The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  While Churchill took the measure of Papandreou, the archbishop entertained the lesser lights in Churchill’s party. Damaskinos had brought a bottle of ouzo as a gift, which the British partook of heartily, thinking the clear liquid was water. After downing a tall glass of the stuff (mixed with whisky), Colville told his diary, “I have never felt closer to death.” He also concluded that Damaskinos cut “a magnificent figure and also has a sense of humor.” Churchill thought likewise after meeting with Damaskinos. Thus, the holy man whom Churchill had weeks earlier called a quisling and dictator now found himself in the prime minister’s good graces, addressed now by Churchill as “Your Beatitude.” Colville noted that “we are now in the curious topsy-turvy position of the Prime Minister feeling strongly pro-Damaskinos (he even thinks he would make a good regent).” That was Churchill’s way; nothing substituted for a face-to-face meeting. It was agreed that Damaskinos would indeed chair the meeting of all parties scheduled for the next day. Papandreou—who Macmillan thought “a worthy man, but vain, and therefore shifty”—was being marginalized, and that meant King George of the Hellenes was as well.82

  The meeting with the Greek factions took place on December 26 at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Getting from Ajax to the ministry proved a dangerous business. Two artillery shells straddled the ship as Churchill prepared to leave. A burst of machine-gun fire peppered a stone wall above his head. Churchill went by armored car, scolding Colville on the way for not carrying a weapon in such perilous circumstances. To placate the Old Man, Colville borrowed a tommy gun from the driver. “What is he going to do” in case of attack? asked Churchill. “He will be busy driving,” Colville replied.83

  They found the ministry blacked out and without electricity or heat. Kerosene lamps burned in the bleak conference room. Damaskinos took his place at the head of the table, a signal to the ELAS that movement toward a settlement was under way. The problem was, the ELAS were not in attendance. Then, after Churchill and the archbishop made their opening remarks, “three shabby desperados, who had been searched and almost stripped before being allowed to enter, came into the dimly-lit conference room.” The Communists had arrived, ready to talk rather than shoot. Churchill and the British departed, leaving the Greeks to sort things out among themselves. By the next afternoon they had reached an agreement. The Communists accepted Damaskinos as regent. Papandreou drafted a letter of intent to King George of the Hellenes in that regard, a statement Macmillan believed would prove Papandreou’s death warrant. (It did not. He served as prime minister twice again from 1963 to 1965.) At Churchill’s request, Damaskinos pledged absolutely and without reservation to guarantee Papandreou’s safety. King George promised not to return to Greece until the people had spoken in a plebiscite. By late on December 27, it was done. Churchill had not strictly speaking secured a cease-fire, let alone a signed truce, but he had secured the regency. “Greece’s troubles were by no means over,” Eden later wrote, “but at the least the Greek people would now have a chance to choose their destiny without fear.”84

  On December 29, the day he returned from Greece, Churchill received a cable from Stalin in which the marshal threatened to recognize the Lublin Poles to the complete exclusion of the London Poles. The interests of the entire Polish people, Stalin wrote, cannot be sacrificed “in favor of a handful of Polish emigrants in London.” Roosevelt, when informed, cabled Stalin that he was “disturbed and deeply disappointed” by the message. “I am more than ever convinced,” the president wrote, “that when the three of us get together we can reach a solution of the Polish problem.” Stalin, in reply, promised a “free and democratic Poland” but also reminded Roosevelt, “The problem of Poland is inseparable from the security of the Soviet Union.” As well, Stalin told Roosevelt, he did not want Polish anti-Soviet partisans operating in the rear of the Red Army as it drove into Germany. In fact, the Soviets and their Lublin puppets had been systematically destroying the Polish resistance movement since August. Churchill joined Roosevelt in asking Stalin to delay any irrevocable decision on the Lublin Poles until the three leaders met at the end of January. Since October, when Roosevelt first proposed a Big Three meeting to coordinate the final assault on Germany and its partition into occupied zones, events had outpaced plans.

  The Red Army was now poised to overrun western Poland and strike into Germany. The war in Europe could be over in weeks, yet no agreement had been reached on the structure of the United Nations Organization, which would keep the peace, or on the makeup and role of the European Advisory Commission, which would manage German affairs, or on the fundamental question of Polish borders. The president had proposed to Stalin that they all meet in Scotland; Stalin declined and suggested the Crimean seaside resort city of Yalta as an alternative. Roosevelt, an ill man, protested the vast distances he’d have to travel to the Crimea, and proposed Malta, or Athens, or Cyprus. He had lost twenty pounds during the fall campaign, which had ended in his election to a fourth term. He had been hit that year by influenza, angina, and bronchitis. He was weak and could no longer stand behind a podium, supported by his steel braces, to deliver speeches. His lungs crackled with fluid retention, a symptom of congestive heart failure. He allowed to Stalin that his doctors were worried that a journey to Russia would be dangerous.85

  Stalin gave no ground. He could not leave Russia, he told Roosevelt, on the advice of his doctors. The leaders agreed after much back-and-forth to convene in Yalta. The town was a two-day ride by armored train for Stalin, but for Roosevelt it would require a 4,800-mile, ten-day sea journey to a secure Mediterranean port, and a 1,300-mile flight from there to Yalta. Churchill’s journey would not be nearly as arduous, but its long air legs would prove tiring for any traveler. The Crimean climate would do nothing to ameliorate the situation. Conditions in Yalta were so bad, Churchill told Hopkins, “we could not have found a worse place for a meeting than if we had spent ten years on research.”86

  On New Year’s Eve, Harold Nicolson and his wife, Vita, crouched in front of the dining room fireplace at their ancient Kentish estate, Sissinghurst, and listened to the “gabbles” of Adolf Hitler as he broadcast to his countrymen. The reception was bad, but they heard enough of Hitler’s “horrible… voice” to grasp that he was warning Germans of their fate were they to lose their “moral staunchness.” He declaimed “on the strength of the Führung, on the need for unanimity, on the order of the sein oder nicht sein [to be or not to be] theme.” Jock Colville also listened, and thought Hitler “seemed in low spirits.” His Ardennes gambit had stalled, but it had made for a bleak Christmas in London.87

  The New Year arrived in a snowbound Europe—“Sunshine and frost,” Colville told his diary on January 1. The skies blued that morning, perfect flying weather, as evidenced just after dawn, when eight hundred Luftwaffe fighter planes screamed over Allied airfields in Holland and Belgium “at zero feet” and destroyed 130 RAF planes caught on the ground, including Montgomery’s new American-built C-54. With fields and roads covered in drifting snow and with hard frosts coming daily, the countryside looked like “a fairyland,” Colville wrote, and added, “The V-2 rockets are falling like autumnal leaves.”88

  Churchill, icebound at Chequers with the roads to London impassable, spent most of New Year’s Day dictating memos in bed, far too many, in Brooke’s estimation, and “all of a futile nature… due to faulty reading of documents… or concern with details he should not get himself mixed up with.” The meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta was on, but getting there was proving problematic. When Roosevelt’s doctors objected to the president flying over the Alps in his unpressurized Skymaster, Churchill suggested that he and Roosevelt meet in Malta, and then fly at a more friendly altitude on a southern route over the Black Sea: “We shall be delighted if you come to Malta…. Everything can be arranged to your convenience. No more let us falter! From Malta to Yalta! Let nobody alter!” Churchill also suggested Argonaut—“which has a local but not deducible association”—as the code name for th
e conference (it was to the Black Sea that Jason sailed in search of the Golden Fleece). His cables implied a jaunty optimism that Churchill did not in fact feel. John Peck thought that the end of the war “and the problems it will bring with it are depressing the P.M.” Churchill’s mood can be measured by New Year wishes he sent a colleague: Best wishes “for this new disgusting year.”89

  Montgomery and Patton were preparing to hit the Ardennes salient, the former from the north, the latter from the south. Once the salient was sealed, Eisenhower intended to turn his armies toward the Rhine. Churchill cabled Roosevelt with the opinion he had expressed to the cabinet at the height of the Battle of the Bulge, that the German gambit in the Ardennes “is more likely to shorten than to lengthen the war.” Yet Eisenhower had not yet decided upon his strategy for exploiting the German defeat in the Ardennes. He had no plan for the endgame, and was weighing the advantages of encircling—and destroying—the Ruhr Valley before continuing east on the north German plains against an attack on a broad front along the upper and lower Rhine. He could make no decision, he told the chiefs, until he knew what the Russians intended to do, and when. To answer that question Air Marshal Tedder had been dispatched to Moscow, but he was held up in Cairo by foul weather. Churchill, with little faith in Tedder’s ability to extract any information from Stalin, told Colville that sending Tedder to Moscow “is like sending a man who has learned to ride a bicycle to paint a picture.” The Old Man took matters into his own hands and telegraphed Eisenhower’s concerns directly to Stalin.90

  While awaiting Stalin’s reply on military matters, Roosevelt and Churchill heard from the marshal on political matters. On January 4, Stalin informed Roosevelt by cable that given the fact that the London Poles were “aiding the Germans,” the presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. had no choice but to recognize the Lublin Poles. Roosevelt duly informed Churchill, adding that he was not going to reply to Stalin, “but we may discuss the matter at the meeting.” Harriman later wrote that Roosevelt “held fast to his belief that he personally could accomplish more in man-to-man talks with Stalin than Churchill, the State Department or the British Foreign Office.” Churchill became less sanguine as the month went on: “Make no mistake,” he told Colville. “All the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be Bolshevised; and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for poor Poland.”91

  Roosevelt continued to freeze Churchill out, much as he had before Tehran. “Much to my regret,” he cabled, the Yalta trip will force the postponement of “my projected visit to the United Kingdom until a later date.” The president had long promised to make such a trip, and had told Eden at Quebec that he would visit London after the election, “win or lose.” The London press had run with the rumor of a presidential visit for months. Mollie Panter-Downes wrote that were Roosevelt to come to England, “he will get as big a hand here as Churchill got in Paris.” But Roosevelt, Harriman later wrote, “with careful regard for Stalin’s suspicions,” was approaching Yalta exactly as he had approached Tehran; he avoided Churchill in order to placate Uncle Joe. As well, he was concerned that a visit to England so soon on the heels of Churchill’s Greek sojourn might appear to Americans as a presidential endorsement of British imperialism in the eastern Mediterranean. Eleanor Roosevelt, fearful of a domestic backlash, advised her husband not to visit London or Paris. When Churchill suggested to Roosevelt that they spend at least a few days on Malta planning for the conference, Roosevelt declined. He told Churchill he’d be heading straight to Yalta within hours of arriving in Malta. Furthermore, he offered the opinion that the Yalta portion of the trip should last no more than “five or six days.” Churchill was “disgusted” by Roosevelt’s unwillingness to spend more than a few days at the most important meeting of the war, Colville wrote, “and says even the Almighty required seven to settle the world. (An inaccuracy which was quickly pointed out to him. Viz. Genesis I).”92

  Late on January 8, Field Marshal Brooke, summoned by the P.M., found Churchill working in bed “sipping coffee, drinking brandy and smoking his big cigar.” The Old Man was in fine form because he had received directly from Stalin the information Eisenhower most desired and that Tedder, stuck in Cairo, could not procure. To Churchill’s delight, Stalin informed him that the Red Army would soon be on the move, not later than midmonth. The message had been personal. Colville had long noted the ease with which Churchill could be charmed, and Stalin, for all his bluntness, could charm with the best of them.93

  In the east, eight Soviet armies had been reorganized along the eight-hundred-mile battle line from the Baltic to Belgrade. Each Soviet army was given a designation that identified the portion of the front it occupied; any two of the armies were as large as the Anglo-American forces in the west. The Eastern Front, static in the Warsaw/central sector since August, ran south from just east of the East Prussia frontier to within a few miles of Warsaw, and then along the east bank of the upper Vistula. The remnants of Hitler’s Army Group North, twenty-six divisions and almost two hundred thousand men, were trapped behind Soviet lines in Latvia. In the far south, Tito and the Soviets had held Belgrade since late October, but the Germans still held the Yugoslav-Hungary border region. The Red Army had surrounded Budapest, where almost two hundred thousand Germans found themselves trapped within the city. The overall length of the Eastern Front had shrunk by four hundred miles since the summer, which benefited both the attackers and the defenders, but Soviet supply lines now stretched rearward more than eight hundred miles. Since August, the Red Army had rebuilt the railroads, and they now brought up millions of tons of supplies by rail and by road, aboard tens of thousands of American-made Studebaker trucks. By January, Soviet armies north of the Carpathians were ready, but until Churchill extracted that fact from Stalin, the Western allies had no idea of just how ready. In fact, Russian complaints about the weather, Russian secrecy in general, and Russian stasis on the front since the Warsaw uprising had led many in Anglo-American circles to doubt Russian intentions, and to underestimate Russian capabilities.94

  Hitler certainly underestimated the threat in the east. On January 9, he confidently told his generals that the Red Army lacked the threefold superiority in men that an attacker traditionally needed to forge a breakthrough. When first apprised of the Soviet buildup, Hitler scoffed, “It’s the greatest bluff since Genghis Khan! Who’s responsible for this rubbish?”95

  The Führer was correct in regard to the entire length of the front, but incorrect regarding that portion Stalin intended to attack. Marshal Zhukov commanded the First Belorussian Front, which was arrayed just east and south of Warsaw. To Zhukov’s left, the armies of the First Ukrainian Front under the command of Marshal Ivan Konev were astride the Vistula about thirty miles east of Cracow. Together, Zhukov and Konev commanded 160 divisions, twice as many as the Allies had arrayed west of the Rhine, and 32,000 pieces of artillery. These two massive Soviet armies alone accounted for almost one-third of the Red Army’s total strength, and outnumbered the Germans at their front by six to one in men, eight to one in artillery, six to one in tanks, and eighteen to one in aircraft. The Berlin-Dresden axis lay just over three hundred miles due west.96

  On January 12, Konev struck. His heavy artillery put down a barrage with a density of more than six hundred shells per mile of front, a display Sir John Keegan called “an earthquake concentration of artillery power.” Zhukov followed on January 14. The rest of the Soviet armies north of the Carpathians, but for the northernmost on the Baltic, soon followed. The German front collapsed. On the sixteenth, Hitler transferred his headquarters from Ziegenberg, near Frankfurt, to the Chancellery in Berlin. Warsaw fell to Zhukov on January 17. To the south, Konev was driving for Cracow and Breslau. Upper Silesia, Germany’s second-most-important industrial area, lay just beyond. Albert Speer had scattered armament factories throughout the region, which had so far escaped damage at the hands of the RAF and the Eighth Air Force. On January 20, Hitler, to the dismay of his commanders east and
west, announced to his captains, “I’m going to attack the Russians where they least expect it. The Sixth SS Panzer Army is off to Budapest!” It was a wild diversion born of delusion.97

  On January 22, Konev’s forces crossed the upper Oder, less than two hundred miles from Berlin. South of there, on January 27, the Red Army entered the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz. On Himmler’s orders (issued months earlier in anticipation of this day), the Germans had blown up the last of the gas chambers and fled, leaving behind almost eight thousand starving Jews and Polish POWs, along with the pilfered luggage, dentures, and eyeglasses of their victims. The pelf included almost one million women’s dresses, and 38,000 pairs of men’s shoes. By then, another Soviet army had driven deep into East Prussia, where fleeing SS troops blew up Hitler’s Wolfsschanze on their way out of Rastenburg. All along the front, SS units herded Allied POWs and slave laborers westward toward concentration camps in Germany. Those who straggled or collapsed from hunger were left to die on the roadside or shot.98

  Two million East Prussians now fled in a human stampede before the Red Army. “It was as if,” Sir John Keegan wrote, “the submerged knowledge of what the Wehrmacht had done in the east” seized Germans “with terror and flung them on the snowbound roads in an agony of urgency.” Eight centuries of Germanic settlement was undone in days. “Speed, frenzy and savagery characterized the [Soviet] advance,” professor John Erickson wrote. “Villages and small towns burned, while Soviet soldiers raped at will and wreaked an atavistic vengeance” on any home or village that displayed any insignia of Nazism. Soviet T-34 battle tanks chased down and crushed German refugees “in a bloody smear of humans and horses…. Raped German women were nailed by their hands to the farmcarts carrying their families.” When Tito’s number three man, Milovan Djilas, visiting Stalin in Moscow, voiced his disdain for such atrocities, Stalin answered, “Does Djilas, who is himself a writer, not know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can’t he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?” Stalin told Djilas, “You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal, and it is not ideal, nor can it be…. We have opened up our penitentiaries and stuck everybody in the army.”99