The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  No discussion took place about the possibility that one of the Four Policemen might be the aggressor of the future. As with all the talks at all the conferences, the press (never in attendance) were given only broad summaries after the fact. Roosevelt did not publicly unveil his blueprint for a world organization until late May of 1944.

  After Roosevelt and Stalin finished their chat and before the start of the second formal session, Churchill, with anthems playing and honor guards standing at attention, presented Stalin with the Sword of Stalingrad, a gold and jewel-encrusted dagger offered as a gift from King George VI, “in token of the homage of the British people… to the steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad.” Stalin accepted the sword, and passed it on to Voroshilov, who proceeded to drop it out of its scabbard and onto his great toe. Despite Voroshilov’s gaffe and the obvious discomfort of all present, Churchill later wrote that as the sword was carried out of the room by an honor guard, he spied Roosevelt sitting off to one side, “obviously stirred by the ceremony.” In fact, Roosevelt found such displays of pompous imperial symbolism to be distasteful contrivances. The show meant much to Churchill, little to Roosevelt, and still less to Stalin. British historian Roy Jenkins later noted that Joseph Stalin was not about to accept a jeweled bauble as any sort of substitute for an assault on France.341

  Stalin, with characteristic bluntness, said as much a few minutes later at the start of the second plenary session, when he came right at Roosevelt much as he had come right at Churchill during their second session in Moscow the previous year. “Who will command Overlord?” the marshal demanded. Roosevelt replied that the decision had not been made. Stalin replied that he could hardly take Overlord seriously until it had a commander, and by the same logic, until it had a commander, it would appear the Anglo-Americans were not taking it seriously. He insisted the commander be named within the week. A brief, uncomfortable silence followed. Roosevelt had no answer ready. Churchill then made a gallant attempt to defend the merits of action in Rhodes and Turkey. As for Overlord, he again stressed the conditions that had to be met in order to undertake the invasion, including that of the Germans having no more than twelve divisions in reserve in France on the day of the invasion. Where Churchill saw sound planning and contingencies, Stalin saw equivocation. He interrupted: “I wish to pose a very discreet question to the Prime Minister about Overlord…. Do the Prime Minister and the British Chiefs really believe in Overlord?” Certainly, replied Churchill, given that the conditions as outlined were met. “When the time comes it will be our stern duty to hurl across the channel at the Germans every sinew of our strength.” Given that Stalin and Roosevelt had already agreed upon the date, May 1, Churchill had no choice but to accept the inevitable. Hopkins had warned him that Roosevelt would come down on the side of Stalin, and he had.342

  Brooke was livid. “After listening to the arguments put forward for the last two days,” he told his diary, “I feel more like entering a lunatic asylum… than continuing with my present job.” And as for the way his boss and Roosevelt had comported themselves in the meeting, “Winston was not good, and Roosevelt even worse.” Stalin, alone but for Voroshilov at the table, and surrounded by twenty-six American and British luminaries, including Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, had taken control of the conference. In what John Keegan called “one of the most brutal contrivances of public embarrassment recorded in diplomatic history,” Stalin had shamed Churchill into conceding his total commitment to Overlord, as well as the need to appoint a commander, and soon.343

  Stalin hosted that night’s dinner, due to start in just an hour. Churchill, while changing into his evening dress, had Sawyers summon Moran to treat his sore throat, which had lingered now for more than two weeks. Asked by Moran how the day’s business had turned out, Churchill growled, “Nothing more can be done here.” But he held out hope that something could be done with President nönü and the Turks, whom he planned to meet in Cairo in a few days. With Turkey in, he told Moran, he could more reasonably argue the case for his Balkan strategy and perhaps a delay in Overlord. He would have developed the thought further, but Stalin awaited his arrival. Sawyers interposed, “You are late, sir.” “Bloody,” Churchill growled, and stomped out.344

  Only the principals and their closest aides attended that night’s feast—Hopkins, Molotov, Eden, Harriman, and Ambassador Clark Kerr. Sarah had not been invited, nor had Elliott Roosevelt. But he successfully crashed the affair by lingering just outside the door until Stalin waved him in. Stalin’s banquets, as Churchill had learned in Moscow, were fueled by prodigious quantities of vodka and wine, and humor of Stalin’s crude variety. The marshal needled Churchill relentlessly throughout the evening, Harriman recalled, and several times implied that Churchill, “nursing some secret affection for the Germans, wanted a soft peace.” Roosevelt listened, smiled, but did not rise to Churchill’s defense. Rather, the president delighted in Churchill’s unease. Roosevelt “always enjoyed other people’s discomfort,” Harriman recalled. “It never bothered him much when other people were unhappy.”345

  Churchill did not rise to the bait until Stalin proposed to shoot at least 50,000 German officers after the surrender in order to ensure Germany’s docility well into the future. “I would rather,” Churchill replied, “be taken out to the garden here and now and be shot myself rather than sully my own and my country’s honour by such infamy.” Roosevelt then chimed in with a compromise; he suggested that only 49,000 officers be shot. Eden, meanwhile, was making desperate gestures in Churchill’s direction intended to peg the whole scene as a joke. It might have ended there had not Elliott Roosevelt, by then drunk, wobbled to his feet and endorsed Stalin’s plan, adding that he was sure the U.S. Army would support it.

  At that Churchill walked out. He found himself alone in a semidarkened room. A few minutes passed; then he felt hands clasping his shoulders from behind. He turned to find Stalin and Molotov, each smiling broadly. They had “been playing,” they assured Churchill, adding that “nothing of a serious kind had entered their heads.” Stalin had a very captivating way about him when he chose, Churchill recalled, and this was his most captivating moment of all. Still, Churchill later wrote that he “was not then and am not now fully convinced that all was chaff and there was no serious intent lurking behind.” He wrote those words long before the official documents regarding the Katyn massacre were released by HMG. The law forbade him to write what he knew, which was that Stalin and the Politburo were guilty of ordering the NKVD to murder the Polish officers in the Katyn forest. The obtuse reference to “no serious intent lurking” in Stalin’s remarks was as close as he could get to the root of the matter. And of course, the law kept him from telling the world that Roosevelt, too, knew that Stalin had murdered the Poles. Churchill had sent Roosevelt the very precise and damning Foreign Office report on the matter. Stalin’s joke, if he was joking, was crude but in character. Roosevelt’s participation, given his knowledge of Katyn, was disgraceful.346

  In Cairo, Roosevelt had taken to delivering seemingly good-natured jabs at Churchill during the cocktail hour or at dinner. “Winston,” the president declared one evening, “you have four hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your English blood, and just don’t understand why a country might not want to acquire land somewhere if they can get it.” At Tehran, the ribbing took the form of bullying gibes uttered with forethought solely for the pleasure of Stalin, who joined with Roosevelt in the “teasing,” as Roosevelt biographer Robert Sherwood termed it. It was a shabby display, perhaps to be expected from the coarse Stalin, but not from Churchill’s genteel friend Franklin Roosevelt. As he had after demeaning de Gaulle at Casablanca, Roosevelt took delight in recounting to his cronies back home, including America’s first female cabinet secretary, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the humiliations he inflicted upon Churchill. “As soon as I sat down at the conference table, I began to tease Churchill about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars, about his habits. It began to reg
ister with Stalin,” who smiled, and then laughed aloud, as Roosevelt pressed on. Roosevelt said he had felt enough at ease to call Stalin Uncle Joe, which brought forth another guffaw from the marshal. “The ice was broken,” Roosevelt told his cabinet, “and we talked like men and brothers.” Alan Brooke termed Roosevelt’s display a “betrayal.” Years later, Lady Mary Soames offered, “The president’s behavior hurt my father,” but as with all tribulations that came Churchill’s way, “it did not unman him.”347

  The next day, November 30, was Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday. Lord Moran expected to find his patient in “poor fettle” that morning, after the previous evening’s sordid events, but Churchill had already dismissed the episode as if it were “only a bad dream.” After breakfast he met privately with Stalin, where he argued the case for further actions in the Mediterranean before Overlord. Stalin did not buy it. Instead, he warned that if by May Anglo-American forces had not landed in France, “bad feeling” and an erosion in Russian resolve would result, for Russians were “war weary.” Here again was Stalin playing his negotiated peace card.

  During the third plenary session, as friendly as the previous night’s dinner had not been, Roosevelt and Churchill pledged their absolute allegiance to Overlord. And they pledged their support of a warm-water port for the Soviet Union. The military decision on Overlord having been taken, Churchill could only promise to support and nurture the operation, although he reminded Stalin that landing craft, not British reluctance, would determine the issue. Having gotten what he came for, Stalin stressed secrecy and deception in planning the invasion; were the Germans to learn even the meanest of details, the Allied invasion forces and the Red Army would find themselves in extreme peril. The Germans had proven themselves quite adept at such subterfuge, Stalin admitted, at the expense of the Red Army. Churchill and Stalin agreed on the need for false radio messages, dummy tanks and planes and airfields, and covert cover plans. They stressed the need for covert radio traffic intended to confuse the Germans as to when the Anglo-American invasion and the Soviet summer offensive would be launched—simultaneously or sequentially—thus denying the Germans the option of shifting troops from one front to the other. And of course, disguising the “where” of both Allied offenses was paramount. “The truth is so precious,” Churchill told Stalin, “that she should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.”348

  The formal session adjourned on that note, and the principals and military chiefs wandered off to their lodgings to dress for dinner, which was to take place in the British legation, at Churchill’s insistence. The children were invited, Elliott, Randolph, and Sarah, as were the leading diplomats. It was to be quite the affair, and why not, it was his birthday, after all, Churchill later wrote. As well, he was the oldest of the leaders. And in a barely disguised jab at his allies, he wrote, “We were by centuries the longest established of the three Governments; I might have added, but did not, that we had been the longest in the war.”349

  As the dinner hour approached, Stalin made his appearance, escorted by fifty Russian policemen who took up positions at the doors and windows. Roosevelt’s Secret Service men shadowed the Russians. Inspector Thompson supplied Churchill’s security. Thompson, when among Russians, liked to carry two guns under his jacket. Roosevelt brought along a birthday gift, a lovely Kashan bowl Harriman had purchased from a museum curator earlier that day after Roosevelt, realizing he had not thought to procure a gift for Churchill, had dispatched his ambassador to find something appropriate.350

  The banqueting room in the British legation was done up in county house elegance—white linens, bone china, numerous candelabra casting a golden light over the scene. Portraits of British royals hung on the walls, which were inlayed with glass mosaics. Thick red draperies covered the windows. Persian waiters in red-and-blue livery and wearing white gloves tended to the needs of the assembled. Brooke noted that the waiters’ gloves seemed too large, which resulted in the fingertips flapping when they handled the plates. A cake with sixty-nine candles sat in the middle of the table.351

  Churchill announced that the meal would be conducted in the Russian style, with toasts encouraged, but with champagne instead of vodka. One of the first salutes raised was to Sarah, by Roosevelt. Churchill then proclaimed that the whole political world was now a matter of tints, and England’s was getting pinker. Stalin replied, to much laughter, “A sign of good health.” Roosevelt returned to the tint theme later in the evening when he announced that the effect of the war would be to “blend all those multitudinous tints, shades, and colors into one rainbow where their individuality would be lost in the whole.” Brooke thought that a “fine idea.” He had had a fine day, prevailing upon the Americans that the window for Overlord should be expanded to June 1 to allow for changes in circumstances, which had a habit of changing. By doing so, Brooke bought more time in the Mediterranean. The CIGS that night was, for a change, in a festive mood, a good thing, because the festivities continued into the new day. Churchill raised a glass to “Stalin the Great” and another to Roosevelt, in tribute to the president’s “devotion to the cause of the weak and the helpless.” And when Stalin raised a toast to Brooke, which in effect accused him of not liking Russians, Brooke responded by referring to Churchill’s remarks earlier in the day regarding lies and deception. Then he raised his glass to Stalin, and asked, might “one’s outward appearance deceive one’s friends?” In fact, Brooke added, he felt only “friendship and comradeship” toward Stalin and the Red Army. Stalin liked that, and told Brooke that “some of the best friendships of this world were founded on misunderstandings.”352

  Toast followed toast; Churchill drank to the proletarian masses, Stalin to the Conservative Party. Then the marshal turned to Roosevelt and lifted his glass to America, without whose production of tanks and planes “the war may have been lost.” This facile salute ignored the fact that for almost two deadly years, while America prepared for war and Stalin avoided war, Churchill and Britain alone had fought the war. Still, Churchill later wrote that he “went to bed tired but content, feeling sure that nothing but good had been done. It certainly was a happy birthday for me.”353

  The next afternoon, when Churchill and Stalin sat down to discuss Polish borders, they did so without Roosevelt’s direct participation. The president explained at length to Stalin his domestic political difficulties, and announced that he could not take part in any such discussion for at least a year; nor could he be publicly associated with any arrangement arrived at. “This,” Eden later wrote, with great understatement, “was hardly calculated to restrain the Russians.” When Stalin sensed weakness, he struck. Pressed by Churchill to outline his frontier demands, Stalin responded with anything but restraint. He “asked for the Curzon Line, with Lvov to go to the Soviet Union.” The Curzon Line, proposed as Poland’s eastern border by British foreign minister George Curzon in 1919, ran from the Baltic to the Czech border. But when Polish borders were finally established in the early 1920s, the frontier fell 150 miles east of the Curzon Line, in territory that had been part of czarist Russia. Stalin wanted that territory back. In many places the Curzon Line almost exactly overlay the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line of 1939, a happy coincidence for Stalin, who pointed out that the frontiers of 1939 were the most ethnographically correct. Eden and Churchill saw immediately where Stalin was going and asked if he was proposing the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line. “Call it what you will,” replied Stalin.354

  He indeed was proposing that the British in effect ratify the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, but he couched his argument in terms of the British accepting a Polish frontier of their own invention. Churchill ordered a map produced, and pointed out differences between the two lines in the Baltic north and in the south, where Lvov fell on the Polish side. Stalin waved off the differences. He wanted the Polish border moved such that Lvov would end up on the Russian side. Churchill later wrote, “I was not prepared to make a great squawk about Lvov.” In the north, Stalin sought Königsberg, which Churchill had no ob
jection to. Königsberg going to the Russians would solve the problem of a year-round Baltic port. Churchill then suggested the new western Polish border follow the Oder River, which Stalin did not object to. However, the Oder flows from two tributaries, the Western Neisse and the Eastern Neisse. No one in the room thought to clarify which branch of the Neisse would define the new Polish border. Churchill concluded by telling Stalin, “The Poles would be wise to take our advice.” But Eden began to doubt they would ever reach a settlement that the Poles would agree to. And he joined Churchill, Brooke, Ismay, and Cadogan in feelings of dismay and perplexity with the “American unwillingness to make ready with us for the conference in advance.” “Above all,” Eden later wrote, “I began to fear greatly for the Poles.”355

  The final piece of political business conducted in Tehran was an agreement in principle by the Big Three to the Curzon Line and the need to reward Poland with German territory. Roosevelt had sat in on but had not contributed to the discussion, but he joined his partners in endorsing the solution. He did not tell Cordell Hull of this, and indeed told the London Poles months later that he had not agreed to any such arrangement. But whether through a translator’s indiscretion or Roosevelt’s unwillingness to articulate his position for fear of domestic political repercussions, Stalin believed Roosevelt had agreed. Consequences accrued a year later.356

  Stalin had come to Tehran seeking assurances on only two matters: Overlord and his western borders. He left Tehran with both. Roosevelt had arrived believing Stalin to be, in his own term, “getatable.” The president left believing he had got at Stalin, although he told reporters that Stalin proved “tougher than he had expected.” Robert Sherwood called the end of the Tehran Conference the “supreme peak of Roosevelt’s career.” Perhaps, but Roosevelt had paved his chosen path to Stalin’s good graces over his friendship with Churchill. Alec Cadogan concluded that Churchill’s lack of guile was as vital to the alliance as was Roosevelt’s wit and homespun charm. Churchill was as he appeared; Franklin Roosevelt was not. Cadogan believed Churchill “has very few reticences; U.J. is shrewd enough to spot that, and must, I think, have satisfied himself that he was reading an open book, that there was no concealment or duplicity, and he could have faith.”357