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Fryer: Reviews - British CP and WW2

On 2 September 1939, the day before Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain issued a manifesto urging a “struggle on two fronts”: for a “military victory over Fascism” and for the removal of the Chamberlain government. [2] General Secretary Harry Pollitt was set to work to write a pamphlet, How to Win the War, which came out on 14 September and was hailed by Rajani Palme Dutt, before he knew better and before the pamphlet was withdrawn, as “being one of the finest things that [Pollitt] had produced, so clearly and simply presented”. It was William Gallacher, Communist MP for West Fife, who revealed this statement of Dutt’s to the CC, no doubt to Dutt’s embarrassment; and it is not the least juicy plum in this 50-year-old pudding of a book.

But on 14 September something else happened: the Daily Worker received a press telegram from the Soviet Union saying it was a robber war on both sides. Pollitt suppressed this telegram because it was against the line of the 2 September manifesto. However, at the next day’s meeting of the party’s Political Bureau, Dutt, ever responsive to his master’s voice, said the line would have to be revised. Indeed, Stalin had already given orders to that effect, in a private chat with Dimitrov on 7 September; Dimitrov had handed the word down to the Comintern Secretariat, which had approved his theses on 9 September, instructing the Communist Parties of France, Britain, Belgium and the USA in particular that they must immediately correct their political line.