Stalin полностью

Beyond his greed and distraction, Stalin’s inability to pick up on the political changes in London was driven by an abiding antipathy toward the Western powers.¹⁷ But Churchill, too, had trouble perceiving all his options. He reveled in little Finland’s fight against the Soviets, publicly declaring that it proved how “Communism rots the soul of a nation.”¹⁸ He had ceased his cultivation of Maisky. But the West’s war against Germany was going poorly. Even after the first British evacuation of Dunkirk, the new PM had dispatched still more ground troops to France, to prevent that country’s fall. In doing so, Churchill almost lost his land army—and the war—right then and there. The commander of British reinforcements in France was soon imploring the PM to evacuate these troops, too. Some 338,000 British as well as French and Belgian soldiers did manage to escape from Dunkirk back across the Channel, thanks only to a blunder by Hitler and his top commander, halting their ground attacks, as well as French sacrifices in a rearguard action. “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be,” Churchill exhorted on June 4, 1940, as Britain’s land army fled in boats. “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” This ringing oratory elicited a lukewarm domestic reception, a further sign of British precariousness.¹⁹ It did not take a genius to grasp that the only formidable land army remaining on the continent, besides Hitler’s, was Stalin’s.

NEW REALITIES

On June 5 and 6, Pravda printed portraits of Soviet military brass, apparently to reassure the public in the face of the latest triumphal march of the Wehrmacht. By June 14, after a little more than four weeks, the Germans had already entered Paris.²⁰ The fathers and grandfathers of these troops had fought for more than four years and never seized that prize.²¹ On June 17, a new French government sued for peace. “Honor, common sense, and the interests of the country require that all free Frenchmen, wherever they be, should continue the fight as best they may,” a general named Charles de Gaulle quixotically broadcast from London to France over BBC radio on June 18.²² Three days later, the German victory was sealed in the same French forest, inside the very same railway carriage—a rickety old wagon-lit used by Marshal Foch—in which the Germans had surrendered in the First World War. Hitler sat in Foch’s former seat.²³ Nazi Germany decided to occupy more than half of France, including the Atlantic and English Channel coasts.²⁴ A collaborationist rump French state was allowed in the southern city of Vichy.

France’s fall came to seem inevitable, especially since it lacked the protection afforded by the Channel, but in the years leading up to 1940, French military industry had created an arsenal roughly equal to the Nazi one.²⁵ True, the French air force significantly lagged the Luftwaffe, but France fielded more ground soldiers and tanks than did the Wehrmacht. And the German tanks were often inferior.²⁶ French intelligence operated a remarkable agent network, signals intelligence, and photoreconnaissance, but after France’s famed Second Bureau had issued a dozen secret warnings of an imminent German attack—going back to November 1939 and including four in April 1940—and the predicted invasion had failed to materialize, the officers had lost their credibility.²⁷ French higher-ups, for their part, failed to make proper use of the plentiful information acquired of German plans.²⁸

An even deeper problem involved tactics: the French fought a war of position, the Nazis a war of movement.²⁹ France’s plan of battle had two aspects: fixed defensive fortifications, known as the Maginot Line, and a motorized northern army intended to thrust into Belgium and Holland and establish front lines there.³⁰ Between the two lay a soft spot, the Ardennes, which some French military experts considered traversable even by mechanized forces, despite its forested and mountainous terrain and a substantial river, but the French had done nothing to prepare for such an eventuality, laying no antitank obstacles and only scattered bunkers. This was exactly where the audacious Germans struck.³¹ The Wehrmacht could not conceal its massing of troops for an assault through the Ardennes, of course, but Germany conducted a feint, invading the Low Countries through the Gembloux Gap, drawing the bulk of French forces northward to interdict a presumed Wehrmacht advance to the Channel coast. By instead slicing with its main strike between the French and British land forces massed in Belgium, to the north, and the Maginot Line, to the south, the German army stormed into a vacuum and achieved the largest encirclement in military history.