Page 290 - The Chief Culprit

Churchill’s Warning and Stalin’s Reaction y 235

Churchill wrote several letters to Stalin. But unfortunately they all reached Stalin at
times when Churchill was in dire straits. e best-known letter in this series reached Stalin
on April 19, 1941. Churchill wrote this letter on April 3 and requested the British ambas-
sador in Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, to immediately hand it to Stalin in person. But nei-
ther Stalin nor Molotov would receive the ambassador. Finally, on April 19, Cripps did not
hand but transmitted the message, and not to Stalin, but only to Andrei Vyshinsky, Deputy
People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs. On April 22, Vyshinsky informed the ambassador that
Churchill’s message had been handed to Stalin.
By the time Stalin received the letter, the British situation had exacerbated, compared
with the time when the letter was written. e German army seized Belgrade on April 13
and headed south, posing threats to British troops in the Balkans. Rommel’s tank divisions
reached the Egyptian border in the area of Bardia and Es-Sallum on April 12. If they broke
through to the Suez Canal, the main artery connecting the British Empire would be cut.
Yugoslavia surrendered to Germany on April 17. e road to Greece was open. St. Paul’s
Cathedral in London was damaged in an air raid on April 16. In April, Greece was on the
verge of surrender. On April 18, Korizis, the Greek prime minister, committed suicide. After
that, the capitulation talks commenced. On April 23, the Greek armed forces surrendered.
British troops there were in a catastrophic position, and the question was whether or not
they could be evacuated. In this context, Stalin received the most important of Churchill’s
letters.
On May 20, 1941, the German armed forces started the most massive airborne opera-
tion in German military history to capture Crete. ere were 32,000 British and 14,000
Greek troops on the island. Several days later, without having superiority in numbers, German
paratroops took control of the island and annihilated the more numerous British and Greek
forces. Military experts unanimously concluded that the taking of Crete was an ingenious re-
hearsal by Hitler’s paratroops before landing on the British Isles. On May 24, 1941, the larg-
est ship of the British fleet in the Atlantic, the battle cruiser Hood, clashed with the Bismarck,
Germany’s largest battle ship. e battle lasted eight minutes. One direct hit to the British
ship caused it to explode and sink in a matter of minutes. Out of the 1,421 crew members,
only three survived. In June 1941, German U-boats sank sixty-one British merchant ships,
totaling 431,000 tons. 3
Churchill wrote his first long letter to Stalin on June 25, 1940, when neither Hitler
nor the German generals had any intention of invading the Soviet Union. e plan for
Operation Barbarossa or any other plan for war against the Soviet Union simply did not exist.
Churchill’s letters were not based on knowledge of German plans, but on sound calculations.
He simply directed Stalin’s attention to the situation in Europe: today Britain had problems
with Hitler; tomorrow it would inevitably be the Soviet Union’s turn. Churchill urged Stalin
to unite with him against Hitler, and to lead the Soviet Union into the war on the side of
Great Britain and all of vanquished Europe.
e text of Churchill’s message received in Moscow on April 19, 1941, can be found in
hundreds of Soviet books and articles. Here it is: “I have received reliable information from
a trustworthy source that the Germans, after deciding that Yugoslavia had fallen into their
clutches on 20 March, began to transfer three armoured divisions, of the five stationed in
Romania, into the southern part of Poland. As soon as they learnt of the Serbian revolution,
this transfer was cancelled. Your Excellency will easily appreciate the significance of these