OPERATION UNTHINKABLE

Whether it was being planned as the last military operation of World War Two or as the first such operation of World War Three, very few people outside a rather narrow circle of historians and Churchillian buffs know the name of Operation Unthinkable and what it was all about. Those for whom it will become a revelation, will find it incredible, and so it is, although it is true, while the reader is advised not to take it too seriously.

“Operation Unthinkable” is not a metaphor for something else. It was a real code word for a real operation. Initially introduced as “a highly improbable event,” it was promptly rephrased as “a purely hypothetical contingency.” Its author was none other than Churchill himself, and it appears that coming up with this idea he was opposed by both the British and the Americans, with the sole exception of General Patton. But by the end of 1945 Patton was dead (as a result of a suspiciously freak accident), and Churchill was out of his job (temporarily and deliberately, as Stalin would say), and the truly “unthinkable,” and essentially nonsensical, operation did not go anywhere.

It starts with the following tirade in a letter to British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, written by Churchill (still the Prime Minister) in May 1945, with a no small touch of his customary literary flair:

“…Terrible things have happened. A tide of Russian domination is sweeping forward. After it is over (the war), the territories under Russian control will include the Baltic provinces (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), all of eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, a large part of Austria, the whole of Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Bulgaria. This constitutes one of the most melancholy events in the history of Europe, and one to which there has been no parallel. It is to an early and speedy showdown and settlement with Russia that we must now turn our hopes.”

And now, to the essence of the Operation Unthinkable... Ostensibly worried about the might of the Soviet armies at the end of World War II, Churchill envisaged an apocalyptic scenario, in which the USSR entered into a strategic alliance with…Japan--- (Wow! The man really understood a thing or two about recent history and current affairs. Those who have not yet read my entry Yamamoto, published on this blog on February 19^th, 2011, are encouraged to read it, to understand what I mean) ---and, having overrun Eastern and Central Europe, continued with its takeover of Western Europe, on the road to world domination. With this contingency in mind, Churchill suggested that the United Kingdom and the United States together, and enlisting the military remains of Nazi Germany, stage a preemptive attack, or at least put up greatest active resistance to the prospective Soviet aggression, and recommended that the American atomic bomb be used as the new Alliance’s trump card against Comrade Stalin’s divisions. Churchill was obviously showing off his confidential knowledge of the American atomic program, but he somehow failed to realize that having discharged all his masculinity at Alamogordo and on Japan, Uncle Sam’s atomic arsenal could not replenished right away, to be menacingly waved at Russia.)

Some ultraconservatives have actually praised Churchill for his silly and hazardous idea, proclaiming him a prophet of sorts, who had envisaged the very worst-case scenarios of the cold war era, developed in earnest by NATO and other American allies. But before we resign ourselves to a rational analysis of this irrational plan, certain important things need to be factored into the picture. By the time of his conception of the Operation Unthinkable, he [Churchill] was already well aware of Stalin’s plan to blackmail him into political concessions with material of personal nature. He was also aware about the British security leaks from his office all the way to Stalin’s. In fact, historians know that Operation Unthinkable had indeed been leaked to Moscow, virtually, since day one of its existence on paper. Stalin obviously had no interest in rolling Soviet tanks over Western Europe, and no practical expectation of a continued overt relationship with Japan, soon to be occupied by the American troops, anyway. He was also apprised of the fact that, even though the United States was serious about the development and production of the atomic bomb, the existing amounts of enriched uranium and plutonium were insufficient for producing atomic weapons right away in a sufficient quantity, and he had little to fear from the American nuclear genie during this critical period before the Soviet Union would itself acquire a nuclear deterrent to Uncle Sam’s fright-fest. (My most pertinent entry Who Stole The A-Bomb will be posted soon.)

Having taken all of this into account, I am tempted to conclude that Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable was nothing more than his personal statement to Stalin, like so many people in an argument shout obscenities at the other, loud and feisty, but otherwise meaningless. Paraphrasing the proverb, for each big man so much littleness.