In 1938 Stalin watched closely as Hitler decided to test the temper of the Western Allies by occupying all of Austria. When no serious consequences resulted, the Fuehrer prepared to assimilate other areas along the German borders. At Munich he threatened to blitzkrieg Europe unless England and France let him take over the industrial section of Czechoslovakia. When they agreed, he immediately extended his occupation to nearly all of that valiant little country.
In 1939 Hitler seized Memelland in Lithuania and then prepared to march into Poland. However, at this point he hesitated. Russia wanted Poland, too. As a matter of fact, Russia held the balance of power in Europe and Hitler did not dare take steps which would start an all-out war in the West unless he could be assured that Russia would not interfere. Hitler, therefore, made overtures to Stalin to sign a nonaggression pact. To the astonishment of the whole world, Stalin accepted! This meant that Hitler could go to war with the assurance that Russia would not interfere.
This caught most of the Communist world completely off guard. For years Red propaganda had portrayed Stalin as the world’s leading opponent of Nazism and Fascism. Now Stalin’s regime had ratified a pact with the Nazis which gave them a carte blanche to start a war in the West.
In America it took the Communist press several days to get their propaganda in reverse. Whittaker Chambers says it was absolutely incomprehensible to American Communists that Stalin would capitulate to his greatest enemy. It was not until Chambers talked with Stalin’s former director of espionage in Western Europe that he heard the official explanation. General W.G. Krivitsky said this pact demonstrated Stalin’s genius as a strategist. He explained that Stalin knew this pact would turn Hitler loose on Europe but that he also knew that as the war progressed it was likely that the western nations would fight themselves into exhaustion. At that point Soviet troops could march in. Almost without a blow the Soviet troops would be able to take over all of Europe in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat!
And just as Stalin had suspected, Hitler was not at all slow to take advantage of the political shove Stalin had given him. The pact was signed August 23, 1939. By September 1, the German Panzers were pouring through the valiant, but helpless ranks of the Polish horse cavalry, and thousands of tons of bombs were falling on Polish cities.
Also, as Stalin had expected, England and France were immediately dragged into the war because of their commitments to Poland. This was a war which these countries were neither physically nor psychologically prepared to wage. Before a year had passed, Poland had been divided between Germany and Russia and France had been occupied. Soon afterwards the British troops were bombed off the European continent at Dunkirk, and the Nazis were then left practically without resistance as they expanded their occupation into Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium.
Assuming that the war would now settle down to a struggle between Germany and England, Stalin felt ready to make his next carefully calculated move. Only two major capitalist nations still remained outside of the conflict: Japan and the United States.
On April 13, 1941, Stalin nudged the Japanese war lords into an offensive in the Pacific. This was accomplished by the same simple device as that which had turned Hitler loose on Europe—a pact.
At that moment Russia, even more than the United States, was the greatest single impediment to Japanese expansion in East Asia and the Pacific. By accepting a pact with Russia, the Japanese war lords were left free to launch their pan-Asiatic campaign in the Pacific and the Far East. They made immediate preparations for their attack.
Stalin Suffers a Strategic Defeat
Stalin now intended to sit back and wait for the capitalist nations to endure their baptism of fire. He had assured the Soviet military leaders that World War II would be won by the nation which stayed out the longest. That nation, of course, must be Russia. What he did not know, however, was that Adolf Hitler had been planning a disastrous surprise for the Communist Motherland. In fact, at the very moment Stalin was promoting his neutrality pact with Japan, Adolf Hitler was secretly announcing to his general staff: “The German armed forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign.”
The great surprise came on June 22, 1941. Hitler scrapped the pact and attacked Russia on a 2,000 mile front with 121 divisions and 3,000 planes. He had written all about it years before in Mein Kampf.
This sudden blitzkrieg attack changed the history of the world. It shattered Stalin’s intention to stay out of the war while the capitalistic nations fought themselves to exhaustion. It meant that Russia would enter the war prematurely and with the most meager preparations.
World War II Moves Closer to the United States
To many observers in the United States, this new development in World War II appeared favorable to the interest of peace-loving countries. Hitler’s attack on Russia locked the world’s two greatest aggressor nations in deadly combat and even military leaders thought this might relieve future world tensions. But within six months the Germans had occupied 580,000 square miles of the richest land in the USSR—land originally occupied by more than one third of Russia’s population, and in spite of the “scorched earth” policy of Russia, the Nazi troops successfully extracted their supplies from the people and the land so that they were able to race forward without waiting to have supply lines established. Soon German Panzers had penetrated to a point only sixty miles from Moscow and Hitler announced exuberantly that “Russia is already broken and will never rise again.”
All of this shocked the rest of the world into the reprehensible possibility of a Nazi empire which might extend from England to Alaska. Instinctively Americans began cheering for the Russians. It was considered to be a matter of vital self interest, implemented by the traditional American tendency to cheer for the underdog.
Then the fatal dawn of Sunday, December 7, 1941, brought the devastating attack of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and the United States found herself in the holocaust of World War II before she was even halfway prepared. In desperation American leaders reached out in all directions for friends. It is important to remember that the black boots of Hitler’s marching Wehrmacht had pounded a paralyzing fear into the hearts of peoples on every continent. It was Nazism—not Communism—that was blotting out the light of civilization around the earth. Therefore, since Russia had already been brought within the orbit of American sympathy, it is not difficult to understand how she became an intimate U.S. ally almost over night. Somehow it seemed impossible to remember that this was the very same Russia that had joined a nonaggression pact with Hitler to turn him loose in Europe, and had joined a neutrality pact with the Japanese to turn them loose in the Pacific.
The U.S. Policy of Coexistence Goes into Its Third Stage
By the early spring of 1942 it was not only apparent that the war had caught U.S. military strength at a very low level, but it was also equally obvious that the Axis had practically destroyed all of America’s traditional allies. Perhaps, as George F. Kennan suggests, this may partially account for the desperate gamble taken at that time by certain U.S. diplomatic strategists in dealing with Russia.
Already the diplomatic navigators had gone from a policy of plain coexistence with Communism in 1933, to one step lower where they had decided to accept the abuse and the broken promises of the Communist leaders. Now they resolved to go even further. They decided to try to convert the Communist leaders to the American way of thinking by showering them with such overwhelming generosity that there could be no vestige of suspicion concerning the desire of the United States to gain the cooperative support of the Communist leaders in winning the war and later preserving the peace. It was assumed that they would then become permanently and sympathetically allied with the United States and the western democracies in building a “one world” of peace and prosperity.