Pedro Fernández Barbadillo (Bilbao, 1965) holds a PhD in Public Law from the Universidad San Pablo CEU and a Master’s degree in Journalism from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the newspaper El País. He works as a journalist for several Spanish media such as libertaddigital.com and gaceta.es. He was director of the news services of 7NN channel (2022-2023). He has written two humorous books about Basque nationalism and the socialist Prime Minister Rodríguez Zapatero, another about Spain under Franco’s regime (Eternamente Franco), a selection of characters and episodes of the Spanish Golden Age (Eso no estaba en mi libro de historia del Imperio español) and a history of the United States through its presidents, its Constitution and its electoral system (Los césares del imperio americano). He coordinated the book edited in 2020 by the ECR group of the European Parliament entitled Historical Memory: threat to peace in Europe.
In the first week of October 1939, Poland was divided between Berlin and Moscow, whose armies even held joint parades in places like Brest-Litovsk. Stalin then began to implement the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. On November 30, the USSR invaded Finland, because its government (a coalition of liberals and social-democrats, not threatening fascists) had refused to accept the installation of Red Army military bases and to exchange part of its territory.
During November 1939 and April 1940, the war involved only Germany, France, Great Britain and the remnants of the Polish armies, but no battles similar to those of the Great War took place on the Franco-German border. Killing took place only in Poland and Finland.
Even the air forces restrained themselves and did not carry out bombing raids on civilian targets. The only battles of those months were fought at sea, such as the sinking of the battleship Royal Oak by the submarine U-47 at the base of Scapa Flow, which caused more than 800 dead, and the Battle of the Río de la Plata in December 1939, in which three British cruisers cornered a German battleship, the Admiral Graf Spee, whose captain sunk it rather than surrendered.
During those months, the belligerent governments took various measures. Military staffs continued to draw up plans. And both sides planned the occupation of neutral Kingdom of Norway.
On February 11, the USSR and Germany signed a trade agreement, whereby Stalin supplied Germany with raw materials and foodstuffs, especially oil. Then, the Allies agreed to give Moscow a lesson, even at the risk of the USSR upgrading its pact with the Third Reich to a military one, and began to prepare for the bombing of the Caucasus oil fields.
On March 13, Finland signed the Treaty of Moscow with the USSR, which forced it to make large territorial concessions, although it escaped annexation. Up to that moment the Franco-British had done nothing useful to help the Scandinavian country, except to pronounce lyrical messages of support and to expel the USSR from the League of Nations.
In the same month, the Franco-British Supreme War Council began preparations for Operation Pike in earnest.
Several British planes, based at Habbaniyah, near Baghdad, penetrated Soviet airspace to take photographs of Baku, Grozny and Batumi, in order to choose targets. Tests were also conducted at the Woolwich arsenal to prepare the most suitable explosives.
Taking advantage of the absence of ‘hot war’ in Europe, the British moved 48 Bristol bombers, plus some Vickers Wellesley for night bombing, to the Middle East on 1 April. The French assigned 65 Martin Maryland bombers plus 24 Farman F.222 for night missions.
The operation was planned to last three months and in that time it was estimated to drop over a thousand tons of explosives (4,000 tons of explosives were dropped on Dresden in a single night). Squadron bases were to be in Turkey, Iran (independent and neutral, though anti-Soviet, nations) and Syria, under French mandate.
The start of Pike was set for May 15, but five days earlier, Germany launched on France, Belgium and Holland. We know about Operation Pike because the Germans captured a train at La Charité-sur-Loire loaded with boxes of official documents.
So few bombs and in low precision bombing would not have damaged the Soviet refineries, but perhaps it would have meant a casus belli between France, Great Britain and the USSR. Had it been executed, it might have provoked a confrontation between the European democracies and the two European totalitarian regimes, which would not have been as surprising as the alliance between Winston Churchill and Josif Stalin.
