Hitler’s failure to subdue Britain was eating at him. Britain’s Royal Air Force not only had prevented the Luftwaffe from attaining the air superiority required for a cross-Channel invasion, but was bombing Berlin and other German cities.202 Between July 10 and October 31, 1940, in the so-called Battle of Britain, Hurricanes and Spitfires shot down 1,733 Luftwaffe aircraft. The British lost 915 planes. (“Never had so many owed so much to so few,” Churchill would remark of the air war.) Both Sea Lion and the vague preliminary plans for an invasion of the Soviet Union had been postponed, from fall 1940 to spring 1941. The Wehrmacht was the largest unemployed land army in the world. The Führer, losing the initiative, went into seclusion at the Berghof from October 5 to 8 to contemplate his options.
NKVD intelligence under Beria was reporting that at least 85 infantry divisions—two thirds of the German land army—were deployed in the east, and airfields and other military installations were going up one after another.203 In October 1940, Beria suddenly became solicitous toward the few hundred Polish officers whom he had not murdered at Katyn and other sites back in spring 1940. He even had the interned Polish lieutenant colonel Zygmunt Berling retrieved from a Soviet labor camp to Moscow in first class. When Merkulov told Berling that there were plans to form a Polish army on Soviet territory, the latter assumed that the more than 20,000 captured Polish officers were in the Soviet Gulag somewhere. “We have no such people now in the Soviet Union,” Beria responded, laconically. Merkulov added: “We committed a big mistake with them.”204
Soon Beria informed Stalin that the NKVD had assembled some two dozen Polish officers as the basis for an anti-German army, just in case. It was a new era. Not a single one of the thirty-five Soviet films produced in 1940 would feature a principal “enemy” of domestic origin.205 No foreign films would be allowed onto the Soviet screen the entire year. Still, a new breakthrough musical comedy emerged: on October 8, 1940,
Also in October, Marshal Kulik married his third wife (Olga Mikhailovskaya), a friend of his daughter’s who was in her final year of high school—he was thirty-two years her senior. Stalin, now in the eighth year of his (second) widowhood, took no such indulgences. He was adjudicating between rival screenplays for a film about a seventeenth-century Georgian military figure, Giorgi Saakadze, who had led an uprising against the Persian shah to liberate and unify Georgia. “The princes and feudalism proved stronger than the [Georgian] tsar and nobles,” Stalin explained to film boss Bolshakov in a letter on October 11, 1940, adding that Saakadze’s efforts to compensate for domestic weakness with foreign alliances had failed, for objective reasons.207
Hitler emerged from his alpine hideaway with a renewed push to subdue Britain, indirectly. But first, on October 12, Wehrmacht troops occupied Romania to secure the Ploieşti oil fields. “The Germans have raised a barrier,” remarked the Italian ambassador to Moscow to his confidant, Schulenburg. “The [Russian] march to the south has been stopped, the oil is at the disposal of the Germans, through Constanza the Germans have reached the Black Sea, the Danube is a German river. This is the first diplomatic defeat of comrade Stalin.”208 In fact, even though TASS issued a denial, Berlin had afforded Moscow forty-eight hours’ advance notice of “training troops” to be stationed on the Danube to “instruct” the Romanian army.209
