Report: Britain Planned Soviet Attack

Within days of Germany’s World War II defeat, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered his aides to draft contingency plans for an Anglo-American invasion of the Soviet Union, a British newspaper reported Thursday.

Citing documents recently discovered in Britain’s public archives, the Daily Telegraph said the plan, code-named “Operation Unthinkable,” eventually was rejected by Churchill and replaced with a strategy to guard against invasion by Josef Stalin’s Red Army.

Historians had long believed that the tense period immediately after the war gave rise to such invasion plans, but they had never been able to prove it until the documents were found, the newspaper said.

The battle plan, presented as a report to Churchill on May 22, 1945--14 days after the end of the war in Europe--included the use of up to 100,000 German troops to back up 500,000 British and American soldiers attacking through northern Germany, the newspaper reported.