From the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Allies had been intensely hostile to the Soviet Union and became even more so after Stalin attacked Finland in late 1939. That Winter War went badly as the heavily outnumbered Finns very effectively resisted the Soviet forces leading to an Allied plan to send several divisions to fight alongside the Finns. According to Sean McMeekin's ground-breaking 2021 book
Stalin's War, the Soviet dictator became aware of this dangerous military threat, and his concerns over looming Allied intervention persuaded him to quickly settle the war with Finland on relatively generous terms.
Despite this,
the Allied plans to attack the USSR continued, now shifting to Operation Pike, the idea of using their bomber squadrons based in Syria and Iraq to destroy the Baku oilfields in the Soviet Caucasus, while also trying to enlist Turkey and Iran into their planned attack against Stalin. By this date, Soviet agriculture had become heavily mechanized and dependent upon oil, and Allied strategists believed that the successful destruction of the Soviet oilfields would eliminate much of that country's fuel supply, thereby possibly producing a famine that might bring down the distasteful Communist regime.
Yet virtually all of these Allied assumptions were completely incorrect. Only a small fraction of Germany's oil came from the Soviets, so its elimination would have little impact upon the German war effort. As subsequent events soon proved, the USSR was enormously strong in military terms rather than weak. The Allies believed that just a few weeks of attacks by dozens of existing bombers would totally devastate the oil fields, but later in the war vastly larger aerial attacks had only limited impact upon oil production elsewhere.
Successful or not,
the planned Allied attack against the USSR would have represented the largest strategic bombing offensive in world history to that date, and it had been scheduled and rescheduled during the early months of 1940, only finally abandoned after Germany's armies crossed the French border, surrounded and defeated the Allied ground forces, and knocked France out of the war.
The victorious Germans were fortunate enough to capture all the secret documents regarding Operation Pike, and they achieved a major propaganda coup by publishing them in facsimile and translation, so that all knowledgeable individuals soon knew that the Allies had been on the verge of attacking the Soviets. This missing fact helps to explain why Stalin remained so distrustful of Churchill's diplomatic efforts prior to the Hitler's Barbarossa attack a year later.
However, for more than three generations the remarkable story of how the Allies came so close to losing the war by attacking the USSR has been totally excluded from virtually all Western histories. Therefore, when I discovered these facts in the 1952 memoirs of Sisley Huddleston, a leading Anglo-French journalist, I initially assumed he must have been delusional:
The notion that the Allies were preparing to launch a major bombing offensive against the Soviet Union just a few months after the outbreak of World War II was obviously absurd, so ridiculous a notion that not a hint of that long-debunked rumor had ever gotten into the standard history texts I had read on the European conflict. But for Huddleston to have still clung to such nonsensical beliefs even several years after the end of the war raised large questions about his gullibility or even his sanity. I wondered whether I could trust even a single word he said about anything else.
However, not long afterward I encountered quite a surprise in a 2017 article published in
The National Interest, an eminently respectable periodical. The short piece carried the descriptive headline
"In the Early Days of World War II, Britain and France Planned to Bomb Russia." The contents absolutely flabbergasted me, and with Huddleston's credibility now fully established — and the credibility of my standard history textbooks equally demolished — I went ahead and substantially drew upon his account for my long article
"American Pravda: Post-War France and Post-War Germany."
If all our World War II history books can exclude a fully-documented story of such enormous importance, they obviously cannot be trusted about anything else.
