Operation unthinkable: How Churchill wanted to recruit defeated Nazi troops and drive Russia out of Eastern Europe



Next week sees the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. One man towered above all others at this perilous time - Winston Churchill.



In a major two-week series, war historian Max Hastings casts new light on him.



Here, in part nine, he tells how Churchill became a Cold War prophet in foreseeing the menace of the Soviet Union...

Ahead of the game: Winston Churchill foresaw the menace of the Soviet Union and began making plans to go to war with Russia

When Winston Churchill learned in the spring of 1945 that the Americans were going to halt their advance on Berlin from the west and leave Hitler's capital to the mercies of the Red Army of the Soviet Union, he was furious.

The United States government had made an absolute commitment not to let post-war Europe separate out into distinct areas of political influence. But now this was precisely what was being allowed to happen.



Russian behaviour was worsening by the day as Stalin's all-conquering men rolled up the countries in the east and made them satellites of Moscow, in defiance of agreements made by the heads of state at the Yalta conference only weeks earlier.



Keep on going eastwards was Churchill's advice to the Allied armies, until the Russians showed some willingness to keep their side of the bargain about the future shape of Europe.



Meanwhile, Stalin was in paranoid mood, fearful that the West was planning to make its own deal with the Germans, cut him out and possibly even turn on him.



He was deeply suspicious of what Churchill was up to. 'That man is capable of anything,' he told his army commander, Marshal Zhukov.



But Churchill wasn't up to anything, because the Americans wouldn't let him. They showed no interest in diplomatic brinkmanship with the Kremlin, despite the vital issues for the future of the world that were at stake. Washington wanted no confrontation with Moscow.



Churchill found it hard coming to terms with the era that was dawning. Back in 1941, he had assumed that when the war ended the United States and the British Empire would together form the most powerful armed and economic bloc the world had ever seen. The Soviet Union would be struggling. 'They will need our aid for reconstruction far more than we shall need theirs,' he said then.



By 1945, the Soviets were vastly stronger, and the British much weaker, than he had expected. As for the U.S. commitment to Anglo-American interests, in Europe or anywhere else, this was more tenuous than it had ever been.

Menace: Soviet leader Josef Stalin at the Potsdam conference where he met Truman and Churchill to make arrangements for post-war Europe in 1945

In the cold light of day, the prime minister understood all this. As Russian forces were allowed to proceed to their agreed halting point on the River Elbe, he summed up his fears in a letter to his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden.



'Terrible things have happened. A tide of Russian domination is sweeping forward . . . After it is over, the territories under Russian control will include the Baltic provinces, all of eastern Germany, all Czechoslovakia, a large part of Austria, the whole of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.



'This constitutes one of the most melancholy events in the history of Europe and one to which there has been no parallel. It is to an early and speedy showdown and settlement with Russia that we must now turn our hopes.'

It was a diplomatic showdown he was referring to at this point. He wanted the Americans and the British to hang tough in deliberations with Moscow.



But the difficulty was that the Allies were in an uncharted new world. To the vast shock of his countrymen, who had been kept in the dark about how ill he was, President Roosevelt died on April 12.



Into the shoes of this towering figure stepped vice-president Harry Truman.

Victory in Europe: Winston Churchill waving to crowds gathered in Whitehall on VE Day

In the first weeks of the new President's tenure, there were indications that he was ready to deal much more toughly with the Russians than had Roosevelt in his last months. But he was no more willing than his predecessor to risk an armed clash with the Soviet Union for the sake of the overrun Poland or indeed any other European nation.



Washington believed that, with the U.S. army and the Red Army facing each other on the banks of the Elbe, there was no virtue in empty posturing.



Nor did Churchill's combativeness towards Moscow find much resonance among his own people. For four years the British had embraced the Russians as heroes and comrades-in-arms, ignorant of the absence of reciprocal enthusiasm.



Beyond a few score men and women at the summit of the British war machine, little was known of the perfidy and savagery of the Soviets as they smashed their way through Eastern Europe.



Jubilant: Londoners dancing in Piccadilly Circus on after Churchill had broadcast to the nation to say the war with Germany was over

VE-Day was proclaimed on May 8, 1945. At 3pm the prime minister broadcast to the British people, telling them the Germans had signed an act of unconditional surrender, and 'the German war is therefore at an end'.



He recalled Britain's lonely struggle, and the gradual accession of great allies: 'Finally almost the whole world was combined against the evil-doers, who are now prostrate before us. We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing; but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead.'



Japan had still to be beaten. 'We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our task, both at home and abroad. Advance, Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King.'



From a balcony in Whitehall that evening, he addressed a vast, cheering crowd, who sang Land Of Hope And Glory and For He's A Jolly Good Fellow. But back in his rooms, all he could talk about was his dismay at Soviet barbarism in the east.



While the world celebrated, he spent the first days of peace plunged in deepest gloom about the fate of Poland.



At Downing Street, he invited the Soviet ambassador, Feodor Gusev, to lunch and gave him a dressing down.



The Russian recorded how Churchill 'roared' as he listed a catalogue of grievances about Poland, about communist forces trying to seize Trieste and British representatives being barred from Prague, Vienna and Berlin.



Truman agreed that urgent talks were needed. Yet what if talking to Stalin got nowhere? Was there anything the Western Allies could do? Churchill thought there was. They could go to war again.



Within days of Germany's surrender, he had astounded his chiefs of staff by inquiring whether Anglo-American forces might launch an offensive to drive back the Soviets. He requested the military planners to consider means to 'impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire' to secure 'a square deal for Poland'.



They were told to assume the full support of British and American public opinion and that they would be able 'to count on the use of German manpower and what remains of German industrial capacity'.

In other words, the beaten Germans would be mobilised on the West's side. There was even a target date for such an assault - July 1, 1945.



The Foreign Office - though not the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden himself - recoiled in horror from Churchill's bellicosity, as did the chief of the Army, Sir Alan Brooke. 'Winston gives me the feeling of already longing for another war!' he noted in his diary.



(Indeed at the Potsdam conference in July 1945, Churchill's inside knowledge that the Americans had just completed the first successful atomic bomb test emboldened the PM in his crusade to bring Stalin to heel. Pushing his chin out and scowling, he told Sir Alan: 'We can tell them that if they insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev and so on.')



Nonetheless, the British Army high command faithfully executed Churchill's wishes by examining scenarios for military action against the Russians. It required feats of imagination unprecedented even among the many wild ideas they'd had to consider during his war premiership.



Needless to say, given the acute sensitivity of their draft proposal for what was termed Operation Unthinkable, security was at a premium. Needless to say, too, Stalin learned very quickly what was going on in the British camp.



One of the many spies he had in Whitehall swiftly conveyed to Moscow tidings of an instruction that had gone out from London to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the senior British commander in Germany, urging him to stockpile captured German weapons for possible future use.



But, the Kremlin apart, Churchill's promptings remained a state secret for more than half-a-century until confirmed in papers released by the National Archive in 1998.

In the report the planners drew up for the PM, they were quick with their reservations, pointing out that the Russians could resort to the same tactics they had employed with such success against the Germans, giving ground amid the infinite spaces of the Soviet Union.

Churchill with Roosevelt who died in April 1945 - the British PM hoped his successor Truman would deal more toughly with the Russians but he was no more willing to risk an armed conflict than Roosevelt

'There is virtually no limit to the distance it would be necessary for the Allies to penetrate into Russia in order to render further resistance impossible.'



The planners estimated that 47 Allied divisions would be needed for an offensive, 14 of them tank divisions. A further 40 divisions would have to be kept in reserve for defensive or occupation tasks. Against this, the report said, the Russians could muster twice as many men and tanks.



It concluded that these odds 'clearly render the launching of an offensive a hazardous undertaking. If we are to embark on war with Russia, we must be prepared to commit to a total war, which will be both long and costly'.

On the question of re-arming and putting the defeated German army back in the field, the planners were concerned that veterans who had already fought in the bitter battles on the Eastern Front might be reluctant to repeat the experience.



The chiefs of staff were never under any delusions about the impracticability of an offensive against the Russians to liberate Poland. Brooke wrote in his diary that 'the idea is of course fantastic and the chances of success quite impossible. There is no doubt that from now onwards Russia is all-powerful in Europe'.



All the evidence suggested that Operation Unthinkable was just that - unthinkable.

Potsdam: President Truman (centre) with Josef Stalin and Clement Attlee who participated in the conference with Churchill

An outline plan went to the PM on June 8, along with the written opinion of the chiefs that 'once hostilities began. ..we should be committed to a protracted war against heavy odds'. There would be no hope of defeating the Russians without 'a large proportion of the vast resources of the United States'.



What, then, if the Americans didn't stay the course? Churchill was alarmed. If the Americans withdrew from such a fight, Britain would be left horribly exposed, since the Russians had the power to advance to the North Sea and the Atlantic. It would be 1940 all over again.



'Pray have a study made,' he asked in a note, 'of how then we could defend our island, assuming that France and the Low Countries were powerless to resist the Russian advance to the sea.'



But then it was as if he came to his senses because he added that the codeword 'Unthinkable' should be retained, 'so that the staffs will realise that this remains a precautionary study of what, I hope, is still a highly improbable event.'



Before sending the note, he took his red pen and altered the last three words from 'highly improbable event' to 'purely hypothetical contingency'.



The chiefs responded to his inquiries about what would happen in the event of a Soviet advance to the Channel. Russian naval strength, they concluded, was too limited to render an early amphibious invasion of Britain likely. They ruled out a Soviet airborne assault.



It seemed more likely, they suggested, that Moscow would resort to intensive rocket bombardment, on a scale more destructive than that of the German V1s and V2s. To defend against such a threat, they that estimated a massive force of 230 squadrons of fighters and 300 squadrons of bombers would be necessary.



A few days later, the 'Unthinkable' file was closed. A cable had arrived from President Truman which made it clear there was not the slightest possibility that the Americans would lead an attempt to drive the Russians from Poland by force, or even threaten Moscow that they might do so.

The U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Japanese town Nagasaki, on August 9, 1945 - the month before Churchill got inside knowledge at Potsdam that they had completed a successful test of the bomb emboldening him to bring Stalin to heel

Ultimately, Churchill knew in his heart that the tyranny established by the Red Army could not be undone either through diplomacy or by force of arms. But he never doubted the malevolence of Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe, and indeed around the world, and in that regard he was ahead of his time.



In the years after the war, it became progressively apparent that the Western Allies would have to adopt the strongest possible defensive measures against further Soviet aggression in Europe.



In August 1946, the U.S. chiefs of staff became sufficiently fearful of conflict with the Russians to initiate military planning for such a contingency. In London, the 'Unthinkable' file was taken out and dusted down.



Though at no time was it ever deemed politically acceptable or militarily practicable to attempt to free Eastern Europe by force of arms, military preparations for a conflict with the Soviet Union became a staple of the Cold War.



Churchill had proved that, in this new war, as with the one that had just finished, he had unique foresight.



But in one crucial area he lacked any foresight at all. The old warhorse had given little thought to how he and his country would deal with peace.



As we will see tomorrow, he was in for a rude awakening.



• Extracted from Finest Years: Churchill As Warlord published by HarperPress on September 3, 2009, at £25. To order a copy for £22.50 (inc p&p) call 0845 155 0720.

