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  4.  » Churchill’s secret plan to start World War THREE … in 1945

New book charts PM’s bid to launch surprise attack on Stalin straight after defeating Hitler in scheme so bold it was codenamed: Operation Unthinkable

  • Churchill ordered plan to be drawn up when it became clear Soviet Union wanted to keep captured territory
  • In May 1945, Joseph Stalin’s troops had taken Berlin and were occupying Poland and rest of Eastern Europe
  • Attack plan was drawn up by Brigadier Geoffrey Thompson and presented to Churchill and military chiefs
  • Would have seen Allied troops led by Britain and America push Soviet troops back from Berlin

Harry Howard – Mail Online Oct 25, 2021

With the defeat of Nazi Germany more or less certain in February 1945, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill praised his Russian counterpart Joseph Stalin as a ‘friend whom we can trust’.

He was speaking at the Yalta Conference, where the two men were joined by US president Franklin Roosevelt to discuss the post-war reorganisation of Europe after the Soviet Union’s central role in overcoming Adolf Hitler.

But when Soviet troops captured Berlin in May 1945 and Stalin showed no willingness to relinquish his control of Central and Eastern European countries, Churchill ordered the creation of a plan that would have plunged the world into another devastating conflict

The astonishing blueprint – officially named Operation Unthinkable – outlined how British and American forces would embark on a ground, air and naval offensive against their ally the Soviet Union.

The War Cabinet files outlining the plan – and the recorded horror of military chiefs which ultimately killed it off – were declassified in 1998 and now sit in the National Archives.

The blueprint acknowledged the horrendous odds – the Soviets had 170 military divisions, compared to Britain the US’s combined 47.

To redress the balance, the plan’s architect – Brigadier Geoffrey Thompson – even proposed rearming troops from the Wehrmacht and murderous Nazi SS, who had been in charge of the death camp network which carried out the Holocaust.

Operation Unthinkable is outlined in historian Giles Milton’s new book Checkmate in Berlin, which is being published on Thursday by John Murray Press.

Churchill ordered his joint planning staff to draw up the blueprint at the beginning of May in 1945, shortly after Hitler had committed suicide and the Red Army had captured Berlin.

The papers in the National Archives reveal how the aim of the plot was to impose on Russia the ‘will of the United States and British Empire.’

Milton writes of the ‘remarkable’ level of detail in the plan. It included tables, charts and maps, along with tables listing the strength of both the Soviet and Allied forces.

From July 1,1945, Allied forces would launch a surprise attack on Stalin’s forces, pushing the Red Army back to the Oder and Neisse rivers, 55 miles east of Berlin.

By this point, Soviet troops were occupying Berlin and had control of Eastern Europe, including Poland.

The Western assault, which would be the largest tank offensive in history with 8,000 armoured vehicles used, would end with a huge showdown in the countryside in Soviet-occupied Pila, in what is now north-west Poland.

Despite the significant difference in the number of Allied divisions when compared to their potential adversaries, Thompson outlined how naval superiority would be used to good effect – with a seizure early on of the Baltic port of Stettin.

Thompson hoped that stopping Western exports to Russia would cripple its military. Milton explains that the Soviet Union was dependent on America for explosives, as well as rubber, aluminium, copper and 50 per cent of its aviation fuel.

 

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