The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  He listened as Roosevelt proposed that once Italy was wrapped up, the Anglo-American armies might swing into the Balkans, link up with Tito’s forces, and drive northeast toward Romania and a conjunction with the Red Army as it drove west. This suggestion surprised and disturbed Hopkins, who scribbled a message to Admiral King, asking, “Who’s promoting this Balkan business?” King replied that it seemed to be Roosevelt’s idea. But Roosevelt and Churchill had previously discussed this idea, or at least had discussed Churchill’s idea of a thrust through Slovenia toward Vienna. Churchill followed the president’s remarks with a synopsis of his case for driving from Rhodes through the Dardanelles, if Turkey came in on the Allied side. If Churchill thought that some version of his Balkan strategy was on the verge of validation, Stalin quickly disabused him of the notion. Turkey “was beyond hope” and would not come in, the marshal declared, and the Dardanelles were not worth the effort. Stalin then proposed that southern France, not the Balkans, should be the next Anglo-American objective, the better to coordinate with the Normandy invasion. Churchill expressed support for the southern France venture but stressed that it must not come at the expense of Italian operations.326

  Stalin then suggested that it might be best to cease operations in Italy before April, whether or not Rome had been taken, and to then shift six divisions from Italy to the southern France gambit rather than toward some hoped-for conjunction with the Red Army. He proposed that the southern France operation take place on April 1, a month before Overlord. Roosevelt, to Brooke’s chagrin, voiced his approval. Operation Anvil, as the southern France plan was then code-named, called for two divisions, with four more to follow. As Brooke saw it, to strip six divisions out of line in Italy, where they were successfully engaging Germans, and throw them ashore in France would allow the Germans to shift their forces to the beachhead, where the defender would have a great advantage. Brooke predicted the “annihilation of these six divisions” if they were thrown into southern France. After dispensing with the Anvil threat, the Germans would then at their leisure shift forces against Overlord. This was the exact scenario Churchill most feared.327

  Brooke saw that Stalin was pushing a political strategy couched as military strategy. Militarily, any conjunction of Allied armies on the Eastern Front would lead to profound questions of command and control. Who would lead this combined force west to Berlin? Stalin was a unilateralist in military matters. Besides, the tensions within the Anglo-American arm of the alliance testified to the difficulties of joint commands. Stalin’s military logic was sound, and Brooke now grasped the politics behind it. The marshal was determined to keep the Anglo-Americans out of any territories he considered to be within his “security belt,” which was to say, the Balkans, and perhaps Hungary, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Stalin did not want the Dardanelles opened; that, too, would bring the British and Americans onto his left flank, in the Black Sea. Thus, as for a thrust through the Balkans, Roosevelt proposed and Stalin disposed. Churchill hadn’t even been able to fully develop his argument for Rhodes. Brooke saw the ramifications: “His [Stalin’s] political and military requirements could now be best met by the greatest squandering of British and American lives in France.” Churchill began to see it as well. After the meeting, Moran found him so dispirited he asked if something had gone wrong. “A bloody lot has gone wrong,” Churchill replied. Roosevelt had given Stalin an opening, and the marshal had marched right through.328

  The dinner that night, hosted by Roosevelt, came to an early end when the president, stricken by a gastrointestinal bug, went green in the face and was wheeled off to his quarters, but not before he and Stalin took turns and delight in excoriating the French and German peoples. The Germans, Stalin proclaimed, understood only authority, and he intended to give them authority, by keeping them firmly underfoot for at least a generation. He also voiced concern about unconditional surrender; the president, Stalin said, should clarify his terms. Otherwise, the resolve of the German people would only be strengthened, and the Red Army would be the primary victim of any such resolve. Harriman agreed with the marshal, but Roosevelt stood firm; he would not make the same mistake Woodrow Wilson made when he announced his Fourteen Points (imprecise and open to wide interpretation). Regarding France, Stalin insisted that the entire French people were helping the Nazis and should be punished accordingly after the war. French colonial possessions should be stripped away and held in trust, as per Roosevelt’s suggestion earlier in the day. The demeaning of France continued until Churchill, who had remained silent, protested that he could not envision a civilized world without a strong and vibrant France. Stalin’s reply, Harriman recalled, “was contemptuous.” France was a charming place, Stalin offered, but it would have no role in postwar international affairs. And no real importance should be attached to de Gaulle, who had little real influence in any affairs. Roosevelt voiced hearty agreement. Churchill was finding himself more the odd man out with each passing hour.329

  After Roosevelt was wheeled away, Churchill, finding himself alone with Stalin, escorted the marshal to a sofa. There, joined by Eden and Molotov and two interpreters, Churchill and Stalin, in a bilateral conference of their own, settled down to discuss the fate of Poland. But Stalin had not finished his treatise on Germany and Germans. He recounted that when German prisoners of war from the laboring classes (the Communist Party) protested that they were only following orders, he ordered them shot. He was convinced that Germany would re-arm within fifteen or twenty years. Churchill, keen to display his solidarity, replied that Germany had to be kept under wraps for at least fifty years, all the while denied civil and military aviation and an army high command capable of plotting new depredations. Anything less, Churchill offered, would be a betrayal “of our soldiers.” When he advised that the three Allies must be willing to take and maintain control over Germany, Stalin answered, “There was control after the last war, but it failed.”330

  Then Churchill wavered on his long-held belief that Germany should emerge after the war a member of the European family—albeit militarily impotent but economically strong. Instead, he threw his lot in with Roosevelt, Morgenthau, Lord Cherwell, and Stalin, all of whom favored a dismemberment of Germany into, as Churchill told Stalin, “a broad, peaceful, cow-like confederation.” (Several months later he told Lord Moran, “If the Ruhr were grassed over our trade would benefit.”) This was an about-face from his stance in August 1941, when in announcing the Atlantic Charter, he proclaimed: “Instead of trying to ruin German trade by all kinds of additional trade barriers and hindrances as was the mood of 1917, we have definitely adopted the view that it is not in the interests of the world and of our two countries that any large nation should be unprosperous or shut out from the means of making a decent living for itself and its people by its industry and enterprise.”331

  The Germany of the future that Churchill described to Stalin bore a close resemblance to Roosevelt’s postwar Germany, a Carthaginian future, in fact, which is to say, no future. Then Stalin—who had spoken at dinner of punishing Germany—spoke of an economically strong Germany, but denazified and demilitarized, broken into several zones occupied by the victors, but not quite the impoverished pasture envisioned by Roosevelt. Stalin would need German steel and machine tools after the war, but he told Churchill he did not want to wake up one day to find German watchmakers producing rifles and German carmakers building tanks. Only active Allied control applied well into the future would keep Germany in line. Churchill proposed isolating Prussia and folding portions of Bavaria into the Danubian Federation that he had long envisioned. “We are the trustees for the peace of the world,” Churchill offered. “If we fail there will be perhaps one hundred years of chaos.” So wedded was he to the idea of his Danubian Federation that Churchill seems to have forgotten that the previous “Danubian federation”—the Austro-Hungarian Empire—had been torn asunder by the nationalist tendencies of its component parts, a cascading series of events that led to the Great War.332

 
Then, like two hungry guests at an inn where the kitchen had only one veal chop remaining, they fell upon Poland, specifically its postwar borders. Had Cordell Hull been in the room, he would have argued that any such questions be discussed only at the postwar peace conference, a policy that stemmed in part from Hull’s distrust of the British, whom he presumed would try to reclaim all of the Empire’s losses, if not more. Every military strategy the British proposed was parsed by Hull and the U.S. State Department (and many in the U.S. military) in terms of, what are the British really up to? Robert Sherwood later wrote, “The State Department was traditionally on the alert against any of its Foreign Service officers who displayed the slightest tendency to become pro-British.” But Hull was in Washington. So complete was Hull’s isolation that he did not see any transcripts of the Tehran discussions for more than nine months, when Anthony Eden, as a courtesy, briefed him. If Churchill was going to broach the subject of Polish borders with Stalin, now was the moment, with Roosevelt ill in bed and Hull in limbo.333

  Churchill began by reminding Stalin that Britain had gone to war for Poland. But, he added, Britain was now fighting alongside Russia, and “nothing was more important than the security of the Russian western frontier.” Churchill was a pragmatist; the subject had to be addressed before Russian troops overran Poland. Earlier in the day, Hopkins had told Eden that Americans were “terrified of the subject” of Polish borders, which Hopkins called “political dynamite.” Large blocs of American voters of Polish, German, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian descent would be voting the following November, and any talk of Polish borders would unsettle them all. Eden stressed to Hopkins that if the matter wasn’t addressed now, it would be worse in six months, with Russian armies in Poland and the American elections that much nearer. Those were Churchill’s sentiments, but for the part about the American elections. He believed that Poland was “an instrument needed in the orchestra of Europe.” It was not a card to be played in American elections.

  So, with Stalin, over cigars and coffee, Churchill opened the door: “Are we to try,” he asked, “to draw frontier lines?” Stalin replied, “Yes,” and asked if it was to be done without Polish participation. “Yes,” Churchill replied. Then, using wooden matches, Churchill demonstrated his idea of moving Poland westward, “like soldiers taking two steps ‘left close.’ If Poland trod on some German toes, that could not be helped.” This pleased Stalin.334

  Churchill was executing a nimble sidestep. Henceforth, the European war would be fought to restore freedoms, but not necessarily borders. The Atlantic Charter stipulated that “sovereign rights and self-government be restored to those who have forcibly been deprived of them” and “all the men in all the lands live out their lives in freedom from want and fear.” The charter also contained the fuzzy pledge that after “the final destruction of Nazi tyranny” the subsequent peace must “afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries.” But boundaries did not draw themselves, nor did they result from elections along strict ethnographic lines; otherwise, Eire would swallow Ulster, and Scotland might opt out of the United Kingdom. Boundaries were drawn by the strong, ideally with due consideration given to ethnographic and geographic realities. Indeed, the eastern Poles were far outnumbered by their Ukraine and Belarus neighbors. That entire swath of Poland, pried from Soviet Russia in the early 1920s, had been part of czarist Russia. Why would the Poles want to maintain dominion over the vast Pripet Marshes and the peoples there when German farmland and industry could be had with the stroke of a pen? Churchill told Stalin that if Germans in the western reaches of the new Poland chose to flee westward into the new Germany, so be it. The Poles could have it all, territory and liberty.

  Churchill was setting a new course among numerous shoals. Poland was an ally; two Polish divisions were readying for deployment to Italy. Polish pilots had defended London. Poland was dying, its citizens butchered, its crops plundered to feed the Reich. Yet the Polish government in exile, in London, had not been elected, so, in fact, there was no real Polish government in exile, only Polish democrats biding their time before returning to Poland. Churchill would fight henceforth to restore their freedoms, but not their borders. As allies, the London Poles would of course be consulted in the matter, but they would not be allowed to unilaterally determine the borders of the Poland they might someday return to. German borders would be determined by the victors in order to protect Europe, and especially Poland, from Germany. And in deference to Stalin, Polish borders would be drawn to protect Russia’s western frontier, necessarily at the expense of Poland. Before bidding Stalin good night, Churchill suggested that the three leaders—himself, Stalin, and Roosevelt—“form some sort of policy which we could recommend to the Poles, and advise them to accept.”335

  Before adjourning, Churchill offered his most favored caveat: “I have no power from Parliament… to define any border lines.” Indeed, Churchill was reverential of his King, his cabinet, and Parliament, but this out afforded him safety and deniability. He knew that the last British prime minister to sit down with a European dictator to draw frontiers had helped precipitate this war.336

  The next morning, when Churchill again suggested to Roosevelt that they meet for lunch before the plenary session, Roosevelt again refused. The second snub by Roosevelt fully alerted Churchill to the course change Roosevelt was steering in their relations. “The change came about,” Sir Ian Jacob later wrote, “when the Americans felt they had developed enough power to conduct their own line of policy.”

  It showed the President in a new light. He [Roosevelt] was determined to break free from entanglement with Churchill and the British, and to meet Stalin without any prior consultation or agreement on a common line beforehand. Churchill was greatly disturbed by this development…. That the president should deal with Churchill and Stalin as if they were people of equal standing in American eyes shocked Churchill profoundly, and seemed to nullify all the patient work that he had done during the previous three years.

  Roosevelt’s execution of his strategy could generously be described as petty, mean-spirited, and conducted at his friend’s expense. Roosevelt’s behavior “shocked Churchill,” but underlying his actions, Jacob wrote, was “a superficial” and “dangerous” understanding of Russia’s “age-long goals in Eastern Europe.”337

  The image many Americans had of Russia was formed in part by the fawning praise of Russia spewed by Henry Luce and all but the most rabid anti-Roosevelt newspapers. Time had named Stalin its 1942 Man of the Year. Luce’s saccharine salute to Stalin was purged of any reference to Stalin’s purges. No mention was made of the Holodomor, the famine that resulted in the slow death by starvation of several million Ukrainians in the early 1930s. Rather, Stalin faced “immense disorderliness” and “the problems of providing enough food for the people,” which he solved by “collectivizing the farms” and the introduction of “20th century industrial methods” to his “superstitious, illiterate people.” Stalin and the Russians were heroes, and “have fought the best fight so far” against Hitler. No mention was made of England fighting alone for two years while Stalin was in league with Hitler. Life displayed acute myopia when it reported that Russians are “one hell of a people” who “think like Americans.” The murderous secret police organization NKVD was described as “a national police force similar to the FBI.” Americans who didn’t read newspapers and magazines could take the measure of Mother Russia in one of the year’s most popular films, Mission to Moscow, based on the memoirs of Joseph E. Davies, the former American ambassador to the Kremlin. One reviewer wrote that the film’s “Russians look like fur-coated Americans, and the Soviet Union is pictured as a land of magnificent food and drink, as it probably was in the circles in which the Davieses moved…. Despite its Hollywood flourishes, Mission to Moscow has power…. But Franklin Roosevelt and Joe Davies are the ones mainly glorified. Of President Roosevelt, even the Russians speak in hushed, reverent tones.” The movie might have had power, but it wa
s Hollywood fantasy power, though it at least made a passing reference to Stalin’s purges.338

  Roosevelt had arrived in Tehran firm in his belief that his powers of charm and persuasion would carry the day, although his knowledge of European politics was thin and his knowledge of Russia thinner still. Sir Ian Jacob, describing Roosevelt, used almost the same phrases as did Averell Harriman and George Kennan: “He [Roosevelt] had no idea…. He seemed to imagine that he could handle Stalin.” That he could not became apparent to Churchill as the three leaders worked their way through three more meetings and two dinners, which Cadogan called “woolly and bibulous.” As for Roosevelt’s performance, Cadogan wrote, “[The] President, in his amateurish way, has said a lot of indiscreet and awkward things.”339

  During their second private meeting, Roosevelt outlined to Stalin his concept of a postwar international organization that would be charged with keeping global peace. It would consist of a General Assembly composed of members of the alliance. Overseeing this assembly would be an executive committee consisting of the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and China. This committee would deal with nonmilitary matters such as food and health. Stalin (like Churchill) thought China a curious choice as the world’s fourth “great” power, but he did not press the issue. Of the executive committee, Stalin asked, would its decisions be binding? Likely not, Roosevelt replied, as the U.S. Congress would never permit America to be bound by decisions made by such a body. The third branch of the organization would take the form of “The Four Policemen”—Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and China—and would be charged with keeping the peace, if necessary by bombing and invading aggressor nations. Stalin listened politely, then steered the discussion to the treatment of Germany. As he had told Churchill the previous evening, Germany, once defeated, must be forcibly kept from reinventing itself as a military power. Yet from what he had heard so far, Roosevelt’s proposed international organization could not supply the safeguards that he, Stalin, thought necessary.340