The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  On January 27, Zhukov’s forward units crossed the Oder, the last natural obstacle between his armies and Berlin, less than one hundred miles distant. Having again outrun his supplies, he paused.

  That day, Hitler moved to his new Berlin headquarters—a concrete-and-steel bunker deep beneath the Chancellery. While chairing the first meeting there, Hitler asked Göring and Jodl, “Do you think the English are enthusiastic about all the Russian developments?” Jodl replied, “They [the English] have always regarded the Russians with suspicion.” Göring added, “If this goes on we’ll get a telegram [from the English] in a few days.” No telegram was forthcoming, but the RAF was, and the American air forces, and the Red Army. Three days later, Albert Speer prepared a report for Hitler that summed up the consequences of losing Silesia. The coal supply would last two more weeks; aircraft were plentiful, but supplies of synthetic fuel were exhausted. The report began: “The war is lost.” Hitler read the first line and ordered the report placed in his personal safe. By February 3, Zhukov had established secure bridgeheads across the northern Oder.100

  Churchill, Sarah, Eden, and the chiefs left by air for Malta on January 29, reaching the island the next morning. Churchill arrived chilled, tired, and with a temperature that spiked to 102 degrees. Sarah thought, “Here we go again.” Lord Moran told his diary: “He [Churchill] has a bad habit of running a temperature on these journeys.” The Old Man, lacking the strength to leave the plane, spent six hours in restless sleep on the tarmac before being whisked off to a cabin on board HMS Orion.101

  While Churchill recuperated, the British and American Chiefs of Staff sat down for talks on the proper strategy Eisenhower should pursue in order to kill the German armies at his front. Eisenhower had finally submitted his “appreciation” for future actions in which he proposed to attack along the length of the Rhine, and cross it at several points. This broad-front strategy displeased the British, who argued that Germany was, in essence, already defeated and that Eisenhower’s plan was too methodical and too cautious. Instead, the British argued, Eisenhower should hurl Montgomery’s army into the Ruhr basin with Berlin the ultimate objective while the American armies along the upper Rhine guarded that flank. Eisenhower had already expressed his total opposition to this “pencil line thrust on Berlin.” Marshall, at times “brutally frank… stood four-square behind Eisenhower,” Ismay later wrote, “and the British had no option but to give way.” Brooke and Churchill had understood since late summer that through “force of circumstances”—the Allied army “was predominantly American”—they would have to accede to the Americans’ wishes. Still, they came away believing that Marshall, although closing the door on any further discussion, did not close it on the prospect of getting as far east into Germany as possible in order to discourage the Russians from pushing west. The British welcomed this prospect, believing it left open the possibility of getting to Berlin, and of denying the Soviets the North Sea and Baltic coasts. But Marshall had not endorsed, let alone championed, a run to Berlin, and he had made it absolutely clear that he would continue to back Eisenhower in his strategy, wherever it took the Allies.102

  Had Field Marshal Sir John Dill, the British liaison to the American Chiefs, been present, he might have guided Marshall to a more precise statement of intent and mediated Marshall’s growing dislike of the supercilious Brooke. But Dill had died in November in Washington. So great was Marshall’s respect for Dill that he arranged for the field marshal to be buried in America’s Valhalla, Arlington National Cemetery.

  With brass bands playing national anthems and with the Stars and Stripes and Union Jacks snapping in the breeze, Roosevelt sailed into Valletta Harbor on February 2 on board the cruiser USS Quincy. Wearing a cloth cap, and with a cape hanging off his shoulders, he waved from the bridge as Quincy passed alongside Orion. All who saw the president were shocked by his gaunt, almost skeletal, appearance. He would ordinarily have emerged refreshed and invigorated after a ten-day sea voyage. Instead, he looked frail and exhausted. After a brief informal meeting with Churchill, Eden, and the Combined Chiefs in the ship’s wardroom, Roosevelt kept to his stateroom until the aircraft were readied to ferry the delegation to Yalta late that night. Eden told his diary: “He [Roosevelt] gives me the impression of failing powers.”

  The president spoke little during the meeting. Again, as before the Tehran Conference, Churchill and Roosevelt failed to forge a united front to present to Stalin. The matter of the framework of the United Nations Organization had been settled in the early autumn at Dumbarton Oaks, but the exact mechanism for Great Power voting had yet to be worked out, and Stalin had stated his belief that any Great Power that was party to a dispute should be able to exercise its veto prerogative; that is, any of the Big Four could effectively override the wishes of the General Assembly. Allied zones of occupation in Germany had been proposed at the second Quebec conference, but the question of whether the French would gain such a zone had not been settled, and nor had the question of German reparations. Stalin had made himself quite clear in that regard; he wanted everything not nailed down in Germany carted off to Russia. Most critically, Roosevelt and Churchill had not agreed on a policy to guarantee Polish borders and Polish liberties. Eden confided to Harry Hopkins that “we were going into a decisive conference and had so far neither agreed what we would discuss nor how to handle matters with a Bear who would certainly know his mind.”103

  Pug Ismay framed the Yalta Conference in Clausewitzian terms: “War is a continuation of policy by other means.” Both sides, Ismay later wrote, the potential losers and winners, must give political consideration to the consequences of their military decisions, the loser to preserve what he can from the wreckage, the winner “in order to ensure that the purposes for which he took up arms, will be realized in the post-war.” The main German armies had now been compressed to the German frontiers, east and west. They would henceforth fight on German soil for German soil, if not for German honor. The Greater Reich had disappeared. Sixteen Wehrmacht divisions in Norway, and more than twice that many in Croatia and Italy, were effectively cut off from Berlin. German troops in Amsterdam were now trapped behind Allied lines. The end was coming, and it was coming fast. For Poland the end had come; the Red Army now occupied the entire country. While on board Orion Churchill wrote a long letter to Clementine, in which he offered: “The misery of the whole world appalls me and I fear increasingly that new struggles may arise out of those we are successfully ending.”104

  At about midnight on February 2, twenty American Skymasters and five British Yorks began lifting off at ten-minute intervals from Luqa airfield on Malta for the seven-hour flight to the Crimea. A sixth York, carrying staff members from the Foreign Office and War Cabinet, had lost its way and crashed in the Mediterranean on the trip to Malta. Most on board were drowned, including aides to Cadogan and Brooke. Seven survivors were picked up, but the plane took vital maps, charts, and papers to the bottom. Churchill had not done much preparation for the Yalta meeting to begin with; now he could not catch up. The loss of the papers, Harold Nicolson wrote, “will cast a gloom over the conference.”105

  The Russians had been told originally that about thirty-five Americans and a like number of British would make up the entourage traveling to Yalta. That figure now stood at close to seven hundred. Yet only two members of it really mattered.106

  The fate of Poland—of all central and Eastern Europe—rested with a dying man, a tired man, and Joseph Stalin, described by his comrade Milovan Djilas as “an ungainly dwarf of a man” whose “conscience was troubled by nothing, despite the millions who had been destroyed in his name and by his order.”107

  The aerial flotilla arrived at the Laki airfield in the Crimea early on February 3. Yalta was about eighty miles distant, a seven-hour drive on rutted and washed-out coastal roads. Soviet troops, many of them stout women, guarded the entire route. Stalin arranged for Roosevelt and the Americans to take up residence in Yalta itself, at the Livadia Palace, the summer
home of Czar Nicholas II, where once a thousand servants tended to the care and feeding of seven royal Romanovs. The plenary sessions would take place there. Churchill and the British were put up at the Vorontsov Palace, about twenty minutes from Yalta. Alec Cadogan found the place to be of “indescribable ugliness,” built in 1837 “in what Baedeker so aptly describes as a combination of the Moorish and Gothic styles. You couldn’t possibly imagine what it looks like.” The furnishings, Cadogan wrote, were “of an almost terrifying hideosity.” Sarah Churchill tried her hand at a description: “It looked like a Scottish baronial hall inside, and a cross between a Swiss chalet and a mosque outside.” It was perched on a bluff high above the sea. A great stone staircase on the seaward side was set off by three pairs of sculpted lions: one pair slept on their paws, another stared seaward, the third bared their fangs to roar. A pair of stone lions guarded the front gates. Another huge lion sculpture occupied a prominent place in the grounds. This beast had one eye open and one closed. Whether Churchill saw—or Stalin intended—the irony in the menagerie of stone lions remains unrecorded. The British were warned by the Soviets to take care where they strolled; the area had not been fully cleared of land mines.108

  Stalin arrived on February 4 and took up residence in the Yusupov Palace, more a country estate than a palace, situated between the Churchill and Roosevelt sanctuaries. The Germans had looted all three residences of furniture and fixtures but, remarkably, had not destroyed them on their way out of town. Stalin, in turn, stripped three Moscow hotels of furniture and fixtures, along with cooks, chambermaids, and waiters, which he sent by train to Yalta so that the gathered Allied elites might sleep and dine in relative comfort as they charted the course of the postwar world. Churchill raised a toast in that regard at a small dinner party hosted by Roosevelt the evening of February 4: “The whole world will have its eyes on this conference. If it is successful we will have peace for one hundred years.”109

  Five years later, Churchill wrote in his memoirs, “Poland had indeed been the most urgent reason for the Yalta conference, and was to prove the first of the great causes which led to the breakdown of the Grand Alliance.” He had telescoped his memory by the time he wrote those words. Each of the Big Three brought his own most important priority—or two—to Yalta; Churchill’s was Poland. Roosevelt came seeking a final determination on the structure of his beloved United Nations Organization. He came, as well, seeking firm commitments from Stalin on the Pacific war. General MacArthur had taken Manila that week, and the war against Japan had entered a new and critical phase. Issues in need of discussion abounded: the Russians, by sending troops into northern Iran, seemed poised to make mischief there. The issue of German reparations had to be addressed, along with the “dismemberment” of Germany (a term Stalin insisted upon) and the organization of Allied zones of occupation in Germany and Austria. Should France have such a zone? Churchill thought it should; Stalin, having months earlier signed a friendship treaty with de Gaulle, thought France should have a role, but limited; Roosevelt, though he loathed de Gaulle, was not about to cast a veto or waste political capital over that issue. A great deal more than Polish borders and the structure of a Polish government was on the Yalta agenda—or, rather, would have been if the Big Three had arrived with an agenda in place. They had not. Instead, during eight days of afternoon meetings and evening feasts, the agenda presented itself as each of the leaders waited for just the right moment to lay claim to the matter that most concerned him.110

  Stalin certainly held Poland to be a matter of interest, but for reasons different from—and at odds with—Churchill’s. Churchill later wrote that Poland was discussed at seven of the eight plenary sessions. Poland indeed was mentioned often, but not until the third session did the Big Three get down to brass tacks on Poland, because, as Averell Harriman later wrote, “the fate of Poland… had been largely decided before Roosevelt and Churchill took up the subject with Stalin at Yalta. Events were in the saddle.” The dispute, at its core, came down to this: Was Poland (its borders and future government) a clean slate to be filled in (Churchill and Roosevelt), or was the Communist Lublin government (in place in Warsaw) to form the basis for the evolution of Polish self-government (Stalin)? Churchill reminded Stalin that Britain had gone to war for Poland on a point of honor. Stalin, as he had for three years, reminded Churchill that Poland was not simply a matter of honor for the Soviet Union, but a question of both honor and security—honor because the Russians had been in regular conflict with the Poles for centuries, and security because Poland occupied that swath of Eastern Europe that emptied onto the Russian homeland. He also pointed out to Churchill that he thought it ironic that Churchill wanted to dictate terms to Poland, while he, Stalin, who was called a dictator, simply wanted the Poles (guided by his Lublin puppets) to chart their own course. It was a mess that defied solution.111

  And although Roosevelt composed a handwritten letter to Stalin during the conference that made clear his concerns about Poland, the president displayed an insouciance that regularly took the form of jokes that served only to undercut the importance of the issue. Eager to end one discussion that was going nowhere, Roosevelt offered, “Poland has been a source of trouble for over five hundred years.” Toward the end of another meeting, Roosevelt, while perusing a map of Eastern Europe, asked Molotov how long ago certain areas belonged to Poland. When Molotov replied, “a very long time ago,” Roosevelt said, “This might lead the English to ask for a return of the United States to Great Britain.” On that note, Roosevelt, exhausted, adjourned the meeting. Of Roosevelt’s behavior Eden later wrote, “I do not believe that the president’s declining health altered his judgment, though his handling of the conference was less sure than it might have been.”112

  During the plenary sessions of February 9 and 10, the Big Three finally reached an agreement on Poland, or, more accurately, an interim agreement. Despite his insistence that nothing be dictated to the Poles, Stalin prevailed. The Lublin Poles would be recognized as the Polish provisional government; in turn the Lublin government would pledge to hold elections as soon as possible (Stalin thought within a month), but the validity of the elections was to be guaranteed not by representatives of the three Allies on the spot, but rather by the Big Three foreign ministers, who would meet in Moscow. This barely satisfied Churchill’s insistence that Poland be “mistress in her own house and captain of her soul.” He could return to London and truthfully tell the House that he and Roosevelt had not thrown over the London Poles, had not accepted in toto the Lublin government, but had agreed to a mechanism (free elections) for all Polish factions to take their cases to their countrymen. Yet no Polish leaders of any stripe had been invited to Yalta to air their opinions on the matter. Finally, the Big Three settled the matter of Polish borders, but again, as an interim recommendation to be taken under consideration at the peace conference. The borders east and west would take the general shape discussed a year earlier at Tehran—half of East Prussia to the Poles, half to Russia; the Curzon Line would define the eastern border, and Upper Silesia would go to the Poles, but Lvov to Russia. The new border would shift to the Neisse River in the west, but, as at Tehran, no final decision was made on which branch of the Neisse, the Eastern or Western. In effect, the final decision on Polish borders, like many of the issues discussed at Yalta, had been taken “under consideration.” Churchill later wrote, “It was the best I could get.”113

  “For further consideration” became the order of the day. Stalin insisted that German reparations amount to $20 billion and that half go to Russia. Churchill objected. Twenty billion was far more than Germany could pay; it was the oppressive peace of Versailles redux. He insisted that an actual figure not be included in any declaration; Stalin prevailed, though Roosevelt saw the resolution as agreeing to disagree, the matter to be settled later. Likewise, the matter of German “dismemberment” was sidestepped by all agreeing that the first step in that direction must take the form of Allied zones of occupation. There woul
d be four: France was in. On the makeup of the United Nations, the Russians—to Roosevelt’s delight—dropped their demand for separate membership for their sixteen republics and said they’d settle for just two. Roosevelt agreed that the offer “deserved sympathetic consideration.” Molotov had shot for the stars and was rewarded with the moon. Yet this agreement, too, was only “in principle,” to be considered and possibly codified at the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco, in April (Belarus and Ukraine were admitted in October). That was Roosevelt’s style—move things along but don’t press.

  On the Pacific front, Roosevelt sought concession from Stalin for airbases on the Asian mainland; Stalin sought the return to Russia of Sakhalin and other territories grabbed by Tokyo in 1905. Manchuria would be a Russian “sphere” (Roosevelt’s quest to quell spheres of influence did not extend to Russia). Asia was an area of discussion that Churchill claimed he had no interest in. “To us,” he later wrote, “the problem [Pacific deals and agreements] was remote and secondary.” Perhaps, but Stalin and Roosevelt had reached agreement on a number of Asian matters in secret and without consulting the British or Chiang. “This [agreement],” Eden wrote, “was, in my judgment, a discreditable by-product of the conference.” It also, Eden wrote, undermined the argument of those who attributed Roosevelt’s decisions at Yalta to his illness. During a conference that was “strenuous even for a man of Churchill’s energy,” Roosevelt found time and energy to conduct a parallel conference with Stalin.114