Dan Snow's History Hit - Stalin's War

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

The Second World War is often depicted as a straight battle between good and evil but it was perhaps less straightforward than that. Whilst the Nazi regime was undoubtedly barbarous and deserved its fate the consequences of victory were not always the positive they are portrayed to be. Indeed for much of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the end of the war leads to decades of military occupation and repression under the Soviet Regime. That regime was led by one man; Stalin. Dan is joined by Sean McMeekin, author of Stalin's War, who argues that it was Stalin who really shaped the conflict in order to achieve his own geopolitical aims.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hey folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. What a weekend we've been having over here at History Hit.

We've had the D-Day wreck. That's gone bonkers, that podcast. People listening to Stephen Fisher describe how he discovered a new wreck of a D-Day vessel on the south coast of England. We've had Brandy Scalacce talking about head transplants. Things have gone insane. And today we've got one that's going to get everyone going.

We're talking about Stalin. Talk about how Stalin led the Soviet Union through the Second World War. It's controversial stuff, folks. We're talking to Sean McMeekin. He's a professor of European history and culture at Bard College in upstate New York, where my niece went. No connection, but that's nice. And this book has set the old cat among the pigeons. It was great fun chatting to Sean about Stalin and whether he thinks the reception to his recent book

has been fair. It's an endlessly fascinating subject as we approach, let's not forget, the 80th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the largest land invasion in the history of the world. Now the largest invasion by sea was D-Day, you may have heard of it. We're talking about D-Day this weekend because it's the anniversary of D-Day. We've got a special code that regular listeners will have heard me lament before because it's so unbelievably cheap. 50% off your first six months as HistoryHit.tv subscribers if you use the code D-Day. Head over to HistoryHit.tv, world's best history channel. Watch the documentaries, listen to all the back episodes of this podcast, support everything we're doing here at HistoryHit.

We're really, really grateful. I can't tell you how exciting it is to be over here at the moment and have the support of tens of thousands of you subscribing. If you wish to join those subscribers, please head over. Now's the best chance you're ever going to have because until tonight, midnight, Pacific time, I guess. I'm not sure. Anyway, until tonight, midnight, somewhere in the world, the code D-Day gets you six months, 50% off.

You can get History Hit every month for the price of a pint of beer. You'd be mad not to. So head over, use the code D-Day. In the meantime, here's Sean McMeekin. Enjoy. Sean, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Oh, it's my pleasure, Dan. Thank you for having me. This book is so provocative and exciting.

I mean, let's start with the stuff that everybody agrees. Well, everyone agrees that you're a brilliant writer and all that kind of stuff. But let's start with the stuff that everyone agrees, which is, do we need to jettison this idea about the First World War being this kind of absolute, just appalling, pessimistic, dystopian nightmare, and the Second World War being this kind of uniquely positive struggle against an absolute evil? Well, I do think this story needs to be complicated somewhat. I understand why it endures. I mean, look, let's face it, in many Western countries, there aren't that many things

that unite us anymore. And so I kind of understand we like to have some history we can believe in, the good war, a struggle against evil. And obviously, it makes for good copy, it makes for good writing, it makes for good movies. I think that at the time, the story was actually much messier. I think over time, the story got kind of polished and cleaned up a little bit. And maybe in America, an even more simplistic version of it, a kind of Hogan's Heroes version. And I suppose in Britain, you have varieties of this as well. That is where you almost just leave out all of the complicated factors. You leave out Eastern Europe and you leave out the Balkans and you leave out the fates of places like Manchuria and the Pacific War even. We probably pay a little more attention to it in the United States than

people do in Britain because it was a little more central to our experience of the war. But I think part of the problem is that the closer you look at it, the less simple it becomes. That is to say, the choices that were made by the statesmen and also the outcomes on the ground. I suppose if you're in France or if you're in Britain or the United States, you can say, well, look, in the end, it all turned out all right, even if obviously there were these huge losses and France had a national trauma and so on. But of course, in a lot of other places, the war didn't really turn out so well at all. You know, it led to enduring civil conflict, in many cases, lasting military occupation. And of course, then these communist regimes,

some of which actually endure to this day. Yeah, well, before we get to Eastern Europe and North Korea and all that kind of stuff, I'm very struck in your writing. I've interviewed a lot of Second World War veterans who, of course, felt totally betrayed, British particularly, who felt the outcome of the war was a terrible result for everything they'd been fighting. They were fighting for king and empire in one of the periodic great power struggles that have been going on since the War of Austrian Succession or before, you know, in the Polar War. It's very much in that context of great power wars. And they weren't happy with it being rebranded as being about the Holocaust being placed at the centre, because they didn't know

about the Holocaust when they were fighting in Italy or northwest Europe. And the British Empire obviously collapsed almost immediately after the war. And these veterans, a lot of them feel that this narrative that we've built is not accurate. Well, I think that's quite right. That's part of what I meant by the way the war has been polished over time. It is something that it really wasn't at the time, even for a lot of the people who were fighting in it. And you're right, if they were fighting for king and country and for the empire, then it obviously didn't turn out well at all. I mean, it led essentially to the ignominious collapse of the empire. I suppose in the United States, at least one can look back and say, well, we more or less sort of pushed the British out,

and we inherited a lot of the infrastructure of their empire. But I think that's also true, not just in the sense of the loss of kind of fighting for king country and the empire and it not necessarily turning out very well, but also just in terms of what they thought they were fighting for even ideologically. I think in some ways, a book that really marked me

that has gone a bit out of fashion, perhaps, is Evil in War's Sword of Honor, the trilogy, where you have this kind of this hero guy crouch back and there's this famous line, which I just cite in one of my frontispieces, the longer version of the quote that the enemy had kind of cast all disguise. This is the Molotov-Ribbentrop Act, of course, when Hitler and Stalin team up in 1939. And so Guy Crouchback enlists, and he thinks that all of the horrors of the modern age are up in arms, and we need to stem this evil. And then, of course, he ends the war helping Tito impose

communism on Yugoslavia. And he's a little bit confused as to what the war really was about then by the end. It's not a very edifying message. And I think maybe partly for that reason, it has kind of fallen out of fashion. But I think you're absolutely right that particularly you would think for many British veterans, there would have been a sense of, if not betrayal, then just a sense of confusion as to what happened. And Poland's a great example. Poland just gets absolutely smashed in the war, utterly destroyed. Warsaw is rubble by the end of the war. The Soviets march in, hostile military occupation lasting four and a half decades. And on top of all of that, Poland never received assent in reparations from either Germany or

Russia. They actually petitioned Germany as recently as 2017 for reparations payments, and they were denied on the basis that they'd waived their right to reparations back, and I think it was 1953 when Poland was essentially an occupied Soviet satellite state. So the good war doesn't make sense if you look at it from the vantage point of Poland or many of these other countries. I think for Britain, maybe it was a moral crusade in a sense, but in the end, a little bit of a falling on the sword, that Churchill is in some ways the tragic figure because he does believe in the empire. And yet, a lot of his policy choices led to, among other things, the collapse of that empire, perhaps not in the immediate aftermath of

the war, but certainly the great weakening of it, the bankrupting of the empire, which eventually led to its collapse. And then obviously, there is the fact that the key ally, the ally that provided the majority of boots on the ground in the great struggle against Hitler, was Joseph Stalin, who arguably one of the most evil men who has ever lived. Well, I think that's quite right. And Churchill, again, this is part of the kind of the tragedy of Churchill and his career and his premiership. Churchill understood this perfectly well. I mean, he had started off, he had a reputation dating back to the days of the Russian Civil War as kind of a thumping anti-communist.

He had advocated for a much firmer policy vis-a-vis the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. He didn't really get his way at that time. But in the 30s, he obviously became, most people say rightfully, more concerned about the threat coming from Nazi Germany, from Hitler. He became quite consistent on that question. He was almost so famously bellicose vis-a-vis Hitler that it was part of the reason they kept him out of the cabinet, because putting him in the cabinet would have been understood at least before

September 1939 as a virtual commitment to fight. But then Churchill, once I suppose the war starts, he begins to see the Soviet Union as possibly useful, as a possible ally, as a counterbalance to Hitler and Nazi Germany. And again, geopolitically, there's a kind of genius in this. I mean, he's seeing this as early as November 1939, long before anyone in the war cabinet really sees it, when they still see Stalin as at least as evil and not perhaps as great an immediate threat as Hitler, but certainly as great a long-term threat. And in the winter of 39-40, they're actually quite seriously discussing going to war against the Soviet Union.

They're even worried about opinion in the neutral countries. This is the way they discussed it in the War Council, because of the hypocrisy of the British stand that Britain had declared war on only one of the countries invading Poland in September 1939. And Churchill, once he's in power after May 1940, he does begin to change the policy. And he does court Stalin's, perhaps not a proven affection, but he definitely writes to Stalin saying saying perhaps we can find some common ground hoping that eventually the Soviet Union will be drawn in there's a kind of genius I mean Churchill you could say that there was a sort of prophecy that he saw before anyone else that eventually the United States and the Soviet Union would be in the war but some of the aspect vis-a-vis the Soviet

Union and even really vis-a-vis the Americans it is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy because, of course, Britain took active measures to try to help, to some extent, bring the United States into war as far as kind of shaping public opinion, cultivating Roosevelt. And then vis-a-vis Stalin, Churchill, it's almost like he just threw all caution to the wind after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, this great impulsive decision to send the Hawker Hurricane fighters that were supposed to defend Singapore. And after that, all of these regifted or reassigned bombers, fighters, and tanks from U.S. lend-lease consignments, many Britain's own tanks, were all sent to the Soviet Union in 1941. There's a kind of selflessness to it, which I'll admit part of it is quite appealing, but of course there's also a

short-sightedness to it, particularly when it came to things like sending processed aluminum or aluminium, as I think it's usually called in British English, to Stalin, which was desperately needed in Britain's own airplane factories. And this was understood at the time. There was heavy American pressure for Churchill to agree to all of this. And I think by about 1943 or so, it was becoming clear that Britain's sacrifice would end up leading to the loss of British power and influence as Britain was being eclipsed. But at the time, I suppose, after the fall of France, Churchill was so desperate.

He needed an ally, and I suppose Stalin appeared almost providentially, as it were. And so he kind of threw all his eggs in the Stalin basket. The Russians kind of periodically appear in British history. basket. The Russians can periodically appear in British history. They're despised kind of eastern despotism, except when you're fighting Napoleon and the Kaiser and Hitler, in which case suddenly a couple of units of Cossacks goes down well. But you talk about that nature of the huge support that the Soviet Union got. It's one of the great questions, and we're all asking it this year, the anniversary of Operation Barbarossa. Do you think Western support for Stalin was possibly decisive? Well, I do think it was.

Initially, it was admittedly at the margins. It took a long time for much of the equipment to reach the Soviet Union. And because of the renewed clampdown and a little bit of the Cajun-ness in the Russian archives, believe me, they don't want to hear about Lend-Lease anymore. They actually shut down the Lend-Lease Museum in Moscow a couple of years ago. And so I have to be a little bit reticent even about some of my sources, but let's just say it's not a popular topic in Russia these days. So it's a little bit hard to ferret out, for example, the exact percentage of Valentine tanks, for example, that were actually deployed at the Battle of Moscow in December 1941. Many of the pursuit planes and the fighters and even some of the bombers were still being used in the Arctic region

and in part to defend the land lease transports. By the time of Stalingrad, it actually becomes, if not easy, but it becomes easier to document, not just in terms of the formation of these new mobile armored units, which begins in about July and August of 1942, which are heavily British and particularly American, more so really with the Jeeps and the Studebakers and the trucks than with the tanks. With the tanks, the percentage is a little bit more still in the Russian favor. There, they're more getting some support at the margins. But when it comes to motorized vehicles

overall, when it came to pursuit planes, and then ultimately even when it came to things like bombers that the U.S. was building exclusively for the Soviet Air Force, and there were even some tanks, including a diesel Sherman, they were building exclusively for Stalin. That increasingly becomes significant, not just at the margins, but in absolute terms, particularly when it came to trucks, Jeeps, and other motorized vehicles, where by 43-44, the Germans have virtually none, really, in the field compared to what the Russians have, where they get in the course of about 12 months, they receive about 300,000 trucks, Studebakers, Jeeps, etc. And you can actually see that in some of the pictures I try to unearth for the book of

crashing into Bucharest and Berlin and some of these other cities where they're actually riding in on American trucks and Jeeps and tanks and even Harley-Davidson motorcycles and rubber. Of course, it's hard to document out the exact percentage, but at times you get a hint, you get a clue. I'll give you an example. So a German staff officer, quite highly ranking, actually writes home by airmail from Stalingrad. I believe this was actually even after the city was encircled, although I can't remember the precise date. And he actually writes home to his wife

that 50% of the vehicles in the new armored brigades being thrown against us are American manufactured. There's that great scene, and Fitzroy McLean, almost despite himself in his book, Eastern Approaches, despite playing a large role to some extent in Britain shifting her own resources in the direction of Tito and the partisans, that is the communist Yugoslavia. He's somewhat astonished to see these Red Army tank and truck drivers come in, and they're kind of boasting about Soviet technology while they're driving Chevrolets. But of course, a lot of them actually think these were Soviet made, you know, and they were essentially, this is the other real contrast vis-a-vis Soviet Union,

is that Roosevelt drove an extremely hard bargain with Churchill, beginning with the basis for destroyer's deal, even before Lend-Lease, back in the summer of 1940, after the fall of France, where it essentially takes this, almost it's like a blood price that Britain has to turn over virtually the entirety of her bases in the Western Hemisphere in exchange for these 50 kind of mothballed, decrepit World War I vintage destroyers. Steep interest is charged for all of the lend-lease loans, and Britain pays in full right up until 2006. And everything was sent to Stalin on consignment, essentially, at least during the war years, for free. After the war, there was a settlement reached in the early 1950s of about two pennies on the dollar. But actually, during the

war, Stalin essentially got everything for free. The comparison is fascinating there. But is that naive? A sign of desperation and hoping that they could exact concessions from Stalin at the end of the war? Or was it cynical? Did they think, look, and they were right, that between 80 and 90% of German casualties suffered in the Second World War were against the Soviets, 20 million Soviets. I mean, just the scale of that war is unimaginable. So did Western politicians think, let's fight till the last Byelorussian or Kazakh has been killed? Who is using who here? Oh, that's a great question. Citizenship versus naivete. I think there's obviously a bit of both, and I think it kind of changed over time. So that actually, I would say, oddly enough, I'd say in 1941 and 42, when the

Soviets were most desperate, I wouldn't say cynicism exactly. I mean, there's obviously some idealism there to think, oh, well, these plucky Russians are suffering so much, and we can't let them go under. There's an element, I think, of cynicism, too, in that, after all, if we can kind of pay them to fight and equip them to fight, then we won't have to do it as much ourselves. The saving lives argument. And obviously, for someone like Churchill, and to a lesser extent, Roosevelt, because the U.S. is not as directly involved yet. Obviously, before Pearl Harbor, they're not directly involved in the war at all. But from Churchill's perspective, sure, you can save British lives. In fact, this was always the Soviet counter-argument if there were ever any complaints about lack of gratitude. Well,

you know, we're the ones bleeding and dying. We're paying for your spam. That's, of course, the pork substitute product the Americans were sending with our blood. And there's obviously something to this. I think both Roosevelt and Churchill, to a certain extent, thought not only were the Soviets doing the damage, but might as well let them do the damage. I do think that after 1943, while there still may be an element of that kind of a little bit of idealism, a little bit of cynicism, I do think the naivete does begin to play a role. You can begin to see, again, Churchill, I think, had wised up. And by 1943, Britain, for example, stopped sending so much processed aluminum. They're a little bit more careful about allowing the re-gifting of their own lend-lease supplies after 1943, partly because

they can kind of almost sense the leaking away of British power. From the perspective of the United States, there really could have been a rethink, particularly in summer 1943, before and after the famous so-called Cursed Battle or Citadel. It's obviously after Stalingrad already, so to some extent the Soviets have already ensured their survival. July also brings the Allied landings at Sicily, shortly followed by the invasion of the Italian mainland, so the Allies are starting to pick up the slack a little bit. There was even a sunset clause in the original Lenley statues dating back to March 41, where after June 30, 1943, it was essentially supposed to sunset absent new congressional authorization. Now, the problem was there were a lot of people in Congress that would have liked to have a bit more oversight

over how the money was being spent and allocated and shipped because there were a lot of countries involved, not just the Soviets. But for that very reason, it had been almost booby-trapped in a very clever way where because it was all now rolled together into one resolution, if you wanted to vote against, for example, these increasingly gargantuan deliveries to Stalin's armies, you would also have been voting against Lenin, say, to Britain and China, to some extent the original just recipients because of both the war against Hitler in Europe and the war against Japan in Asia. There were a lot of voices in the American camp, particularly those who were actually posted to the U.S. Embassy after 1943, who became increasingly concerned. First of all, that a lot of the stuff wasn't even being used. Sending over these marine diesel engines in 1944, the Russians aren't even using. That would have actually been very helpful at D-Day, which they actually didn't have because they had sent them to the Russians. With Japan, it's someplace even more striking. You know, they end up sending something like 8.244 million tons of Lenlis aid to Vladivostok right through a war zone.

And it's amazing that it even happened, that the Japanese let it happen. They let it happen because they were kind of happy that the Americans were wasting everything on the neutral Soviets instead of using it themselves or sending them to China. There I do think there was a little bit of naivete involved where they didn't really quite understand what the long-term consequences would be. But it's a bit hard to fault them in 41 and 42 when they don't want the Russians to go under and that's understandable.

And as you put out, there's some cynicism too. Better that they bleed and die than us. That's definitely part of the thinking. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. I've got Sean McMeekin on talking about Stalin. More after this. Hi, I'm Susanna Lipscomb. And in my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors,

I'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Belefketh to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Churchill was a man very keenly aware of his history, and there was a long historical tradition. I can't remember who it was. Was it Bismarck or Napoleon said the Brits always fight to the death of the last Austrian? You know, so sending vast amounts of cash to European allies to do the fighting is in the glorious British tradition.

But in this case, it backfires because said European allies end up a nuclear-armed super state in control of much of Eastern Europe. The bit that has got everybody talking in the historical world, Sean, is your suggestion that Stalin didn't just manipulate and take advantage of this naivety and some of the cynicism, but that he was pulling the strings all the way through, that he actually precipitated, well, the Second World War. Yeah, I see how people are making that argument. I do find that it's a bit of a caricature, but I understand where they're getting it. You know,

the way I'm kind of selling the book, I'm trying to explain Stalin's perspective. So that in the 1930s, for example, when he's looking at the European landscape, and frankly, there's a mirror imaging of this in the West, where a lot of people are talking about the possibility that Hitler's going to invade the Soviet Union. Obviously, there's allusions to this even in Mein Kampf about Lebensraum and the resources of the East. But the Soviet perspective, and some of this is simple historical experience, looking back at the First World War and the question of the Eastern Front and the Western Front. After all, the Russians had pulled out of the war at Brest-Litovsk and left the Western Allies alone in the Western Front. The

Russians had kind of forgotten that part. The Russian perspective was more, oh, look how badly we suffered. The flip side of this, from the perspective of Marxism-Leninism, was that this had led ultimately to the triumph of communism, that effectively the conflagration, the powers being at war, without this, communism never would have come to pass. And so the next war was on the one hand just inevitable because it was seen as inevitable in the Marxist-Leninist dialectic. And what Stalin wanted was to make sure that it was the right sort of war. So it's not that I think he was controlling the chancelleries, that he was in control of the British and the French government or anything like that. Rather that in 1939, what Stalin thought was that the Western powers were

hoping to maneuver Hitler into invading the Soviet Union. And in contrast, he wanted to maneuver in such a way that they would fight instead and that the Soviet Union would not have to fight. Effectively then, the goal or the strategy was for the Soviets to stay neutral as long as possible. So you can see in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, for example, and there's some controversy about the authenticity of this or that conversation with Molotov. There's one on August 19th, for example, that was actually published in a Swiss-French newspaper in December 1939, and everyone all thought, oh, that must be a forgery, and Stalin, of course, denied it. But some Russian historians actually found a copy of some transcript very close to the Havasch, as it was called, transcript from 1939 in the Russian archives in the early 1990s.

And this is when Stalin is effectively telling Molotov, look, if we cut a deal with Hitler, then Britain and France will go to war with Germany, and that's pretty much exactly what we want. In fact, in some ways, what Stalin says about that war is eerily similar to what Harry Truman first said when he heard about Operation Barbarossa, which was effectively, we'll see which side is winning and we'll help the other side. So effectively, what he thought was that Britain and France were stronger. And so initially, he'll ally with Germany and, you know, help Germany with all these supplies, all the economic resources that the Soviets were helping the Germans with to evade the British blockade. At some point, he hoped the powers would exhaust themselves. So in that sense, he didn't really get the war he wanted. He got the

lineup he wanted. But then the fact that the Germans routed everyone, that was not what he wanted. He wanted the Germans to be weakened. He was kind of shocked and surprised at how weak and inept Britain and France turned out to be. It was a waiting game shocked and surprised at how weak and inept Britain and France turned out to be. It was a waiting game. That is to say, he was hoping that his agreement with Hitler would lead to a European war. The part he got wrong was that he was hoping that they would bloody each other up really badly. Now, vis-a-vis the Pacific War, again, that's actually much clearer. It's quite clear with the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1941 that what Hitler wanted was for Japan to turn her attention southwards.

And they did talk openly about the fact that as Matsuoka installed the Japanese foreign minister, they saw the Anglo-Saxon powers as their enemy, ideologically and strategically. And so he did hope that Japan would eventually cross swords with him. Now, that doesn't mean that he, again, was pulling the levers in the White House or anything like that. Rather, that Stalin had a foreign policy. He had a worldview, a way of viewing the world, a way of viewing warfare, which informed his decisions and which did help to some extent to manipulate or change the course of events. Again, things might have been going that way anyway. Maybe Britain, after March 1939, was just resolved on war with Hitler.

There are signs that that was true, that even Chamberlain, despite being the archipelago, had actually changed his own mind, his own posture. In that sense, what Stalin was able to do with the Malta-Frippentrop pact was, you might say, give history a shove. That is, things were already maybe moving in that direction, but it wasn't quite clear how they would turn out. And by cutting a deal with Hitler, a quite sweeping deal, mind you, that had all kinds of layers of, of course, territory and influence swapping and economic resource swapping. It was not quite a military alliance, but it was pretty close to one. It was pretty clear that that would lead Hitler to invade Poland. And then, of course, it was up to Britain and France how they would respond. There was no guarantee they would declare war on Hitler, but it was certainly

Stalin's hope that they would. Speaking of giving history a little nudge there, I think the Russo-Finnish war, the Winter War is so fascinating. 39 to 40, Soviets invade Finland. I've always thought of it as giving history a nudge and it convinces Hitler the Red Army's rubbish and he should invade as soon as possible. You place a different emphasis on the Winter War. Talk to me about that. Well, yeah, it's something that you might have noticed a lot of the reviewers obviously have picked up on. The thing I haven't quite figured out is why very few seem to have caught on to what I think is significant, at least for the narrative that I'm telling, and that is to say its impact on Stalin. The war itself, you know, as you point out, it did affect to some extent the thinking,

I think, of the German general staff vis-a-vis the fighting effectiveness of the Red Army. I think that was clearly in effect. It didn't necessarily come to fruition that next summer. There was a bit of a delayed effect. But rather, the brutality of the war, the way it bogged down, the way the press turned so negative, the Soviet Union was actually ejected from the League of Nations because of the invasion. All these stories start pouring out of Finland about even these kind of terror units behind the Red Army, basically these soldiers who were being ushered into battle by these machine gunners mowing them down as they retreat. It was extremely bad, shall we say, public relations for Stalin and his regime. And one of the things I do talk about is this very serious discussion in the staffs of both the British and the French High Command, the Supreme

High Command, that is the Anglo-French High Command, the British Imperial General Staff, and also the British War Council. It's really amazing that some of the reviewers act like I invented this idea out of old cloth. In fact, they were told to direct their staffs to plan for war with the Soviet Union on the assumption they would be at war with the Soviet Union by April 1940. They also surveilled the defenses of both Baku and Batumi, the great oil producing center of Baku, and a lot of the refineries, the pipelines leading to Batumi and the Black Sea and thence to world markets. This is the oil, incidentally, that was also largely fueling Hitler's war machine. There was also discussion of landing troops at

Pitsamo in northern Finland. This is where Hitler got his nickel supplies, which were extremely important in the production of panzers. They were far enough advanced in their planning that they actually sent bombers to Khabania, the base in Iraq. Stalin, because he had such a fantastic intelligence network and his kind of antennae were very attuned to any plot against him, he had of course sniffed out all of these plans. He actually had an informant high up in the French establishment in Damascus who was telling him all about Weygand and the French army in Syria and their plans. So he knew all about this. And so he took two key actions in sequence. The first was to order what we now call the Katyn Massacre, this kind of almost preemptive rounding up and mass murder

of Polish officers he'd arrested in 1939. In the end, more than 15,000 officers and nearly 23,000 Polish elites in all. It might seem strangely connected to Baku in Finland, except that Stalin knew that there were a lot of Poles training in England, both in the RAF, the Royal Air Force, and also potentially in the echelon of amphibious troops who were going to land in Finland. And he was terrified of the Polish officers, this potential fifth column in the Soviet Union. So the real point of the chapter is its relation to what we now call the Katyn Massacre. And the second thing Stalin did was sign a peace agreement with Finland, surprising nearly everyone on March the 12th. A somewhat punitive, but in fact not really that

punitive peace treaty, which really did cut the legs out from under the Allied intervention plans. I mean, I think it was one of the most critical decisions he ever made. But you can't always expect reviewers to understand the fine points, especially when they have limited space, I think, to deal with in their reviews. But I find the story fascinating, and I hope a lot of readers will as well. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. There are counterfactuals always lurking with these enormous decisions of 40 and 41. The one that we endlessly wrestle with in Britain is Churchill's absolute determination never ever to come to a negotiated peace with Hitler. In the writing of this book, where's your thinking on that decision, how it came to be? And obviously, we can't ask if it's the right decision, because he would have been facilitating murder and genocide on a gigantic scale. But how would things have been different if that decision had gone differently? Well, yeah, I think there's sort of a throwaway clause. It's not even a line in my conclusion where I allude to the Hesse affair. And I think that's probably

what got a lot of people kind of talking about this. I certainly wasn't trying to suggest that the right thing for Churchill to do was to cut an agreement with Hitler in May 1941 and to jointly invade the Soviet Union together. I don't know quite where people got that idea. What I was trying to explain about the Hess Affair, there are a few lines in an early chapter, and then there's an allusion to this in the conclusion, is how this actually was perceived by Stalin, which is to say for Stalin, this was a nightmare. Stalin, one of the reasons why he discounted a lot of the intelligence coming from Churchill about, let's say, German invasion plans for Barbarossa, he didn't trust Churchill, first of all. And second of all, he thought Churchill had an agenda and he thought Churchill's agenda, and remember, some of this went back to the pre-war period too, was to put Nazi Germany

and the Soviet Union at loggerheads with one another. I certainly think that by May 1941, there would have been no thought really of any serious agreement between Britain and Nazi Germany, not least because by that point, Britain really had just lost battle after battle, and there almost was no way to save face, even had Churchill wanted to. I think in some ways, there were a couple of earlier periods where it might have been conceivable as early as, let's say, November 1939 after the fall of Poland, when Britain was also trying to figure out what to do vis-a-vis the Soviets, who had also invaded Poland along with Nazi Germany and where Hitler made the first

of his long series of peace proposals in the Reichstag. There may have been a little bit of discussion, I think, after the fall of France. And this is the kind of thing that gets dramatized in some of these movies about Churchill, like the recent one, I think, with Gary Oldman, where there's this discussion of we're so weak, will Hitler throw us a bone, you know, make some kind of an offer? I think it just wasn't in Churchill's nature to think of such things. I think your question is really what would have happened had Churchill been less stubborn and less principled and had he been willing to cut some kind of a deal with Hitler. In the end, that counterfactual, I suppose, I mostly just see as unrealistic because of both the nature of Churchill and probably also the state of British public opinion at the time.

I myself, and this is, again, I kind of wish people had paid more attention to the things that I actually do talk about more and in more depth and detail in the book. I find the period of 1943 a little bit more interesting, which is to say, when there were a lot of contacts made through back-channel intermediaries, then really up as high as Canaris, the head of the Opfer, German intelligence, that is with the German resistance to Hitler. And that's the kind of thing where you could conceivably see both Churchill and Roosevelt saying, well, look, if we can get Hitler out of the way, you know, if they can somehow topple him, whether by assassination or coup d'etat, arrest, torture, who knows how they would have done it.

But had they been able to get Hitler and perhaps Hitler, Heydrich, some of the evil figures in the Nazi party out of the way and actually negotiated with some of those German officers plotting against him? I think that's a more interesting counterfactual because I think it's more plausible. And it also relates a little bit more to the state of, I think, public opinion in Britain in the United States. Now, admittedly, any such context would have had to have been secret, at least initially. But had it eventually gotten to the stage where one of the attempts on Hitler, and there was a pretty serious one in March 1943, where effectively the detonator froze at altitude

in his plane, and it was kind of just bad luck for the plotters that it didn't go off. Or, of course, the more famous one in July 1944 involving Stauffenberg et al. Had any of those plots come close to succeeding, and there actually was a German resistance that had come to power. I certainly don't think there would have been massive objections among the public, certainly not in the United States. Britain might have been a little bit of a tougher nut to crack, that is, to negotiating some type of perhaps a very conditional ceasefire with lots of conditions applied and so on. 1940-41, it's tough to see that. I mean, in some ways that really is, it's often called the finest

hour when Britain fights alone. I think just psychologically alone, it would have been very hard for Churchill to contemplate making any sort of a deal. As far as what that might have looked like, it's hard to say. There's the usual view is that Hitler all along inevitably was going to invade the Soviet Union. I'm not necessarily sure that's the case. I think Hitler was also hedging his own bets

in the summer of 1940. He started looking into it, but he hadn't necessarily resolved on invading the Soviet Union yet. I don't think any of these principles necessarily had some master plan where they knew the way things would turn out. I think that's part of what makes the story so fascinating, is that there actually were a lot of different paths that history could have taken at almost any point, 1939, 1940, really almost up to the end of the war. Yeah, I was very struck by your 1943 counterfactual

because it also strikes me at that point that Churchill was far more of an equal with Stalin and Roosevelt at that point of the war when more British troops were engaged than American, for example, in the main theatre of war. So I wonder if Churchill's partial eclipse towards the end of the war also makes that 43 period so fascinating. I think that's right. I mean, I think in the end. I mean, I think in the end, although Churchill himself was certainly stubborn about going too far in any negotiations with the resistance, my reading of it is it was far more Roosevelt who objected on principle to, he actually issued the standing order to the American press not even to mention a German

resistance. And this was part and parcel of his emphasis on unconditional surrender after it was announced at Casablanca. And Churchill was in a very difficult position from this point until the end of the war, because Britain was in such a precarious position, I think, materially and financially, that he couldn't go against Roosevelt. And many of Roosevelt's decisions, whether it was the unveiling of unconditional surrender or the Morgenthau plan that they initialed at Quebec in September 1944. I don't think Churchill really liked these ideas. He was kind of forced to swallow them. And frankly, Roosevelt took Stalin's side at Tehran. I mean, that's one of the most astonishing things in the

war. It's not just the hard bargain Roosevelt drove over terms for aid and loans and military equipment and lend-lease and bases for destroyers. But he literally took Stalin's side on all questions of substance. At Tehran, he refused to meet Churchill before the main sessions, insisting on meeting Stalin first. You know, he effectively sandbagged Churchill on this question of were any operations possible in the Adriatic, either prior to or maybe even in coordination with D-Day. He effectively took Stalin's side.

And part of it was, I think, out of ideology. I think Roosevelt really did not admire the British Empire, and he sort of wanted to see it go down. And I think in the end, he kind of made some of these decisions partly impulsively, and I think partly out of calculation. And I think Churchill suffered for it. Thank you so much, Sean. I really enjoyed that. It was an absolute gallop around the whole Second World War. It's very, very kind of you to indulge me. Tell everyone what the book's called. The book is called Stalin's War. The UK edition, there's no subtitle.

I think in the US edition, it's Stalin's War, A New History of World War II. Nice. That's a good subtitle. Thank you very much, Sean, for coming on. Okay. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me. We have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours,

our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. I've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I really appreciate that. Then from the

comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast. We can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting pummelled. Thank you. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.