Abstract
At The Same Time As Moscow Started To Activate Its Policies In The eastern Baltic, it became clear that the British strategy that had been pursued so far was in ruins. After the dismal performance of British forces in Norway, Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister on May 8, promising to steer Britain’s war effort with more vigor and military acumen. Churchill’s abilities as a war leader were soon put to test when German forces launched operation Fall Gelb on May 10 to knock France out of the war. The fall of France in June 1940 left London without an ally on the continent. Peace with Hitler was seriously discussed in the government, but Churchill and Anthony Eden resisted the prodding by Chamberlain and Halifax to start negotiations, fearing the loss of morale of the working people.1 In any case, there was no chance of receiving honorable terms from Hitler, and on July 10 the German Luftwaffe started its campaign to gain air superiority over England in preparation for an invasion of the British Isles.
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Notes
Elisabeth Barker, Churchill and Eden at War (London: Macmillan, 1978), 144.
David Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan (London: Cassell, 1971), June 20, 1940. The same view was taken by Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, War Cabinet, June 22, W. M. (40), 175th Conclusions, The National Archives, UK (hereafter: TNA). John Harvey (ed.), The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (London: Collins, 1978); Ben Pimlott (ed.), The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton 1940–45 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986); John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939- 1955 (London: Phoenix Press, 2005).
On Baltic propaganda, Magnus Ilmjärv, Silent Submission: Formation of Foreign Policy of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania: Period from Mid-1920’s to Annexation in 1940 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2004), 403–09.
For the American but to some extent also the British views, see Leonard Leshuk, US Intelligence Perceptions of Soviet Power, 1921–1946 (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2003), 119–30.
Gabriel Gorodetsky, Stafford Cripps in Moscow, 1940–1942: Diaries and Papers (London; Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007), 1–21; Peter Clarke, The Cripps Version: The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps (London: Allen Lane, 2002).
Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War (London: HMSO, 1962), 454.
Clarke, The Cripps Version. On the Moscow period, Harry Hanak, “Sir Stafford Cripps as Ambassador in Moscow, June 1941-January 1942,” The English Historical Review, vol. 97, no. 383 (April 1982): 332–44; Gabriel Gorodetsky, Stafford Cripps’ Mission to Moscow, 1940–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
J. R. M. Butler, Grand Strategy, vol. 2 (London: HMSO, 1957), 209.
Robert Manne, “The British Decision for Alliance with Russia, May 1939,” in Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 9, no. 3 (July 1974): 8, 14, 15.
Halifax at the House of Lords, December 5, 1939, quoted in Kaarel Robert Pusta, Soviet Union and the Baltic States (New York: J. Felsberg 1942), 45.
Churchill’s speech at the Carlton Club, June 28, 1939, cited in Louise Grace Shaw, The British Political Elite and the Soviet Union 1937–1939 (London; Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003), 178; Daily Telegraph, June 8, 1939.
John Harvey (ed.), The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey, 1937–1940 (London: Collins, 1970), June 5, 1939; Anthony Eden, The Reckoning (London: Casell, 1965), 55.
Winston Churchill, Second World War: The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1949), 306.
Chubarian, Aleksandr O. (ed.), Dnevnik Diplomata, London, 1934–1943: Ivan Mikhailovich Maiskii: Kniga 2, Chast 1 (Moskva: Nauka, 2009), 28–31.
On the Russian intervention, Markku Ruotsila, Churchill and Finland: A Study in Anticommunism and Geopolitics (New York: Routledge, 2005), 17–44.
Thomas Munch-Petersen, The Strategy of Phoney War: Britain, Sweden, and the Iron Ore Question, 1939–1940 (Stockholm: Militarhistorika Forlaget, 1981), 35–38, 109–11; Karl Lautenschläger, “Plan ‘Catherine’: The British Baltic Operation, 1940,” Journal of Baltic Studies, vol. 5, issue 3 (Autumn 1974): 211–21.
Christopher Bell, Churchill and Sea Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 157; Andrew Lambert, “The Only British Advantage: Sea Power and Strategy, September 1939—June 1940,” in Michael H. Clemmesen and Marcus S. Faulkner, Northern European Overture to War, 1939–1941: From Memelto Barbarossa (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 45–74.
War Cabinet conclusions, July 29, August 8, August 9 and August 13, ibid. On the isolation of the Baltic ministers in London, Ernst Jaakson, Eestile (Tallinn: SE & S, 1995), 193.
Ibid. On Cripps’s preconceptions, Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 103.
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© 2014 Kaarel Piirimäe
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Piirimäe, K. (2014). British Perceptions and Reactions, 1939–1940. In: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Baltic Question. The World of the Roosevelts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442345_3
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