The Last Lion
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He never enjoyed the confinement of long sea voyages; this was the worst ever. Yet aboard the ship he found pleasure in the usual places: his cronies, good food, strong drink, and bad movies. Beaverbrook’s lieutenant, George Malcolm Thomson, recalled “there was one movie one night, The Sea Hawk, in which there was an attack on a British naval ship by pirates as I remember it. A great deal of countless stuff going on the deck of this sailing ship and I remember Churchill, who was always in his dressing gown. He had dined rather well I think, as usual. I can remember him getting up and shouting ‘We’re winning, we’re winning!’ ”55
Actually, wherever they were fighting, on sea and on land, but for a thin slice of North Africa, they were losing. And so, too, were the Americans. A New York Times headline that week screamed: U.S. FLIERS SCORE: BOMBS SEND BATTLESHIP, CRUISER AND DESTROYER TO THE BOTTOM. The Times did not say exactly where in the Pacific these alleged heroics took place. In fact, U.S. fliers had not only not hit a Japanese ship, they had not yet even located a Japanese ship.56
Still, one item of good news emanated from Duke of York’s radio shack: Auchinleck in Libya had accomplished as much in thirty days as Wavell and O’Connor had in sixty the previous year. Axis troops in Bardia, where Rommel had set up his headquarters in anticipation of taking Tobruk, found themselves surrounded. Rommel, outnumbered in tanks by four to one, had fled west with his remaining armor, toward Benghazi, which Auchinleck would claim on Christmas Eve. Days later, Rommel drew up his lines at El Agheila, four hundred miles west of Tobruk. It was an orderly retreat, but it was a retreat, Rommel’s first. The Western Desert had changed hands again. Yet this time, the enemy retreating across Cyrenaica was not Italian but German. Given the back-and-forth nature of the battle, and the resourcefulness of Rommel, Churchill resisted any temptation he may have harbored to proclaim in the name of the King, as he had a year earlier, another “Bardia Day.”57
While aboard ship, Churchill learned from Eden, in Moscow, that Stalin still maintained a healthy appetite for real estate, in spite of having lost much of western Russia to the Wehrmacht. Churchill told Eden that although Britain had declared war on “the cats-paws” of Hungary, Romania, and Finland, the War Cabinet would refuse to satisfy Stalin on this new matter of postwar boundaries. Although Stalin’s defeat in the coming summer seemed as likely as, if not more likely than, eventual victory, he had his maps out, and he wanted assurances that Russia’s postwar western boundaries would preserve his territorial gains in eastern Poland, Romania, and Finland. As for the three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which had all bolted the czar’s collapsing empire in 1918, Stalin wanted them back. To Attlee, Churchill cabled: “Stalin’s demand about Finland, Baltic States, and Roumania [sic] are directly contrary to the first, second, and third articles of the Atlantic Charter, to which Stalin has subscribed. There can be no question whatever of our making such an agreement, secret or public, direct or implied without prior agreement with the United States.” He told Eden that to “approach President Roosevelt with his [Stalin’s] proposals would be to court a blank refusal and might experience lasting trouble on both sides.”58
He had often during Britain’s bleakest hours privately shared with friends and close associates his visions for the postwar world. “After the War” was a phrase heard in popular songs and a turn of phrase used often at the Churchill dinner table, in telegrams to Roosevelt, and in his addresses. It was shorthand for subjects not to be formally considered until Hitler was dead and Europe had reached the “broad, sunlit uplands” of liberty. He had earned the right to muse on the subject of “After the War,” yet not once in his first fifteen months as prime minister had he done so in public. Then, curiously given his public reticence on the matter, within a few hours of sitting down with Roosevelt at Argentia, he had set to work drafting the Atlantic Charter, which amounted to a bilateral declaration on international civil rights and the Anglo-American blueprint for the postwar peace (as well as a moral imperative that Americans might fight for). After the two leaders agreed on the text (without consulting Stalin), they announced the Atlantic Charter to the world.59
If Churchill and Roosevelt felt it their duty to state their vision of the postwar world, why should not Stalin? Stalin, whose borders after all had been violated, and whose capital was now under siege, believed his claims on the Baltic states to be self-evidently proper. Churchill downplayed Stalin’s maneuvers: “No one can foresee where the balance of power will lie… at the end of the war,” he cabled Eden, yet most probably it would lie with the bloc of America and Britain, which would emerge from the war far less “exhausted” than Stalin, who would need Anglo-American help to rebuild more than the Americans and British would need Stalin. Still, Churchill heard enough in Stalin’s demands to make him wary, though like a denizen of Plato’s cave, he could divine only shadows of things beyond his immediate vision, which was entirely focused on crushing Hitler. He could not make out exactly what was coming by way of Moscow, or its size, or its speed, but he didn’t much care for it. Always remember, he had cautioned Eden, that Bolsheviks are “crocodiles” who understand only force. Years later he told his grandson, Winston Spencer Churchill, that he knew—at the first mention by Stalin of postwar boundaries—exactly where the seeds for the next European conflict would germinate, adding that from early 1942 on, he put every strategic decision in the war against Hitler under two lenses: “How will it shorten the war, and how will it prevent the Bear from stealing the peace.”60
Those may well have been the sentiments of an old man who wanted to reposition himself more favorably in the historical story line. Yet, given the Faustian pact Churchill and Roosevelt made with Stalin, it seems improbable that Stalin’s demands suddenly awakened in Churchill the prospect of postwar trouble. This was Joseph Stalin, after all, Hitler’s former partner, a gunman who in his youth robbed banks for the Marxist cause and later—also for the cause, his own—resorted to mass murder. Why did Churchill and Roosevelt during the next three years fail, utterly, to hatch any plans between themselves that addressed the possible—probable, even—consequences to Europe of their alliance with the Soviet dictator? Both spoke in the starkest terms of the consequences to the world were Hitler to win. From a moral perspective, Stalin was simply the lesser of two evils; he killed his political opponents because they opposed him, not because of their bloodlines. Hitler, victorious, would kill everybody. The death of Hitlerism was therefore the main objective of the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance, but each of the three Allied leaders had a different political agenda, and each envisioned a postwar world different in structure from that envisioned by the other two. Stalin’s political objectives were patently at odds with both the Atlantic Charter and Churchill’s hopes for democratic European spheres of influence, which he intended first and foremost would serve to keep Prussia (but not all of Germany) down on the farm, quite literally.
The wonder is not that in late 1941 Churchill foresaw future problems with Stalin, but why he ever could have thought otherwise. Churchill was well versed in the history of Russia’s relationship with Europe. He had lectured Colville the previous June on the Swedish invasion of 1700 and of Napoleon’s 1812 gambit. Now, twice within a generation, the Germans had turned on Russia. Russia was an Asian nation with a foot in Europe, and Western Europeans had regularly stomped on that foot. Protection of Russia’s western frontiers had driven Russian foreign policy for two centuries, Czarist, Leninist, and Stalinist. Moscow had always sought a security belt between itself and the West. The West, meanwhile, maintained a cordon sanitaire between itself and the Muscovites. The Poles had historically paid the price for their geographical position in relation to Russia’s security needs, and had done so again when Hitler and Stalin signed their 1939 pact. By signing the pact, Stalin believed (incorrectly as he had learned in June) that he had widened his security belt. His war aims were to reclaim it, and to destroy the German threat once and for all. He articulated those aims often during the next thr
ee years. He linked all of his war decisions with Russian territorial interests and the German threat to those interests. He never disguised his aim, and held to it, wrote James MacGregor Burns, “with steel-like tenacity.” For Stalin, defeating Germany and reclaiming Russian security were two sides of the same coin. Churchill’s was a one-sided coin: defeat Hitler. His and Stalin’s objectives, therefore, were similar but not identical.61
It was a vital distinction. Stalin believed that were Hitler to be assassinated or overthrown, possibly by the Prussian officers whom Hitler despised, the West might reach an agreement with the new Hitler-less Germany and then turn—with Germany—against Russia. It was a paranoid belief, but one strongly held nonetheless. Churchill indeed considered Hitler an interim enemy; he held Germany to be part of the European family, destined to again take its place at the table after Hitler was dealt with. Stalin, however, saw Germany as Russia’s perpetual enemy, now more than ever deserving of annihilation. Once Hitler was vanquished, as Stalin saw it, the West would once again consider Moscow and communism to be its supreme enemies, a status cemented with the revolution of 1917. For the duration of the war, Stalin’s relationship with his allies was informed by his certainty that Churchill and Roosevelt were not and never would be true friends of Russia.
For their part, Churchill and Roosevelt never entirely trusted Stalin. For the next three years they weighed every decision against the possibility that Russia might quit the war, as the Bolsheviks had done in 1917. They withheld the Ultra secret from Stalin (although they passed along Ultra decrypts as information gained from reliable “agents”), and of course they did not bring Stalin into the atomic bomb project. Yet, where Churchill’s trust in Stalin was qualified, his loyalty to Stalin was not, and never diminished throughout the war. In Churchill’s moral paradigm, loyalty was an absolute, where trust admitted to degrees. Even as Stalin made the extent of his territorial ambitions known in 1943 and 1944, Churchill remained loyal, cabling Roosevelt in April 1944, “I have a feeling that the [Soviet] bark is worse than its bite.” Even as victory became certain and Stalin’s demands for territory—at the expense of liberty within those territories—hardened, Churchill remained the steadfast partner. After Yalta, in early 1945, Churchill told the Commons that Stalin’s “word was [his] bond…. I know of no Government which stands to its obligations… more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government.”62
Given their distrust of Stalin, why did two such brilliant politicians as Churchill and Roosevelt remain so loyal to an ideological enemy who for almost twenty years had terrorized his own people while declaring capitalism to be his mortal foe? Because, Churchill wrote in his memoirs, they had no decent alternative. “Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill was blind to the continuance of terror and tyranny in the Soviet Union,” Harriman later wrote. But they needed Stalin and the millions upon millions of Russian men he could feed into the teeth of Hitler’s war machine. Stalin, supported by the West, could buy the time America needed to arm. For England, each day the Russians fought diminished the prospects of a German invasion of the Home Island. As well, Roosevelt and Churchill truly believed that a man’s word was his bond; they were gentlemen, after all. As the war progressed, they became quite confident that they could handle Uncle Joe (they often called him “UJ” in their private communications) much as they handled each other—with tenacity (Churchill) and charm (Roosevelt). Yet they never appreciated the fullness of the man. “Let no one think Stalin is a thug… or roughneck,” the journalist and author John Gunther wrote three years earlier. Stalin was a reader of Plato, a student of the American Civil War, a man of brains as well as prescient political instinct. He once dismissed a group of Bolshevik writers by telling them to “read Shakespeare, Goethe and other classics, as I do.” He had a sense of humor, which Hitler did not. He was perhaps the most politically adroit of all the principals, Allied and Axis. Yet Churchill and Roosevelt believed he was malleable, reachable, and teachable.63
Harriman later recalled that Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s certainty that “they knew how to get along with Stalin” infected the judgment of “lesser lights,” including, Harriman admitted, himself. He confessed in his memoirs that he “was not entirely immune to that infectious idea” of getting along with Stalin given the “tough talks” he had held with the marshal in “tough sessions.” Beaverbrook tried to prove his loyalty to Stalin by shipping to the Soviets the Lend-Lease matériel Stalin demanded, matériel that Britain desperately needed. Churchill feared Beaverbrook’s generosity would result in Britain being “bled white.” All of the players, American and British, thought they could handle UJ. In fact, Uncle Joe had never been a man to be handled. Rather, he had proven himself the consummate manhandler.64
Eden that month took a pragmatic approach to Stalin’s demands, telling the War Cabinet that the Soviets would inevitably, one way or another, get the Baltic states, the implication being now was as good a time as any. For Churchill, this would not do. The time for drawing boundaries, he told Eden, was not yet at hand, and such questions “can only be resolved at the Peace Conference when we have won the war.” He then went easy on Eden, whose journey to Moscow was the most important of his career to date. The Old Man expressed his overall satisfaction with the mission and advised his emissary to “not be rough with Stalin.” A discussion of boundaries, however, was out of the question. Such was Churchill’s political, and moral, position in regard to Eastern Europe, a position that events and Stalin in time undermined.65
Confined by the weather to his cabin aboard the Duke of York, Churchill dictated three long memos in which he outlined to the War Cabinet and the COS his plans for Europe and Asia in 1942, and his worldwide plans for 1943, which included the “advantage in declaring now our intention of sending armies of liberation into Europe in 1943.” Those words were intended not only for the British chiefs but for Roosevelt and his advisers. Nowhere in the three memos did Churchill refer to the possibility of sending large Allied armies into Europe in 1942; he knew it could not be done. Yet the Americans were already thinking of doing just that—opening a second European front by autumn. Stalin had demanded one since July. Churchill, within months, would find himself under fire from the Americans, Stalin, and British leftists, accused by all of opposing a second front, when in fact, on the advice of his military chiefs, he opposed only a premature second front, a distinction he tried without success to impress upon his allies that year, and upon his critics for the rest of his life.66
While Churchill was at sea, Adolf Hitler sated the curiosity of all who had wondered for several days just who would replace Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch as commander in chief of the German army and head of Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), the army’s high command. Given that Germany was a land-based power, OKH had been, traditionally, the primary military voice within the Wehrmacht, until 1938, when Hitler configured his personal military mouthpiece, Oberkommando des Wehrmacht (OKW), which directed all branches of the German military. From then on, the professional staff officers of OKH, loathed by Hitler for their Prussian and aristocratic lineage, exercised less influence. In reality, OKW, sprinkled throughout with Hitler’s lackeys, planned and directed operations in all theaters except Russia, where OKH had been left to manage the eastern army (Ostheer) under the eye of and at the pleasure of OKW, a relationship that played nicely into Hitler’s strategy of pitting his military services against one another. Von Brauchitsch, his heart failing and lacking the stomach to argue with Hitler—who had been outraged by Brauchitsch’s strategy of taking Moscow before the Caucasus oil fields—resigned.
It was clear to Hitler that only one German possessed the requisite military genius to replace Brauchitsch, who, he later told Goebbels, was “a coward and a nincompoop.” And so on December 19, the Führer appointed himself commander in chief of Germany’s army. He was of course already supreme commander of all German armed forces, but C in C was a hands-on job of tactical—not only strategic—decisions. A purge of the ranks had beg
un; Rundstedt, Guderian, and Erich Hoepner, considered panzer geniuses just a year earlier, were pushed out, and Bock was retired. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel stayed on as chief of staff of the supreme command of the German armed forces, an imposing title that belied his status as a rubber stamp for Hitler. Franz Halder stayed on as chief of staff at OKH with hopes of serving as a counterweight to Hitler’s increasingly baneful influence over the army. Halder was just the sort of professional soldier Hitler distrusted. The disfavor was returned; more loyal to his army and to Germany than to Hitler, Halder loathed the Führer, yet duty demanded he serve him to his best ability. Colorless and professorial, Halder protected the army’s traditions and was one of the very few in the highest ranks who felt it his duty (and was man enough) to apprise Hitler of the Führer’s strategic weaknesses. Still, Halder later told a historian that he carried his pistol to staff meetings in the Reich Chancellery with the intent of ridding Germany of the poisonous Austrian, but “as a human being and a Christian” could not bring himself to do so. Yet had he done so, the porcine Göring would have taken Hitler’s place, and were Göring to be toppled, Hitler’s number three man (and Rudolf Hess’s successor), the thuggish yet clever and ambitious Martin Bormann, would assume the leadership, that is, if the more thuggish and more ambitious Heinrich Himmler did not dispute the issue. No lone assassin could dismantle the Nazi apparatus.67