How Churchill’s Successor Gave Stalin the MiG

Seventy-nine years to the day that Keir Starmer, leader of Britain’s Labour Party, became prime minister, a previous Labour leader, Clement Attlee, had decisively defeated Winston Churchill’s Conservatives in the election of 1945, less than two months after the end of the war in Europe. It was a moment of fundamental importance in British history: Churchill, the man who was to a very large degree responsible for the Allied victory in the war, was out, replaced by Attlee.

Although generally regarded as a man far more interested in domestic social reform than in anything else, Attlee, not unlike his predecessor, left a transformative legacy in world politics—only for the worse.

At home, as he would write in a private letter years later, Attlee aimed to provide to the people “the things all should enjoy in a modern community.” Within mere months of taking office, the Labour Party began passing a set of laws that created the British welfare state, starting with the National Insurance Bill in February 1946. Attlee pursued his policy in a country essentially bankrupt after World War II, with a defense budget amounting to a sixth of annual economic output, and a similar proportion of men still serving in the armed forces. On Aug. 14, 1945, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes, a government adviser, had already warned of the possibility of a “financial Dunkirk,” a total budgetary collapse. Five days later, this prospect came much closer when the United States ended Lend-Lease support of Britain, upon Japan’s acceptance of surrender terms.

To avoid impending fiscal disaster, Attlee acted quickly with a combination of crude immorality and ruthless cynicism that few remember. But the catastrophic strategic consequences of his actions reverberated across the globe from Cuba to North Korea, transforming the military balance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War and directly affecting the United States—an impact that continues to be felt to this day.

First, at the start of December 1945, he secured a $5 billion loan from the United States. Such a sum is a trifle in today’s world of trillion-dollar budgets, but at the time, it saved Britain’s fiscal position. In itself, the loan was a reasonable continuation of an essential wartime alliance. Yet the political significance of funding a British socialist experiment with American capitalist money was far from morally pure.

Given the scale of Britain’s fiscal difficulties and the scale of the planned welfare state, the loan was only a temporary solution. Attlee was ready for a bigger idea. On Jan. 5, 1947, he called the preparation for defense against the Soviet Union—the policy preferred by the chiefs of staff of the armed forces—a “strategy of despair.” Instead, Attlee wanted an accommodation with the USSR, and he had already argued that Britain should largely withdraw from the Middle East, and also from Greece, where the government was fighting a difficult civil war against Communists.

This was too much even for Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary and a core member of the Labour leadership. He wrote to Attlee that the proposed policy was equivalent to the appeasement of Hitler. Almost simultaneously, the chiefs of staff threatened a collective resignation. Attlee needed a way out. Again, he leaned on the central pillar of postwar European peace and prosperity, America. On Feb. 21, 1947, Bevin explained to the United States that Britain could no longer support Greece. The Americans, for lack of alternatives, agreed to help the Greeks, and a few months later they declared the “Truman Doctrine” of supporting “free peoples” fighting against armed minorities—Communists. British withdrawal from Italy, and many other places, soon followed.

Even with the handover of security responsibility to America, the problem of increased welfare spending in a barely solvent country defied solution and would finally be eased only by the Marshall Plan, which granted Britain another $3 billion starting in March 1948. The flow of this aid ended in December 1951. By this time, Attlee was out of office, and Churchill was back.

In the middle of the great fiscal crises that enveloped Britain between the end of Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan, Attlee personally authorized two export transactions with the Soviet Union for the sale of jet engines manufactured by Rolls-Royce—specifically, 10 Nene and 10 Derwent engines in May 1946, and a further 15 Nenes and 20 Derwents in March 1947. The transactions were small in scale: The two sales to the USSR earned Rolls-Royce the rather limited sum of £364,000, with the Nene priced at £7,300 and the smaller Derwent at £6,050. The Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust has not provided any comparative information concerning the company’s sales in 1946 and 1947. Nonetheless, it is possible to say that the money could not have been of much significance to Rolls-Royce. As for Britain as a whole, it was a trifle. By comparison, Britain imported grain and flour worth £3,248,000 from the USSR in September 1948 alone.

Since Bevin was comparing Stalin’s regime to the Nazis in January 1947, it was not the case that Attlee’s cabinet was seized with optimistic delusions concerning the nature of the USSR. In fact, already on June 5, 1946, Attlee had adopted Churchill’s phrase, “the Iron Curtain” when speaking of disagreements with the Soviet Union. At the same time, Attlee cynically called on Britain to “try and understand the Russian mind and Russian history” in pursuit of better relations. Remarkably, this attitude toward Russia, practically verbatim, is still common in 2025.

Attlee, at least, would quickly drop the act. In a speech on the occasion of May Day 1948, Attlee called Soviet methods as “ruthless and unscrupulous” as those of the Nazis. But the damage had been done. The 55 British engines, including five improved Nene IIs, were all delivered by November 1947. Attlee’s cabinet had handed over a critically important military technology to a regime that it had compared to the Nazis, in private before deliveries were complete, and in public shortly after the contracts had been fulfilled.

The engines, once delivered, led to a revolution in the Soviet aviation industry. At the time of the purchase, the Soviet Union manufactured precisely two jet engine types, which were simple copies of German wartime engines. The Jumo 004 was manufactured as the RD-10 at Factory No. 26 in Ufa, and the BMW 003A as the RD-20 at Factory No. 16 in Kazan. Neither engine was sufficiently powerful or reliable to compete with more modern British or American engines.

On April 6, 1946, Stalin held a meeting in the Kremlin. The subject was what to do about the problem of jet engines. This is when the idea of buying British engines was raised, and when Stalin supposedly remarked, “What kind of fools will sell their secrets!” Having found the fools and obtained their secrets, the USSR raced to copy the new engines. As was customary Soviet practice, the USSR treated its lack of license production rights, or any other intellectual property rights to the engines, as simply irrelevant. Factory No. 500 in Tushino, near Moscow, was tasked with manufacturing the Derwent V as the unimaginatively designated RD-500. Factory No. 45 inside Moscow was to make the Nene I as the RD-45. The Soviet Nene passed 100-hour state trials on Aug. 19, 1948, and the Derwent that September.

The manufacture of the engines was a challenge for Soviet industry. Most difficult was producing the alloy for the engine blades, called Nimonic 80 in Britain. Introduced in 1942, this consisted of 20 percent chrome, 0.08 percent carbon, 2.3 percent titanium, 1.5 percent aluminum, and the rest nickel. This alloy was overwhelmingly superior to the Tinidur used in German engines. Wartime Germany, short of raw materials, had been forced to use an alloy containing more than 50 percent iron for turbine blades.

In the USSR, the jump from Tinidur to Nimonic 80 required a national research effort, including the disassembly of Derwents and Nenes to obtain precise specifications of the Nimonic alloy. It was eventually copied as the KhN80T, later renamed EI437. The sale that Attlee authorized allowed the Soviet Union to initiate the production not only of its first useful jet engines, but also of its first modern heat-resistant alloy. The Soviet aviation industry, which was previously incapable of competing with the West, would reap the benefits of this transformation for the rest of the Cold War.

The sale and the copying of the engines and the alloy were sufficiently awful but were not enough to build modern aircraft. For that, the Soviets needed well-educated and forward-looking engineers. These, too, were imported. On Oct. 22, 1946, about 2,000 German engineers and their families were taken from the Soviet Zone of Occupation as part of Operation Osoaviakhim—the name of the Soviet Society for the Promotion of Defense, Aviation, and Chemical Warfare. The engineers were transported to the USSR, where they spent years working in various industries, including aviation.

It is overwhelmingly likely that without German technical knowledge, the Soviet Union would not have been able to build aircraft with swept wings. Such aircraft are fundamentally superior in speed to aircraft with straight wings, but the USSR had no know-how to manufacture any jet aircraft before acquiring German data in 1945, let alone aircraft with swept wings. The first two Soviet jet fighters, the MiG-9 and Yak-15, flew on the same day, April 24, 1946. Both had straight wings and were powered with copied German engines.

After the arrival of the German engineers, changes were swift. The first Soviet jet fighter prototype with swept wings, the Lavochkin La-160, flew on July 26, 1947. A very short time before that, on April 15, 1947, the Mikoyan design bureau was ordered to create a high-performance fighter. The head of this bureau, Artyom Mikoyan, had unique connections. His elder brother, Anastas Mikoyan, had been a full member of the Politburo, the narrow group of party leaders around Stalin, since February 1935. He had also been the trade minister since December 1938. It was this ministry that had bought the British engines.

The younger Mikoyan had no trouble getting Nenes for his fighter. The first two prototypes of the I-310(S) did not even wait for Soviet copies of British engines to be made, but rather used original Nenes bought in Britain, including one of only five Nene IIs that had been delivered. This has been publicly acknowledged by Russian sources. What has not been acknowledged, even so many decades later, is who designed the swept wings of this aircraft.

The importance of this design feature was embedded in the aircraft’s designation, in which the letter S in I-310(S) stood for Strelovidny—"swept.” It first flew on Dec. 30, 1947, the month after British engine deliveries had been completed. The Nene and the swept wings combined to create a Soviet breakthrough in aviation technology. An anonymous German, or more likely a team of anonymous Germans under Soviet supervision, had changed not only aviation history, but also, as it turned out, world history.

The MiG-15, as the I-310(S) became known in production, was radically advanced compared with the MiG-9. It was 145 kilometers an hour (90 mph) faster, with a speed of 1,045 kilometers an hour (650 mph), and could fly three kilometers (10,000 feet) higher, with a service ceiling of 15,500 meters (81,800 feet). Britain had nothing like it. If the Soviet Union could mass-produce the MiG-15, the entire balance of military power between the West and the USSR would change.

If Attlee’s main focus was to create a welfare state, Stalin’s was to establish a well-armed empire. Between 1948 and Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet industry manufactured 1,737 Derwents (RD-500s) and an extraordinary 38,527 engines of the Nene series. The Nene became the most produced Rolls-Royce-designed jet engine in history, and the production tempo did not lessen even after 1953 (Table 1).

The Soviet Union would have a new jet-powered air force. Almost 21,000 MiG-15s and its successor type, the MiG-17, were built. More than 6,000 Ilyushin Il-28 twin-engine jet bombers were also manufactured (Table 2).

Having faced no substantive threat from the obsolete aircraft of the postwar Soviet air force, the West now confronted a problem of an altogether different kind. This was not all. The first Soviet air-launched cruise missile, the KS-1 “Comet” (AS-1 Kennel), was a smaller pilotless MiG-15, powered by an RD-500K engine, a simplified Derwent. Its ground-launched version, the “Sopka” (SSC-2b Samlet), was one of two kinds of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons sent to Cuba in 1962 to support the ballistic missile deployment, the other being bombs for Nene-powered Il-28 bombers.

Despite the close call of the Cuban crisis, the West managed to avoid a nuclear catastrophe throughout the Cold War. But the MiG-15 played a central role in creating the nuclear crisis of the 21st century.

In July 1950, North Korea, a Soviet-equipped puppet state of Stalin’s USSR, invaded South Korea. In difficult fighting, American forces stopped the North Korean offensive and then counterattacked and advanced into North Korea. On Oct. 25, the Chinese army attacked the Americans, and from Nov. 1, Soviet MiG-15s provided air defense for the Chinese supply routes into Korea. They engaged in air combat with American aircraft, all of which at that moment were straight-winged and therefore much slower than the MiG. The B-29, the piston-engine bomber that had dropped the nuclear bombs on Japan, and which the U.S. Air Force attempted to use as its main striking force in Korea, was very vulnerable to the MiG-15 and was almost completely withdrawn from operations in areas patrolled by the new Soviet fighter.

With the Soviet MiG-15s providing air cover and the Chinese army the manpower, Communist control over the entire territory of North Korea was reestablished. Until the very end of the war, which ended in a stalemate, American pilots and those of the British Commonwealth routinely fought against MiGs. The U.S. Air Force alone lost more than 150 aircraft in these air combats. The Navy and the United States’ allies lost yet more. Like the B-29s, obsolete aircraft were simply pulled out of operations over MiG Alley—the part of North Korean airspace patrolled by MiGs. An ill-considered engine sale had killed, and would continue to kill, significant numbers of Allied pilots.

The regime of the Kim family, a vicious Stalinist dictatorship, exists to this day—now both a client of the People’s Republic of China and an arms supplier and close ally of Russia. To a significant degree, it is a monument to the foolishness and the cynicism of Clement Attlee and his cabinet.