Russia at war 1941-1945

—Halifax or Daladier?—not Chamberlain, of course, for who would want to see him! All the same, there was obviously "something in it" if all the top army and navy and air-force leaders were attending the banquet... These were the kind of confused impressions people had in Moscow at the time. Certainly nothing had been done in London or Paris to fire the Soviet public's imagination.

Present-day Soviet historians treat this Anglo-French Military Mission with the utmost severity. "Here were generals and admirals who had either reached the retiring age, or were holding only secondary posts... The British Government's attitude to the Mission was so frivolous that it had not even given them any powers. Only towards the end of the talks, after a lot of insisting by the Soviet side, did Drax produce some sort of credentials, but even these did not allow him to sign any kind of agreement with the USSR. The

credentials of the French general were no better. All they had been empowered to do was to conduct negotiations with us." The History recalls that after the Soviet Government had proposed that Britain and France send military missions to Moscow, these people

"had taken eleven days to prepare for their departure, and had then taken six more days to travel by slow cargo-passenger boat to Leningrad, and thence to Moscow".

[ IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 168. In Maisky's Memoirs Admiral Drax is made to look like

someone straight out of P. G. Wodehouse]

The principle underlying the Soviet proposals was not only reciprocity, but also equality in the war effort to be put into this mutual assistance by the two sides. But even before Shaposhnikov outlined his proposals in detail, he had already been taken aback by the British reaction to his first mention of the "respective contributions":

When B. M. Shaposhnikov said that the Soviet Union was ready to make available

against the aggressor 120 infantry divisions, sixteen cavalry divisions, 5,000 medium and heavy guns, 9,000 to 10,000 tanks, and 5,000 to 5,500 bomber and fighter

planes, General Heywood, a member of the British Mission, talked about five

infantry and one mechanised divisions. This in itself was enough to suggest a

frivolous British attitude to the talks with the Soviet Union.

[IVOVSS, vol. I, p. 169, quoting from AVP SSSR (Foreign Policy Archives), Anglo-

French-Soviet Negotiations in 1939, v. Ill, f. 138.]

The History does not, however, mention the suggestions of the French, who had a numerically far larger army than the British.

The military convention the Russians proposed was to be based on three eventualities: 1) IF THE BLOC OF AGGRESSORS ATTACK FRANCE AND BRITAIN. In this

case the Soviet Union will make available seventy per cent of the armed forces that France and Britain will direct against the "main aggressor", i.e. Germany. Thus, if they use ninety divisions, the Soviet Union will use sixty-three infantry divisions and six cavalry divisions, with the appropriate number of guns, tanks and planes—

altogether about two million men.

In this case Poland must participate with all her armed forces, in view of her

agreements with Britain and France. Poland must concentrate forty to forty-five

divisions on her Western borders and against East Prussia. The British and French Governments must obtain Poland's undertaking to let the Soviet armed forces pass

through the Vilno Bulge and, if possible, through Lithuania to the borders of East Prussia, and also, if necessary, through Galicia.

2) IF THE AGGRESSION IS DIRECTED AGAINST POLAND AND RUMANIA.