WAR COULD HAVE ENDED IN 1943

RIA Novosti is continuing to publish conversations between Valentin Falin, who has a Ph.D. in historical sciences, with the agency's military commentator Viktor Litovkin. They have spoken of the little known pages in World War II that were previously classified and sometimes had a decisive influence on the progress and outcome of the hostilities.

Question: World War II's modern historians have different opinions about its final stage. Some experts maintain that the war could have ended much earlier, as Marshal Chuikov wrote in his memoirs. Others argue that it could have dragged on for another year. Which of them is closer to the truth? And what is the truth? What is your personal opinion?

Answer: Modern historians are not the only ones who argue about this question. The war's length and end were even discussed during the war itself. They have been constant since 1942. Or, to be more exact, this question worried politicians and the military since 1941, when an overwhelming majority of statesmen, including Roosevelt and Churchill, did not believe that the Soviet Union would hold out for longer than four to six weeks. Only Benes believed and maintained that the Soviet Union would do what it did and finally defeat Germany.

Q.: As far as I remember, Eduard Benes was President of Czechoslovakia in exile. After the Munich deal of 1938 and the country's occupation, he was in Britain, right?

A.: Yes. Then, when these assessments and evaluations of our viability proved wrong, when Germany suffered its first strategic defeat under Moscow, the opinion changed drastically. The West began voicing concerns that the Soviet Union could emerge too powerful out of the war. And if it became too powerful it would determine the future face of Europe, according to Adolf Berle, the then US Assistant Secretary of State, who coordinated the work of American intelligence. This view was shared even by people around Churchill, including very respectable people who before and during the war worked on the doctrine of the British armed forces' operations and the overall British policy.

This, in large part, explains why Churchill was against opening the second front in 1942, although Lord Beaverbrook and Sir Richard Stafford Cripps in the British leadership and, especially, Dwight Eisenhower and other designers of US military plans believed that there were technical and other preconditions to defeating Germany in 1942. They took advantage of the fact that most German forces were deployed in the east and the 2,000-km coast of France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway and Germany itself was open for the allies' intervention. At that time the Nazis did not have any permanent defense facilities along the Atlantic coast.

Moreover, the American military insisted and tried to persuade Roosevelt (there are several memorandums written by Eisenhower on the issue) that the second front was necessary, it was possible and its opening would make the war in Europe short and would force Germany to capitulate if not in 1942, then in 1943 at the latest.

Yet this did not suit Britain and numerous conservative figures on the American Mount Olympus.

Q.: Who do you mean?

A.: Well, the whole State Department headed by Cordell Hall was extremely unfriendly towards the Soviet Union. This explains why Roosevelt did not take Hall to the Tehran Conference and the Secretary of State received the protocols from the Big Three meetings only six months after Tehran. The irony is that the Reich's political intelligence brought the same protocols to Hitler in three or four weeks. Life is full of paradoxes.

After the Battle of Kursk in 1943, where the Wehrmacht was defeated, American and British chiefs of staff, as well as Churchill and Roosevelt, held a meeting in Quebec on August 20. They discussed whether the United States and Britain should withdraw from the anti-Hitler coalition and unite with Nazi generals for a joint war against theSoviet Union.

Q.: Why?

A.: Because the ideology of Churchill and those in Washington who shared it maintained that "these Russian barbarians should be held up" as far as possible in the East, weakening the USSR as much as possible, if not defeating it, first of all, with German hands. This is how the task was set.

It was Churchill's very old plan. He developed the idea in his conversations with General Kutepov back in 1919. The Americans, British and French failed and could not suppress Soviet Russia, he said. This task should be given to the Japanese and Germans. He gave similar instructions to Bismarck, the first secretary of the German embassy in London in 1930. In the first world war the Germans behaved like idiots, he maintained. Instead of concentrating on destroying Russia, they began war on two fronts. If they dealt only with Russia, England would have neutralized France.

For Churchill it was not so much war against the Bolsheviks as it was the continuation of the Crimean war of 1853-1856 when Russia, for better or for worse, was trying to impede British expansion.

Q.: In Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and the oil-rich Middle East...

A.: Naturally. Consequently, talking about different variants of waging war against Nazi Germany, we should not forget about the different attitudes towards the allies' philosophy, towards England's and America's obligations to Moscow.

I will digress from the issue for a second. In 1954 or 1955, Ghent hosted a priests' symposium devoted to the question of whether or not angels kissed each other. After many days of debates, the symposium concluded that they did, but without passion. Relations within the anti-Hitler coalition were somehow similar to this whim of the angles, if not the kiss of Judas. The promises were given without commitments or, worse, to mislead the Soviet partner.

Let me recall that this tactics disrupted the talks between the Soviet Union, Britain and France in August 1939, when something still could have been done to contain the Nazi aggression. Yet they defiantly left no choice for the Soviet leaders, but to sign a non-aggression treaty with Germany. They left us exposed to the Nazi military machine, which was getting ready to strike. I can quote a directive formulated in Neville Chamberlain's office that said that if London could not avoid an agreement with the Soviet Union, the British signature should not mean that, if the Germans attacked the USSR, Britain would come to help the victim and declare war on Germany. He said that they should have an opportunity to say that Britain and the Soviet Union had different interpretations of facts.

Q.: There is a well-known historical example, that, when in 1939, Germany attacked Poland, the British ally, London declared war on Berlin, but did not take a single serious move to really aid Warsaw.

A.: In our case, not even a formal declaration of war was at issue. The Tories assumed that the German machine would go as far as the Urals, leveling everything on its way. And no one will be left to lament England's wile.

These ties between times and events existed during the war and gave food for thought. And I believe this thought was not all too optimistic for us.

Q.: Let's get back to 1944-1945. Could we have ended the war before May?

A.: Let's put the question this way: why was the allied landing planned for 1944? No one focuses on this issue. Yet the date was not randomly chosen. The West took into account our huge losses of soldiers, officers and weapons in Stalingrad. Losses in Kursk were also big. We lost more tanks than the Germans.

In 1944 the country was conscripting 17-year-olds. The villages were almost empty. Boys born between 1926-1927 were not drafted only if they worked at defense plants - their directors did not let them go.

The American and British intelligence assessed the outlook and agreed that by spring 1944, the Soviet Union would have exhausted its offensive potential. It would have run out of human resources and unable to deal the Wehrmacht a blow comparable to the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk. It meant that by the time of the allied landing we would be stuck in confrontation with the Nazis and cede the strategic initiative to the United States and Britain.

Even conspiracy against Hitler was planned to coincide with the landing. The generals brought to power in the Reich were to dissolve the Western Front and allow the Americans and British to occupy Germany and "liberate" Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Austria... The Red Army was to be stopped within the 1939 borders.

Q.: I remember that America and Britain even made a landing in Hungary, near Balaton, in order to seize Budapest, but the Germans destroyed all of them...

A.: That was not so much a landing force, but more a contact group to establish connections with Hungarian anti-Nazi forces. However, this was not the only failure. Hitler survived the attempt on his life, Rommel was severely wounded and got out of the game, although the West had counted on him. Other generals lost their nerve. And what happened - happened. America did not get an easy march across Germany to triumphant music. They got involved in battles, sometimes intense ones, for example, the Ardennes operation. Nevertheless, they were progressing towards their goals. Sometimes very cynically.

Let me give you a specific example. U.S. troops approached Paris. A rebellion broke out there. The Americans stopped 30 km from the city and waited for the Germans to destroy the rebels, because most of them were Communists. The number of the victims there were from 3,000 to 5,000 people, according to different sources. But the rebels gained control and only then did the Americans take Paris. The same happened in the south of France.

But let us get back to the period we began with.

Q.: The winter of 1944-1945.

A.: Yes. In the autumn of 1944 several meetings took place in Germany, chaired by Hitler and then on his order by General Alfred Jodl and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. The main idea was as follows: if they could give the Americans a good whipping, the United States and Britain would become very interested in the talks that had been held secretly from Moscow in 1942-1943.

Berlin planned the Ardennes operation not to win the war, but to spoil relations between the West and the Soviet Union. The United States was to understand how strong Germany still was, how important it was for the Western powers in their confrontation with the Soviet Union. And that the allies did not have enough strength or will to stop the Red Army when it came close to German territory.

Hitler emphasized that no one would speak to a country in trouble, only when the Wehrmacht would have shown that it was powerful would talks begin.

Suddenness was the trump card. The allies took the winter quarters, believing that Alsace and the Ardennes mountains were a perfect place for a vacation and a bad one for hostilities. The Germans, however, intended to break through to Rotterdam and to cut the Americans off the Dutch ports. This circumstance was to determine the western campaign.

The launch of the Ardennes operation was postponed several times. Germany did not have enough forces. And it began in the winter of 1944, when the Red Army fought its hardest battles in Hungary, near Balaton and Budapest. At stake were the last sources of oil - in Austria and some in Hungary, which were controlled by Germany.

This was one of the reasons why Hitler decided to defend Hungary despite everything. And why in the thick of the Ardennes operation and immediately before the Alsace operation he in fact began withdrawing forces from the West and sending them to the Soviet-Hungarian front. The main force of the Ardennes operation, the SS 6th tank army, was withdrawn from the Ardennes and sent to Hungary...

Q.: To Hajmasker.

A.: In fact, the redeployment began even before Roosevelt's and Churchill's panicked address to Stalin, when they, if we translate the diplomatic language into common terms, begged: help, save us, we are in trouble!

And we have evidence that Hitler thought that if our allies had so often left us exposed and obviously waited to see whether Moscow would hold out and the Red Army survive, then we could do the same. In 1941 they waited for the Soviet capital to fall, in 1942 not only Turkey and Japan, but also the United States waited for us to surrender Stalingrad to reconsider their policies. The allies did not even share with us such intelligence information as the German plans of onslaught via the Don towards the Volga and on to the Caucasus, and so on.

Q.: If I'm not mistaken, we received this information from the legendary Rote Kapella.

A.: The Americans did not give us any information, although they even knew the dates and times, including the preparations of operation Citadel at the Kursk Bulge.

Of course, we had tangible reasons to see how our allies could wage a war, how much they wanted to wage it and how ready they were to promote their main plan for the operation on the continent, the plan called Rankin. It was not Overlord that was the main one, it was Rankin, which envisaged the establishment of British-American control over alloy Germany and all East European states in order not to admit us there.

When Eisenhower was appointed commander of the second front, he was ordered to prepare Overlord, but always bear Rankin in mind. If there were favorable conditions for Rankin, he was to cancel Overlord and send all forces to Rankin. The revolt in Warsaw was spurred in compliance with this plan, as were many other things.

In this sense, the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945 were moments of truth. It was not a war on two fronts, but a war against two adversaries. Formally, the allies wereengaged in hostilities, which was very important for us as they did distract some part of the German forces. Yet their main scheme was to stop, if possible, the Soviet Union, as Churchill said or, as some American generals put it more rudely, "to stop the offspring of Genghiz Khan."

By the way, Churchill formulated this idea in an openly anti-Soviet way in October 1942, when our Nov. 19 counter-offensive under Stalingrand had not yet begun. "We should stop these barbarians as far as possible in the East."

When we talk of our allies, I in no way want to or can undermine the deeds of their soldiers and officers who fought as we did, knowing nothing about political intrigues and their leaders' schemes, they fought honestly and bravely. I am not undermining the help we got under the lend-lease, although we never were the main recipients of it. I am just trying to show how complicated, controversial and dangerous the situation was for us throughout the war till the victory salute. And how difficult it sometimes was to make a decision. We were not simply misled, but over and over left exposed to the enemy's blow.

Q.: Does this mean that the war could indeed have ended much earlier than May 1945?

A.: If I may be absolutely frank, it could have. Yet it is not our country's fault that it had not ended in 1943. It is not our fault. If our allies had been faithful to their allies' duty, if they had fulfilled the commitments to the Soviet Union in 1941, 1942 and in the first half of 1943... But they did not, and the war lasted for another one and a half or two years.

Most importantly, if it had not been for these delays with the opening of the second front, there would have been 10-12 million fewer victims among the Soviet people and the allies, especially in occupied Europe. There would not even have been Auschwitz, for it began working actively only in 1944...