The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  It was left to Roosevelt to utter perhaps the most important statement—or at least the statement most full of portent—of the conference. In what Churchill called a “momentous declaration,” Roosevelt volunteered during the first plenary session that he did not think American troops would stay on in Europe much longer than two years after Germany’s defeat. He had told Harriman much the same two years earlier, and had told Churchill several times in 1944. The statement was meant to diminish Stalin’s wariness of the West ganging up on him. It reconfirmed for Churchill his belief in the need for a strong France. To Stalin it also sent a clear message of indecision, if not weakness. It told Stalin that agreements made at Yalta depended on trust for their implementation but might be abrogated through force. To Eden it was another occasion when Roosevelt “mistakenly as I believe, moved out of step with us, influenced by his conviction that he could get better results with Stalin direct than could the three countries negotiating together. This was an illusion.”115

  The illusion was conjured under circumstances that would try the stamina of a young man, let alone three old men. Churchill’s day began at midnight, when he took to his bed to read dispatches and newspapers until the early hours. He rose and bathed shortly before noon, and took what he referred to as “brunch,” appropriating the American name for the midday meal. Plenary sessions began around 4:30 each afternoon and ran until about nine at night. Each of the Big Three hosted a feast during the conference, Churchill’s turn coming on February 10. These liquid affairs were defined by lengthy toasts and “buckets of champagne,” as described by Cadogan. “I think we’re making some progress,” Cadogan told his diary, “but this place is still rather a madhouse.” During these affairs, myriad jolly men leapt to their feet to offer, as they thought, toasts of warmth and wisdom. Churchill raised one such to the Soviet army: “The men who have broken the back of the German war machine.” They toasted political parties, the King of England, the common man, leaders, women, the alliance, the future. During Stalin’s dinner, given at the Yusupov Palace, Cadogan estimated that fifty toasts had been raised; Edward Stettinius pegged the toasts at forty-five and the courses at twenty. Celebrants fell asleep; some slipped beneath the table. Thus, the future of the world was agreed upon. “I have never known the Russians to be so easy and accommodating,” Cadogan wrote in a letter to his wife. “In particular, Joe has been very good.” He added, “The president in particular is very wooly and wobbly.” The president, Churchill confided to his doctor, “is behaving very badly. He won’t take any interest in what we’re trying to do.” But what were they trying to do? After eight days they had agreed to disagree, agreed to postpone final decisions, and, as Churchill put it, agreed “to consult about a consultation.”116

  On February 11, the Big Three signed their Declaration on Liberated Europe—the Yalta Declaration, as elastic a document as produced during the war. In essence it was a reprise of the Atlantic Charter, that is, not a law but a loose confederation of words upholding the “right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live” and pledging the “restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those people who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations.” Two weeks later, Churchill explained it all to the House. First, he placed blame for the need to even conduct such negotiations squarely at the feet of the London Poles:

  Let me remind the House, and those who have undertaken what I regard as the honourable duty of being very careful that our affairs in Poland are regulated in accordance with the dignity and honour of this country, that there would have been no Lublin Committee or Lublin Provisional Government in Poland if the Polish Government in London had accepted our faithful counsel given to them a year ago.

  Then, after posing rhetorical questions on the viability of the Yalta Declaration—will it work, will elections be “free and unfettered”—he gave his answer:

  The impression I brought back from the Crimea, and from all my other contacts, is that Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honourable friendship and equality with the Western democracies. I feel also that their word is their bond. I know of no Government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government. I decline absolutely to embark here on a discussion about Russian good faith.117

  Churchill left Yalta early on the evening of February 11. The plan called for him to stay one more night, but upon driving into the grounds of the Vorontsov Palace, he turned to Sarah and said: “Why do we stay here? Why don’t we go tonight—I see no reason to stay a minute longer—we’re off.” He strutted into the private office and announced, “I don’t know about you—but I’m off. I leave in fifty minutes.” And he did, in ninety minutes, to be exact. The staff packed up everything, including laundry that was still damp, and were off within two hours. Churchill motored forty miles to Sevastopol, where the Cunard liner Franconia rode at anchor, his home for the next three nights. Meanwhile, Stalin, Sarah wrote, “like some genie, just disappeared.” Roosevelt flew off to Cairo on the morning of the twelfth. On the fourteenth, Churchill boarded his Skymaster at Laki for a flight to Athens, where he checked in on Archbishop Damaskinos, the new regent, and where, although the crowds cheered the old Englishman, the underlying political infections that Churchill had treated seven weeks earlier still festered. From Athens, deeply anxious now about the future, Churchill flew on to Cairo, to say his farewells to Franklin Roosevelt, who was taking his rest on the USS Quincy after conducting a parley with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. The president, Churchill later wrote, seemed “placid and frail. I felt that he had a slender contact with life.” They never met again.118

  Within a few weeks, throughout the European theater, the agreements taken at Yalta strained under their structural flaws and Roosevelt’s “momentous statement” that American troops would remain in Europe for only two years after the war. This was an opening Stalin soon seized, and exploited. Churchill and Britain now lacked the political and military means to change the course of events in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria—as well as in Yugoslavia, where Tito was prepared to play the Soviets and Anglo-Americans off against each other. But not in Greece, where Stalin, keeping his word, had not interfered. In Greece, Jock Colville later wrote, Churchill’s show of force—to guarantee free elections, not override them, as was Stalin’s wont—brought Greeks “twenty or so years of… freedom and democracy.” Still, a sense of failure had gripped Churchill for the entire journey. By early spring, Stalin’s abjuration of the decisions taken at Yalta would guarantee the veracity of Churchill’s intuition. One vital matter was not even addressed by the Big Three in Yalta: just exactly where in Germany would the Allied armies finally stop?119

  Churchill returned to London on February 19. By then the RAF and American air forces were dropping more bombs on Germany on any given night than the Germans had thrown at Britain during any month of the Blitz. During the first ten months of 1944, 250,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Germany—double the amount that had been dropped during the years between 1939 and 1944. Now, entering the final months of the conflict, the British and American air forces were determined to double that figure; 500,000 tons was the goal. It was reached. Roosevelt and Morgenthau may have backed away from their plan for a desolate Germany, but the Allied air forces were well on their way to producing exactly that result. On January 25, four days before leaving for Yalta, Churchill had asked Arthur (“Bomber”) Harris whether Berlin and Dresden, along with Leipzig and Chemnitz, might not be “especially attractive targets” by virtue of their importance to German communication and rail networks. Air Chief Marshal Portal sought to concentrate on German tank factories, which were still rolling out new Tiger tanks. The tanks were no longer intended for massed attacks but for the defense of German towns and cities; just one of them could hold up an infantry company for a day. Harris thought he could hit both the tank factories and the rail centers. The RAF and the Russians believed that such
a bombing offensive was critical not only to shortening the war but to winning it. The Red Army could not do it alone. On January 29, the day Churchill had departed for Yalta, Portal agreed to launch attacks on tank factories and on Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz.120

  As long as rail hubs such as Dresden functioned, Hitler could move freely within his interior lines. The Germans had transferred three divisions to the Russian front and were bringing up eight more. Indeed, that prospect so troubled Stalin that he asked Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta to direct Anglo-American air forces to destroy all such rail hubs, especially Dresden. The Allied air forces did just that over three nights beginning on February 13, when two thousand tons of high explosives and incendiaries were dropped into the center of Dresden. Water fountains boiled away; ancient bricks and stonework exploded into shrapnel. The Elbe burned, ignited by the jelly of incendiaries. At least 20,000 citizens perished, perhaps as many as 30,000; there could be no exact tally, for most of the victims had been reduced to ash. Ten days after the Dresden raid, Churchill took his weekend at Chequers. Colville and the usual retinue, along with Bomber Harris, accompanied the Old Man. While waiting in the great hall for Churchill to appear for dinner, Colville asked Harris what the effect of the Dresden raid had been. Harris replied, “There is no such place as Dresden.” Churchill spoke of the raid in rather less sensational terms. In fact, Colville later wrote, Churchill “never mentioned it in my presence, and I am reasonably sure he would have done so if it had been regarded as anything at all special.”121

  Six weeks later, on April 1, Churchill wrote a memo to the Chiefs of Staff: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so-called area bombing of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests.” He went on to say that with the war almost won, continued bombing of that magnitude would result only in the Allies inheriting a ruined nation that could supply no matériel for the rebuilding of British houses, let alone German. In a draft of the memo (which he called his “rough” memo) he had used the word “terror” to describe the bombing, and had added, “The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.” He dropped those lines from his final version after the Chiefs of Staff objected. Yet he had made his point: the time had come to cease the airborne onslaught he had championed for four years.122

  On March 6, on the grounds that they needed stability behind their lines, the Soviets set up a puppet government in Romania. Churchill had ceded to Stalin during their autumn meetings a 90 percent “interest” in Romanian affairs, but he had not intended that to mean the right to unilaterally install new governments. The coup, Colville wrote, “inflamed the P.M. who saw that our honour was at stake…. The P.M. and Eden both fear our willingness to trust our Russian ally may have been vain and they look with despondency to the future.” That future was coming fast.123

  Since June 1941, the premise that Hitler must be defeated was the mortar that bonded together first Churchill and Stalin, and then the alliance, for more than three years, even as cracks appeared in the foundation. With Hitler and Nazi Germany now doomed, that bonding ingredient no longer sustained the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance. The Yalta meeting had been called not to make plans to defeat Hitler but to settle once and for all the matter of the political shape of postwar central and Eastern Europe. Yet whereas the three Allied leaders had fought together for three years with a common aim, each now positioned himself at cross-purposes to the others, even as to how the final act of the war should play out.

  On March 7, forward elements of the American First Army made their way across a railroad bridge that crossed the Rhine at Remagen, about a hundred miles south of Montgomery’s British and Canadian armies, which faced the Ruhr. The Germans had intended to destroy the Remagen bridge but the Americans secured it with minutes to spare before the explosive charges were set off. By the morning of March 8, the Americans had a foothold on the east bank. A week later, the American Third Army crossed the Moselle, and seven days after that, it crossed the Rhine in force at Oppenheim, south of Mainz and about 150 miles south of Montgomery. It had taken Montgomery a month to slog to his current position; with the Ruhr at stake, von Rundstedt, under orders from Hitler to defend the Ruhr at all costs, had flooded the lowlands at Montgomery’s front. Von Rundstedt (called out of retirement months earlier) had slowed the British advance, but by March 21 Montgomery was ready. That night, the first squads of the Black Watch crossed the Rhine. Two nights later, Montgomery began throwing his main forces across, including the American Ninth Army, which was attached to his command. The operation was code-named Plunder, and Winston Churchill had arrived by air in order to see the curtain go up.

  Montgomery had asked Brooke to keep Churchill away, but the Old Man was not to be denied. Not since 1813 had British troops fought on German soil. Accompanied by his naval aide, Tommy Thompson, along with Brooke and Jock Colville, Churchill took up residence at Montgomery’s forward headquarters. The Old Man was given two caravans (trailers, to a Yank), one for work and one for sleep. Monty had several caravans, Colville noted, of varying nationalities. One had belonged to the Italian general Bergonzoli; another was used for sleeping, a third was filled with caged canaries and served as a map room. Two portraits of Rommel hung on the wall. On the morning of March 24, Colville and some friends repaired to a hillside overlooking the river. They watched and listened as two thousand big guns put down a barrage, and as fighters and bombers streamed overhead. Far overhead, an aerial armada of gliders and paratroop transports drifted past on its way to the drop zone. At one point Colville spied a distant contrail arching high into the sky on a westerly bearing: a V-2 on its way to Antwerp or London. Churchill took all this in from Monty’s headquarters. Everyone noted that some of the Allied planes returned in flames, with parachutes popping open high in the sky.124

  The next day, the prime minister went on a special quest to the river’s edge. There, near Wesel, he climbed onto a wrecked bridge to take in the scene. Brooke thought the adventure misguided, especially when German snipers and gunners began pouring fire at British engineers a few hundred yards downstream. With shells falling nearby and raising great columns of mud and spray, Brooke advised Churchill to depart. Instead, Churchill “put both his arms round one of the twisted girders of the bridge and looked over his shoulder… with pouting mouth and angry eyes! Thank heaven he came away quietly, it was a sad wrench for him, he was enjoying himself immensely!” The next day, after driving south to Eisenhower’s headquarters, the Old Man asked Montgomery to join him in taking a motor launch across to the German side. “Why not,” answered Montgomery. Churchill later wrote: “We landed in brilliant sunshine and perfect peace on the German shore, and walked about for half an hour or so unmolested.” Later that day, as recorded by Brooke, Churchill took himself on a long trek down to the river, where “on arrival he solemnly relieved himself in the Rhine.” Brooke could only see Churchill’s back, but was sure the Old Man wore a “boyish grin of contentment.”125

  Within a week, Montgomery and the American Ninth Army had established a secure beachhead about twenty miles deep and thirty-five miles wide on either side of Wesel. The American Ninth and First Armies encircled a German army in the Ruhr and met at Lippstadt, near Paderborn. By April 4 Montgomery’s Second British Army had pushed even farther east to Hamelin, on the Weser River. This put the British and the Americans on their right about 150 miles from Berlin, a straight shot across the northern German plains. The Russian armies on the lower Oder, meanwhile, had been resupplying for eight weeks and had yet to commence their final, fifty-mile drive to Berlin. In fact, the Russians had told Eisenhower that they would likely not begin that assault until mid-May.126

  In mid-March, Molotov refused entry into Poland to a British diplomatic mission. On the sixteenth Churchill cabled Roosevelt: “At present all entry into Poland is barred to our representatives. An impenetrable veil has been drawn across the scene…. There is no doubt in my
mind the Soviets fear very much our seeing what is going on in Poland.” Two weeks later, Churchill protested to Stalin “the veil of secrecy” drawn around Poland and warned that if “our efforts to reach an agreement about Poland are doomed to failure, I shall be bound to confess the fact to Parliament.” But they had reached an agreement on Poland at Yalta, albeit one so imprecisely worded that it was open to wide interpretation. The word “interpretation” appears repeatedly in telegrams between Roosevelt and Churchill during the last weeks of March and the first week of April (by which time most of Roosevelt’s communications were written for his signature by Admiral Leahy or the State Department). A less vague and more rigidly legalistic declaration might not have forestalled Stalin’s abrogation of it, but it would have at least served as a means to articulate the exact nature of Stalin’s abrogation. The vagueness of the declaration underscores Stalin’s adroit (and deceitful) negotiating skills. Now, with the Red Army preparing for the final drive down the roads to Berlin and Vienna, Stalin was free to interpret that agreement in terms satisfactory only to himself.127