Operation Unthinkable (Churchills Plan for War with the Soviet Union)

Within days of the defeat of Germany in World War II, Winston Churchill ordered his war cabinet to draw up contingency plans for an offensive against Stalin that would lead to ``the elimination of Russia'', according to top secret British documents.

The resulting battle plan included the use of up to 100,000 German troops to back up half a million British and American soldiers attacking through northern Germany. It assumed that Stalin would invade Turkey, Greece, Norway and the oilfields of Iraq and Iran in retaliation and launch extensive sabotage operations in France and the Low Countries.

A 29-page report, codenamed Operation Unthinkable, was presented to the Prime Minister on 22 May 1945, 14 days after the end of the war in Europe.

It assumed that the Third World War would start on 1 July 1945, probably with a surprise attack by 47 British and American divisions between Dresden and the Baltic.

The war cabinet plan ruled out ``total war'' against the Red Army, which outnumbered the Allies by more than two to one, adding that there was no reason why an Anglo-American invasion of Russia would fare any better than Hitler's Operation Barbarossa.

Historians had long believed that the tense period immediately after the meeting of the armies of West and East led to plans of this sort, but today's publication is the first proof of their existence.

Professor D.C. Watt, the eminent historian who has written the official history of the British cabinet office in wartime, said it was the first time the papers had been read by anyone other than the principals.

``Nobody has ever seen this kind of thing before,'' he said, ``but we have had strong suspicions that they must have been written.''

The Unthinkable plan was eventually rejected by Churchill on the advice of the Chiefs of Staff and replaced with a defensive scheme to guard against invasion by the Red Army..

re : The US plus the Japanese from the east.

The German High command were willing to put German troops at the disposal of the Western allies to use against the Soviets, but I think Japan would of been a different matter.

Would the American public agree to Americans fighting along side Japanese soldiers.

I don’t think the British public would agree and I think the reports of the holocaust would have had a major effect on any American, British German alliance .

Tony

Perhaps Churchill and Truman should have precipitated an attack on the Soviets in July 1945. The Russians were hundreds of miles into hostile territory (East Germany and Poland). The United States had the atomic bomb, which would have levelled Minsk, Leningrad, or Kiev, not to mention Soviet troop concentrations. There were hundreds of thousands of Wehrmacht troops who would have been very willing to fight on the Anglo-American side against the Soviet rapists and looters. The anti-Communist Poles would have risen against the Russians, as would have the Baltic states. The Soviets could have been pushed back to their 1939 borders in a few months. The Anglo-American monopoly on the atom bomb, plus support for nationalist uprisings in Ukraine, Central Asia, etc., would have forced the Russians to sue for peace, under a Brest-Litovsk type treaty.

The Soviets could have threatened Turkey, Greece, etc., but with heavy Anglo-American pressure on their forces in Central Europe and the possibility that the United States, after forcing the Japanese to an unconditional surrender, could have opened a second front in the Vladivostok area in short order, they would have been fools to do so.

In mid-1945, the U.S. leadership, including Harry Truman, could never have been persuaded to join the British in such a surprise attack. Remember that at the time, President Truman was making favorable remarks about "Unlce Joe" Stalin. Reportedly, Truman was angered at Winston Churchill's remarks, made in the President's home state of Missouri, about an "iron curtain" descending upon Europe. There were, in addition, highly placed Soviet agents in the U.S. State Department, of whom Alger Hiss was the most notorious. After Stalin had effectively communized most of Eastern Europe, Truman, Dean Acheson, et. al., turned anti-Communist. But by that point, any Allied military offensive in Europe was untenable.

The anti-anti-Communist mindset of the American leadership in 1945 was the probable reason that Churchill rejected the operation.

The USSR did not successfully test an atomic bomb until 1949. Granted, the Soviets could have released radiological, chemical, and biological weapons, but the Anglo-Americans could have responded in kind, with equal or superior delivery technology. Hitler did not cross the threshold into these weapons even when the Third Reich was in extremis; there is no reason to believe Stalin, more rational than the German Fuhrer, would have done otherwise.

In July 1945, Japan was virtually prostrate, with their military forces pushed back to their home islands, Korea, and Manchuria. Allied bombing had, by mid-1945, greatly curtailed Japanese industrial might. There are those who believe that the Japanese government was suing for peace before the atomic bombings and that said bombings were unnecessary. Without discussing whether the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were necessary, suffice it to say Japan was in no condition to be of much assistance to the USSR.

As for the Germans, remember that the Red Army took merciless vengance upon their nation. An important Soviet general bragged that "the blond hag (Germany) was in for a hard time." Soviet troops raped several million German women, from eight to 80 years of age. Most items of any value that were not hidden were stolen by the Russians. Unspeakable atrocities were inflicted on German POWs in Soviet camps. Machinery and factories would be boxed en masse back to the USSR, and over a million Germans died on a "Trail of Tears" from areas that had been German for centuries, like Silesia and the Sudetenland, to what would later become West Germany.

It is no wonder that German refugees fled from the Soviet enemy lines on the east to the Anglo-American lines on the west and why the German military fought the Soviets fiercely on a two year retreat from Russia back to Berlin, while fighting the Americans and British far less intensely. It is extremely unlikely that German soldiers would shoulder arms with such mortal enemies. On the other hand, they would have welcomed the chance to avenge their wives, girlfriends, mothers, and sisters, under the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes.

As for the Poles, the main resistance before the Soviet takeover was from the anti-Communist Polish Home Army that was more or less intact in mid-1945. The Baltic States, victims of mass exile by Stalin and too-willing collaborators with Hitler, were also an area that would have risen if given an opportunity. Don't forget, too, that guerilla warfare against the Soviet state continued in Ukraine until the early 1950s.

On top of all this, Stalin was a consummate realist who also believed in the inevitable victory of Communism. As a result, he would have retreated to the 1939 boundaries and await the next opportunity to advance the Communist cause. Furthermore, the British had no desire to recreate Operation Barbarossa. Thus, it would appear that had the British and the Americans took on the Soviets in mid-1945, the Red Tide would have retreated at least from the future East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic States.

There was a strong anti-Communist element in the Polish population. Remember that in late 1944, the nationalist Polish Home Army rebelled in Warsaw against the Nazis. The Red Army waited outside of Warsaw and let the Wehrmacht do the dirty work of defeating the anti-Communists before they pushed the Germans out. Hundreds of thousands of anti-Communist Poles never returned from service with the Western Allies. A British-American move against the Soviets would have triggered civil war in Poland, and possibly, in western Ukraine. The Baltic States were also restive; the resentment against the Soviet occupiers ran deep. In the early 1990s, it was this area that led the way to the breakup of the USSR.

Additionally, I believe that even if the Soviets courted the old Nazi leadership, the German armed forces, especially the Wehrmacht, would have supported a renewed Third Reich. Both the officers and the troops would have been happy to fight, even in American or British uniforms, to free their land from the Soviet yoke. The hard core Nazi group was so connected to Hitler that the fall of the Third Reich discredited them. Look how rapidly the West Germans adapted to democracy and free market economics after 12 years of Naziism and three years of Allied military occupation.

In short, the Red Army would have been facing Anglo-American forces, armed with nuclear weapons, in the unfriendly climes of East Germany and Poland. BTW, I believe the U.S. could have built numerous atomic bombs in short order, as the nation's industrial and scientific bases was at full steam in 1945.

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