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08.05.2020 15:25:31
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WWII;
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По мнению Гамелена: "happy complement to the Scandinavian operations"
At the morning meeting of the War Cabinet on January 12, Halifax told his colleagues Sweden was still emphatically opposed to taking action that might provoke the Germans.
The following day Brigadier Christopher G. Ling, former Director of Military tary Operations in India, returned from a fact-finding mission to Finland. Ling told the War Cabinet that Marshal Mannerheim believed he could hold off the Red Army until May if 30,000 Allied troops were sent to northern Finland. Finnish nish forces then could be concentrated against Soviet forces engaged in Karelia. The old aristocrat wanted the Allies to send regular troops to Finland by trickling them through Sweden as small groups of "volunteers." Ling added that "Field Marshal Mannerheim's final observation had been that, if we could stop supplies of oil from Baku reaching Russia, this would end the war against Finland land"
On January 15, William Bullitt, the emphatically anti-Communist American ambassador in Paris who had been posted to Moscow immediately prior to the arrival of Lawrence Steinhardt, summarized a conversation with Alexis St. Leger-Leger, the loose-lipped Secretary retary General of the French Foreign Ministry. In this conversation, Leger leaked news of a French plan to attack Petsamo with Polish forces, as well as the British opposition to it (this will be discussed below). The secretary was very nervous, Bullitt advised Washington, that a German attack in the West was imminent but cryptically added that "the French Government had by no means forgotten the power of the Finns," apparently meaning that if tiny Finland could stand up to the USSR, then France, the victor of World War 1, could surely blunt a German attack.
Leger also told Bullitt that the British were "entirely idiotic" to hope the Soviets might someday join the Allied cause against Hitler and that the French had proposed to bombard the oil fields of Baku and Batum with aircraft and warships.
With the exception of General Gamelin's half hearted Saar offensive, the Western Front had now been quiet for over four months. Virtually nothing had been done to reverse the partition of Poland or to prevent Stalin from completing his conquest of Finland. French morale, already suspect, sagged still further. Daladier sensed this and hoped to lift French spirits by undertaking operations against the USSR. He therefore instructed Gamelin and Admiral Francois Darlan "to prepare a memorandum concerning eventual intervention for the destruction of the Russian oil fields". Gamelin responded favorably, hoping to deprive Germany of oil and greatly weaken the Soviet economy. He predicted that the failure to protect Russia from becoming an Allied target would discredit Stalin and bring his government to "total collapse." He also told Daladier that the scheme was a "happy complement to the Scandinavian operations," but if those failed to materialize, striking the Caucasus would be all the more desirable.
Patrick Osborn. Operation Pike: Britain Versus the Soviet Union, 1939-1941 (Contributions in Military Studies)