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..

--my guess is the plans were aborted because they knew they had soviet sleepers in their midst, and in fdr's establishment, and that stalin had a copy of the plans within a day or two of them being written. They also new they would be starting such a campaign 100% infiltrated by communist sympathisers in all the liberated countries they were based in at that time of the end of the war. In short, it would have been a very bad play militarily, they stood a good chance of losing heavily. Quite a bit of the maqui, and the other resistance movements were all pro soviet, and they had literally millions of sympathisers in areas just saturated with modern weapons that had been abandoned all over recently. It would have been the mother of all behind the lines guerrilla wars almost instantly with the first advance against the soviets.

If the Red Army and the Wehrmacht united against the British and American armies, the English speaking nations would have been defeated soundly if they attacked the Soviets, especially with the active French Communist maquis in the Anglo-American rear. However, if you subscribe to the theory that the "Germans are always Germans," that is, conquerors, the victims of German conquests were the Slavic nations to the East. By Nazi racial mythology, the British, mainly of Germanic and Celtic origin, were more "Aryan" than the Slavs, who were regarded as Untermenschen. While the United States is more heterogeneous, in the 1940s, a majority of the U.S. population was of Northwestern European origin, as were almost all American political and military leaders. Thus, whether Nazi or not, the Germans would have been more inclined to side with the Anglo-Americans in a fight with the Soviets. Given these factors and accounting for German animosity toward the Soviets in light of their atrocities in eastern Germany, it is inconceivable that the Red Army and the Wehrmacht could have teamed up.

The following is a summary account of events in East Prussia at the end of the war (from Eastern Documentation Section of the German Federal Archives at Koblenz):

"In East Prussian villages within the triangle Gumbinnen-Goldap-Ebenrode the same scenes were witnessed, old men and boys being castrated and their eyes gouged out before being killed or burned alive. In nearby Metgethen, a suburb of Königsberg, recaptured by the German 5th Panzer Division, around 60 women were found in a demented state in a large villa. They had been raped on average 60 to 70 times a day. In nearly every home, the bodies of women and children were found raped and murdered. The bodies of two young women were found, their legs had been tied, one limb each between two trucks, and then torn apart when the trucks were driven away in opposite directions. At Metgethen railway station, a refugee train from Konigsberg, consisting of seven passenger coaches, was found and in each compartment seven to nine bestially mutilated bodies were discovered. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an ex captain in the Soviet Army, recalls, 'All of us knew very well that if girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction.'"

A German-Russian alliance in 1945 would have been as inconceivable as a Nazi-Zionist one.

I think that it would of been a very hit and miss operation, with limited benefits

Rear area security would of been a problem for both the Western Allies and Russia, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish nationalists on one side and Communist resistance on the other side.

Both sides would of been able to recruit German Troops, the Western allies could of used the remnants of the Russian Liberation Army to build a Russian army to fight on the Western side.

I cant see the Population of the West supporting another European war so soon after the defeat of Germany, and with the details of the holocaust coming out there would of been a revulsion at the thought of dealing with the Germans as allies.

Britain could of lost the Empire a lot quicker as troops ear marked for empire duties in the Middle East far East and Africa, would instead be needed on the new Front. The NKVD and SMERSH forerunners of the KGB and GRU would of been used to formant wars of revelation and liberation across the globe.

Also such a war would of further bankrupt Europe as money that was earmarked for national reconstruction such as the Marshal plan would instead be needed to maintain the armies needed to fight.

I think it was too much of a risk.

Even if we had beaten Russia what then there would still of been wars to fight in Africa, the Middle East and far East, Europe would be in a worse shape than after the Second World war. And with communism gone you would still get liberation movements accept they would be nationalist or religious

Tony

Did Churchill veto the proposal because of the potential difficulties or because Washington would not have cooperated? British intelligence was likely aware of Communist infiltration in the State Department; President Truman and his advisors were not anti-Soviet at this time. Remember that British and American troops were constrained from advancing eastward into Berlin, Vienna, and Prague in order to let the Soviets claim the honor of taking these capitals. Had Patton taken Prague and Montgomery captured Berlin, Germany would not have been divided, and at least Bohemia would have escaped the Communist clutches. Because of the treason of bureaucrats like Alger Hiss and the naivete of leaders like Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, I suspect Churchill realized that this Operation Impossible was indeed impossible.

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Thanks tonycavanagh. Note: this topic is from 11/16/2001. Blast from the Past. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.