In my last programme I looked at what Britain would do if the miracle of Dunkirk hadn’t happened. I concluded that Britain would most likely have come to terms with Hitler. Probably some time in June 1940. 

In just 12 months time, at the latest on 22 June, 1941, although probably much earlier without England involved in the war any longer, Hitler would turn on Russia.

British Historian, Alistair Horne, in his book To Lose a Battle wrote:

Had the BEF had been wiped out in northern France, it is difficult to see how Britain could have continued to fight; and with Britain out of the battle, it is even more difficult to see what combination of circumstances could have aligned America and Stalin's Russia to challenge Hitler.

In this programme I’m going to look at what might have happened to Russia when as Churchill had said of the looming Battle of Britain: The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Now that meant the Soviet Union.

Would Stalin have survived then? With the Panzers starting their engines lined up along the borders with Stalin’s Russia, and Guderian and the Panzer forces knowing how to fight a lightning war this time, base on their experience in France.

Tag words: Blitzkrieg; Lend Lease; Harry Hopkins; Alistair Horne; To Lose a Battle; Winston Churchill; Joseph Stalin; Heinz Guderian; Norman Gelb; Dunkirk: The Complete Story of the First Step in the Defeat of Hitler; Adolf Hitler; Theodore Roosevelt; fireside chat; Cordell Hull; Operation Barbarossa; Harry Truman; president Herbert Hoover; Colonel Yeaton; Ambassador Steinhardt; Maxim Litvinov;