The Greatest Battle

by Andrew Nagorski

  As Bohlen bitterly noted, Davies never asked him his opinion of the trials, preferring instead to confer with Colonel Faymonville, the military attaché who would invariably confirm the Soviet version of events, and with those American correspondents who were of a similar inclination. His clear favorite among them was Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter who denied the existence of the Ukrainian famine during the forced collectivization campaign and routinely served as an unabashed apologist for Stalin. “I shall always feel under a special obligation to Walter Duranty who told the truth as he saw it and has the eyes of genius,” Davies wrote in his diary.

  When he published his book Mission to Moscow shortly after the Germans launched their attack against the Soviet Union, Davies felt more than ever impelled to offer a benign explanation of all Soviet behavior. “In my opinion, the Russian people, the Soviet government, and the Soviet leaders are moved, basically, by altruistic concepts,” he wrote. “It is their purpose to promote the brotherhood of man and to improve the lot of the common people. They wish to create a society in which men may live as equals, governed by ethical ideals. They are devoted to peace.” Since he believed almost everything his Soviet hosts had told him, he also accepted their assurances that the country was ready to defend itself. “It is my judgment that both the Soviet government and its army are a great deal stronger than is generally recognized in certain European quarters,” he wrote to Roosevelt on January 18, 1939, from his new posting as the ambassador in Brussels.

  As for the impact of the army purges, he wrote after the Germans invaded: “There were no Fifth Columnists in Russia in 1941—they had shot them. The purge had cleansed the country and rid it of treason.”

  On September 7, 1939, just a few days after Germany had invaded Poland to start World War II, a new military attaché arrived to take up his post at the American embassy in Moscow. His name was Ivan Yeaton. This army major arrived with a set of assumptions about the Soviet Union opposite to the ones Davies and Faymonville had subscribed to. His initial experiences only reinforced his conviction that Stalin’s Russia was a sinister, violent netherworld. Yeaton had barely unpacked, he recalled in his unpublished memoir, when the Red Army attacked Poland from the east and the Polish military attaché showed up at his door. “We are ordered to evacuate the embassy within hours and allowed to take only one suitcase,” the Pole explained. “I have been warned that as soon as I leave the embassy for good I will be arrested and eventually shot. Therefore, I must escape. It will cost a lot of money; so I will appreciate it if you will buy any or all of my household equipment at your own price.”

  Yeaton offered him the cash he had available by buying his wine cellar at a dollar a bottle and never saw his Polish counterpart again, although he later heard that the NKVD was searching for him in Kiev. Recalling the fate of thousands of Polish officers who were shot the following year in the Katyn forest, the American pointed out, “He had nothing to lose by making a desperate attempt to escape.” And Yeaton was quick to register what was happening to others whose countries were falling under Soviet rule. “The wife of the Latvian ambassador, a delightful, gracious and charming hostess, who had had servants all her life, was seen with a group of women prisoners waiting to be crowded into an empty box car attached to a train heading east,” he wrote.

  Properly suspicious, Yeaton immediately fired his young Russian driver, who was “a little too cocksure of himself.” Two weeks later, Yeaton encountered him on the street in the uniform of a NKVD captain, commanding the four “guards” who were assigned to follow him day and night. “He laughed in my face,” Yeaton noted. There was nothing the new attaché could do about that, but he was determined to follow a very different routine from Faymonville’s, whose quarters he had inherited. He scorned his predecessor’s “dependence on Soviet hand-outs” and sought out military attachés from other embassies who were similarly critical. “The one thing that opened other doors for me was the unanimous dislike and fear of communism on the part of all missions in Moscow,” he asserted. That kind of observation gave the impression that he was reporting from a different capital than the one Davies and Faymonville had inhabited.

  Yeaton also waged a campaign to tighten security at the embassy. He noted that many consulate clerks gave cocktail parties that were replete with young Russian women “generously provided” by the NKVD. “These ‘party girls’ were well-trained linguists and informers known in intelligence circles as ‘pigeons,’” he pointed out. “Having attended a few of these parties, I was amazed at the freedom with which these lads discussed embassy affairs before the pigeons.” He made one other observation: “It also became obvious, at least to me, that there were homosexuals in the group. From the security point of view, this was a dangerous situation.” Without informing his colleagues, he urged the F.B.I. to send “an expert on homosexuality” to Moscow. An agent arrived for a visit, and, as Yeaton recorded with satisfaction, “a week or so later we had a small group of bachelors ordered home.”

  Such actions didn’t exactly make Yeaton a popular figure at the embassy, even among those diplomats who shared his bleak view of their surroundings. But the new ambassador, Laurence Steinhardt, was quickly coming to appreciate those members of his staff who displayed none of the kind of willful blindness that Davies and Faymonville had exhibited.

  A lawyer firmly established in New York’s wealthy Jewish community who had already served as ambassador to Sweden, Steinhardt was a liberal Democrat with—from Roosevelt’s perspective—excellent family connections. His uncle Samuel Untermeyer was a major campaign contributor who was openly sympathetic to the Soviet Union. When he appointed Steinhardt to the Moscow post, the president clearly believed he’d be more in the Davies than the Bullitt tradition. But, as Yeaton observed, Steinhardt soon proved “ready to stand up to Soviet obstruction tactics when necessary.” As soon as the new envoy began displaying those tendencies, Soviet officials derided him in typically virulent terms. Konstantin Umansky, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, reported that Steinhardt was “a wealthy bourgeoisie Jew who was permeated with the foul smell of Zionism.”

  Steinhardt quickly became irritated by the routine harassment of diplomats in Moscow—the constant surveillance and climate of suspicion and the Soviet practice of making daily life as difficult and full of restrictions and bureaucratic regulations as possible. Like Bullitt, he began pushing for an American policy of reciprocity, proposing that the State Department should treat Soviet diplomats in Washington the same way and in general taking the approach that American behavior should respond in kind to Soviet actions. Although he had rejected such recommendations before, Roosevelt appeared to change his mind after the series of Soviet actions following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact—the invasion of Poland and the takeover of the Baltic states and then the attack on Finland. “I think we should match every Soviet annoyance by a similar annoyance here against them,” he told Hull and Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles in December 1940.

  Despite the restrictions, Yeaton moved around as much as he could, carefully observing what was happening. He would take long walks, and in the early months of 1940 noted that as more Soviet men were called up for military service, “more and more women and boys replaced able-bodied men workers.” One day an experimental fighter plane, with its designer aboard, disintegrated as it flew almost right over him. The police quickly cordoned off the wreckage, and the Foreign Office replied to Yeaton’s inquiries by claiming no such accident had happened. But a few days later the Soviet press reported that the designer had died, making it sound like it was from natural causes.

  On June 18, 1941, Yeaton spotted a German diplomat loading his two prize boxer dogs on a plane to Germany. This prompted him to cable Washington that Hitler would strike “within days.” When the attack came, Yeaton’s driver was called up, so he was allowed to drive on his own. And he quickly discovered that his bodyguards had disappeared as well. This was a result of the desperate need fo
r manpower, not any Soviet shift in policy, but Yeaton decided to exploit the situation as much as he could. He soon collected more than a half dozen militia citations for violating the wartime rules, including driving at night and trying to slip out of the city, making for the fighting to the west. By comparing his impressions with those of other foreigners in the capital and the accounts of refugees fleeing the fighting, he put together highly pessimistic assessments of the Soviet Union’s chances of holding off the Germans. “If my reports appeared to follow the German propaganda line more closely than the Soviet releases, I was unaware of it, and I could find no shred of evidence on which to base an optimistic report,” he recalled later.

  But it was more than Yeaton’s pessimism about the military situation that would get him in trouble. After all, his view that the Red Army couldn’t withstand the German assault wasn’t uncommon. It was the combination of that pessimism with his instinctive aversion to Stalin’s regime that pushed him to oppose the policies that would quickly be championed by Churchill and Roosevelt in response to the German attack on the Soviet Union. In those summer months of 1941, those policies became a matter of both public and very personal disputes.

  On the night before the German invasion, Churchill hosted a dinner at his country retreat, Chequers, for Foreign Secretary Eden, Cabinet Secretary Edward Bridges, U.S. Ambassador John Winant, and their wives. The British leader declared that the invasion of the Soviet Union was now certain and that Hitler was hoping that he could count on garnering support from right-wingers in both Britain and the United States for that action. The German dictator would be proven wrong, Churchill assured his guests, and Britain would do everything possible to help Russia in this conflict. Winant quickly added that this certainly would be true for his country also.

  After dinner, Churchill and his personal secretary, John Colville, took a walk on the croquet lawn and picked up on the same theme. Colville asked him whether, as a staunch anti-communist, he wasn’t troubled by the notion of helping the Kremlin. “Not at all,” Churchill replied. “I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

  Woken at four the next morning with the news about the German attack, Churchill prepared a radio address that he broadcast on the BBC that evening. It would prove to be one of his most memorable orations, pledging his nation to a fight for total victory against Hitler. “We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until, with God’s help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its people from his yoke,” he said. Declaring that “any man or state who fights on against Nazism will have our aid,” he added, “It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people. We shall appeal to all our friends and allies in every part of the world to take the same course and pursue it, as we shall faithfully and steadfastly to the end.”

  Churchill hadn’t forgotten the Kremlin’s earlier behavior or talked himself into believing that Stalin suddenly would be an ideal partner. Writing about Hitler’s invasion of Russia, he noted, “Thus the ravings of hatred against Britain and the United States which the Soviet propaganda machine cast upon the midnight air were overwhelmed at dawn by the German cannonade. The wicked are not always clever, nor are dictators always right.” But even the canny British prime minister probably didn’t realize just how much time, energy, and frustration would go into nurturing the relationship with the dictator who was now his ally.

  Right from the start, Stalin and his entourage frequently ignored their new Western allies or were downright dismissive of them. Churchill was stunned that his emotional radio speech of June 22 in support of the embattled Soviet Union at first met with no reaction from the Kremlin. Finding that silence “oppressive,” Churchill wrote to Stalin on July 7 again promising as much help as possible to Russia. It wasn’t until July 18, nearly four weeks after Churchill’s speech, that Stalin wrote the prime minister to thank him for those assurances of support. But that first letter also contained a demand that the Kremlin would consistently push from then on: the establishment of a second front against Hitler in the West—in other words, sending British troops to the Continent to fight the Germans there.

  Churchill responded with barely concealed impatience that his country was in no position to launch an attack on the Continent at that time. “You must remember that we have been fighting alone for more than a year, and that, though our resources are growing and will grow fast from now on, we are at the utmost strain both at home and in the Middle East,” he explained. A steady stream of demands and complaints from the Soviet side would follow, and, as Churchill put it, “I received many rebuffs and rarely a kind word.” He added, “The Soviet government had the impression that they were conferring a great favor on us by fighting in their own country for their own lives.”

  Though Churchill found himself struggling to keep his irritation in check, he faced little internal opposition to his policy of providing aid to the Russians. Across the Atlantic, Roosevelt had also offered “all the aid we possibly can to Russia,” but there were public and private dissenting voices. Former president Herbert Hoover warned that “we find ourselves promising aid to Stalin and his militant conspiracy against the whole democratic ideals of the world” and that if the United States entered the war and helped make a Soviet victory possible, this would facilitate Stalin’s expansionist ambitions. Senator Harry Truman came up with what sounded like a more coolly calculated approach. “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances,” he declared on the day the Germans attacked the Soviet Union.

  Even George Kennan, serving at that time in the American embassy in Berlin, wrote to Loy Henderson, a former Moscow colleague now back in the State Department, to warn that “we should do nothing at home to make it appear that we are following the course Churchill seems to have entered upon in extending moral support to the Russian cause.” He argued that Russia had “no claim on Western sympathies,” since it clearly wasn’t fighting for the same ideals as the West. “Such a view would not preclude the extension of material aid wherever called for by our own self-interest,” he concluded. “It would, however, preclude anything which might identify us politically or ideologically with the Russian war effort.” Other government and military officials had a purely practical concern. Did it make sense to send military and other aid to the Soviet Union if, as many were predicting, it wouldn’t be able to hold out anyway? If the pessimists proved right, the Germans would seize those supplies as soon as they completed their conquest.

  But Roosevelt and his closest aides had no intention of accepting such advice. In fact, they would soon outdo Churchill and his team in lavishing praise on Russia for its war effort and adopt a see-no-evil approach that precluded any real consideration of extracting concessions from Stalin in return for aid. In theory and practice, it quickly became apparent that Roosevelt viewed Russia as an ally worthy of unconditional support. Steinhardt’s notion of reciprocity in relations, which the president had briefly endorsed, was unmistakably trumped by the new policy.

  The point man for that policy was Harry Hopkins, one of the president’s closest advisers, whose pro-Soviet tilt had already attracted the notice of Moscow. In mid-July, Hopkins was dispatched to London for consultations with Churchill about how to deliver on the promise of aid to Russia, and the prime minister introduced him to Soviet ambassador Maisky. The Russian envoy was elated by Hopkins’ “obvious sympathy for the Soviet Union” and came away convinced that he was “much more sympathetic” to Soviet needs than Churchill was. In his memoirs, Maisky wrote, “Harry Hopkins has remained as one of the most advanced people among the leading personalities in the bourgeois world during the second world war.”r />
  Hopkins was closely attuned to the thinking of former ambassador Joseph Davies, who was still acting as Roosevelt’s adviser on Russia and dining regularly with Soviet ambassador Umansky in Washington. Not surprisingly, Davies was a fervent advocate of aid to Russia and, reflecting the Kremlin’s official line, he sought to accent the positive even during the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa, when the Red Army was suffering major losses. In a “My dear Harry” letter to Hopkins on July 18, Davies declared, “The resistance of the Russian army has been more effective than was generally expected.” At the same time, he argued that the Russians would continue to resist even if the Germans occupied much of their territory. All of which meant that no matter how bad the military situation looked, Western aid to Russia wouldn’t be in vain.

  It was no accident that Davies’ favorite former military attaché reemerged onto the scene at the same time. After Colonel Faymonville had returned from Moscow, the War Department had effectively banished him because of his reputation as an apologist for Stalin’s regime. But on July 13, he was assigned to Washington’s Division of Aid Reports, which oversaw Lend-Lease, the military aid program that, up to that point, was channeling supplies to Britain. While the formal head of this operation was General James Burns, this was Hopkins’ bailiwick. Faymonville was assigned to helping get the Russian aid program going, and he did so with his usual enthusiasm.