The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  An air of tragedy hung over Livadia, which had been built in 1911 as a summer palace for the last czar, Nicholas II, and his czarina, Alexandra, at a cost of two million rubles, paid in gold. Orthodox priests had spattered holy water and swung smoldering censers to bless each room. Little imagination was required to see the royal couple with their four daughters and ailing son arriving by imperial train from St. Petersburg, snacking on reindeer tongue and smoked herring as they cavorted through the villa or aboard the three-masted, twin-funneled royal yacht anchored below the bluff. It was said that lion-head embellishments on the marble benches outside the front entrance caricatured the czar; that he slept in a different room every night to foil assassins; that a private outside staircase had been used by the mystical Rasputin to visit the czarina. After abdicating in 1917, Nicholas futilely petitioned to retire at Livadia; instead, he and his family were murdered, and the villa became first a tuberculosis asylum and then a German division headquarters in 1941. Hitler had promised the estate to Rundstedt after the war for services rendered, and thus it escaped the torch.

  Now Roosevelt slept in the czar’s first-floor suite, whose décor was described as “early Pullman car,” with brass lamps shaded in fringed orange silk and bottle-green harem cushions scattered across the floor. Marshall was assigned another royal bedroom upstairs, and Admiral King, to the great mirth of his comrades, occupied the czarina’s boudoir.

  * * *

  At four o’clock on Sunday afternoon, the heavy wooden doors flew open and a Secret Service squad marched into the Livadia foyer, followed by a Soviet security phalanx at port arms. From a black Packard in the semicircular driveway emerged a short ursine figure in a round military cap and a greatcoat adorned with epaulets and six brass buttons. His trousers were tucked into boots of soft Caucasus leather with elevated heels, and on the khaki tunic of his marshal’s uniform he wore the red ribbon and five-pointed star of a Hero of the Soviet Union. The impenetrable dark eyes and gray pushbroom mustache were softened by a slight smile that revealed irregular teeth, more black than bone in tint, and even the fading light showed that beneath a heavy coating of talcum powder his cheeks were dimpled with the smallpox scars he had incurred at age six. All conversation stopped—Russian servants were careful not to rattle the teacups—and junior officers pressed forward, necks craned, as if to catch a fleeting glimpse of Grendel.

  Joseph Stalin intrigued even Franklin Roosevelt, who now greeted the marshal with a broad grin and an extended hand from behind the desk of his makeshift study in the palace. They shared native shrewdness, political acumen, and a conviction that their respective nations were about to become superpowers—a recent coinage that they would help define. In other respects the wealthy patrician had little in common with this son of a drunk cobbler and a mother born into serfdom. Roosevelt a few weeks later would tell his cabinet, preposterously, that during Stalin’s youthful study for the priesthood “something entered into his nature of the way in which a Christian gentleman should behave”; in fact, he had left the seminary to specialize in bank robbery, extortion, and—as the first editor of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda—manipulation of the masses. Calm, laconic, and often courteous, with, in Brooke’s estimation, “a military brain of the highest caliber,” he was also vindictive, enigmatic, and a murderer to rival Hitler. Still, Roosevelt repeatedly told his lieutenants, “I can handle Stalin.” As for the marshal’s perspective: he had observed a few months earlier that “Churchill is the kind of man who will pick your pocket of a kopeck.… Roosevelt is not like that. He dips his hand only for bigger coins.”

  Beneath a painting of a farmer plowing his field and a chandelier with bulbs of varying size and brilliance, they made small talk. The president was pleased they could have a private conversation before Churchill joined them. Stalin spoke a few snatches of English, perhaps learned from Hollywood movies, notably, “You said it!,” “So what?,” and “What the hell goes on around here?” With Bohlen translating and taking notes, Roosevelt assured the marshal that he was “living in comfort” at Livadia, where all plenary sessions would convene for the president’s convenience. He observed that Allied military fortunes had “considerably improved” since their last meeting, in Teheran fourteen months earlier. With armies from east and west now edging closer, he hoped that General Eisenhower would be able to communicate directly with Soviet field commanders rather than routing all messages through the Combined Chiefs. The shocking pillage of Crimea made him “more bloodthirsty than a year ago,” the president added, and he urged Stalin to consider offering a dinner toast “to the execution of fifty thousand officers of the German army.”

  The marshal replied that the carnage was much worse farther north in Ukraine; there the enemy’s Lebensraum plan to settle ten million German colonists in the east had resulted in genocide. Everyone had become more bloody-minded, he said, for the Germans were “savages and seemed to hate with a sadistic hatred the creative work of human beings.”

  Roosevelt offered Stalin a cigarette and lighted another for himself. The British, he said, were “a peculiar people and wished to have their cake and eat it too.” As for the French, he wholeheartedly agreed with Churchill’s tart rationale for excluding De Gaulle from ARGONAUT. (“I cannot think of anything more unpleasant and impossible,” Churchill had recently written Anthony Eden, his foreign secretary, “than having this menacing and hostile man in our midst.”) Yet the president believed it might make sense for France to have a postwar occupation zone in Germany, along with the Big Three.

  Why, Stalin asked, given how little France had contributed to winning the war?

  “Only out of kindness,” Roosevelt replied.

  Stalin nodded. “That,” he said in his thick Georgian accent, “would be the only reason to give France a zone.”

  They parted with another handshake. Later, tamping tobacco into his pipe, the marshal gestured toward the ailing man in the wheelchair and mused aloud, “Why did nature have to punish him so?”

  * * *

  Upon Churchill’s arrival at 5:10 P.M., the first plenary session began with twenty-eight men convening in what had once been the Livadia state dining room. Half sat around a circular table covered in white damask and the rest perched on chairs along the walls. Measuring fifty by thirty feet, the chamber had double walnut doors at one end and a huge conical fireplace, now blazing merrily, at the other; half a dozen arched windows gave onto the garden. In this high-ceilinged room Nicholas and Alexandra in 1911 had celebrated the sixteenth birthday of their eldest daughter, the Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, with a dress ball and a cotillion supper; as an autumn moon sailed above the Black Sea, the czar gave Olga a necklace of thirty-two diamonds and pearls. It was said that even in November the scent of roses had perfumed the night.

  Much of ARGONAUT’s initial meeting was given over to reports from the front. Speaking without notes, General Marshall offered a concise summary of circumstances in the west. The German salient in the Ardennes had been eliminated, he said, and Eisenhower hoped to cross the Rhine in March. Montgomery was readying an offensive southeast toward the Rhine above Düsseldorf, supported by the U.S. Ninth Army, which would drive northeast toward the same objective. The Ruhr would then be enveloped rather than assaulted frontally. A supporting attack by Bradley’s army group would angle toward Frankfurt and beyond, with Devers’s army group shielding the right wing. Tens of thousands of tons of cargo now arrived every day in European ports—this even though more than sixty V-1s and V-2s had pummeled Antwerp just two days earlier. Allied bombing continued to batter the Reich, Marshall added: in less than a year German oil production had dwindled to 20 percent of its peak.

  The Soviet account, read by General of the Army Aleksei I. Antonov, was electrifying. The winter offensive launched east of Warsaw in mid-January had advanced three hundred miles in three weeks; the Germans evidently had expected Stalin to await better weather and so were caught out. Red Army troops outstripped even the ten to twelve miles a day
their commanders had hoped for, and Soviet soldiers now stood on the Oder River, less than fifty miles from Berlin. Enemy forces in East Prussia had been cut off, with Soviet legions sweeping toward Stettin, Danzig, and Königsberg on the Baltic. Industrial Silesia had been overrun. Red Army political officers were nailing up signs with messages scrawled in diesel oil: “You are now in goddamn Germany.” Antonov estimated that forty-five German divisions already had been destroyed in the offensive.

  The Soviets currently possessed a seven-to-one superiority over the Germans in tanks, eleven-to-one in infantry, twenty-to-one in artillery. Hitler had shifted reserves from the west, but many were diverted to Budapest, or to screen Vienna and the Hungarian oil fields. Stalin chimed in to say that on the central front in western Poland, Soviet divisions outnumbered German by 180 to 80. Neither he nor Antonov noted the liberation near Kraków a week earlier of Auschwitz, among the most heinous of Nazi concentration camps. Only a few thousand inmates had been found alive, but subsequent investigation would reveal the extermination of more than a million people, mostly Jews, and unspeakable medical experiments. The Germans had not had time to cart away seven tons of women’s hair shorn from victims, or 348,820 men’s suits and 836,515 dresses, neatly baled, or the pyramids of dentures and spectacles whose owners had been reduced to ash and smoke.

  “Our wishes,” Antonov said, “are to speed up the advance of the Allied troops on the Western front.” German defenses had congealed east of Berlin; although Eisenhower in Versailles was offering three-to-one odds that the Russians would enter the enemy capital by March 31, that proved optimistic. Many Soviet divisions had been pared to fewer than four thousand men, with shortages of air support and artillery ammunition. Bridgeheads on the Oder remained pinched. Rain, snow, and mud slowed the armies’ momentum, as did the need to shift supply lines from Russian rail gauges to narrower western European tracks. Enemy counterattacks threatened the flanks in East Pomerania. Antonov put Red Army casualties in the past three weeks at 400,000, almost quadruple U.S. losses in the Bulge. When Admiral King complimented Soviet valor, Stalin replied, “It takes a very brave man not to be a hero in the Russian army.”

  Valor, yes, but also iniquity. Soviet atrocities were now rampant in the east; they included the burning of villages, wanton murder, and mass rape in East Prussia, Silesia, and elsewhere. By late 1945, an estimated two million German women would be sexually assaulted by Red Army assailants, and that figure excluded Poles and liberated Soviet women who had been kidnapped by the Wehrmacht to Germany as slave laborers. In Königsberg, nurses would be dragged from operating tables to be gang raped. “Our men shoot the ones who try to save their children,” a Soviet officer said. German fathers executed their daughters to spare them further defilement, and raped women were nailed by their hands to the farm carts carrying away their families as part of the migration of 7.5 million Germans to the west over the next few months. “They are going to remember this march by our army over German territory for a long, long time,” a Russian soldier wrote his father. Of these things, nothing was said—not in the Livadia salon that day, nor at any point during ARGONAUT.

  At 8:30 P.M., Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and eleven others adjourned to dinner “in very good humor,” according to Bohlen’s notes. Great care had been taken not to have thirteen at table lest the number discomfit the superstitious Roosevelt. Filipino mess boys served caviar, sturgeon, beef and macaroni, fried chicken, fruit, and layer cake, washed down with vodka and five types of wine. “The world will have its eyes on this conference,” Churchill declared. “If it is successful, we will have peace for a hundred years.” The prime minister was described by one diplomat as “drinking buckets of Caucasian champagne”; Stalin sipped only half his vodka during the innumerable toasts before discreetly recharging his glass with water.

  Not until the final half hour did political issues arise, when table talk turned to the postwar epoch soon to come. “We three have to decide how to keep the peace of the world,” Stalin said, “and it will not be kept unless we three decide to do it.” Surely it was “ridiculous to believe that Albania would have an equal voice with the three great powers who had won the war,” he continued, adding that the Soviet Union would “never agree to have any action of the great powers submitted to the judgment of the small powers.”

  Roosevelt agreed that “the great powers bore the greater responsibility,” and should dictate the peace. But smaller nations could hardly be ignored. “We have, for instance,” he said, “lots of Poles in America who are vitally interested in the future of Poland.”

  “But of your seven million Poles, only seven thousand vote,” Stalin interjected, apparently concocting his statistics from thin air.

  Great nations, Churchill declared, “should discharge their moral responsibility … with moderation and great respect for the rights of the small nations.” Rising to his feet, he proposed a toast to “the proletariat masses of the world,” then added, “The eagle should permit the small birds to sing and care not wherefore they sing.”

  Shortly after eleven P.M. the gathering dissolved. Much work lay ahead, but president, prime minister, and marshal agreed they had made a good start. Not everyone agreed. “A terrible party I thought,” Anthony Eden noted in his diary. “President vague and loose and ineffective.” Churchill had “made desperate efforts and too long speeches to get things going again. Stalin’s attitude to small countries struck me as grim, not to say sinister.”

  * * *

  Stalin’s attitude toward Germany was far grimmer. He made this clear when the conference reconvened late Monday afternoon, February 5. “I should also like to discuss … the dismemberment of Germany,” he told Roosevelt and Churchill, reminding them that at Teheran the president had proposed carving the Fatherland into five lesser states. “Hasn’t the time come for decision? If you think so, let us make one.”

  “We are all agreed on dismemberment,” Churchill said, “but the actual method, the tracing of lines, is much too complicated a matter to settle here in five or six days. It requires very searching examination of geography, history, and economic facts.… We reserve all rights over their land, their liberty, and their lives.… It is not necessary to discuss it with the Germans.”

  “No,” Stalin agreed, “simply to demand from them.”

  Roosevelt asserted that he still favored “the division of Germany into five or seven states,” but in fact the Anglo-Americans had backed away from such draconian solutions since their brief flirtation the previous fall with Henry Morgenthau’s agrarian scheme.

  “We are dealing with the fate of eighty million people and that requires more than eighty minutes to consider,” Churchill said. Whatever the Allies decided must not leak to the enemy, he added. “Eisenhower doesn’t want that. That would make the Germans all the harder. We should not make this public.”

  “No,” Stalin said, a cigarette jutting from his mustache, “these questions for the moment are only for us. They should not be public until the time of surrender.”

  Glancing at a note slipped to him by Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt proposed deferring the matter until the three foreign ministers could devise a method for secretly studying dismemberment options. On the related issue of how postwar Germany should be occupied, the president observed that zones had been agreed upon by the European Advisory Commission in London but not yet approved by the Big Three governments. With a shuffle of paper he passed around a crude, hand-drawn map showing the tripartite division of Germany, including a jointly administered Berlin.

  Churchill now raised the question of giving France an occupation zone, perhaps carved from the British and U.S. sectors, since the “French might be able to be of real assistance” in a protracted postwar period.

  How long would U.S. forces likely remain in Europe? Stalin asked Roosevelt. “I can get the people and Congress to cooperate fully for peace but not to keep an army in Europe for a long time,” the president replied. “Two years would be the limit.”
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  “Germany should be run by those who have stood firmly against Germany and have made the greatest sacrifices,” Stalin said. “We cannot forget that in this war France opened the gates to the enemy.”

  Churchill could hardly let the marshal’s shabby amnesia pass unchallenged. (“He loves France like a woman,” Moran told his diary later that evening.) But rather than remind Stalin of his 1939 nonaggression pact with Hitler, and of Moscow’s congratulatory telegrams to Berlin following every subsequent Wehrmacht victory, the prime minister slyly mused that every nation had “difficulties in the beginning of the war and made mistakes.” In postwar Europe, he insisted, “France must take her place.”

  But who should pay for the catastrophe? Much of the Soviet Union lay in ruins—Roosevelt and Churchill had seen that for themselves in the Crimea—and rebuilding would require many years. Since shortly after the German invasion in 1941, Stalin had pressed for reparations. Now, he said, the Soviets had a specific plan: German heavy industry would be reduced by 80 percent through confiscation of aviation plants, synthetic-oil facilities, and the like, and the Soviet Union would require payment from Berlin of $1 billion in German goods annually for a decade, with a like sum to the Anglo-Americans.