces during the successful conclusion of these campaigns in 1942/3 was an idiosyncratic character whose leadership style was top down but effective: soldiers knew what was expected of them and how their actions fitted an overall strategy. Monty’s style earned him the loyalty and respect of his troops as they eventually drove the German Afrika Korps and Italians out of North Africa. They in turn developed a pride in themselves and an independence that had some consequences for the authorities. Once the fighting was over troops had time to meet together and engage in pursuits that active combat precluded. The ABCA process encouraged CPGB members to talk openly and express their views and this resulted in members identifying one another and meeting together. It also lent a platform to supporters of the CWP who, as described in Chapter 6, were socialists who were unshackled from association with the coalition government. The two groups were able to work together and promote discussion amongst troops about the home and international post-war world. Training for junior officers in the delivery of ABCA classes was provided by education officers – selected NCOs who had an interest and aptitude in current affairs: in the Middle East many of them were Communists. 164

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 164

29-01-2021 01:21:42

Communists at War

Developments in Cairo were greatly facilitated by the establishment early in the war of an all-ranks leisure time and cultural centre known as Music-for-All. This was unusual in that it was free from the class structures that normally pervaded such places – it was open to all irrespective of branch of service, rank, dress or gender. The only stipulation was that only service personnel could gain access along with accompanying guests. Because it was on non-government premises, there were freedoms that would have been impossible in a services-run establishment like a NAAFI. Music-for-All hosted the usual interest group clubs (chess, dominoes etc.), a Music Appreciation Society (that was actually a Marxist study group) put on entertainment, and provided good-quality food. Into this mix were the troops of the Eighth Army whose pride and purpose reminded many of the New Model Army of Cromwell’s time. Their successes came at the same time as the Red Army emerged triumphant at Stalingrad and began to push back the Axis armies from Russia. All this engendered optimism and a thirst for change. Political studies and discussion, through a ’Brains Trust’ and a ‘Thinking Aloud’ group, became increasingly public at Musicfor-All, drawing in all who had previous associations with the trade union and labour movement. Cairo also hosted an independent left-wing bookshop – Rond Point – that also became a centre of leftist activity and promoted reading and discussion. Communists and CWP members in Cairo took the initiative and obtained permission to establish a ‘soldier’s parliament’ at Music-forAll. This was modelled on a ‘Springbok Parliament’ that had been set up by South African troops in Salisbury, Rhodesia, in September 1943. Through ABCA it received official approval and had its first meeting on 1 December 1943. Each meeting involved a discussion based on the practices of the Westminster parliament with a South African barrister who had an interest in parliamentary procedure acting as speaker. Party lines were avoided so as not to infringe regulations and each meeting involved a fresh government and opposition who debated issues such as nationalization, at the end of which a vote was taken from the floor. As time went on the audiences for the two-hour sessions got larger and larger and more and more participatory. The committee who determined the topics chose controversial subjects so as to make the debates entertaining. One of the officers involved claimed that this resulted in left-wing bias and so the idea came about of having a mock election 165

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 165

29-01-2021 01:21:42

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Cairo Parliament general election results, February 1944. (Imperial War Museum)

for a parliament who would then hold ‘office’. This involved volunteers taking on the task of representing the views and policies of the principal British parties at the end of which the election would be held. The event, held on 2 February 1944, attracted over 400 men and women, including some from Commonwealth countries, the USA and Poland – everyone in uniform was given a voting slip on admission. The result was an overwhelming victory for Labour (the Communists present supporting them) with the CWP receiving less than half their vote, then the Liberals, and finally, with only seventeen votes, the Conservatives. The mood of those present was obvious to all. Labour then took office under Private Harry Solomons, elected prime minister after the actual candidate was posted elsewhere. The Cairo Parliament had its first sitting on 1 March where it debated a ‘government’ motion in support of the Atlantic Treaty and the alliance between Britain and the USSR. The audience of over 500 approved. The next meeting on 5 April was scheduled to discuss nationalizing the banks. However, much occurred during that month. The growing popularity of the Parliament incurred wrath at British government level, especially when German radio reported that Soviets were being set up 166

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 166

29-01-2021 01:21:42

Communists at War

by disaffected troops in Cairo. The commanding officer in Egypt issued instructions that seriously curtailed the scope of the parliament – banning its use of that name, setting boundaries on discussion and membership, and bringing the meetings under military control. Although the 5 April parliament completed business, it was forced, under protest, to consider its position. By the end of April, the parliament, or ‘forum’ as it had become, was no more. The organizing committee and a number of prominent members (including Aircraftman Leo Abse who was later to become a real Labour MP) were all quickly dispersed to other postings. Clearly this experiment had rattled the establishment. In a separate but in some ways related event, 200 Eighth Army veterans of the 51st Highland Division in Italy had refused an order to disperse into other formations to help out American troops who were bogged down in battle at Salerno. Their mutiny, based on their desire to remain together as a fighting unit, was crushed and several of the participants received long prison sentences, sending out the same message that the stifling of the Cairo Parliament had: democracy and self-determination were not tolerated in the British Army. Some other mock parliaments took place with official approval at a local level. One was organized on the large RAF base at Heliopolis in Egypt, also in 1944. Another and quite different example is recorded as having taken place in the remote hills of North-East India where troops from the Worcester Regiment were resting after the tough battles of Kohima and Imphal in the summer of 1944 which had resulted in victory but huge loss. CPGB member Wally McFarlane was invited by his CO, Colonel Charles Street, to organize a parliament: over a four-week period debates covered ‘equal rights for women’, ‘state control’, ‘what to do with Germany after the war’ and ‘should India have Independence?’, arguments continuing long after votes were taken. The atmosphere prevalent amongst the troops of the victorious Eighth Army can also be measured by the story of Hamish Henderson’s war. Henderson, 23 years old in 1942, was a poet, songwriter and foreign languages expert who was an officer in the Intelligence Corps attached to the 51st Highland Division in North Africa. His task was to interrogate captured German and Italian prisoners and at that he was so good that he was given autonomy and free rein. A Scottish nationalist and communist by inclination rather than party membership, he was imbued with the spirit of comradeship and anti-fascism that he 167

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 167

29-01-2021 01:21:42

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

found amongst serving troops, and composed and collected songs that captured the popular mood. He speculated perhaps romantically, that his 51st Highland Division was the nucleus of a people’s army that would bring about change back at home once the war was over, and for him, that included Scottish independence. The 51st Highland Division survivors of his time were all dispersed by the time the war ended (including those who mutinied in 1944) and such ideas would always be dreams. After North Africa Hamish went first to Sicily and ended his war in Italy with the Communist Partisans who liberated much of the country in advance of British and American troops. The photograph of Hamish and his associates in the military jeep named Bandiera Rossa offers an unusual and probably unique portrait of an officer and communist serving with the British Army. After the war Henderson continued militant support for Scottish republicanism and collected folk songs for the Edinburgh University School for Scottish Studies which he helped create in 1951. This brought him into close contact with Scottish Gypsy Travellers, whose plight he wrote about in the CPGB’s Morning Star newspaper. Henderson was also secretary of the Scottish-USSR Friendship Society in the late 1940s.

Hamish Henderson (left) in the Bandiera Rossa jeep, Italy 1945. (Family of Hamish Henderson)

168

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 168

29-01-2021 01:21:43

Communists at War

Left-wing Scottish nationalism was no abstract issue and must have been of concern to at least some in authority: an ABCA pamphlet Here’s Tae Us of October 1943 was devoted to Scotland and its history, acknowledging inequality and endemic poverty. It delved into questions of devolution and home rule that have contemporary relevance. Concerns about the break-up of the union as a potential outcome of expectations and aspirations raised by the war were not without foundation despite the general indifference the ABCA pamphlet ascribes to most Scots: in April 1945 the Motherwell by-election produced the first Scottish Nationalist Party MP in a constituency that had elected a Communist for a short period in the early 1920s.

51st Highland Division march into Tunis at the end of the North Africa Campaign 1943. (Odhams Victory Book 1945)

169

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 169

29-01-2021 01:21:43

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Communist activists were also sent to the Far East to defend India and fight the Japanese. Awareness that the subdued populations did not always share Britain’s war aims was fundamental to their internationalism and several forged links with Communist comrades from the countries in which they found themselves. The artist, CPGB member and Spanish Civil War veteran from London, Clive Branson, was one (see Chapter 1). Conscripted into the Royal Armoured Corps in 1941, he was posted out to India, the country of his birth – his father having been an Indian Army officer. Branson was educated and privileged by birth but by 1942 was a veteran activist devoted to the cause of international communism. He was appalled by the casual racism he encountered amongst his colleagues and stood up against it. He also made links with Communist Party of India members in Poona, Bombay and Ahmednagar, befriending activists and preferring their company to most of his fellow British. Clive wrote a series of letters home to his wife Noreen and although censored they convey his feelings and continued commitment. He was recommended for promotion on numerous occasions, but having turned down the offer of a commission, was stifled by military authority. He was eventually promoted to sergeant prior to his death in action in Burma on 25 February 1944. Back in the UK, in the same year, the CPGB published an edited version of Clive’s letters home which included a tribute from his Indian comrades. Branson was well known and not really a typical working-class Communist. That could be found in the character of Stan Henderson from Watford who had been called up for the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment in 1940. Henderson was a very active CPGB member who had opposed the Party’s attitude towards the war and resigned as secretary of his branch as a consequence in late 1939. He was a shop steward in the Transport Union (TGWU) in British Oxygen and at the time of Clive Branson in uniform. (Rosa Branson) 170

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 170

29-01-2021 01:21:44

Communists at War

joining up had just been sacked for trade union activity. Throughout his training, Henderson and a fellow CPGB member, Wally Buller, tried their best to be exemplary soldiers so that they might enjoy some freedom to influence their colleagues. They organized popular discussion meetings and circulated CPGB literature. Stan, by now a corporal, was posted to India and, having some knowledge of the country through pre-war communist education, argued against the briefings on the troopship that characterized British rule as benign, and the subject people as racially inferior. This also led to challenges to the racism he encountered once in India. Before long, his unit was sent to Singapore, landing just in time to take part in its ill-fated and poorly prepared defence before being captured along with 80,000 others. Stan Henderson maintained his communist activity throughout most of his three-and-a-half-year ordeal of captivity during which 328 colleagues from his regiment died. Much of this time was spent building the Burma railway. He never lost faith in his communist and internationalist ideals despite seeing the worst side of humanity in the form of many of the guards: Stan found it hard to defend the idea that the Japanese were also human beings when starvation and disease were commonplace and brutality normal. Nonetheless, he and CPGB colleagues celebrated May Day and organized, as best as they could, discussion groups and the sharing of literature. He even managed to identify a socialist amongst the guards. Freedom came in August 1945 and by October Stan was home, characteristically jumping the train as it crawled through Watford Junction Station on its journey from Liverpool to Euston. During his years in captivity there had been no news or communication with his wife and child who had remained in the same sub-standard slum throughout the war. He was soon active again and involved in the struggle for better housing as a member of the London Squatters’ Movement. Stan Henderson’s bravery in spreading the ideals of communism in the awful environment of Japanese captivity and slave labour, mirrors the activity of European comrades whose politics led to their incarceration in Nazi concentration camps from the early 1930s onwards. Many, including German communist leader Ernst Thälmann, were eventually murdered, but the survivors maintained secret organization and remained steadfast in their commitment. The desire to build a better world was clearly one that equipped disciplined Communists to deal with extreme adversity at times when the future could not have looked darker. 171

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 171

29-01-2021 01:21:44

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Internationalism was fundamental to communist ideology and postings overseas offered opportunity for CPGB members to meet with comrades from their host countries, some of whom were not regarded as friends of the British owing to their anti-colonial activities. This was certainly true in the Far East where British Communists met colleagues in India and Burma. There were also informal encounters involving Italians, Yugoslavs and Greeks, and one member posted to a POW camp for Germans in England managed to identify socialists among the captives. Bert Ramelson, who was later to become national industrial organizer for the CPGB met members of the Palestine Communist Party which united Jews and Arabs. As the end of the war neared and occupied territory was liberated, some CPGB members encouraged absorption of released anti-fascist prisoners and others as partisans to fight alongside them, and organized unofficial arms deliveries to partisan groups. Such activities were stopped and curtailed: as we shall see in Chapter 8, self-liberation by Communist partisan groups in parts of Europe (notably Albania and Yugoslavia) did occur but was not to be encouraged in countries where an Allied presence could lead to more orderly change that was in the interests of the UK and USA. (See also Chapter 4 for comment about resistance in the Channel Islands and the involvement of Communists.)

Conclusion Many CPGB members who were steeled in semi-secret communist methods of organization and used to hardship, took readily to service life and were able to continue agitation in a variety of circumstances including the most adverse ones imaginable. They offered example of devotion to the war effort as well as argument about how the world might be better organized so that future wars could be avoided. They stood out against the racism that was encouraged semi-officially overseas, and forged links where possible with their comrades in these countries. Some used their intellectual skills to advantage and became educationalists in the army, which enabled their ideas to be popularized. The Cairo Parliament, where they worked in non-sectarian fashion with others, was both a pinnacle of success, and also an example of the limits to which the British establishment would allow such activity. Their efforts contributed, as seen in Chapter 6, to the overwhelming election victory of Labour in July 1945. 172

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 172

29-01-2021 01:21:44

Chapter 8

Why Die for Stalin? Peace, the Onset of Cold War and the End of ‘Really Existing Socialism’

The Russian occupation line in Europe runs from Lubeck to Linz. Czechoslovakia has been engulfed. The Baltic states, Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria have been reduced to satellite states under totalitarian communist rule. Austria is denied all settlement. Yugoslavia has broken loose. Greece alone is saved. Our armies have gone, and it will be a long time before even sixty divisions can once again be assembled opposite Russian forces, which in armour and manpower are in overwhelming strength. Winston Churchill on Europe prior to the Potsdam Conference, June 1945* There was an inevitability that the pragmatic wartime alliance would not last once victory was realized. A reversal to disagreement arising from differing ideology was bound to happen but events during the war itself meant that, unlike the stand-off of the pre-war period, this would escalate into precipitous but usually well-controlled confrontation once it was over. The Cold War that resulted lasted from 1945 until 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Popular understanding of this period is largely derived from Churchill’s memoirs of the immediate post-war period published in the early 1950s: these spend many pages justifying his increasingly aggressive stance towards the Soviet Union, despite a lack of evidence to back up suspicions about Stalin’s intentions. Such views however, became the mainstream Cold War narrative in the West that persisted until fairly recent times. A full history is beyond * Triumph and Tragedy p. 523.

173

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 173

29-01-2021 01:21:44

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

the scope of this book but this final chapter will examine the wartime roots of the Cold War and the impact on the pro-soviet CPGB who had grown in influence and prestige during the course of the period between 1941 and 1944. As described in Chapter 6, the general election of 1945 demonstrated the will of the British people, including servicemen and women on the various fronts, for post-war social change: discussion of socialist ideas played a large part in this, and Communists were amongst those who fomented such processes, even though it was the mainstream Labour Party who were the electoral beneficiaries. The Cold War furthered the marginalization of Britain’s Communists as they were inevitably judged by popular perceptions of their Soviet mentors.

Towards Victory and Peace As their hope for a new world order crashed around them through 1944 and into 1945, Hitler and his faithful followers sought to capitalize on the ideological differences of their opponents in the wartime alliance. The Nazi propaganda leaflet illustrated was dropped by air on Allied troops preparing for the D-Day invasion of Europe in early 1944 – its call for an alliance with German forces against the Communist threat from the east fell on deaf ears. In the west the Allies were at last on the point of opening the long-awaited Second Front, and in the east the Soviets were about to launch Operation Bagration that would take the war back beyond the USSR’s borders. The Soviets, the British and the Americans were sticking to their 1943 agreement that no side would strike a separate deal with any German and that nothing short of unconditional surrender was acceptable. The Allied agreements that emerged as victory neared also resolved areas of influence and control, but it remained to be seen whether these would be adhered to. Goebbels’s leaflet call was premature but quite accurately foresaw how the Americans and British would come to see the world once the war was over. In early 1945, Goebbels coined the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’ to describe how Europe might be divided after a Soviet victory – a phrase with its intended meaning borrowed famously by Churchill in a much-quoted 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, on east–west divisions. It would be wrong to ascribe blame on the Soviets for the growth of tension: there were other forces at work. By mid1945 Goebbels was dead and the Nazi regime was finished; however, 174

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 174

29-01-2021 01:21:44

Why Die for Stalin?

Nazi leaflet aimed at Allied troops in the West, 1944. (Author’s collection)

the influence of the divisive ideas that they had promoted since the 1920s persisted for another forty-five years. Beneath the surface of resolve and agreement the alliance was always fraught with mutual suspicion. Both sides were worried that the other might seek a deal with the Germans that would throw the burden of the war back on themselves. Success relied on joint effort even if the major burden had to be borne by the Red Army in the east. On the Allied side technology was hidden from the Soviets (and not just the atomic bomb) and in the view of many, a stalling for as long as possible of the launching of the Second Front in Western Europe. British intelligence efforts were also secretly focused on fomenting an internal overthrow of the Nazis by disenchanted members of the military and civil establishment in Germany. Had such efforts been successful, there might have been moves for a western peace with a new power in Germany, and a joint anti-Communist crusade. This never happened but would have had supporters in power in Britain including possibly Churchill. Although western detractors have since insinuated that the Soviets were ungrateful (for Lend-Lease) and obstructive (as in the case of relief 175

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 175

29-01-2021 01:21:44

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

for the Warsaw insurgents in 1944), the evidence is lacking that they did not uphold the agreements made between Stalin and his contemporaries in Britain and the USA. However, by 1944 there was a widespread belief that the Soviets might use their victory to impose communism throughout Europe. This was propagated by those in military and civil power who had always been suspicious of the USSR and did not believe its 1943 withdrawal from aspirations for worldwide communist revolution (see Chapter 3). The British actually had a secret plan (Operation Rankin) to land troops in Europe to challenge the Soviets in the event of German capitulation in advance of Allied landings in France. Such fears were promoted by the massive presence of Communists in the resistance forces who were fighting back throughout German-occupied Western as well as Eastern Europe. The propagators of suspicion and fear were kept in check whilst victory remained uncertain but gathered in force and influence once it neared. This worked its way down to servicemen on the front line: a Royal Navy rating escorting one of the last Arctic convoys in the spring of 1945, recalls that crews were told not to fraternize with Russians in Murmansk as ‘after the war we might have to take them on’.* However, elsewhere on the River Elbe and in Northern Germany there were celebratory meetings when the Red Army met British and American troops just as the war was about to end on 25 April 1945. At the same time though, the British and Americans had entered secret negotiations with the German command in Austria for a surrender in Italy and Austria: whilst they told the Soviets about this, they also refused them a place at the table – further heightening at this late stage Stalin’s suspicion that they were negotiating a separate peace to enable the Germans to focus on the war in the east. The facts, despite what has been said and written since, are that the Soviets made superhuman efforts, with great losses, to finally end the war. Until April there was a chance, as advocated by Montgomery and other military leaders, that the British and Americans would make it a race to capture the German capital and it was only near the end that they decided to stop at the River Elbe (and just beyond in the British case) to allow the Soviets to take Berlin – at an enormous cost in lives that the British and Americans entirely avoided. The Soviets were simply incapable of going any further and had no intention of confronting * Woodman p. 432.

176

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 176

29-01-2021 01:21:44

Why Die for Stalin?

their allies. Soviet demobilization in waves according to age and years of service, followed quickly and within a few years an army of over twelve million had been reduced to five million (faster than took place in the USA). Victory was followed by adherence to agreements about the division of Germany, influence elsewhere and entry into the war on Japan. Communist resistance movements, in as much as they were under Moscow control, were held in check and desisted from any attempt to force or manipulate their way into power in France, Italy or elsewhere. The historian Kolko contends that the influence of Communists in the resistance movements was in inverse proportion to the presence of the Red Army and that wherever they were able to influence their adherents in the west, Moscow acted to restrain them. Communists were often the most committed and bravest of fighters in the resistance movements of France and other occupied countries, but despite their sacrifices and the respect they had earned, accepted the Moscow line and handed over their arms once peace was established. Even in the formerly occupied countries in Eastern Europe which bordered the USSR (and had been liberated by the Red Army), the crushing of dissent and installation of Soviet-backed Communist government emerged only through the consolidation of Cold War tension a few years later. There were certainly issues in Poland – reflecting the tensions that had persisted between the two countries historically and throughout the war. The portent of things to come however emerged in Greece in 1944.

Greece: Liberation and Civil War In December 1944 Churchill faced a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons over British armed intervention in newly liberated Greece. This, Churchill argued, was to guarantee democracy, but to his critics it seemed that the opposite was the case. Britain had long had an interest in Greece – its situation in the Eastern Mediterranean being important to safe access to the Suez Canal and India. In 1941 when the Germans invaded Greece to relieve their Italian allies, the British had sent troops to help deter them, but overwhelming force, coupled with poor British strategy, had defeated the Allied forces in Crete and on the mainland, and the official Greek administration went into exile in Cairo. That dictatorial government had come to power in 1936 as a result of a coup 177

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 177

29-01-2021 01:21:44

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

and enjoyed the support of the anglophile monarchy. By 1943 most of rural Greece had been effectively liberated by partisan resistance forces. The Greek resistance had little relationship with the exiled government and, until the spring of 1944, almost no outside influence apart from some very limited (and sometimes useless) British military aid: most resisters were social democratic in outlook and united in the National Liberation Front (EAM) with armed volunteers organized in the People’s Liberation Army (ELAS). EAM and ELAS included Communists of the Greek Communist Party (KKE) who, although influential, never comprised more than about one-tenth of either. Many of the liberated areas enjoyed a civil administration and functioning state (unrivalled to this day) under the EAM that introduced social benefits undreamed of during the pre-war Metaxas dictatorship. Although the EAM was an alliance, factional rivalry within its ranks was unheard of in the interests of unity – moderation usually predominating over radicalism. However, violence against opponents, real or imagined, was unrelenting. As elsewhere it was actually the KKE Communists who were the most vigorous advocates of unity and submerging of difference. By early 1944 the British and Americans viewed Greece as ripe for communist takeover due to the influence of the KKE and their general suspicions of Stalin and the Soviets. The Greek army and navy units that had escaped after the Axis invasion were centred on Alexandria in Egypt and under British command. Their affinity to the new democratic forces that had emerged in Greece became clear when they went on strike in opposition to the Cairo-exiled government’s refusal in March 1944 to involve the EAM. That this refusal was backed by the British was absolutely proven when they moved swiftly to quell the uprising by surrounding the units concerned and starving some 20,000 participants into submission. This was no ‘other ranks’ mutiny: the strike for a republican government was backed by most of the commanders and officers as well as ordinary troops and sailors. The rebellion was over by the end of April and, under British direction, deliberations involving Greek partisans and peasants at the harvest, EAM delegates resulted in the announcement of a government of 1943. (Wikimedia Commons) 178

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 178

29-01-2021 01:21:44

Why Die for Stalin?

national unity in May. Being fully aware of the strength of republican feeling at home, the EAM initially refused to join because of fear of a return of the monarchy and some doubt about whether intentions were really democratic. They relented in August. The fact that Stalin was showing no interest in Greece and seemed to be sticking by agreements made with Churchill and Roosevelt mystified both. However, in return for acquiescence in Greece, Stalin was given a free hand in Romania (including access to its oil) and, as we have seen elsewhere, Poland. The KKE were under instructions, as per the general line of Moscow, to submerge their own party interests for the duration of the anti-fascist war which was still in full flow elsewhere. The Soviet ambassador in Cairo advised the EAM delegation not to antagonize the British, resulting in the August agreement. The Germans, however, were aware of fears surrounding the Communist ‘threat’ to Greece and, under pressure on both Western and Eastern Fronts (after D-Day and Operation Bagration), resolved to withdraw from Greece in the hope that a nicely distracting civil war would erupt – they even left arms dumps for ELAS to take for themselves. By mid-October the Germans were gone and the British moved quickly to land troops in Greece and, in particular, elite paratroopers into Athens. EAM and ELAS had meantime filled the vacuum left by the Germans and were governing the country and its towns and cities with popular support. The British were too late to chase the Germans and it was clear that Churchill’s intent was to use his forces to enforce rule by the exiled conservative government. This met with no resistance from EAM who ordered ELAS units to avoid Athens and fight other rival partisan groups elsewhere. The British-recognized government issued an ultimatum to ELAS to disarm, at the same time as the British imported the arch-monarchist Mountain Brigade and Sacred Squadron to impose their preferred rule. Conflict looked inevitable and was eventually sparked when an unarmed demonstration for democracy in Athens was attacked by the police with the deaths of twenty-five demonstrators. The experienced and well-trained ELAS ‘Parnassus Brigade’, who were in Athens, began to move into position but were disarmed by the British quite peacefully whilst awaiting instructions from the EAM. Other less-organized ELAS units in the city began to fight back and bitter fighting was soon underway, with the British on one side and this small number of ELAS units, backed by the Greek people, on the other. The battle was a fairly hopeless one and British victory assured. 179

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 179

29-01-2021 01:21:45

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Above left: British paratrooper during street fighting, Athens, 18 December 1944. (IWM/ Wikimedia Commons) Above right: To the Barricades, an EAM poster, Greece, December 1944. (Wikimedia Commons)

British troops were ill-prepared for such a role. An ABCA pamphlet of July 1943, Balkan Background, would have been used to brief them on the general background. Whilst it contained some useful history, it was light on such matters as British financial interests in Greece and the popular support enjoyed by the liberation movement who were entirely independent of the British-backed government in exile. It ended, rather optimistically, with the announcement that all partisan forces in Greece were to come under Supreme Allied Command in the Middle East. The British House of Commons debate on 8 December ended in government victory but with many Labour members abstaining. Churchill refused to deal with ELAS and, because their fightback was led half-heartedly anyway, and opposed by growing numbers of wellarmed and seasoned British troops, they capitulated on 22 December. Churchill then personally brokered a peace deal that saw ELAS disband. For the British it was a lucky escape as Churchill’s strategy was not popular and, had more British troops suffered, might not have been 180

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 180

29-01-2021 01:21:45

Why Die for Stalin?

Nikos Zachariadis, 1945. (Wikimedia Commons)

sustainable as this was no anti-fascist crusade. For the Greek people, the British propping an imposed government was a disaster: the absence of democracy soon cracked and by the end of 1946 the country was plunged into a full-scale civil war that lasted for an awful three years. This time the KKE Communists, under the command of Nikos Zachariadis who had been released from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany, tried to fill the vacuum left by ELAS, and were supported by their Yugoslav and Albanian comrades, but still not by Moscow. The British kept out – the business of funding and supporting the ‘anticommunist’ forces passing to the Americans. The unequal Battle of Athens in December 1944 had marked the decisive historical moment and it had been lost due to duplicity and poor leadership; it was now too late. The KKE, no longer having the popular support that ELAS had enjoyed, resorted to forced conscription and terror. In Britain the CPGB soon spoke up about a campaign whose aims were not part of the overall strategy to defeat fascism, but clearly aimed at re-establishing an unpopular but pro-British government and monarchy. Willie Gallacher had spoken in the December 1944 parliamentary debate, referring to messages from angry British troops in Greece, and British factory workers. Within the Labour Party there was disquiet at the support of many of its leading members, like Ernest Bevin, for a British policy that smacked of imperial interest. This threatened to explode at the Labour Party annual conference on 13 December and was avoided only because critical motions were manoeuvred off the agenda in favour of a bland one that regretted the tragedy taking place and 181

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 181

29-01-2021 01:21:45

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

looked forward to free elections. The Daily Worker devoted a page to anonymously scripted letters from serving soldiers in Greece on 4 January 1945. These included one which said, ‘We who have fought for liberation and against the oppressors of our fellow men are being dragged into the position of oppressor to the most gallant Greek patriots.’* Disquiet was only diminished by the cessation of hostilities and the withdrawal of the British from Greece, but to Communists Churchill’s intentions were clear, as was Labour’s unwillingness to mount an effective challenge. CPGB pamphlet, October 1945. (Author’s A CPGB pamphlet on Greece collection) later in 1945, as the crisis there continued, described it as ‘Winston Churchill’s most explosive legacy to war-torn Europe’ – prophetic words. Stalin meantime, kept his promise to Churchill and, with bigger fish to fry in his own backyard, remained quiet.

Prisoners of War One of the main cultural differences to have emerged by the end of the war was the contrasting attitude taken to prisoners of war by the Allies: the British and Americans regarded their returned POWs as heroes, and suspicion of collaboration was a secondary consideration that might be investigated if necessary. The Soviets regarded their troops who fell into enemy hands at best with suspicion, and at worst as traitors. This stemmed from huge losses early in the war and the need to bolster resistance enshrined in Stalin’s Order 270 of August 1941 which virtually * Branson 1997, p. 94.

182

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 182

29-01-2021 01:21:46

Why Die for Stalin?

outlawed surrender. From then on returning prisoners of war, who had usually been treated brutally and murderously by the Germans, were immediately arrested to undergo ‘filtration’: they had to prove they had not contributed to their capture and had not colluded in any way with the enemy. Release meant marked documents and restrictions on movement (both only removed officially some years after the war’s end) and continued suspicion – a fate that befell many who had acted heroically and resisted after capture. Those who were found to have acted against the interests of the mother country might be executed or imprisoned. This might seem harsh and unreasonable but the fact must be taken into account that many captured Red Army troops did go over to the German side – some very willingly, and were party to war crimes committed by

Soviet POWs and slave labourers liberated by the British waiting to be returned to the USSR from Hamburg, 1945. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

183

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 183

29-01-2021 01:21:46

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

the Nazis. Others, though, were forced into German uniform as death might be the alternative: thousands of captured Soviet POWs early in the war were herded into large open-air camps and left to starve. Screening during wartime to weed out real spies sent back by the Germans was also not unreasonable when the country was in great danger. All this suggests that the question of how returning POWs were treated has to be placed in context. This assumes importance because as the war’s end neared, many thousands of captured Allied POWs were liberated by the Red Army from camps in Eastern Europe. The British and American authorities were keen to welcome them home and prioritized this in discussions with the Soviets. What they could not understand was the Soviet indifference and disinterest in this matter and this was misinterpreted as deliberate obstruction. Channels were established to return POWs – in particular those liberated in Eastern Poland through the port of Odessa. Others, however, were left to fend for themselves for long periods and had to make their own way back to American and British lines with or without the help of sympathetic Red Army troops moving west. Nonetheless, there were reports of deliberate mistreatment and further incarceration of Allied POWs. The situation at the end of the war was chaotic and confused and the stories that have since emerged offer very different experiences. One unsubstantiated German account* has RAF officers from a camp in East Prussia opting to fight with the Germans against the advancing Soviets. Contrastingly, in his autobiography, Mike Peyton, a Northumberland Fusilier who had spent time in a camp liberated by the Red Army, briefly describes joining them and fighting westwards until the war ended and he could cross to British lines. Much the same is recorded by celebrated Battle of Britain pilot Robert Stanford Tuck who also escaped as his POW camp was being evacuated by the Germans, and fought with the Red Army until finding his way to the British embassy in Moscow and returning home in 1945. One escapee earlier in the war managed to go eastwards into Soviet territory but ended up in custody under suspicion of spying: James Allan, a military policeman captured at Dunkirk in 1940 escaped from a POW camp near Danzig (now Gdansk) in Poland not long after being sent there. With the help of the Polish * Duffy, 1993.

184

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 184

29-01-2021 01:21:46

Why Die for Stalin?

underground he went eastwards into Soviet-held territory only to be arrested as a spy because of his knowledge of the Russian language. He was tortured by the NKVD in Moscow but eventually released into British custody in late 1941 after Russia’s entry into the war. In March 1945 an RAF Halifax bomber, badly damaged in a raid on Eastern Germany, made a desperate bid for the Soviet lines. The bomber crashed and the only survivor was NCO ‘Scotty’ Young whose adventures were remarkable: after trekking for several days through Polish forests he was picked up by a Soviet patrol who also assumed he was a spy because of his knowledge of The sensational Cold War-era cover of a 1956 Russian. According to Young’s war memoir concerning escape and captivity. autobiography, he and others (Harper Collins Panther Books) tried at one point to steal an aircraft to fly back to British lines; he was eventually sent home via Odessa along with others, thanks to the intervention of the British Military Mission established in Lvov, Ukraine, for that purpose. The accounts of CPGB members in the armed forces do not seem to include any concerning liberation by the Soviets as POWs. Histories of the British secret services (e.g. Bowers, 1989) do suggest that attempts were made whilst the war was still underway to infiltrate agents into Eastern Europe to support nationalist anti-Soviet groups, but these were compromised by Soviet spies in the British establishment. Perhaps the Soviets, after all, had reason to be suspicious. However, reports from returning POWs suggested generally that they had been treated well, although conditions were primitive, and at worst had suffered the petty theft of watches.* * Kitchen, 1986.

185

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 185

29-01-2021 01:21:46

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

With the release of papers and opening up of discussion in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, there were some sensational and controversial books written about the fate of POWs on both sides of the conflict in Europe. One of these, the prolific writer Nigel Cawthorne’s The Iron Cage, contends that at the war’s end thousands of British and American POWs liberated by the Red Army were held as hostages for bartering purposes – to secure the return of all Soviet citizens who had served with German forces. Cawthorne argues that many (hundreds if not thousands) disappeared into the Soviet Gulag system and were never seen again. Whilst this was certainly the fate of a small number of British and Americans suspected of spying during the Cold War period, Cawthorne’s claims seem far-fetched, based as they are on circumstantial rather than grounded evidence. Although it took longer than it might have done, it does seem that British prisoners of war who ended up in Soviet hands were all returned within a few months of the war’s end. The Germans kept meticulous records but their systems broke down when the camps were evacuated as the Red Army drew near, many POWs dying on forced marches westwards, and some of these never accounted for.

The Quest for British and American Military Superiority: the Atomic Bomb, Dresden and the End of the War There is no evidence from the multiple histories of the Second World War that the Soviet Union sought to be in a position of military superiority over its western allies. Indeed, its efforts industrially were focused on supplying its conventional forces with tanks, aircraft, guns and ammunition. Even though intelligence known to the Soviets suggested the Germans were working on secret weapons, there was no such emphasis in the USSR. The same could not be said for Britain and the USA. American development of the atomic bomb began modestly in 1939 but was stepped up in collaboration with the British and Canadians from 1942 when the project, based in New Mexico, came under the leadership of Major General Leslie Groves. Groves later stated that he knew from the outset that the project was designed to confront the Russians,* a clear * Quoted in Blackett, 1956.

186

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 186

29-01-2021 01:21:46

Why Die for Stalin?

sign of early intent. The Soviets did commence research into atomic weapons when they received intelligence reports of the US/British project in September 1941. However, this remained small scale; by April 1944 it consisted of seventy-four research staff, only twenty-five of whom were scientists. Meanwhile the Manhattan Project (as the joint US–British programme was named) had grown to employ over 130,000 people. It seems the ever-suspicious Soviets underestimated the significance of the intelligence they were receiving, and the importance that possession of such weapons would have on future international relations. The Danish leading nuclear scientist Nils Bohr, who was working with the British for the Manhattan Project, advised Churchill and Roosevelt in 1944 to share news of the ‘A Bomb’ with Stalin before it was tested, in an effort to reduce the possibility of an ensuing arms race. He was ignored and it was not until the Potsdam Conference of July 1945 that President Truman (who had replaced the now deceased Roosevelt) informed Stalin once he had received confirmation of the first successful test. Stalin received the news so coolly that the British and Americans thought he had misheard what he was being told; however, his spies had already informed him of most of the detail, but he did realize that the bomb was now to be used as a bargaining tool to further western interests. The arms race was now on. The explosion of the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima in Japan took place on 6 August. By this time Japan was ready to surrender and might have used the Soviet Union, with whom it still had a neutrality pact, to help negotiate this. However, looking to the future, Stalin kept to the word he had made previously to his allies, and declared war on Japan on 9 August. This was followed by a massive invasion of Manchuria by the Red Army which allowed the Soviets to gain from the inevitable surrender, which took place after the detonation of the second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki on 10 August. It was not only the atomic bomb that was used to keep the Soviets in check as tensions grew. Long before its first test, the British and Americans launched a devastating bombing raid on Dresden on 13–15 February 1945. Dresden was not a military objective – it contained little industry and was swollen at the time with thousands of refugees from the east who were trying to outrun the Red Army just over 100 kilometres away. In four night and day raids, 722 British and 527 US heavy bombers dropped 750,000 incendiary bombs on the city which 187

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 187

29-01-2021 01:21:46

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

RAF aerial photograph of a destroyed Dresden, April 1945. (HMSO/Wikimedia Commons)

ensured its complete destruction, deliberately creating a firestorm and killing up to a quarter of a million people, most of whom were civilians. The main raids were followed by sweeps of fighter-bombers that strafed survivors on the banks of the River Elbe. The scale of the bombing, regarded by many as a war crime, is impossible to justify unless the view is taken that it was intended as a signal to Stalin, that whatever his military successes, his allies held a power of destruction that his forces at that point lacked. 188

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 188

29-01-2021 01:21:47

Why Die for Stalin?

The British in particular remained suspicious of the Soviets as the advance into Germany gained pace. Poland remained a source of contention: in May the Soviets advised that they had arrested sixteen prominent Polish underground leaders who represented the Londonbased government, on the basis that they were promoting anti-Soviet military activity in liberated Poland. It was alleged that they had all been tricked into attending a meeting in March 1945 at which they were promptly taken into custody by the NKVD. Britain and France had initially gone to war in 1939 over the invasion of Poland but efforts to save face in 1945 were half-hearted at best: Churchill ordered a secret war plan to march into Poland and confront the Soviets in order to achieve Polish independence: its name, Operation Unthinkable, rather gives away its premise, and it was dismissed by military leaders as totally unrealistic, and shelved. British betrayal of Polish interests in the face of Soviet power went as far as denying representation of the many Poles who had fought with British forces throughout the war, in the June 1946 Victory Parade in London. Public disquiet about this resulted in a lastminute change of mind, which, even though too late to please the Poles, annoyed the Soviets to the extent that they too stayed away. Whilst British suspicion therefore had some basis in reality in the case of Poland, the other reasons offered as the European war came to an end did not: on the basis of alleged pre-war Soviet ambitions to control the western entrance to the Baltic, Churchill ordered British troops to make a rapid advance to Lubeck and Wismar on the Baltic coast east of the Elbe, in order to forestall any attempt to move into Denmark by the rapidly advancing Red Army. A small British army group which moved well beyond the lines of armed German forces, met the Red Army at Wismar on 2 May. Churchill recorded this as a significant victory – over the Soviets rather than the Germans. There had been memorable celebrations elsewhere on the Elbe the previous week, with Red Army generals and their troops being obviously unaware of their supposed designs on Denmark and the rest of Europe. It seems that the Soviets were well prepared for such meetings and regarded them as occasions for riotous parties to celebrate the end of conflict rather than cordial confrontations to mark the start of new ones. The end of the war in Europe came with the final conquest of Berlin by the Red Army and the destruction of the last organized resistance by the Germans. On 7 May, as if to demonstrate his belittlement of the 189

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 189

29-01-2021 01:21:47

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

British troops meet Red Army soldiers at Wismar, April 1945. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

Soviet effort and sacrifice, General Eisenhower forced a formal German surrender with the signing of a document in Rheims, France. Just prior to this, Churchill’s principal military commander, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, secured a coup with a much-publicized field surrender of German forces in northern and western Germany, Denmark and Holland. Although Montgomery was clear that German forces on the fronts facing the Soviets would have to surrender to them, he and Churchill colluded through silence with the Germans when they announced afterwards that this was a truce (rather than a surrender) that would enable them to keep fighting the Red Army and leave them to govern from their base in Flensburg. The Germans were still at this point, despite the collapse of their fighting capacity, trying hard to engender conflict between the Soviets and their western allies; it is to the eternal shame of Churchill and the British that they allowed themselves to be manipulated by their defeated enemy so easily. It was at this time that Churchill began using the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’ to describe what he believed would be the future border between the ‘free’ West and the Communist-dominated East. This was a phrase not of his making but coined, as we have seen, by Goebbels and used until the end by Nazi leaders. Soviet intercepts of British messages from Churchill to Montgomery indicate that German 190

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 190

29-01-2021 01:21:47

Why Die for Stalin?

arms were to be stockpiled for potential redistribution to captured Wehrmacht troops in the event of war with the USSR. As the war ended rumours were abundant about such possibilities and it took a concerted effort by US negotiators, at that time more conciliatory towards Stalin, to diffuse tensions. The formal capitulation of German forces in the west was without proper Soviet representation and agreement (the wording differed from that previously agreed between the Allies) and the Soviet leadership refused to recognize the Rheims surrender. Fighting in fact continued as the surviving German leadership under Admiral Dönitz ordered the war in the east to continue so as to buy time to enable as many troops and civilians as possible to escape westwards. Hastily it was agreed to hold a further surrender ceremony in Berlin on 8 May which would be signed by the Soviet commander Zhukov and other Allied representatives. Most people in Europe at this time would have thought it right and proper that the Soviet Union should take prime place in the formal ceremony to mark the end of such devastating conflict in which they, more than any other nation, had suffered and sacrificed so much. The signing took place on 8 May and was largely effective – all fighting being concluded within a few days. However the two surrender ceremonies resulted for all time in there being two VE days: one on 8 May celebrated by the British and other Western Allies, and Victory Day, 9 May, which is still marked by the former countries of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. These two days in May 1945 saw celebrations on a mass scale across the world, none more so than in Moscow on 9 May, where there was a remarkable level of spontaneity unusual for the USSR, which included demonstrative appreciation of the part played by Britain and the United States. Changes in attitude and policy as the Cold War replaced the antifascist Grand Alliance were typified by the way in which revelations concerning Nazi atrocities were dealt with. The Western Allies increasingly became lukewarm about making an example of the German people for their actions in, at the very least, turning a blind eye to the Holocaust. Collaboration between the British, Soviets and Americans had begun soon after the liberation of the Auschwitz camps in January 1945, to create a British film, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, about the Holocaust and its workings that would make clear what had happened and how. The Hollywood director Alfred Hitchcock was engaged, and considerable work was put in before the 191

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 191

29-01-2021 01:21:47

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

The formal German surrender, Berlin, 8 May 1945. (Bundesarchiv/Wikimedia Commons)

VE Day, London, May 1945. (Sgt J. Spence/Wikimedia Commons)

192

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 192

29-01-2021 01:21:48

Why Die for Stalin?

British government ordered this to stop and the footage to be shelved. Speculation since as to why such a decision was made has focused on the realization that once the war was finished, things began to look very different to the Western Allies and punishment of ordinary German people was low down the agenda: their efforts were needed to rebuild Germany so that it could again be self-sufficient. There was also a belief that the film would provoke sympathy with Zionism and that Britain’s problems in Palestine where it was in the midst of conflict between Jewish settlers and refugees, and the indigenous Arab population, would be accentuated. The affair was the subject of a successful British 2014 documentary Night Will Fall. In the midst of this was the growing view that the Germans would be needed as allies in future conflict with the Soviet Union, and that demoralizing people by confronting them with what was now viewed as past history, would not help Western interests. The trials of Nazi Germany’s leaders at Nuremburg did go ahead (as agreed in 1943) under joint Allied stewardship in late 1945, but little national or international effort was made immediately after the war to identify or punish those who had carried out atrocity after atrocity across Europe and the Soviet Union. There was a shared if quietly maintained belief amongst the Western Allies that total denazification would leave Germany bereft of those needed to administrate and run its services.

The 1945 Election and the CPGB in the Immediate Post-war Period The question of what type of country peace would bring was on the agenda from the publication of the Beveridge Report in 1942. Whilst Churchill and the Conservatives in the coalition government wanted limits on this whilst the war was still far from being won, it pervaded popular politics and, through the fortunes of the CWP, affected the outcome of a number of by-elections. There had been no general election since 1935 and since then there had been Conservative administrations until May 1940 and the formation of the wartime coalition national government under the leadership of Winston Churchill. Labour was involved in the coalition along with the Liberals and the dominant Conservative Party. The CPGB, with its single MP Willie Gallacher,

193

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 193

29-01-2021 01:21:48

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

publicly supported the coalition after June 1941, leaving others on the left, notably the CWP and ILP (who held three seats in parliament), to criticize it from the outside. After Germany’s defeat in May 1945, and although the war against Japan continued, the Labour Party withdrew from the coalition and commenced preparation for the general election which it was agreed would take place in July. Churchill had been widely respected as war leader and in May 1945 his approval ratings were as high as 80 per cent. However, as early as his appointment in 1940, commentators were picking up that there was a general belief that the Conservatives, who had been in office throughout most of the 1930s, should not be in government once the war was won. This was evident in the wartime by-elections discussed in Chapter 6, where a steady decline in the Conservative vote was apparent. The war brought an end to the abject poverty of the 1930s with widespread state provision to support full employment for the war effort, and a feeling that whilst there was hardship and shortage, it was shared. Churchill was virulently anti-communist and made no secret of this even though he had respect for Stalin and his Soviet allies. Such feeling chimed with the attitude of the Labour Party although they were at pains, in the lead-up to the election, to trumpet their belief in a lasting peace based on friendship with the USSR as well as the USA. At its May conference, Ernest Bevin, a long-time anti-communist, spoke of how – although he was no latterday convert to friendship with the USSR – he had helped to form the Councils of Action that had helped prevent war with Russia in 1920. Under the leadership of Clement Attlee (coalition deputy prime minster), the Labour manifesto for the election, Let us Face the Future, promised full employment, a national health service (NHS), nationalization of the Bank of England, utilities, inland transport, coal and steel. It also promised to improve housing and suggested nationalization of the land without an actual commitment. In all this was a commitment to implement Beveridge’s proposals on social insurance and establish the ‘welfare state’. Labour’s foreign policy proposals were weaker, reflecting the cold war chill that was spreading that is discussed in the next chapter. The Conservative manifesto – based heavily around the personality and popularity of Churchill – also contained some progressive social policies but fell short of full implementation of Beveridge, falling back on the Prime Minister’s 1943 statement concerning affordability and the need for gradual change as 194

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 194

29-01-2021 01:21:48

Why Die for Stalin?

recovery from the war took place. Such caution and the need to continue wartime austerity pervaded the Tory outlook, and this was not lost on an optimistic and expectant electorate. The CPGB continued to look in vain for affiliation to Labour as the end of the war approached, but this was rejected at conferences in December 1944 and May 1945. Party policy was outlined in a major pamphlet by Harry Pollitt in September 1944 – How to Win the Peace. An appeal for unity, as the election neared, centred on a call for a national government of progressive forces achieved through an electoral alliance between Labour, the CPGB, the CWP and others such as the ILP, to defeat the Tories. As there was no such electoral agreement, the Party agreed to stand a limited number of candidates (twenty-one) so as to help avoid vote splits that might result in the election of a Tory MP. The CPGB manifesto was essentially similar to Labour’s in terms of its calls for nationalization and the creation of the welfare state and NHS, but if anything was less strident in its ambition. In this it took its lead from the outcome of the Teheran and Yalta conferences that had agreed peace and progress on the basis of unity between nations. Translated into home policies, this meant dumbing-down hard socialist demands in favour of progressive unity against the Conservatives. As noted in Chapter 6, the Party was no longer projecting itself as the vanguard of revolution: the emphasis now was on national unity and an agreed minimum programme of economic and social progress. Foreign policy was, as might be expected, modelled on friendship with the Soviet Union within the United Nations, and a freeing of the colonies from British subjugation. Labour, as we have seen, refused to sign up to any of this and promoted its own radical reform programme. This was the CPGB’s first election when its programme was not determined by the now-dissolved Comintern, leaving the Party to make its own general interpretation of how to manage the interests of the British working class, the international working class and its Soviet Union mentors. The election result surprised everyone: Labour won with a landslide, gaining 242 to win a total of 393 seats in the House of Commons – leaving the Conservatives with 197 and the combined Liberal Parties with twenty-three. To the left of Labour (if such a thing was strictly true at the time), the ILP retained two seats, the CWP retained one, and the CPGB increased their representation by one: Phil Piratin won Mile End to join Willie Gallacher for West Fife, with Harry Pollitt failing 195

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 195

29-01-2021 01:21:48

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

to get elected in Rhondda by a narrow margin of 1,000 votes. All the twenty-one CPGB candidates were opposed by Labour. The result was a blow to Churchill who had been expected to win, but clearly reflected the national mood. Serving troops also cast their votes (37 per cent of them in total), the belief being that they had swung it clearly towards Labour even though they represented less than Voters in Holborn, London, at the general election, 7 per cent of the total vote. By July 1945. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons) way of post-mortem, this last fact was blamed by many Tories on the influence of ABCA, a belief shared by CPGB and other socialists who were in uniform at the time. Communist members in the army overseas seem to have universally campaigned for Labour and ignored the Party’s official line. The call for a progressive alliance in the election was heavily criticized at the CPGB congress in November 1945, based as it was on an underestimate of anti-Tory feeling. In the USA the Communist Party had gone even further than the CPGB in its unity policy: in 1944 under the leadership of Earl Browder, it had dissolved itself as a Party in order to better support the Democrat administration led by President Roosevelt which was seen as being in tune with the Soviets in the wartime alliance. There were accusations of ‘Browderism’ made against Harry Pollitt but he survived again (as he had in 1939/40 when he had taken the wrong line) – unlike Browder who was expelled from the American organization in 1946. The Party’s move towards social democratic rather than revolutionary-focused forms of organization was also reflected in a rule-change proposal that effectively liquidated factory branches – that were based on a wish to build workers’ councils on the lines of the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik model of workplace ‘soviets’ – in favour of geographical branches. All this was to be overtaken by the generalized attacks on communist ideas at home and abroad that came with the Cold War. 196

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 196

29-01-2021 01:21:48

Why Die for Stalin?

Outmanoeuvred by the Labour Party in their cautious approach to the 1945 general election and effectively abandoned by their Soviet mentors, the war did not end on the high expected by the CPGB. Their membership, whilst still large by pre-war comparison, was steadily falling as Labour’s fortunes rose. They now began to find themselves under siege as the anti-Soviet sentiment being bolstered first by Churchill in Britain, and then by Truman in the USA, began to creep into the mainstream of public opinion and attitude. With the war’s end, the need for popularly supported friendship committees came to an end. Party members continued their aid activity along with others like, ironically, Clementine Churchill as we saw earlier – much of the Soviet Union and areas of Eastern Europe now under the control of pro-Soviet governments, had to be re-built. In the pro-Soviet enclave of Douglas Water in Lanarkshire, the miners led by Alex Clark resolved to collect funds for the people of the Czech mining community of Lidice, most of whom had been murdered by the Nazis in reprisal for the partisan assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. Their support for Lidice, with similar efforts across the world, continued for many years. The CPGB were forced onto the defensive in relation to the Soviet Union as it was no longer the heroic ally but the new threat to world peace. Their previous policy of reducing their revolutionary edge in the name of common unity against the fascists abroad and the reactionary elements at home, had to change quickly. CPGB pamphlets and propaganda now argued that the Soviet Union sought peace and that the real threat of war came from the new world order under the direction of the hugely economic and militarily powerful USA. In the areas of Europe under joint Allied occupation initial friendly relations soured under the continued suspicion that the Soviets retained territorial ambition and supported communist takeover in the West. Whilst this threat was portrayed through the presence of large Communist parties in France, Italy and elsewhere, there was no evidence that any represented an extra-parliamentary threat. Whilst CP membership ebbed and flowed but gradually fell, there were some who were drawn to membership post-war as a direct result of their experiences. An unusual case in point is that of Billy Strachan, a black Jamaican who had come to Britain to fight fascism in 1940 a few months after leaving school, with £2 10/- in his pocket. The casual racism that he met on his arrival and earliest attempts to join the RAF 197

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 197

29-01-2021 01:21:48

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Left: British Soviet Society pamphlet defending Soviet presence in occupied areas of Europe, 1946. (Author’s collection) Below: Early spokesperson for the Windrush generation, RAF pilot Billy Strachan (standing at right), and his Lancaster bomber crew, 1943. (Imperial War Museum)

198

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 198

29-01-2021 01:21:49

Why Die for Stalin?

did not put him off, and he became a wireless operator, an officer and then a Lancaster bomber pilot in the elite 106 Pathfinder Squadron from 1942. Strachan completed more than the standard quota of missions and ceased flying after suffering trauma from a narrowly avoided accident that almost killed him and his crew. He joined the CPGB in 1947 in order to campaign against imperialism and racism – the CPGB was more principled on such issues than anyone else at that time, and it was on the basis of such merit that so many remained loyal through the difficult years that followed. Strachan, who died in 1998, remained a Communist throughout his life, although he had to give up formal membership when he became a barrister. He was an inspirational and prominent spokesperson for black people in Britain, being one of the first to welcome and help the Windrush immigrants in 1948.

The Cold War and the End of Soviet Communism Stalin had wound up the Comintern in 1943 in good faith but this was barely recognized by his erstwhile allies. Some in the West were determined to foster enmity; a popular right-wing 1946 US publication Blueprint for World Conquest did no more than publish the founding documents and programme of the Comintern from 1920 alongside a vitriolic introduction – as if Stalin’s repudiation of most of its premise had never happened. Soviet determination to have secure borders and sympathetic neighbours was interpreted by the western powers as an intention to spread communism. All the effort by ordinary people as well as some in power to achieve mutual understanding in order to bolster the Grand Alliance dissipated quickly as suspicion and distrust spread on both sides of the rapidly developing east–west divide, or ‘Iron Curtain’ as the name that stuck (but replaced in the 1980s by US President Ronald Reagan with the Hollywood movie-inspired epithet of ‘The Evil Empire’). Churchill was no longer on the stage and Britain’s presence as a major player in the world was largely over – this had been evident even before the war ended as Stalin and the American presidents began to cut out Churchill from some of the decisions being made between them. Despite the shared vision of the wartime allies in the creation of the United Nations Organization in 1945, Stalin was forced to revisit the Comintern in the form of firstly the Cominform in 1947, the Comincom 199

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 199

29-01-2021 01:21:49

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

in 1949 and then the Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1955. The larger Communist parties of Europe were given a role in the late 1940s: resisting the Marshall Aid plan that promised US economic assistance in return for sympathetic democracies. The CPGB was too small and insignificant to play much part in this, but elsewhere unrest inspired by the Communist parties grew and threatened stability in the new post-war western European democracies. The Soviets were forced into continuing high levels of military spending to maintain the security that would avoid a repeat of the wartime catastrophe that had befallen them in 1941. Gradually their gravely wounded nation recovered but remained under siege from a capitalist world determined to globalize markets. High levels of arms spending and nuclear proliferation suited American (and British) arms interests so tensions were never far away and proxy wars in Africa and South-East Asia seemed endless. Stalin’s death in 1953 led to some abandonment and renunciation of repression but the sacrifice of personal freedoms for the greater good of the state remained a feature of life until the end. The Soviet Union, as a well-endowed nation in terms of resources, was able to compete and even took a lead for a while in the militarily inspired Space Race of the 1950s and 1960s. This could never be maintained and other sectors of their economy (including supplies to home consumers) groaned with inefficiency and began to stagnate. The standard of living of ordinary Soviet people which had improved through the 1950s, did not get better and more and more people began to yearn for change although no one really thought it would ever come. The social security enjoyed by Soviet citizens seemed a poor price to be paid for lack of choice, the absence of western ‘freedoms’ (including the inequalities that went with them) and empty shelves in the shops. This was felt even more markedly in the satellite countries of Eastern Europe that had come under virtual Soviet control by the end of the 1940s. Repression there was more marked and in some, like Poland, the regime detested by most citizens. By the 1960s the Iron Curtain had taken physical form with borders between east and west designed as much to keep people in as keep western forces out. After years of lacklustre rule, which latterly tried to revive the state’s fortunes by reviving memories of the Great Patriotic War, the end finally came in the late 1980s. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union appointed a leader, Gorbachev, who tried to steer through popular change, but the unintended outcome 200

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 200

29-01-2021 01:21:49

Why Die for Stalin?

was the end of Communist rule and even the outlawing of the Party itself in 1991. All this was promoted of course by the USSR’s ideological opponents in the West, military confrontation on a global scale having been narrowly avoided on several occasions post-1945. The promise of significant military de-escalation in the West at the end of the Cold War was never followed through and Russia has since again emerged as a justification for profitable ongoing military war preparation in the West. One post-Cold War matter of particular concern to many historians is the Prague Declaration of 2008, which has grown to represent the official view of the European Union. In brief summary this seeks to characterize the Soviet Union as similar in character to Hitler’s Germany, and their crimes of equal magnitude. One of its very serious implications is to negate the Soviet Union’s role in defeating fascism in the Second World War and historical accounts in many countries are already beginning to reflect such views. This deliberate revisionism of the recent past should worry all who understand the importance of the wartime alliance and the true place of the USSR in its successful outcome.

The End of the Communist Party of Great Britain With a programme entitled ‘The British Road to Socialism’, the CPGB attempted to adjust to post-war realities. Its links with the Soviet Union brought it security in terms of being able to point to the example of Communism in the East (termed ‘really existing socialism’), but also criticism and fragmentation as it tried to grapple with issues such as the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and suppression of other workers’ movements in Eastern Europe. The CPGB’s greatest contributions were within the peace movement that grew in response to nuclear proliferation, and within the trade union movement. Here however, attacks from left and right took their toll and by the late 1980s their prominent role in the leadership of many trade unions was at an end. Their most bitter opponents on the right of British policies continued, as they had before the Second World War, to look for evidence of ‘Moscow Gold’, but beyond substantial Soviet orders for the Morning Star newspaper (the successor to the Daily Worker) which kept it afloat, this was never evidenced. When British miners went on strike in 1984, under the partial leadership of Communists such as Scotland’s Mick McGahey, 201

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 201

29-01-2021 01:21:49

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

the Soviets did what they could to help – short of blatant interference in British industrial relations that would have been manna to the security services who had secretly infiltrated the Miners’ Union. The strike was lost at the same time as Britain’s industrial base all but disappeared, taking with it the old bastions of Communist support and destroying the neighbourhoods where the Party had enjoyed some credence. Alex Clark from Lanarkshire became a CPGB organizer in Central Scotland in the early 1950s and, like other talented Communists, later became a trade union organizer and leader. Moscow gold certainly never came his way: Jessie Clark recalls the meagre standard of life for their family on the stipend provided by the Party to whom they gave everything. They remained loyal almost to the end but when forced to take sides, took left-leaning positions that led to expulsion as the CPGB debated itself out of existence in the early 1990s. This was not untypical and reflected debates in other Communist parties throughout the world as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. Communists in Britain were unable to build on the lasting prestige their European colleagues had gained in the resistance movements. The exception, in a small way, was Jersey in the Channel Islands, where Norman Le Brocq, a teenager when the occupation began, gained influence through his wartime activity in the resistance (see Chapter 4) and went on to lead the Communists post-war, building the organization to some thirty-five members by the early 1960s and achieving respect and elected position in the Jersey parliament.

Conclusion The wartime alliance between Britain and the Soviet Union ended acrimoniously with both sides squaring up against one another to the background of post-war US military and economic strength. This was based on suspicions and fears that were around pre-war, but largely and pragmatically suspended for the duration of the conflict against Nazi Germany and its allies. By war’s end the situation had changed: Britain was no longer a world power and the end of its empire was only a matter of time. It had suffered in the war and struggled economically to rebuild at the same time as paying a social dividend to those who had made sacrifices to ensure victory. The Grand Alliance members 202

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 202

29-01-2021 01:21:49

Why Die for Stalin?

Soviet poster expressing hope for freedom in Europe, 1945. (Alamy Sputnik)

203

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 203

29-01-2021 01:21:50

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

ended the war with agreement to create a United Nations organization that would avoid future global conflict. However, the project of building socialism and security within the USSR was based on a different premise from the intent of the US to open up and dominate world trade (in which freedom equated to market access) and conflict raged for the next forty years. Whilst this had an open ideological element, it also had a violent underbelly portrayed through the arms race and covert activity, and proxy wars in Africa and other parts of the post-colonial Third World. Global instability was lauded by some as ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It seems now that such observations were premature and that the world remains as unsafe as it ever did in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. Communist ideas have never put down deep roots in Great Britain; relative prosperity and island geography has made the country immune to some of the revolutionary upheavals that have changed nations elsewhere – to paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg: the mass of ordinary people will only support revolution if they feel they have nothing to lose and everything to gain, and that situation has not arisen since the onset of the industrial revolution. Because Britain was (thankfully) not invaded, the CPGB was unable to grow in influence through being the best and bravest fighters against fascism – as they did elsewhere in Europe. Their wartime efforts to be the best supporters of the Soviet’s war effort were never enough to win them such lasting and deep-rooted support. This had begun to tail off by the end of the war: the Soviet Union was still held in high esteem, but the Labour Party had better captured the national imagination as the brokers of social change. Soon, with the advent of Cold War, the CPGB would suffer by its association with the Soviet Union, and membership decline became continuous. The wartime alliance, despite its flaws and issues, should be celebrated as an example of just what can be achieved through collaboration and joint effort by nations united against a common foe. Humanity is not currently under grave threat of any renewal of fascism although its ideas remain attractive to some and cannot be dismissed; we do, however, have common enemies, including the more abstract concept of climate change: unity of purpose across ideological boundaries is as needed as it ever was. The idea of a political party committed to the ideals that drove people towards communist belief in revolutionary change remains as relevant in the unequal world of today as it was through the twentieth century. 204

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 204

29-01-2021 01:21:50

Appendix 1

Some Lead Characters

Attlee, Clement (1883–1967) – British Labour Party politician. Member of the wartime Cabinet, Labour leader 1935–55, Prime Minister 1945–51. Beaverbrook, Lord (Max Aitken) (1879–1964) – Canadian-born millionaire owner of the Daily Express newspaper and wartime Cabinet minister. Outspoken advocate for the Second Front to relieve the Soviet Union. Churchill, Clementine (1885–1977) – wife of Winston Churchill and very active in promoting medical aid for the Soviet Union for which she was awarded the Soviet Red Banner of Labour award in 1945. Churchill, Winston (1874–1965) – British politician of aristocratic background, outspoken in his dislike of communism but prepared to ally closely with the USSR as wartime Prime Minister because of his deeper hatred of fascism. Beveridge, William (1879–1963) – British Liberal politician and economist who authored the influential and popular report on Social Insurance in 1942 that underpinned the post-war creation of the welfare state. Bevin, Ernest (1881–1951) – British Labour and trade union leader who was Minister of Labour in the wartime coalition government and later Foreign Secretary in the post-war labour government. Branson, Noreen (1910–2003) – British Communist leader and writer, of aristocratic background, who was active (with her husband Clive until his death in action in 1943) for most of her life. She completed the official history of the CPGB started by her contemporary James Klugman. Citrine, Walter (1887–1983) – leading British trade unionist and General Secretary of the TUC from 1926 to 1946. Anti-communist at home but friend of the Soviet Union which he visited several times. 205

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 205

29-01-2021 01:21:50

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Cripps, Stafford (1889–1952) – wealthy barrister and leading left-wing British politician. Ambassador to the USSR 1940-42 and thereafter a minister in the wartime Cabinet. Eden, Anthony (1897–1977) – British Conservative career politician who served as Foreign Secretary in the wartime Cabinet. Gallacher, William (1881–1965) – Scottish shop floor trade union leader and founder member of the CPGB who became one of its leaders and, for many years, its sole MP. Gray, Olga (1906–?) – British-born spy who managed to successfully penetrate the British Communist movement in the 1930s and win their trust for subversive activity which she reported to her British intelligence minders, leading to successful prosecutions in 1937. Hannington, Walter (1896–1966) – London-born founding member of the CPGB and a leading organizer of the unemployed movement in the 1930s. Became a trade union organizer for the engineers’ union in 1939. Johnson, Hewlett (1874–1966) – British Church of England figure who was Dean of Canterbury from 1931–1963. A staunch supporter of the Soviet Union from its earliest days, he visited the country regularly and wrote favourably and uncritically of its leaders and ideals. Awarded the Red Banner of Labour for his wartime aid efforts. Lenin, Vladimir (1870–1924) – Russian-born political theorist and first leader of the Bolshevik Party and Soviet Republic. A venerated giant of the worldwide Communist movement who became an icon after his death – a matter that would have displeased him greatly. Maisky, Ivan (1884–1975) – Soviet ambassador to the UK 1932–1943 and a well-known public figure with his wife Agniya. Although he played a lead role in drawing up the initial Anglo-Soviet agreement in 1941, he was allegedly recalled to Moscow having failed to secure the opening of the Second Front. Molotov, Vyacheslav (1890–1986) – leading Soviet politician in the Stalin era. Co-signatory of the pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and later present at all the wartime meetings and negotiations with the Allies. Although he fell out with Stalin in 1949, he remained loyal until his own death.

206

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 206

29-01-2021 01:21:50

Some Lead Characters

Montgomery, Bernard (1887–1976) – Britain’s most successful wartime general. An idiosyncratic character who earned the respect of his men, but who came into conflict with other Allied commanders. Mosley, Oswald (1896–1980) – British politician from an aristocratic background who was converted to far-right politics in the 1920s and became the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Spent much of the war in prison, his release in 1943 being controversial. Wife Diana Mitford was a close friend of Hitler’s. Palme Dutt, Rajani (1896–1974) – British-born half-Bengali, halfSwede, Palme Dutt was a well-educated leading Communist theoretician and journalist who was loyal to the Soviet view of the world until the end of his life. Piratin, Phil (1907–1995) – working-class Communist Party leader in London, anti-fascist activist in the 1930s, Stepney Councillor and MP for Mile End from 1945–50. Later fell into inactivity whilst remaining a Party member. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (1882–1945) – popular Democrat Party American President from 1933 until his death in 1945, and only incumbent for four terms. Worked closely with Stalin and Churchill and played a lead role in forging the Grand Alliance. Stalin, Joseph (1878–1953) – feared and loved in equal measure within the USSR which he dominated from the 1920s until his death, turning collective leadership into a personality cult and dictatorship. Held responsible for the brutal and repressive policies that built the Soviet economy before and after the war. Truman, Harry S. (1884–1972) – Democrat Party US President who succeeded Roosevelt, authorized the first and only use of nuclear weapons, and led the US into the Cold War era. Webb, Beatrice & Sidney (1859–1947 & 1858–1943) – influential British socialist writers who stood out against revolutionary change in Britain but became supportive of the Soviet Union and promoting of its cause into the start of the war and the Anglo-Soviet alliance. Pollitt, Harry (1890–1960) – a member of the CPGB from its formation, Pollitt was a boilermaker by trade but became a full-time activist in the 1920s, serving as General Secretary from 1929–1956 (with brief

207

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 207

29-01-2021 01:21:50

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

interruption in 1939/40). A loyal supporter of Stalin who found the revelations made from 1956 difficult to accept. Wintringham, Tom (1898–1949) – Grimsby-born First World War veteran and mutineer, Oxford University-educated, joined the CPGB in 1923 and became a leading member. Commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigade in Spain and was wounded twice in 1937. Fell out with the CPGB after Spain when his wife was denounced a ‘Trotskyist’, and became a founder member of the Home Guard, and in 1942, of the CWP. An author and broadcaster.

208

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 208

29-01-2021 01:21:50

Appendix 2

Memorials to the Anglo-Soviet Wartime Alliance

Dundee Area: Dundee harbour features a memorial to a number of submarines from there lost with their crews in the war. These include one to B1, ex-HMS Sunfish, which, with Soviet crew, was en route to northern Russia when accidently sunk by the RAF in July 1944. Just outside Dundee, at the former RAF base at Errol, there is a plaque memorial to the Soviet airmen who trained there in 1943/4 (see Chapter 4), and there are plans to erect a more substantial memorial made from Karelian granite specially imported from Russia. There is also a memorial near the village of Fearnan on Loch Tay to the Soviet Albarmarle aircraft lost with all crew on a training flight in 1943. North of Dundee, in Montrose, the Air Station Heritage Centre at the site of the long-closed RAF airfield has a collection of photographs and artefacts relating to the Soviet aircrew training at Errol which was on display until recently. https://rafmontrose.org.uk/ Loch Ewe, Wester Ross: this was the assembly point for convoys to North Russia from 1942 until 1944. At Aultbea there is a superb museum run by the Russian Arctic Convoy Project dedicated to the memory of the British, Soviet and American personnel who made the dangerous journey. www.russianarcticconvoymuseum.org. A few miles away, at a site of Second World War gun emplacements that defended the entrance to the loch, there is a memorial stone to all who died on the convoys. London – Imperial War Museum: this is the main repository for papers and artefacts relating to the war, not all of which are on display. Just outside the museum, in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, there is a memorial to all the Soviet people who died and a ceremony is held there each year on 9 May. www.sovietwarmemorialtrust.com/

209

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 209

29-01-2021 01:21:50

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Manchester: On 3 September 2020, a memorial was unveiled to ‘The Soviet Soldiers Who Gave Their Lives Liberating Europe’ and ‘The Brave People of the Besieged Leningrad’.

Memorial to Soviet submariners, Dundee Harbour. (Author)

Memorial to Arctic convoy seafarers, Loch Ewe, Scotland. (Author)

210

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 210

29-01-2021 01:21:51

Memorials to the Anglo-Soviet Wartime Alliance

Soviet War Graves in the British Isles: Soviet servicemen who died on British soil were normally interred in the USSR. There are, however, eighteen graves of Soviet POWs who were brought to Britain for medical treatment after liberation from slave labour camps in mainland Europe in late 1944 and early 1945. These are located in Aldershot, Chester, Harrogate, Hartlepool, Huddersfield, Liverpool, Leeds, Shaftsbury and Tidworth. These graves, bearing the Soviet star, are all cared for by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. In addition, there are sixtyone graves on Jersey and 264 on Alderney, where Soviet POWS worked to death as slave labourers on the occupied islands were interred. War Cemeteries in Northern Russia: The Russian cemetery extension just outside the port of Murmansk contains twenty-one British and Commonwealth war graves (four Royal Navy, thirteen Merchant Navy and three Royal Artillery) along with five Polish and American graves and those of three British merchant seamen whose deaths were not war-related, all of whom died in 1942. A few miles away within the naval base at Severomorsk (Vaenga) are the graves of six British and Commonwealth airmen who died in 1941/2. At the remote Vaida Bay military cemetery some eight hours’ drive from Murmansk lie the graves of two Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm aircrew members who died in July 1941. Archangel Allied Cemetery contains the graves of seven British servicemen: four RAF aircrew who died in 1942, a Royal Navy seaman and a Royal Army Service Corps soldier in 1943, and a Royal Artillery gunner in 1944. There are also several hundred graves in Murmansk and Archangel of British soldiers who died during the operations of 1918/19 (see Chapter 2). Talking Birds – Coventry: this is a music, theatre and visual arts project set up in 1992 whose work to date has included keeping alive the link between Coventry and Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) in Russia. Past projects have included celebrations of the Tablecloth (see Chapter 6) and, in 2019, the 75th anniversary of the twinning. www.talkingbirds. co.uk/pages/twinstory.asp

211

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 211

29-01-2021 01:21:51

Appendix 3

Wartime Awards Between Britain and the USSR

This is probably not complete, but, as far as is known, is the first attempt to provide a list in an English-language book. This historical aspect has been poorly recorded but a recent US book (Schwind, 2015) has superbly recorded stories of American seafarers and flyers who were awarded Soviet medals for convoy related duties. Mutual recognition of wartime bravery and achievement featured throughout the war and into the immediate post-war period. Most were made in batches which were announced by the press in the respective countries (in Britain, award announcements were, and still are, made through the London Gazette) and these are the dates that are given. The list below will provide names in firstly date order, then according to award with the most prestigious appearing first etc., then alphabetically in order of rank. All are given in the English language – other literature gives differing translations for some of the Soviet awards, and variations on spelling of Russian names, but an attempt is made here at consistency. There is not enough space to provide detailed information where this is known, but some very brief examples are offered. The list of Soviet awards does not contain those of the Ushakov Medal made in recent years to surviving Arctic convoy veterans by the government of the Russian Federation.

British Awards to Soviet Personnel 17/3/1942 Distinguished Flying Cross: Col A. Kuharenko, Lt Cols B. Safonov, & A. Kovalenko, Maj I. Tumanov – all for air defence of Arctic convoys.

212

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 212

29-01-2021 01:21:51

Wartime Awards Between Britain and the USSR

Safonov was an ace pilot twice awarded the top Hero of the Soviet Union award; he was killed in May 1942. 5/5/1943 Distinguished Service Order: Lt Gen. M. Katukov, Maj Gens V. Baranov, N. Ignatov, P. Mironov, A. Mishchenko, A. Naumov & V. Chistov, Guards Capt V. Kotelnikov, Capts V. Eroshenko, Y. Afansiev & P. Sgibnev, Sen Lt V. Tolkachev, Capts V. Isotov (tanker Azerbaijan, Convoy PQ17) & M. Pavlov (tanker Donbas, Convoy PQ17). Distinguished Service Medal: POs A. Lebedev, A. Frolov, Z. Shchukin & Sen Sailor P. Lashinov. Military Medal: Maj T. Shashlo, PO S. Savostianov, Sen Sgts G. Kolosov & H. Mildzikhov. Distinguished Flying Medal: Guards Jun Lt P. Klimov, Jun Lt Bokiy, Sen Sgts V. Sigolaev & F. Chegodaev. Distinguished Service Cross: Capt A. Sakharov (Convoy PQ16), Mechanics F. Dumbrov (tanker Azerbaijan, Convoy PQ17), M. Fedorov (tanker Donbas, Convoy PQ17) & D. Slauta (tanker Azerbaijan, Convoy PQ17). Order of the British Empire 4th Degree: Capts I. Afansiev (cargo ship Old Bolshevik, Convoy PQ16) & K. Kasyanchuk (cargo ship Engels), Mechanic N. Pugachev (cargo ship Old Bolshevik, Convoy PQ16). Order of the British Empire 5th Degree: Merchant Fleet Med Asst. E. Puzyareva. 19/1/1944 Honorary Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire: Marshal A. Vasilevsky. Order of the British Empire 2nd Degree: Col Gens S. Bogdanov, K. Moskalenko & M. Shumilov, Air Force Col Gen V. Sudets, Lt Gens P. Batov, A. Getman, N. Hagen, A. Kravchenko, N. Psurtsev, P. Semenov & T. Tanaschishin. Order of the British Empire 3rd Degree: Rear Adms G. Bachelors, V. Fadeev, G. Kholosttyakov & A. Petrov, Maj Gens A. Ageev, P. Braiko,

213

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 213

29-01-2021 01:21:51

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

A. Burdeiny, I. Chalenko, I. Fedyunkin, S. Gorshikov, I. Grigorievsky, K. Kolesnikov, P. Mansurov, M. Nekrasov, A. Pankov, A. Radzievskiy, G. Safiullin, E. Sedulin, A. Semyonov, M. Seryugin, P. Shavranov, T. Shvedkov, A. Skortsov, I. Taranov, K. Trufanov, I. Vladimirisky, M. Zaporozhchenko & A. Zhukov, Lt Gens V. Aladinskiy, P. Korolkov, P. Malyshev, P. Morgunov, A. Nechaev, N. Oslikovskiy, A. Proshlyakov & M. Shalin, Cols S. Aristov, M. Grekhov, A. Grogoriev, A. Kustov, G. Maximov, V. Potanhin, V. Rassokhin, K. Sychev & T. Zubov, Capts B. Skorohvatov, V. Yakovlev, Yu. Zinoviev & F. Zozulya. Order of the British Empire 5th Degree: Cols N. Brozgol, K. Chernov, N. Grishin, M. Kashirin & N. Kopylov, Lt Cols N. Apoprienko, N. Budarin, I. Dolmatov, M. Ermolaev, M. Iliyushkin, N. Kharchenko, A. Korozin, M. Kurochkin, S. Levada, A. Loginov, I. Lyubimov, F. Lipantenkov, I. Malov, I. Milekhin, S. Orlyakin, P. Pilyutov, O. Rodionov, A. Roshchektasev, V. Rybalskiy, S. Saenko, G. Timchenko, N. Vasiliev, A. Vanyakin & N. Varchuk, Majs K. Alexseev, V. Golubev, G. Kontsevoy, P. Kutakhov, A. Markevitch, P. Panin, S. Perevertzin, E. Semenchenko, V. Tishchenko, I. Frolov, N. Gladkov, M. Rakitin, I. Soluyanov, V. Strelchenko & S. Zaporozhets, Capts V.Balsashov, A. Baranov, N. Bobrovnikov, V. Chepak, A. Chernyshov, I. Deev, L. Elkin, A. Goryainov, V. Goryachev, A. Grinevitch, N. Khomenko, I. Kuznetsov, N. Lunin, B. Meshcheryakov, A. Mayorov, V. Martynenko, A. Molyodyuk, V. Mordin, I. Moshkarin, I. Musienko, B. Nikolaev, M. Osadchiy, N. Pobedkin, E. Polyakov, F. Ponochevny, S. Poryvkin, M. Ronanov, Z. Sorokin, M. Stepanov, G.Subbotin & F. Vidyaev, Sen Lts A. Artamonov, A. Afrikanov, A. Egerev, V. Mashura, V. Savin, G. Sidorov, A. Simonenko, V. Tsyganov, N. Chaika & P. Yaitskov, Lts S. Akhmetov, G. Bessarabov, A. Vasiliev, A. Karnov, F. Kovalenko, M. Kolovchik, G. Konstantinov, G. Korzun, P. Kuzmin, D. Latyshev, G. Lisitsyn, G. Melnichuk, F. Pakolchuk, A .Simonenko & I. Stogni, Jun Lt G. Filipomenko, WOs A. Kulyashov & V. Mikhailov, Sen Sgts G. Adzharov, I. Grigorash & F. Kazmir, Sgts A. Akhmedzhanov, G. Korshunov, M. Fomin, Sh. Shamratov & Ch. Sharleev, Jun Sgts K. Kodrybaev, M. Mirokarimov, I. Tochenko & N. Trumchelo, Cpls N. Sokolev & A. Udurbaev, Soldier M. Goncharov.

214

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 214

29-01-2021 01:21:51

Wartime Awards Between Britain and the USSR

Twenty-one-year-old Red Army Lieutenant Anatoli Karnov wrote home to his mother: ‘Hi my dear! Mum, I’d like to inform you that I have been awarded the Order of the British Empire of the 5th Degree by the British King George VI. If you want, find the newspaper Pravda for the 11th of May, 1944. If I get the order in Moscow, I’ll have to visit you. Write, how you are, and if you received the money. Mum. I was read a fortune that you were ill. Your loving son, Anatoli, 18.05.1944.’ Lt. Karnov was subsequently awarded the Order of the Patriotic War 1st Class for an action on 23 October 1944 in south-eastern Poland in which he was killed. Archives of the Klinsky Museum Association, Klin, Russia

11/5/1944 Commander of the Order of the British Empire: Capt K. Zinoviev (commander of the battleship Archangelsk – ex-HMS Royal Sovereign). 9/6/1944 Order of the British Empire 5th Degree: Capt K. Evstigeneev (ace pilot and squadron commander, Voronezh front). 5/1/1945 Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath: Marshals G. Zhukov, I. Konev & K. Rossokovsky. Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire: Gen V. Sokolovsky. Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire: Col Gen M. Malinin, Maj Gen. V. Aladinsky. These were all presented by FM Montgomery at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. Order of Lenin holder Squadron Leader A. Rook of 81 Squadron, RAF Murmansk. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

215

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 215

29-01-2021 01:21:51

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Soviet Awards to British and Commonwealth Personnel 31/3/1942 Order of Lenin: Wing Cdr H. Isherwood, Sqn Ldrs A. Rook, A. Miller & C. Haw – all from RAF 151 Wing Hurricane Squadrons deployed to Murmansk in 1941. 17/11/1942 Order of the Red Banner: Cdr E. Hinton (HMS Harrier, see Ch. 4), Capt J. Lawrie (SS Trehata). Order of the Patriotic War 1st Class: CPO C. Collins (RN), CO W. Prance (SS Empire Byron, sunk in Convoy PQ17), Steward R. Quick (SS Empire Byron). Order of the Patriotic War 2nd Class: Bosun F. Kendle (SS Atlantic), Seamen A. Martucci (SS Empire Baffin) and H. Woodward (RN). Order of the Red Star: Cook B. Coffey (SS Afton, sunk in Convoy PQ17), Steward R. Quick (SS Empire Byron). All awarded for acts of valour associated with the Arctic convoys. 25/2/1944 Order of Suvarov 1st Class: FM A. Brooke, ACM A. Harris. 11/4/1944 Order of Suvarov 1st Class: Gen H. Alexander, Adms B. Fraser (for sinking of Scharnhorst) & J. Tovey, Capt G. Black (MN). Order of Suvarov 3rd Class: Brig A. Dudley Ward. Order of Alexander Nevsky: AVM D. Bennett (RAF), Capt J. Crombie (RN), Lt Col W. Williams (7th Gurkha Rifles). Order of Kutuzov 3rd Class: AVM F. Hopps (RAF), Brig H. Fitzroy Maclean, Cdr R. Melhuish (Royal Indian Navy). Order of the Patriotic War 1st Class: Capt G. Boyd (Australian Army), Wing Cdr J. Cunningham (RAF), Lts J. Donovan (RN) & F. Foster (RN), Wing Cdr W. Gardiner (RAF), Gp Capt C. Green (RAF), Subedar B. Gurung (3rd Gurkha Rifles), Sgt N. McIntyre (Australian Army), Sqn Ldr F. Robinson (RAF), Sub-Lt C. Senior (Royal Canadian Navy). 216

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 216

29-01-2021 01:21:52

Wartime Awards Between Britain and the USSR

Order of the Patriotic War 2nd Class: L/Sig S. Archer (RN), Lt E. Brien (Royal Canadian Navy), Capt H. Denny (RA), Flt Lt R. Fairley (RAF), Greaser C. Irvine (RN), Cox. S. Kerslake (RN), Sgt M. Killen (RA), Capt R. Maltby (RA), Wing Cdr B. Radley (RAF), Sqn Ldr A. Reece (RAF), Gp Capt G. Tuttle (RAF), Gnr W. Watts (RA). Order of the Red Star: AVM A. Sanders (RAF), Col. J. Whitfield (West Surrey Regt). Lt Col G. Prendergast (Royal Tank Regt), Capt G. Maund (RN) (North Russia), Sqn Ldrs J. Browning & V. Gittins (RAF), Lt Cdr A. Sayers (RN), CO J. Cook (MN), C/Engineer J. Mummery (MN), Lt R. Horan(RN), Surg Lt G.Murray (RN), WO J. Buswell (RAF), WO M. Forsyth (Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders), Pte A. Stewart (Australian Army), Gnr F. Tibbs (RN). Medal for Bravery: Capt E. Rice (MN), Majs G. Archer (Royal Fusiliers), F. Deakin (RA) & M. Hunter (Northamptonshire Regt), 2nd Offs J. Banister & A. Grieves (MN), 2nd Eng Off W. Laurie, Lts F. Andrews (RN) & J. Moore (RN), Flt Lts E.Chandler (RAF) & D. Smith (RAAF), C/Engineer V. Millington, Sgt S. Brandreth (Royal Signals), Flt Sgts C. Callinson (RAF) & W. McGuinty (RCAF), Sgt. F. Morris (Northamptonshire Regt), Flt Sgt W. Warner (RAF), L/Seaman J. Baillie (RN), Cpl J. Denvir (New Zealand Army), L/Sig R. Wells (RN), AB T. Cunningham (RN), OD C. Morrison (MN). Medal for Combat Merit: Air Cdre H. Cozens (RAF), Capt G. Falconer (Seaforth Highlanders), Maj A. Hunter (Royal Scots Fusiliers), Lts J. Angelbeck (RN) & K. Crane (Durham Light Infantry), Flt Lt J. Dixon (RAF), Lt S. Hickman (RN), Eng Lt R. Tribe (RN), 4th Eng Off A. Gray (MN), FO B.Kenright (RAF), Jnr Eng H. Wallace (MN), Bosun K. Campbell (MN), C/Steward T. Smith (MN), WO M. Ruddy (RAF), Sgt E.Campbell (RAF), POs H. Jones (RN) & E. Sharman (RN), Sgt J. Walker (RASC), Cpls W. Broughton (RAF), H. Smale (RAF) & J. Stewart (Notts & Derby Regt), L-Cpl H. Penny (Berkshire Regt), L/Sig F. Vaukins (RN), ABs E. Claypole (RN) and E. Cox (RN). 21/7/1944 Order of Kutuzov 2nd Class: Lt Gen A. Smith, Brig Gens A. Douglas & A. Jackson, Lt Gen A. Selby. Order of Kutuzov 3rd Class: Brig A. Earley, Col R. Wood. 217

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 217

29-01-2021 01:21:52

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Order of the Patriotic War 1st Class: Lt Cols D. Austin, J. Donaldson, P. Edgell, W. Higman, N. Hunter, A. Mais, H. Robbins & M. Smither. Order of the Patriotic War 2nd Class: L. d’Albuquerque, K. Lindsell, W. Suddaby & C. Rice. Order of the Red Star: Havildar G. Singh, Capt A. Wallis, Subedar N. Nikam. This batch was awarded to British and Commonwealth army personnel engaged in the supply route to southern Russia via Iran. 13/10/1944 Order of Suvorov 1st Class: Lord Beaverbrook (Lend-Lease Minister), Oliver Lyttleton (Minister of War Production). 7/11/1944 Order of Suvorov 1st Class: FM B. Montgomery, ACM T. Mallory. Order of Ushakov 1st Class: Adm Bertram-Ramsey. Awarded to Allied military leaders for the D-Day opening of the Second Front. 9/2/1945 Order of Red Banner of Labour: A. G. Beers (for diplomatic work at the Teheran Conference negotiations). 12/4/1945 Order of Red Banner of Labour: Clementine Churchill. Medal for Labour Valour: Mable Johnstone. Awards made for work in the Red Cross Aid for Russia campaign. 21/6/1945 Order of Victory: FM B. Montgomery (presented at the Potsdam Conference, Berlin, July 1945). Order of the Red Banner: Gen. K. Strong (Royal Scots Fusiliers), Brigs A. Jones (Coldstream Guards) & R. Venables. Medal for Combat Merit: Lt Cols F.Carroll (RE) and R. Rankin (Royal Signals), Capt R. Birtwistle (East Lancs Regt). 218

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 218

29-01-2021 01:21:53

Wartime Awards Between Britain and the USSR

27/7/1945 Order of Red Banner of Labour: Hewlett Johnson (Dean of Canterbury). Distinguished Labour Medal: Albert D’Eye, Marie Pritt. Awards for Aid to Russia work. 28/8/1945 Order of Kutuzov 1st Class: ACM A. Tedder (for services as Deputy Commander Supreme Headquarters Allied Forces Europe (SHAEF)) Medal for Combat Merit: Air Cdre H. Mermagen (RAF), Wing Cdr L. Scarman (RAF). 4/10/1945 Order of Kutuzov 1st Class: Gen. H. Crerar. 16/1/1947 Order of Kutuzov 1st Class: Maj Gen L. Lyne (Lancashire Fusiliers). 27/5/1947 Order of the Red Banner of Labour: Stanley Embery. Order of the Patriotic war 1st Class: George Flett. Order of the Red Star: Henry Adcock, John Ray.

Field Marshal Montgomery decorates Marshal Rokossovsky and other Soviet Generals, Berlin, 12 July 1945. (IWM/Wikimedia Commons)

219

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 219

29-01-2021 01:21:54

Bibliography

Allan, J. (1956) No Citation London, Panther Army Bureau of Current Affairs pamphlets (London, War Office): No. 18 War: How Russia Fights (May 1942) No. 38 War: This is the Red Army (February 1943) No. 45 Current Affairs: Social Security (June 1943) No. 47: Balkan Background (July 1943) No. 53 Current Affairs: “Here’s Tae Us” (October 1943) Basic ABCA Bulletin No. 1 (November 1943) No. 90 War: The Red Army Advances (March 1945) No. 90 Current Affairs: The More We are Together: Community Centres (March 1945) Bain, P. (1995) ‘“Is you is or is you ain’t my baby”: Women’s Pay and the Clydeside Strikes of 1943’ in The Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society No. 30 Baker, A. (1989) The Cairo Parliament 1943–4: An Experiment in Military Democracy Leigh-on-Sea, Partizan Press Beaumont, J. (1980) Comrades in Arms: British Aid to Russia 1941–45 London, Davis-Poynter Beckett, F. (1995) Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party London, Merlin __________ (2004) Stalin’s British Victims Stroud, Sutton Publishing Bell, P. (1990) John Bull and the Bear: British Public Opinion, Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union 1941–45 London, Edward Arnold Белорусова, Анна (2019) Лётчики Особого Назначения Москва, Издательство ACT Blackett, P. (1956) Atomic Weapons and East–West Relations Cambridge, CUP Bourne, S. (2012) The Motherland Calls: Britain’s Black Service Men and Women 1939–45 Cheltenham, The History Press 220

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 220

29-01-2021 01:21:54

Bibliography

Bower, T. (1989) Red Web: MI6 and the KGB Master Coup London, Aurum Press Branson, N. (1985) History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927–1941 London, Lawrence & Wishart __________ (1997) History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1941–1951 London, Lawrence & Wishart Butler, J. (2011) The Red Dean of Canterbury London, Scala Calder, A. (1969) The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 London, Jonathan Cape Campbell, I. & D. McIntyre (1958) The Kola Run: A Record of Arctic Convoys 1941–45 London, Frederick Muller Cawthorne, N. (1994) The Iron Cage: Are British POWs Still Alive in Siberia? London, Fourth Estate Challinor, R. (1995) The Struggle for Hearts & Minds: Essays on the Second World War London, Bewick Press Chamberlain, W. (1946) Blueprint for World Conquest: The Official Communist Plan Washington, Human Events Churchill, W. (1950) The Second World War Vol. III: The Grand Alliance London, Cassell __________ (1952) The Second World War Vol. V: Closing the Ring London, Cassell __________ (1954) The Second World War Vol. VI: Triumph and Tragedy London, Cassell Churchill, C. (1945) My Visit to Russia London, Hutchison Citrine, W. (1942) In Russia Now London, Robert Hale Communist Party of Britain (2013) Our History Pamphlet No.11: The CP in the Channel Islands – from Nazi Occupation to mass work in the modern era Communist Party of Great Britain pamphlets: Will it be War?, Harry Pollitt (July 1939) How to Win the War, Harry Pollitt (September 1939) Why this War?, R. Palme Dutt (November 1939) What is Russia Going to Do? Letters to Bill No. 2, Harry Pollitt (July 1940) Bombers Over London, Ted Bramley (October 1940) Wages, a Policy, Harry Pollitt (December1940) Russia’s Story Told in Pictures (Summer 1941) Into Battle, the Call of May Day 1942, Harry Pollitt (April 1942) Way to Win, Decisions of the National Conference of the CPGB (May 1942) Speed the Second Front, Harry Pollitt (July 1942) 221

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 221

29-01-2021 01:21:55

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Deeds Not Words, Harry Pollitt (October 1942) A Memorandum on the Health & Fitness of the Young Worker in Industry, Young Communist League (1943) The Siege of Stalingrad (June 1943) Unity and Victory: Report of the 16th Congress of the CPGB (July 1943) Clear Out Hitler’s Agents: An Exposure of Trotskyist Disruption Being Organized in Britain (August 1942) Discussion Notes No. 1: Why You Became a Communist (November 1943) Maintain and Strengthen our Party Organization (February 1944) Britain for the People: Proposals for Post-War Policy Discussion Paper, Executive Committee CPGB (May 1944) Equal Pay for Equal Work, Tamara Rust (June 1944) How to Win the Peace, Harry Pollitt (Sept.1944) British Soldier in India: The Letters of Clive Branson (1944) Crisis in Greece (November 1945) 18th Congress Resolutions and Decisions (November 1945) Crome, L. (1988) Unbroken: Resistance and Survival in the Concentration Camps London, Lawrence & Wishart Croucher, R. (1982) Engineers at War 1939–45 London, Merlin Press Deakin, N. (ed.) (2015) Radiant Illusion: Middle Class Recruits to Communism in the 1930s Edenbridge, Eden Vale Editions Deighton, L. (1993) Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II London, Jonathan Cape Deutscher, I. (1966) Stalin: A Political Biography Harmondsworth, Penguin Dewar, H. (1976) Communist Politics in Britain: The CPGB from its origins to the Second World War London, Pluto Press Drummond, J. (1960) A River Runs to War London, W.H. Allen Duffy, C. (1993) Red Storm on the Reich New York, Da Capo Ellison, D. (1941) USSR: The Strength of Our Ally London, Lawrence & Wishart Fennell, J. (2019) Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Forrester, L. (1956) Fly for Your Life: The Story of R.R. Stanford Tuck DSO DFC London, Frederick Muller Gordon, Y. (2008) Soviet Air Power in World War 2 Hinkley, Midland Publishing 222

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 222

29-01-2021 01:21:55

Bibliography

__________ (2008) US Aircraft in the Soviet Union and Russia Hinkley, Midland Publishing Gorodetsky, G. (ed.) (2015) The Maisky Diaries New Haven, Yale Grierson, P. (1943) Books on Soviet Russia 1917–1942: A Bibliography and Guide to Reading London, Methuen Griffith, H. (1942) RAF in Russia London, Hammond & Hammond __________ (1943) This is Russia London, Hammond & Hammond Gunn, D. & Reynolds, K. (2016) Cold Seas and Warm Friendships: Convoys to Russia 1941–1945, An Allied Bridge Over the Arctic Scotland, Stuffcreative Hall, I. (2009) Christmas in Archangel: A Memoir of Life in the Merchant Navy 1939–46 Victoria B.C., Trafford Publishing Hallas, D. (1985) The Comintern London, Bookmarks Hemming, H. (2018) M – Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster London, Arrow Books Henderson, M. (1988) Dear Allies … A Story of Women in Monklands and Besieged Leningrad Monklands District Libraries Henderson, S. (undated) Comrades on the Kwai: Socialist History Society Occasional Papers No. 6 Ceredigion, Open Door Publications Hindus, M. (1943) Mother Russia London, Collins Hobsbaum, E. (1994) Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 London, Michael Joseph Hurd, A. (ed.) (1943) Britain’s Merchant Navy London, Odhams Imperial War Museum (recorded 1986) Oral History Archive: Noreen Branson www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80009003 Joint Committee for Soviet Aid (December 1943) Annual Report London, Caledonian Press Jones. M. (2015) After Hitler: The Last Days of the Second World War London, John Murray Kahn, M. (2016) The Western Allies and Soviet Potential in World War II London, Routledge Kalapani (Oct. 1957) ‘Convoys to Murmansk’ in The Naval Review No. 4 Vol. XLV Kaverin, V. (1972) Two Captains Moscow, Progress Publishers Kisch, R. (1985) The Days of the Good Soldiers: Communists in the Armed Forces WWII London, Journeyman Kitchen, M. (1986) British Policy Towards the Soviet Union During the Second World War New York, Palgrave Macmillan 223

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 223

29-01-2021 01:21:55

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Knight, C. (2012) ‘Mrs Churchill Goes to Russia: The Wartime Gift Exchange Between Britain and the Soviet Union’ in Cross, D. (ed.) A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture Cambridge, Open Book Publishers Knox, B. & A. McKinlay (1995) ‘Pests to Management: Engineering Shop Stewards on Clydeside 1939–45’ in The Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society No. 30 Kolko, G. (1968) The Politics of War:The World and United States Foreign Policy 1943–45 New York, Pantheon Labour Party (March 1943) The Communist Party and the War: A Record of Hypocrisy and Treachery to the Workers of Europe Lane, A. & H. Temperley (eds) (1995) The Rise and Fall of the Grand Alliance 1941–45 Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan Lee, J. (August 1941) Our Ally Russia: The Truth! London, W.H. Allen Lenton, H. & J. Colledge (1964) Warships of World War II Shepperton, Ian Allan Lowe. K. (2013) Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II London, Penguin Maton, M. (2013) Honour the Recipients of Foreign Awards Honiton, Token Publishing Matthews, P. (2014) ‘Soviet War Graves in the UK and the Impetus for the Soviet War Memorial’ in SCRSS Digest www.scrss.org.uk/ Documents/SCRSSDigest_Summer2014.pdf Ministry of Information booklets: Comrades in Arms! Britain and the USSR (1941) Merchantmen at War (1944) Arctic War (1945) His Majesty’s Submarines (1945) What Britain Has Done 1939–1945: A Selection of Outstanding Facts and Figures (1945) Moore, B. & G. Barnsby (eds) (1988) Our History: The Anti-Fascist People’s Front in the Armed Forces, the Communist Contribution London, Communist Party History Group McShane, H. & J. Smith (1978) Harry McShane: No Mean Fighter London, Pluto Press Neat, T. (2007) Hamish Henderson: A Biography Vol. 1 The Making of the Poet Edinburgh, Birlinn

224

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 224

29-01-2021 01:21:55

Bibliography

Northedge, F. & A. Wells, (1982) Britain and Soviet Communism: The Impact of a Revolution London, Macmillan O’Connor, B. (2012) Churchill and Stalin’s Secret Agents: Operation Pickaxe at RAF Tempsford England, Fonthill Media Odhams (1945) The Victory Book London, Odhams Press Overy, R. (1998) Russia’s War Harmondsworth, Penguin Pares, B. (1941) Russia Harmondsworth, Penguin Special __________ (1944) Russia and the Peace Harmondsworth, Penguin Special Pavlichenko, L. (2015) Lady Death: The Memoirs of Stalin’s Sniper Barnsley, Greenhill Books Pauwells, J. (2002) The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War Toronto, Lorimer Pelling, H. (1975) The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile London, Adam & Charles Black Peyton, M. (2005) An Average War: Eighth Army to Red Army Essex, Maypole Press Piratin, P. (1978) Our Flag Stays Red London, Lawrence & Wishart Plokhy, S. (2019) Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: An Untold Story of World War II London, Allen Lane RACM – Russian Arctic Convoy Museum (2013) Commemorative Brochure: Russian Arctic Convoy Veterans Reunion May 2013, Loch Ewe, Wester Ross Aultbea, RACMP Rafeek, N. (1995) ‘Agnes McLean 1918–1994’ in The Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society No. 30 Russia Today pamphlets: Where Women Enjoy Freedom, Tamara Rust (1940) Russia and the League of Nations, Pat Sloan (January 1940) Friendship with Russia Now!, The Dean of Canterbury (May 1940) Children in the Soviet Union, Beatrice King (July 1941) Salute the British-Soviet Alliance, Reg Bishop (June 1942) Fighting Youth of Russia, Ted Willis (September 1942) Russia’s Enemies in Britain, Reg Bishop (September 1942) Soviet Women at War, Maggie Jordan (November 1942) Russia’s Fighting Men, Frank Lesser (1943) Red Army at War, 50 Questions Answered, Ivor Montagu (February 1943)

225

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 225

29-01-2021 01:21:55

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Actors and Audiences in the Soviet Union, Eric Capon (April 1943) The Polish Conspiracy, George Audit (May 1943) Red Army Men and their Dependants, Eleanor Fox (1944) Poland and the Peace, George Audit (1944) The Other RAF, the Story of the Red Air Force, John Howard (April 1944) Ships and Sailors of the Red Navy, Reg Bishop (July 1944) Who’s Who in the Red Army, E.G. Burroughs (October 1944) A–Z of the Soviet Union, Facts and Figures on Every Aspect of Soviet Life, Alex Page (April 1945) Soviet Soldier in Europe, Ivor Montagu (November 1946) Ryan, J. (1996) ‘The Royal Navy and Soviet Seapower, 1930–1950: Intelligence, Naval Cooperation and Antagonism’ PhD Thesis, University of Hull https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:3940 Schwind, D. (2015) Blue Seas, Red Stars: Soviet Military Medals to US Sea Service Recipients in World War II Arglen PA, Schiffer Shunyakov. D. & V. Zapariy (2017) ‘Awards of Soviet Medals to Citizens of Foreign Countries during the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945’ in Bulletin of the South Ural State University Social Sciences and Humanities 17(3) pp. 64-71 Sloan, P. (1941) Russia in Peace and War London, The Pilot Press Smith, E. (2015) Policing Communism Across the British Empire: A Transnational Study https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2015/ 07/23/policing-communism-across-the-british-empire-a-trans national-study/ Soviet Embassy London Press Department (daily publication 1941–45) Soviet War News Steele, J. & N. Steele (2010) The American Connection to the Sinking of HMS Dasher Irvine Self-published Summerfield, P. (1981) ‘Education and Politics in the British Armed Forces in the Second World War’ in International Review of Social History Vol. 26 No. 2 Sweetman, J. (2000) Tirpitz, Hunting the Beast: Air Attacks on the German Battleship 1941–44 Stroud, Sutton Publishing The Second Congress of the Communist International Vol. 1 (Moscow 1921, republished 1977) London, New Park Thetford, O. (1968 4th edition) Aircraft of the Royal Air Force Since 1968 London, Putnam 226

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 226

29-01-2021 01:21:55

Bibliography

Thorpe, A. (2000) ‘The Membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1920–1945’ in The Historical Journal 43(3) Topolski, F. (1941) Britain in Peace and War London, Methuen __________ (1942) Russia in War London, Methuen Ullman, R. (1973) Anglo-Soviet Relations 1917–21 Vol.3 The Anglo Soviet Accord London, Oxford University Press Various Soviet Artists (1941) Spirit of the Soviet Union (with Foreword by Lord Beaverbrook) London, The Pilot Press Walling, M. (2012) Forgotten Sacrifice: The Arctic Convoys of World War II Oxford, Osprey War Office, General Staff (1943 and 1944 editions) Notes on the Red Army London, HMSO Webb, S. and B. (1944 edition) The Truth About Soviet Russia London, Longmans Green West, N. (1983) MI5: British Security Service Operations 1909–1945 London, Triad/Panther Woodman, R. (1994) Arctic Convoys 1941–1945 London, John Murray Young, S. (1954) Descent into Danger London, Allan Wingate

227

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 227

29-01-2021 01:21:55

Index

ABCA (Army Bureau of Current Affairs) viii, 75, 157–165, 167, 180, 196, 220 air raid shelters 20–23 Airdrie and Coatbridge 139, 141 Anglo-Soviet Intelligence Agreement (1941) 92 Anti-Fascism 13, 155, 167 Archangel 26, 74, 76, 80, 85, 86, 88, 89, 99, 108, 118, 120, 125, 126, 211, 223 ARCOS raid 30, 35 Arctic convoys xi, 107–129, 176, 212, 216, 221, 227 Armstrong, George 42–43 Army (British) 76, 89, 117, 154, 155, 168, 189 Atlantic Charter 48, 50, 79, 82 atomic bomb 175, 186, 187 Attlee, Clement 194 Bagration (Operation) 54, 174, 179 Baltic (states) 22, 26, 27, 29, 38, 45, 49, 50, 54, 173 Barbarossa (Operation) 44 Barrow (in Furness) 145 BBC 22, 44, 47, 56, 64, 72 Beaverbrook, Lord 47, 48, 50, 51, 57, 58, 81, 131, 134, 205, 218, 227

Benedict (Operation) 85 Berlin, Battle of 45, 55, 176, 189 Beveridge Report 149, 159, 193 Bevin Boys 146, 147 Bevin, Ernest 12, 33, 181, 194, 205 Bolshevik(s) ix, x, 1–5, 8–11, 23, 25–27, 31, 93, 196, 206 Branson, Clive 19, 154, 170, 222 Branson, Noreen 35, 36, 142, 223 British Ally (британский союзник) 61 British Socialist Party (BSP) 2, 5 British Union of Fascists 12, 39, 207 British Way and Purpose (BWP) viii, 159, 161, 162 Burma 170–172 Cable Street, Battle of 12, 43 Cairo Parliament 166, 167, 172, 220 Cambridge Five 18, 37 Chamberlain, Neville 20, 33 Channel Islands 103–105, 172, 202, 221 Churchill, Clementine 68, 69, 88, 197, 205, 218 Churchill, Winston 25, 27, 44, 45, 47, 68, 173, 182, 193, 205

228

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 228

29-01-2021 01:21:55

Index

Citrine, Walter 12, 56, 205, 221 Clark, Alex and Jessie vi, 15, 16, 138, 197, 202 class (in armed forces) 20, 21, 23, 55, 90, 111, 117, 154 – 156, 161, 165 Clivedon Set 55 Clydebank 144 Clydeside 18, 19, 144–146, 220, 224 coal industry strikes 1944 145, 146 Cohen, Rose 17, 18 Cold War xi, xiii, 35, 45, 61, 72, 89, 102, 107, 120, 122, 128, 173–204 Comintern (Communist International) 1, 3–6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 23–25, 29, 34–36, 39, 42, 53, 136, 148, 195, 199, 223, 226 Common Wealth Party (CWP) viii, 151, 152, 164–166, 194, 195, 208 Copeman, Fred 11 Coventry 21, 70, 139, 211 CPGB (formation of) 5 Cripps, Stafford 38, 50, 51, 206 Daily Worker 13, 17, 22, 23, 36, 40, 41, 56, 131, 182, 201 D-Day 45, 61, 73, 174, 179, 218 democratic centralism 134, 150 DEMS (Defensively Equipped Merchant Ship) 113, 124 Dieppe raid 136 Dresden, bombing of 186–188

Eastern Front 26, 45, 53, 61, 73–75, 80, 81, 179, 225 Eden, Anthony 50, 51, 64, 103, 206 Elbe, River 176, 188, 189 elections (British parliamentary) 5, 8, 11, 29, 31, 35, 133, 141, 148, 151, 152, 153, 172, 174, 182, 193–197 equal pay 143, 144, 222 Errol Airfield 95, 96, 209 Far East ix, 26, 49, 80, 170, 172 Fascism (rise of) 8, 10, 11 Fife 12, 14, 15, 34, 195 Finland 23, 26, 27, 29, 40, 54, 74 Frantic (Operation) 101, 102 Gallacher, William 3, 9, 11, 15, 17, 34, 153, 181, 193, 195, 206 Gauntlet (Operation) 76, 77 General Strike (of 1926) 8, 9, 34, 35 Goebbels, J. 174, 190 Gollancz, Victor 13 Grand Alliance x, 45, 49, 72, 131, 191, 199, 202, 207, 221, 224 Gray, Olga 36, 37 Greece vi, viii, 33, 54, 173, 177–182, 222 Halifax, Lord 55 Hands Off Russia campaign 3 Hannington, Walter 15, 34, 206 Henderson, Hamish vi, 167, 168, 224 Henderson, Stan 170, 171 Hess, R. 38

229

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 229

29-01-2021 01:21:55

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Leningrad 49, 57, 64, 109, 140, 141, 223 Little Moscows 14, 15, 16, 138 Litvinov, Max 26, 32

Hitler, A. x, xi, 10, 11, 20, 32, 33, 38, 44, 45, 49, 50, 51, 55, 98, 103, 149, 174, 201, 207, 222, 223 Home Front ix, 55–73

Maclean, John 2, 16, 143 McLean, Agnes 143, 225 McShane, Harry 15, 19, 224 Maisky, Ivan 17, 31, 33, 37, 38, 47, 50, 51, 57, 58, 62, 69, 88, 128, 206, 223 Mason, John 40 medals, awards and decorations 91, 128, 212–219, 226 memorials 209–211 Merchant Navy (British) 8, 88, 111, 112, 114, 117, 120, 127, 128, 211, 216, 217, 223 Ministry of Information (MOI) 55, 58, 59, 60, 77, 113, 121, 126 Minority Movement 8, 11 Mission 131 78 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 20, 33, 163 Montgomery, Bernard 164, 176, 190, 207, 215, 218, 219 Morrison, Herbert 31 Moscow Gold 34, 41, 201, 202 Mosley, Oswald 12, 39, 152, 155, 207 Munich Agreement 33 Murmansk 26, 27, 48, 57, 74, 76, 77, 80, 83–91, 98, 108, 109, 116, 123–127, 176, 211, 215, 216, 223

Independent Labour Party (ILP) viii, 2, 14, 42, 57, 149, 194, 195 India 18, 22, 27, 35, 75, 111, 150, 154, 167, 170–172, 177, 216, 222 Internationale (anthem) 53, 56, 64, Iran 75, 76, 79, 80, 96, 103, 218 Invergordon Mutiny 11, 32, 117 Japan 26, 49, 53, 78, 79, 80, 85, 170, 171, 177, 187, 194 Johnson, Hewlett 16, 206, 219 Joint Committee for Soviet Aid (JCSA) viii, 137 Jolly George incident 4 Klugman, Jack 18, 205 Labour Party 2–5, 11, 12, 16, 20, 22, 23, 29, 131, 133, 141, 147, 148, 150, 151–153, 174, 181, 194, 197, 204, 205, 224 Lanarkshire 15, 139, 141, 197, 202 Lawrence & Wishart 13 Left Book Club 13, 20 Lend-Lease 48, 78–80, 82, 95, 108, 175, 218 Lenin, Vladimir 2, 4, 6, 9, 19, 23, 26, 206

Nazi x, 10, 11, 20, 23, 24, 32, 33, 35, 38, 39, 42, 43, 46, 49, 53, 230

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 230

29-01-2021 01:21:55

Index

prisoners of war (POWs) 102–105, 113, 141, 182–186, 221 Pritt, D.N. 22, 25

54, 57, 70, 93, 94, 103, 149, 151, 156, 171, 174, 175, 181, 184, 190, 191, 193, 197, 202, 206, 221 National Council for British Soviet Unity (NCBSU) viii, 67, 135, 137, 138 National Health Service (NHS) xii, 194, 195 Palestine 172, 193 Palme Dutt, Rajani 20, 21, 207, 221 Paravane (Operation) 99 Pares, Bernard 57, 225 Pavlichenko, Ludmilla 62, 63, 65, 225 People’s Convention (1941) 22, 23, 41, 143 Percentages Agreement 54, 72 Pickaxe (Operation) 49, 92–95 Piratin, Phil 15, 21, 164, 195, 207, 225 Poland 20, 26, 29, 33, 37, 49, 54, 72, 101, 150, 166, 173, 177, 179, 184, 189, 200, 215, 226 Pollitt, Harry 3, 4, 9, 11, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 34, 36, 134, 153, 195, 196, 207, 221, 222 Popular Front (of 1930s) 12, 14, 20 Polyarnoe 84, 88, 89, 91, 109 Potsdam Conference 55, 173, 187, 215, 218 Poltava (air base) 100–103, PQ17, Convoy 89, 97, 98, 120, 123, 213 Prague Declaration 2008 201

racism 170–172, 197, 199 Ramelson, Bert 172 Red (Soviet) Air Force 45, 95, 96, 226 Red Army xi, 33, 44, 45, 49, 50, 53, 55, 62, 64, 65, 67, 71, 72, 74, 75, 81, 100, 102, 103, 105, 110, 120, 152, 154, 161, 165, 175–177, 183, 184, 186, 187, 189, 190, 215, 220, 225, 226, 227 Red Cross Aid for Russia 68, 69, 137, 218 Red (Soviet) Navy 37, 81, 83, 88, 110, 127, 226 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 50, 51, 53, 54, 79, 151, 179, 187, 196, 207 Royal Air Force (RAF) viii, 30, 31, 48, 50, 57, 64, 74, 80–82, 84–87, 89, 94, 95, 98–100, 156, 167, 184, 185, 188, 197, 198, 209, 211, 215–219, 223, 225, 226 Royal Navy (RN) 8, 11, 37, 76, 81, 83, 88–91, 99, 104, 107, 109–127, 176, 211, 226 Russian Civil War 3, 4, 26–29, 43, 76 Russian (October 1917) Revolution 1, 2, 25 Russia Today Society 23, 46, 131–133, 138, 151

231

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 231

29-01-2021 01:21:55

THE ANGLO-SOVIET ALLIANCE

Second Front (call for) 45, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 62, 64, 68, 73, 79, 81, 82, 94, 131–136, 138, 142, 152, 174, 175, 205, 206, 222 Socialist Labour Party (SLP) 2, 5 Soviet (Red) Navy 37, 81, 83, 88, 110, 127, 226 Soviet War News 60–63, 86, 128, 226 Spain (Civil War) 12, 13, 16, 18, 20, 33, 152, 155, 164, 170, 208, Springhall, Dave 136 Stalin, Joseph 9–11, 13, 16–19, 23, 32, 33, 37, 38, 39, 43, 45–54, 64, 70–73, 76, 79, 81, 82, 100, 137, 151, 153, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 182, 187, 188, 191, 194, 199, 200, 206–208, 220, 222, 225, Stalingrad 45, 51–53, 64, 69–71, 73, 78, 100, 137, 139–141, 165, 211, 222 Strachan, Billy 197, 198 strikes (in wartime) 142–144, 148, 220 surrender, German 190–192 Sword of Stalingrad 70, 71

Tirpitz (battleship) 61, 97–100, 110, 119, 120, 226 Topolski, Feliks 66, 85, 118, 126, 136, 227 Trotsky, Leon also Trotskyism 2, 10, 11, 13, 26, 43, 93, 146, 149, 208, 222 Truman, Harry S. 187, 197, 207 Tyneside 67, 145–147

Tanks for Russia Week 57, 58, 67, 135 Tehran Conference 53, 70

Yalta Conference 55, 195

Vaenga 82, 86, 87, 89, 95, 98, 109, 124, 211 Wincott, Len 11 Wintringham, Tom 20, 34, 152, 155, 161, 208 Webb, Beatrice & Sidney 16, 17, 132, 207, 227 women (in wartime service & the communist movement) 14, 17, 21, 62, 93, 103, 104, 110, 111, 113, 117, 126, 138, 139–141, 143, 144, 145, 162, 166, 167, 174, 220, 225,

Zinoviev letter 29, 34

232

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 232

29-01-2021 01:21:55

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 233

29-01-2021 01:21:55

The_Anglo-Soviet_Alliance_Comrades_and_Allies_during_WW2_P5.indd 234

29-01-2021 01:21:55