WW3 in 1945

Kyt · Oct 24, 2007

This story was published in 1998. When I found it I just thought it was the usual media hyperbole over a few scraps of paper. Not so.

Churchill's plan for Third World War against Stalin

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1998/10/01/nwar01.html

WITHIN days of the defeat of Germany, Churchill ordered his War Cabinet to draw up contingency plans for an offensive against Stalin that would lead to "the elimination of Russia", according to Top Secret documents seen by The Telegraph.

The resulting battle plan included the use of up to 100,000 German troops to back up half a million British and American soldiers attacking through northern Germany. It assumed that Stalin would invade Turkey, Greece, Norway and the oilfields of Iraq and Iran in retaliation and launch extensive sabotage operations in France and the Low Countries.

A 29-page report, codenamed Operation Unthinkable, was presented to the Prime Minister on May 22, 1945, 14 days after the end of the war in Europe.

It assumed that the Third World War would start on July 1, 1945, probably with a surprise attack by 47 British and American divisions between Dresden and the Baltic.

The War Cabinet plan ruled out "total war" against the Red Army, which outnumbered the Allies by more than two to one, adding that there was no reason why an Anglo-American invasion of Russia would fare any better than Hitler's Operation Barbarossa.

Historians had long believed that the tense period immediately after the meeting of the armies of West and East led to plans of this sort, but today's publication is the first proof of their existence. Prof D C Watt, the eminent historian who has written the official history of the Cabinet Office in wartime, said it was the first time the papers had been read by anyone other than the principals.

"Nobody has ever seen this kind of thing before," he said, "but we have had strong suspicions that they must have been written. I had always assumed that the records of this had been lost."

The documents were described yesterday as "very important and very illuminating" by Prof John Ericson of Edinburgh University, an expert on the Soviet Union.

"On June 29, 1945, the Red Army suddenly executed a complete redeployment of its order of battle, for no apparent reason," he said. "I have always wondered why they did it. I have asked Soviet staff officers about it and never been able to understand their thinking. Perhaps we have just discovered the explanation."

The documents, discovered in the Public Record Office in Kew, show that planning was carried out at the very highest level of the British Government and military, being discussed by the Chiefs of Staff. But the scheme was drawn up with extraordinary insouciance about the political realities of the time, when the populations of Britain and America regarded the Red Army as liberators and allies.

Churchill described the plan as "a purely hypothetical contingency", but regarded it as necessary enough to have his planning staff working on it amid the euphoria of victory.

Prof Watt said: "The point is to emphasise the word contingency. The fact that the plan was made is significant, but it was to guard against an unlikely event."

The Unthinkable plan was eventually rejected by Churchill on the advice of the Chiefs of Staff and replaced with a defensive scheme to guard against invasion by the Red Army.
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Kyt · Oct 24, 2007

Analysis by John Keegan, Defence Editor

The West had to protect itself against

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1998/10/01/nwar201.html

NEW evidence that the wartime alliance between the West and Soviet Russia was coming under strain even in the immediate aftermath of VE Day will not surprise British and American foreign policy experts.

It had been of necessity, rather than convenience, and certainly not friendship.

Stalin had sought by every means to preserve the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact with Germany, made in August 1939, right up to the moment when Hitler attacked Russia on June 22, 1941.

Once the pact was broken, Russia fought with desperation. The number of the Red Army's dead has never been satisfactorily established - 10, 12, 14 million. Stalin, nevertheless, pursued a foreign policy that looked to the future position of the Soviet Union, once victory came.

Thus he abandoned the Polish Home Army to Nazi suppression. The advance of his armies into southern Europe in September 1944 was calculated to favour the establishment of Communist or pro-Communist governments in Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria and Romania.

Once Poland was occupied, he installed a puppet regime. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia, he placed the Czech Communists in a dominating position.

His most self-interested act was to delay his declaration of war against Japan until Germany was defeated. It was only on Aug 9, 1945, the day America dropped its second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, that Russian troops crossed the Manchurian border.

At VE Day, therefore, while the Americans and British were fighting in the Pacific and South-East Asia, the whole of the Red Army was still in Europe.

Stalin was, meanwhile, fostering the interests of local Communist parties in areas he did not control - Greece, Italy, France.

Eastern Germany would shortly become his puppet regime. Agreements between the Western and Soviet allies in 1943 had allocated occupation zones in Germany and Austria to the British and Americans and to the Red Army, along a line that would become the Iron Curtain.

While the first encounters in 1945 between the Anglo-American and Soviet forces were ecstatic and heartfelt, western governments were already considering their position vis-a-vis the enormously enhanced power of Stalin's Russia in a Europe divided between Soviet and non-Soviet.

The American charge d'affaires in Moscow, George Kennan, in a report later to become famous as "the long telegram", had warned Washington in February that the then impending defeat of Germany had re-awoken the fundamental aggressiveness of the Soviet regime.

Stalin had ceased to preach Lenin's doctrine of the approaching worldwide triumph of revolution and settled for "Socialism in One Country".

On Feb 9, 1945, he had made a speech that hailed the defeat of Hitler as proof that the Soviet system had triumphed and that anticipated Sovietisation everywhere. Kennan's message was that a new conflict was about to begin.

Kennan's British opposite number, Frank Roberts, was telegraphing London in similar terms and on April 2 the Foreign Office set up a Russia Committee to plan for a post-war world in which Russia would be hostile.

Its first report discussed "co-ordinated defence against long-term attack".

It is against this background that the May 22 report of the Joint Planning Staff must be seen.

By then, both British and American governments were taking account of the Red Army's deep advance into central Europe and their recognition that Stalin intended to capitalise on his triumph.

Harry Truman, the new American president, shared none of Roosevelt's upper-class indulgence of revolutionary rhetoric. An artillery officer in the American Expeditionary Force of l9l8, he dealt in realities.

It would still be some months before Truman shed all American idealism about the possibility of Soviet-American friendship. The Joint Planning Staff's report therefore exceeds realities in claiming that its plan for combating Russian aggression would carry American support.

It also exceeds reality in expecting the American, as well as British, public opinion would support a war against the Soviet Union, however provoked. Exactly the opposite was the case. The Red Army was idolised both in America and Britain.

Nevertheless, as long as it is recognised that the Joint Planning Staff paper is a contingency plan, not an executive instrument, it faithfully represents how the official mind in the West was working in the immediate aftermath of the glory days of May 1945.

The Western victors saw that they had to protect their position against a suddenly over-mighty ally and ordered their professional military advisers to consider what steps would be taken.

All armies make such plans, at all times and irrespective of public statements of foreign policy. It is distasteful that the paper includes a consideration of employing the defeated Germans to fight Russian friends.

That, however, is how military professionals are taught to think. No doubt the Soviet archives contain an exactly similar paper, prepared by Red Army professionals, on how to continue the Second World War against their Anglo-American friends.
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Kyt · Oct 24, 2007

The 37 page file for Operation Unthinkable, scanned as individual jpegs. Well worth a read:

http://www.history.neu.edu/PRO2/

Kitty · Oct 24, 2007

Bloody hell. A scary situation but at the time not that unthinkable.

spidge · Oct 24, 2007

And if a strategy was not in place..............What then?

Kitty · Oct 24, 2007

Armageddon

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