It is difficult to change facts and turn realities upside down. This is true in both science and geopolitics. No matter where justice lies and no matter how long the war lasts, it is no longer likely that Russian President Vladimir Putin will be driven out of Crimea and the Eastern Donbass region by military means.
It’s as if European history is repeating itself. The most striking examples date from 1945. By the end of World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had no doubt that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was a monster, morally indistinguishable from Adolf Hitler.
Most Britons, however, along with many Americans, felt enormous gratitude to “Uncle Joe” and the Russian nation for bearing the lion’s share of the human sacrifice necessary to destroy Nazism. They lacked sympathy for Churchill’s fury at Stalin, who was terrorizing his new empire in Eastern Europe. The British had grown weary of their aging Prime Minister, and especially of his seeming desire to find new enemies to fight when Hitler was gone.
Churchill felt in a special way and felt a special anger because of the fate of the Poles. In September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany specifically in response to Hitler’s unprovoked attack on Poland. Yet the armed forces of these allies were woefully weak. Some prominent Britons – not all of them paid – declared that it was grotesque to try to fight Hitler to help a distant Eastern European nation for which Britain’s army, navy and air force could do nothing immediately when needed. .
In Warsaw, naïve Poles cheered and sang outside the British Embassy, where the ambassador shouted from the balcony: “We will fight side by side against aggression and injustice!” In reality, the British did nothing of the sort. They reneged on a pre-war promise to launch an immediate offensive against Germany because they feared Nazi retaliation.
The French also promised the Poles that in the event of war, their army would attack Germany from the west within 13 days of mobilization. In fact, on September 7, 10 French divisions simply advanced five miles into the German Saarland. Then they stopped and stayed there. Isn’t this similar to the Western European nations today with their far less wholehearted support for Ukraine?
By October 5, 1939, the campaign was over. The Germans occupied Poland, which became the only nation in their empire where for the next five years there was virtually no cooperation between the conquerors and their subjects. The dirtiest aspect of Hitler’s shameless act of aggression was that the Germans retreated into western Poland, relinquishing control of the east to Stalin in accordance with the secret terms of the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact.
Russia rules the Poles with even more brutality than the Germans. The fate of the Jews is well known, but the Nazis and Russians were also responsible for the deaths of nearly a million ethnic Poles before the war ended in 1945.
All these memories were in Churchill’s mind as he resented the plight of post-Hitler Poland, its people bound by new Russian chains, even as Western Europe celebrated its freedom from Nazism. Impulsively, the Prime Minister seized on the idea that if Stalin continued to violate the terms of the Yalta Agreement for the free rule of Poland, the West should enforce them by force. General Sir Alan Brooke, chairman of Britain’s chiefs of staff, was astonished when Churchill asked to know the prospects for the Anglo-American armies to successfully liberate the Poles.
“Winston was delighted,” Brooke wrote in her diary on May 13. “He gives the impression that he is already longing for another war! Even if it means fighting the Russians!” Ten days later, the Prime Minister formalized his request. With “the Russian bear looming over Europe,” he instructed the Chiefs of Staff to explore the prospects of challenging the Red Army occupation before the British and American armies were demobilized.
He asked planners to consider means to “impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire” to secure “a fair deal for Poland.” They were told to assume that they would have the support of American and British public opinion (which in reality would never happen). Even more implausibly, military leaders were led to expect that they could “rely on the use of German labor and what remains of German industrial capacity”. The target date for launching such an offensive was July 1, 1945.
Britain’s Foreign Office was horrified by Churchill’s proposal. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, commander of the Soviet occupation zone, later wrote in his memoirs that he was informed by secret sources that Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, British Commander-in-Chief in Germany, had been instructed by London to stockpile Nazi weapons for future use against the Russians.
The Soviets protested indignantly at a subsequent meeting of the Allied Control Commission in Germany. Zhukov wrote: “We emphasized that history knows several examples of such deception and betrayal of obligations and promises to allies.” This is an example, seen in 2022-23, of the distortion of the truth by the Russians, mobilizing their endless appetite for imaginary insults and harms as Soviet troops execute anti-communist Poles.
The British War Cabinet proceeded to draw up a detailed proposal for what was dubbed “Operation Unthinkable” – a Western Allied offensive against the Russians.
I have spent many hours poring over this fascinating document of over 100 pages in the National Archives of Great Britain, writes Max Hastings in an analysis.
In the preamble, the planners went to great lengths to state that even if the British and Americans advanced eastward for the sole purpose of securing “a fair deal for Poland . . . which does not limit military engagement, rapid success might make the Russians submit to our will … but they might not. That will be decided by the Russians. If they want total war, they are in a position to enforce it … There is practically no limit to the distance to which it would be necessary for the Allies to penetrate Russia to make further resistance impossible.”
“Achieving the decisive defeat of Russia will require a) the deployment in Europe of much of the vast resources of the United States b) a rethinking and reorganization of the German workforce and of all Western European allies.”
The planners recognized that Western air forces could be used effectively against Soviet communications, but “Russian industry is so dispersed that it is unlikely to be a good target for bombing.”
They proposed the deployment of 47 American and British divisions, 14 of them armored. More than 40 other formations had to be held in reserve to meet a possible Soviet counterattack. The Russians could deploy 170 divisions in response, 30 of them armored: “It is difficult to know to what extent our tactical superiority in the air and the superior command of our forces will change the balance, but the above figures will make it dangerous to launch such an offensive venture.”
The word “dangerous” is used eight times to characterize the proposed operation. Planners warn that communists in Western Europe will seek to sabotage the offensive. While it may be true that the German General Staff would have cooperated with the Allies, German soldiers are unlikely to have relished the idea of renewed conflict with the Russians.
The British Chiefs of Staff never doubted that the unthinkable plan was indeed unthinkable to anyone but the Prime Minister. Brooke wrote on 24 May: “The idea is, of course, quite fantastic, and the chances of success quite impossible.” In short, Stalin’s Red Army could have held its own against the smaller American and British forces, even if the rank and file could have been persuaded to take up arms against their former ally.
General Hastings Ismay, the Prime Minister’s personal chief of staff, told Churchill that the chiefs of the armed forces would be happy to explain to him why they considered the operation impossible, “but the less that is put on paper about it, the more -good.”
However, the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote in a commentary on the draft plan: “Once hostilities begin, it would be beyond our power to win a quick but limited success, and we must be engaged in a protracted war against heavy odds. Also, those chances would become fantastic if the Americans get tired and start worrying more about what’s going on in the Pacific.”
It should not be forgotten that this debate in London was taking place while the Allied struggle against the Japanese continued, particularly on Okinawa. Churchill replied to the General Staff on 10 June, admitting that the Russian armies might be able, if Stalin ordered, to advance to the Channel coast of Europe. As for the operation, “the military must realize that this remains a precautionary study of what I hope is still a purely hypothetical contingency.”
A month later, the file on “Operation Unthinkable” was closed when the Americans categorically rejected the idea of fighting the Russians for Poland or any other Soviet nation in Eastern Europe. President Harry S. Truman wrote from Washington that he saw no reason to delay the planned Anglo-American withdrawal westward to the occupation zones agreed upon at Yalta in February.
Stalin got his new empire, and Russia kept it until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the last decade of the 20th century – because the Red Army got there first. If Churchill or the Western Allies had wanted to keep Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania or the Baltic States from Stalin, it would have been necessary for the Normandy landings to take place in 1943, not 1944, and for the Allies to wage a fierce and costly campaign in Europe .
As it turned out, the Russians had created facts that no one but Churchill and American General George Patton were willing to dispute. Today, this is also true of Putin’s perception of Crimea. The only time Crimea could be credibly contested was in 2014 when the Russians seized the peninsula and the West largely acquiesced.
All geopolitics requires calculations in which justice and freedom play only a limited role. Many people today say, “If the Russians are allowed to keep one hectare of Ukrainian soil, democracy and Western security will be shockingly compromised.” This is true. But as most of the peoples of the democracies were unwilling to fight another war for Poland in 1945, it seems unlikely that they would support the fight to the end today to liberate Crimea. It is ugly, but it is a reality that cannot be reversed.
Max Hastings’ analysis is published on the website of Bloomberg TV Bulgaria. Hastings is a Bloomberg columnist, British journalist and military historian who has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph and editor of The Evening Standard.
