Between the lines – Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin
Too often the great war in Europe, Africa and Asia between 1939 and 1945 is depicted as “Hitler’s War”, or the “The Good War,” and “The War of the Great Generation.” In his magnificently challenging new book, Sean McMeekin argues that if it was anybody’s war , it was Stalin’s war, for Josef Stalin was the outright strategic winner of the conflict.
Using new Soviet archival material, he argues that the war that was to be driven by Stalin’s strategy and vision opened with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. From then on, Stalin manoeuvred to effect, and succeeded, despite setbacks and near knockout defeat – most notably with the invasion of Russia in Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941.
Yet the Stalin-Soviet strategy was to continue to work and deliver well after the dictator’s death. It led to Soviet hegemony of Eastern Europe, and in the East, to the success of the Communist revolution in China as well as Vietnam and North Korea coming under Communist rule.
“In Eastern Europe, the war lasted until 1989, in the form of Soviet military occupation. On the Korean Peninsula, in China and Taiwan, questions arising from the conflict remain unresolved,” writes McMeekin in the introduction.
The book is about Stalin and Stalin’s workings of his strategy, and not a comprehensive history of the conflicts from 1931 to the Korean War as such. Yet the description, assessment and analysis of different ground operations is incisive and brilliant. The set pieces of the attack on Moscow, Stalingrad , Kursk and Kharkov and the Soviet version blitzkrieg in Manchuria in 1945 are graphically related, well supported by maps, and with fresh material from the archives.
This all serves McMeekin’s big central question: why did the allied leadership, Churchill and Roosevelt in the lead, fall in with Stalin’s schemes, often to the detriment of their own strategic aims? They were beguiled – duped, even – by the Georgian tyrant. They switched huge resources following the near collapse of the Soviet armies before Moscow and Leningrad in 1941. Millions of pieces of kit, tanks, aircraft, Bren-gun carriers, artillery pieces were shovelled into the Soviet forces. This probably led to delaying the invasion of North Europe by up to a year, allowing the Red Army to take Berlin and huge chunks of territory besides.
The double envelopment plan, Operation Uranus, for the break out and counter thrust from Stalingrad in late 1942 – the greatest use of the tactic since Hannibal at Cannae, possibly – had to be delayed by ten days so more American and British materiel, including Hawker Hurricanes, could be brought south.
Stalingrad and the surrender of Von Paulus’s 6th Army marked the culminating point for the Wehrmacht, and then there was little alternative to strategic withdrawal – but one that would take more than two years to complete. McMeekin points out that Zhukov’s success at Stalingrad was greatly aided by the pressure of the British at Alamein – which caused Hitler to pull back 400 fighter aircraft from the Soviet front. Raids as seeming inconsequential as that at Dieppe also did their bit in diverting and distracting Axis military operations.
The book has already stirred up more than its share of controversy. Much of the critical fire has come from supporters of the great Roosevelt-Churchill mythical partnership. The legend of the two great aristocratic leaders – anomalies in even their own democratic cultures – sits will with the current age of uncertainty in the Anglo-Saxon world. The two great strategic visionaries saving the free world wears well in both the Donald Trump and Boris Johnson era, as it does in the Biden – Johnson conspectus now – and especially now that Biden is so clearly identifying himself with Roosevelt.
McMeekin’s unpicking of the two’s strategic posturing is more than deliberate perversity – it should lead to genuine rethinking. Both leaders fell under the spell of Stalin, as to an extent did their successors. But why did the western leaders allow him such a free hand in the Balkans and southern Europe? Roosevelt’s choice on entering the war to go for a ‘Berlin first’ and ‘unconditional surrender’ strategy in Western Europe was to leave the Balkans, Greece and Italy largely to fend for themselves.
The legacy, which curiously McMeekin doesn’t stress enough, was terrible civil war, in Greece, in Italy – which would cost the lives of nearly 250,000 civilians, and in the Balkans where the legacy conflict would reignite in the 1990s. The big title military historians, with their sweeping accounts of the strategic conflicts of the mid to late 20th century tend to leave the civil wars out, which undermines their whole approach.
Significantly, the great Michael Howard, to which several of the big name historians dedicate their works, a man of letters and arms – he won an MC in Italy in 1943 – absolutely got this. I heard him once give a lunchtime lecture at RUSI about “The Second World War – the global and regional conflicts.” Inside the European and Asian wars lay six or seven major regional conflicts and civil wars, some of whose consequences were still playing out.
McMeekin, for instance, takes a stab at the myth of Josef Broz Tito and the betrayal of the Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic. Tactically it made little sense, as even Churchill’s consigliere in the matter, Fitzroy Maclean, came close to admitting later. Tito later came to be larged up as the dissident member of the Communist bloc, founder of the non-aligned movement, and sleeping partner of the West. Mischievously this book suggests that even in his noisy disagreements, Tito served Moscow pretty well.
With this comes an elegant revisionist somersault on the Mediterranean strategy promoted, and then virtually reneged by Churchill. The big picture historians tend to write this off as a piece of misguided romanticism – perhaps a bid by Churchill to right the mistakes of his strategy to take Gallipoli and the Dardanelles in 1915. A lot of the thrust on the “soft underbelly of Europe” in 1943 made sense, McMeekin points out. Not only was it badly prosecuted from the landings in Sicily onwards, it lost morale and momentum with Roosevelt switching to prioritise Northern Europe and the thrust to take Berlin. The Italian campaign is awkward because it defies the neat categories of the traditional military historians. Sicily itself was tough, but the push up the Italian peninsula was worse. Kesselring fought a ruthless and effective retreat campaign against the odds – he had virtually no air support at all from the winter of 1943. “We just couldn’t get over how darned good the Germans were, surprising us again and again,” Michael Howard once remarked of the dreadful slog through the mountains after Salerno in 1943.
Even so, McMeekin suggests, if the allies had made the push up from the Mediterranean a main effort, they good have beaten the Russians to Vienna and staunched the takeover of the Balkans, the civil wars and grubby totalitarianism which was to be the legacy for another 45 years.
The book is extremely well written in a pithy and slightly argumentative style, and all the better for it. It provokes serious thought. The approach is reminiscent of the author’s mentor and friend Norman Stone, who has a dedication in the end note. He wonders if Norman would have approved. Knowing Norman for 50 years, I can assure him that he would have loved it. So would Norman’s hero, AJP Taylor.
I hope this book goes on provoking for generations to come.
Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin (Allen Lane), RRP. £40.00 is available here.