THE BATTLE OF MOSCOW AND THE SOVIET-BRITISH WARTIME ALLIANCE

By Boris Belitzky 

During Christmas 1941, one of the greatest battles of World War Two, the battle of Moscow, reached its climax. 

When Hitler, in June 1941, attacked the Soviet Union, few military experts in the West expected the Soviet Army to hold out for long. For example, the Military Correspondent of the "Evening Standard" in London wrote condescendingly: "The Poles fought for 18 days. Stalin can do better than this." And the "Daily Express" - in its leader - mused "The Red Army may, or may not, prove that it can fight..."

The early months of the war seemed to support such doubts, and, by the beginning of December 1941, Hitler's forces were at the approaches to Moscow. But here the offensive of General von Bock's army group petered out. And at dawn on December 5th the Soviet forces defending Moscow began a powerful counteroffensive. The moment chosen was ideal - the enemy could no longer advance, but had not yet "dug in" and built up defence positions. Throughout December the Soviet forces continued their counteroffensive. It was the success of this counteroffensive that prompted the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to say in the House of Commons: "In Hitler's launching of the Nazi campaign upon Russia, we can already see that he made one of the outstanding blunders of history."

Russia's victory in the Battle of Moscow did much, in the words of the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, to put Anglo-Soviet relations "on a sound permanent basis now and for after the war."

It was at that time, in the latter half of December, that Eden paid a visit to Moscow for talks with Stalin.  The visit was a well-kept secret, and the British learned of it only later. During the visit the British Foreign Secretary was taken to see one of the sectors of the battlefront, where General Georgy Zhukov's forces had just completed a big advance. Eden was amazed to see the countless abandoned German tanks and other vehicles at the roadside. He was struck by the scale of the German defeat. Never before in the Second World War had the Germans sustained such a crushing defeat.

Today we can, of course, admit that – in addition to the fantastic heroism of the people - the sheer space and the climate of Russia also played a part in bringing this historic victory about. But, in a historical context, it was all-important that the victory at the approaches to Moscow fortified the emerging wartime alliance of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States.

As The Times of London put it on January 2nd, 1942 "Collaboration between the United States, Soviet Russia, and Great Britain for the purposes of war is the one sure guarantee that the Axis threat to civilisation will be repelled and broken." And the paper added, "Its continuance after the war affords the best - perhaps the only hope of rebuilding our civilization on a new and securer basis of ordered freedom and shared prosperity."