My Amazon Review of Sean McKeekin's "Stalin's War: A New History of World War II"

 

Stalin Wins

 

Bard College history professor Sean McKeekin has written an interesting revisionist history of World War II. In his view the real winner of the Second World War was Stalin’s Russia even after the horrendous losses it suffered. All of Stalin’s pre-war aims as outlined in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 were achieved and then some. In Europe Stalin ends up with redefining the Finnish, Polish and Romanian borders along with his capture of the three Baltic states. In the East he ends up controlling Manchuria and North Korea. Not bad for a leader who looked at the jaws of defeat in December 1941 with the German army at the gates of Moscow.

 

How did Stalin do it. McKeekin gives great credit to the Soviet-Japan nonaggression pact of May 1940 which avoided a two-front war. It came about, in part, because Hitler never informed Japan of his plan to invade Russia. Had he done so, McKeekin argues that Japan may have moved north into Russia instead of south into the Dutch Indies. I would respectfully disagree because after Russia bloodied Japan’s nose in Manchuria in 1939 and the collapse of Holland and France in 1940, the way was open for Japan to attack the French, British and Dutch possessions in southeast Asia.

 

That said, through the efforts of Soviet spy Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department the Japan-U.S. antagonism was intensified. White was behind the oil sanctions against Japan and the author of the Hull note which signaled which called for a pullout of Japanese forces in Indochina and parts of China. Remember it was Moscow’s goal to have Japan tied down with a war with the United States. Russia got its wish.

 

McKeekin criticizes Britain for not bombing Russia’s Baku oilfields which were supplying 40% of Germany’s oil and the failure of Britain for not coming to the aid of Finland after Russia’s invasion in early 1940. He wanted to see an all-out fight against totalitarianism. But what was Britain, standing alone to do. It could not fight both Hitler and Stalin.

 

McKeekin writes at length about the lend lease aid given to Russia after Hitler’s invasion. He is way too detailed here, but the fact remains Russia received billions of dollars in aid without conditions. To McKeekin lend lease Administrator Harry Hopkins was “objectively” (my word) a Soviet asset. And it was the lend lease aid that came just in time to save Moscow in 1941 and Stalingrad in 1942. Further by 1943, Roosevelt with Hopkins present at the Teheran Conference all but concedes Eastern Europe to Stalin.

 

At the end of the war, we see White influencing the Morgenthau Plan to deindustrialize Germany. That plan gives backbone to the German Army to undertake the Battle of the Bulge. Just after that at the Yalta Conference we see Roosevelt ratifying the Soviet facts on the ground in Eastern Europe.

 

I don’t buy into all of McKeekin’s assertions, but it does make for an interesting book, save for the over-detailing of U.S. lend lease aid to Russia which should have been left for an appendix.

For the full amazon URL see: Stalin Wins (amazon.com)