Andrew Cockburn

Few people now remember that for many months after the First World War ended in November 1918 the blockade of Germany, where the population was already on the edge of starvation, was maintained with full rigour. By the following spring, the German authorities were projecting a 50 per cent increase in the infant mortality rate. In a later memoir, John Maynard Keynes attributed the prolongation of civilian punishment ‘to a cause inherent in bureaucracy. The blockade had become by that time a very perfect instrument. It had taken four years to create and was Whitehall’s finest achievement; it had evoked the qualities of the English at their subtlest. Its authors had grown to love it for its own sake.’

Between 22 June 1941 and 9 May 1945 the Red Army of Workers and Peasants disposed of ten million German troops, destroyed over six hundred enemy divisions, liberated all of Eastern Europe and finally stormed, unaided, the ‘lair of the fascist beast’, Berlin. This achievement must be considered one of the most extraordinary in military history, for at the outset the Russians were caught completely by surprise and almost completely unprepared. Most of their professional military leadership had recently been consigned to the firing squad or labour camps, and had been replaced by incompetent time-servers. Within a few months of the attack a large proportion of the Soviet Union’s industrial and natural resources had fallen into enemy hands. The Russians’ British allies assumed at the time of the invasion that Germany would be victorious within a month or six weeks. Yet by 1943 the Soviet Union had trained new commanders and had rebuilt its industrial machine, far behind the lines, in greater strength than before. It was the British war effort that had become the sideshow.