Churchill 1940-1945: Under Friendly Fire

by Walter Reid

  Once the State Department and Cordell Hull knew what was being suggested about spheres of influence, Roosevelt had to say that he was unwilling to approve such arrangements.1 Churchill was angry: he was conscious that someone had to do something to limit Russian ambitions, and to date the Americans had done nothing.2 Roosevelt gave some ground. Temporary arrangements might be made, and matters would be reviewed in three months time, but that would be the limit.3

  Roosevelt may have wanted to allow for the development of American business interests, or to avoid what he regarded as undemocratic arrangements: whatever the reason he did not want British and Russian spheres of influence in the Balkans. But Churchill went off to Moscow with a free hand for three months at least, and as a result of Roosevelt’s indecisive stance he thought that the President was more or less acquiescing in his policy. He had, after all, written to the President saying that ‘somebody must have the power to plan and act’; he had asked the President to trust him and give the arrangements three months’ trial. Roosevelt appeared to have done that. The State Department on the other hand thought that spheres of influence had been knocked on the head once and for all. Hull was not aware that on 12 June Roosevelt had agreed to give Churchill’s ideas about spheres of influence during the war a temporary trial. At Moscow Churchill thought he was acting in accordance with Roosevelt’s permission; the State Department thought he was doing exactly what he had been told not to.

  There was plenty of room for misunderstanding. Prime Minister and President were corresponding simultaneously at this time on a number of major issues: OVERLORD, the status of de Gaulle’s Comité, recognition of the new Italian government and zones of occupation, all as well as spheres of influence. Minor matters such as FDR’s gift of two electric typewriters were also dealt with. Issues were not disposed of one by one: Churchill generally replied by return, but Roosevelt did not. His letter of 10 June 1944, for example, was in response to Churchill’s message of 31 May. Since then Churchill had sent eleven other messages and drafted a twelfth, which was not sent. The decision on spheres of influence was therefore not clear-cut and decisively stated.

  The Prime Minister had told the Commons on the day he reached London on his return from Quebec that he could not ‘conceive that it is not possible to make a good solution whereby Russia gets the security which she is entitled to have, and which I have resolved that we shall do our utmost to secure for her, on her western frontier, and, at the same time, the Polish nation have restored to them that national sovereignty and independence for which, across centuries of oppression and struggle, they have never ceased to strive’. And so, on 9 October in Moscow, as they had done at Teheran, he and Stalin discussed making the Curzon Line Poland’s eastern frontier, with pressure being brought on the Poles to agree. The talk then turned to what was to happen in southern Europe and the Balkans. He explained that he did not want to talk of ‘spheres of influence’, a phrase which would shock the Americans, but that if he and Stalin were in agreement, he thought he could sell the agreement to them.

  This Realpolitik resulted in ‘The Percentages Agreement’, some scribbles on little more than the back of an envelope, in which Churchill proposed that Romania be 90 per cent a Russian interest and 10 per cent British; Greece 90 per cent British ‘in accord with the USA’ and 10 per cent Russian; Yugoslavia and Hungary 50 per cent each; Bulgaria 75 per cent Russia and 25 per cent the others. Stalin looked briefly at the list, ticked it and passed it back. It lay on the table until Churchill said, ‘Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an off-hand manner? Let us burn the paper’. Stalin: ‘No, you keep it’.

  The British ambassador’s original draft account of the incident is good: ‘PRIME MINISTER then produced what he called a “Naughty document” showing a list of the Balkan countries and the proportion of interest in them of the Great Powers. He said the Americans would be shocked if they saw how crudely he had put it. Marshal Stalin was a realist. He himself was not sentimental while Mr. Eden was a bad man.’4

  Churchill did keep it and the remarkable document can still be seen. He tried to mitigate its brutality in a letter to Stalin that he dictated two days later: ‘These percentages which I have put down are no more than a method by which in our thoughts we can see how near we are together, and then decide upon the necessary steps to bring us into full agreement’. If they were made public they might appear quite crude, and even callous, but they provided a framework which would avoid bloodshed and ‘our broad principle should be to let every country have the form of government which its people desire’. Averell Harriman told Churchill that Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull repudiated this letter, and it was never sent.

  Churchill realised later that he had forgotten all about Albania, which was now divided 50–50. But Molotov wanted Hungary, which had been 50–50 to be 80–20 for Russia. Eden agreed to this. A gloss was put on the agreement when it was relayed to the War Cabinet. It was ‘only an interim guide’. It would be reviewed at the great Peace Conference which would settle affairs at the end of the war, a conference which never took place.

  The agreement was a diplomatic triumph for Churchill. He had truly no alternative but to make the concessions he did, and Stalin had no need to make his concessions. He may have felt that what he was getting was a fairly free hand in Poland, where Churchill had been making reasonably conciliatory noises;5 and it may have helped that Churchill gave the impression that he was speaking for America, which he was not.

  In fact, the Percentages Agreement was particularly unacceptable to Washington because it followed on negotiations in which there had been profound misunderstandings between London and Washington. Eden and the Soviet ambassador in London, Gusev, had reached a broad agreement in May 1944 that Moscow could deal with Romania after the war, providing that London could deal with Greece. America had been unhappy that this might be part of a process of splitting the Balkans up into Russian and British spheres of influence. On his return to the United States from Teheran, Roosevelt had reported to Congress that private arrangements and notions such as the balance of power and spheres of influence were at an end. Spheres of influence smacked of imperialism. Spheres of influence in the Pacific for the Americans were one thing; spheres of influence for other countries elsewhere another.

  The Polish government-in-exile in London joined Churchill and Stalin in Moscow. Churchill described them in a telegram to the King: ‘Our lot from London are, as Your Majesty knows, a decent but feeble lot of fools, but the delegates from Lublin [the Soviet nominees] seem to be the greatest villains imaginable’. The Poles proved intransigent and when Churchill met the London Poles on 15 October, he ended up shouting, ‘I will have nothing more to do with you. I don’t care where you go. You only deserve to be in your Pripet Marshes.’ Despite a violent attack of diarrhoea, and then a temperature that rose above 100 degrees, bringing two doctors and two nurses from Cairo, he continued to shuttle between the Poles, described by Oliver Harvey as ‘Like the Bourbons expecting everything to come back to them’, and Stalin. No agreement was reached, but the discussions were academic to the extent that Stalin was insisting in any event that his puppets, the Lublin Poles, would have the majority in the future Polish government.

  Russia was still not at war with Japan, but at the conference Stalin gave an undertaking to Churchill that cheered the Americans, and promised to declare war on Japan the day that Germany was defeated. With that promise, Churchill returned to London, telling the Commons on his return that, ‘I have not hesitated to travel from court to court like a wandering minstrel, always with the same song to sing, or the same set of songs’. Harold Nicolson said he was ‘superb. Cherubic, pink, solid and vociferous.’

  Churchill told the Commons that his purpose as a troubadour was to secure ‘the unity of the Allied Powers’. His efforts were not approved of by the Foreign Office, which felt that in December 1944 he was pursuing a
policy of appeasement towards his allies. This was the Economist: ‘Let an end be put to the policy of appeasement which, at Mr. Churchill’s personal bidding, has been followed, with all the humiliations and abasements it has brought in its train, ever since Pearl Harbor removed the need for it’. This view, developed by subsequent historians, is founded on the premise that there could have been a negotiated peace with Germany which would have meant that Lend-Lease did not drain away all Britain’s resources and that she did not emerge as a minor and impoverished nation in a world dominated by America and Russia. In reality, there was no alternative: Roosevelt had committed Britain to a policy of unconditional surrender, Britain could not negotiate a separate peace from her allies and Churchill could only achieve the best results for Britain by working as closely and amicably as possible with those allies.6

  50

  Allies Accelerating Apart. Christmas in Athens

  Hopkins warned the British just before the 1944 Presidential election that they were unwise to hope, as they did, for a Democratic victory. The Republicans were not interested in foreign policy and would leave Britain with a free hand in India, Europe and the Middle East. He knew that after the elections Roosevelt would be homing in on these issues: ‘You will find him right in in [sic] all these questions with his own views and you will have to pay attention to them’.

  He was right: until now Roosevelt had been interested primarily in winning the war. Now, with the election won, and for what remained of his life, he was trying to form the shape of a post-war world. In the second role he was much further from Britain than he had been in his first. Furthermore, Roosevelt’s re-election coincided, more or less, with the replacement of Hull by Ed Stettinius. Although Hull had been no friend of Britain, State Department and President now worked much more closely together, and there was a concerted policy of shaping the post-war world in a way that would restrict Britain’s influence and tend to favour Stalin. Halifax noted that there was a ‘desire for a brand new 100 per cent American foreign policy, not tied to Britain’s apron strings’. This was reflected in American interference in Italy and Greece, where Britain till now had enjoyed a fairly free hand, and was thought to have used it to favour the right. Stettinius blamed Churchill for precipitating the developing crisis in Greece by vetoing the appointment of Papandreou, as Prime Minister. Papandreou led the Greek socialists.

  Greece was indeed Churchill’s major concern in this last winter of the war. As a result of the Percentages Agreement he now had the luxury of regarding Greece as his responsibility. Stalin was in agreement on that; America was not. Churchill’s Greek policy of December 1944 marked a further low point in the increasingly different political positions of the two allies.

  Churchill tried to contact Hopkins by telephone on 9 December. The transatlantic line was particularly bad, and Hopkins could not work out what the problem was. On the following day he heard that Admiral King had ordered Admiral Hewitt, the American Commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, not to permit any troop landing craft to be used to transfer supplies to Greece. Hopkins realised that King was interfering in a political issue. While America was right to keep its troops out of Greece, she could not withdraw cooperation on the matter of transport. From a command point of view, in any case, Hewitt was under the command of General Wilson, and orders should not have been given to him without consultation with the Combined Chiefs. Hopkins was able to defuse the problem by getting King to withdraw his order and by persuading the British ambassador, Halifax, to urge that Churchill should not raise the matter with the President.

  But even the benevolent Hopkins thought that ‘the British government had messed up the whole [Greek] thing pretty thoroughly.’1 All of this came on the heels of a remark by Churchill in the course of the Polish debate in the House of Commons, when he said that ‘all territorial changes must await the Conference at the peace table after victory has been won, but to that principle there is one exception, and that exception is, change that is mutually agreed’. This fairly innocent observation caused a storm in the States, reviving accusations that Roosevelt had had to face ever since Placentia Bay, allegations that the big powers intended to carve the world up. Eden had to make a correction.

  The freedom Churchill had been given by Stalin was remarkable in that the issue in Greece was a communist challenge to the established government. By the beginning of December there were extensive reports of violence by communists in Athens. Policemen were being murdered and police stations were being seized. Churchill voiced his concerns to Clementine, from whom he now received one of her interfering letters. She urged her ‘Darling Winston, Please do not before ascertaining full facts repeat to anyone you meet today what you said to me this morning i.e. that the communists in Athens have shown their usual cowardice in putting the women & children in front to be shot at – because altho’ communists are dangerous, indeed perhaps sinister people, they seem in this war on the continent to have shown personal courage. I write this only because I may not see you till tomorrow & I am anxious (perhaps over-anxious).’ She then added, ‘Tout savoir, c’est tout comprendre; tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner.’

  Churchill paid no attention. He telegraphed the British commanding officer in Greece, General Scobie: ‘Do not hesitate to fire at armed males in Athens who assail British authority or Greek authority with which we are working’. Scobie took 1,800 communist prisoners. Because Colville’s telegram had omitted the key code word, ‘Guard’, to signify that it was a purely British matter and was not to be seen by the Americans, the telegram, with phrases like ‘Treat Athens as a conquered city’, reached the White House. It was then leaked to the press, notably to Drew Pearson, an anti-British columnist on the Washington Post who had a mole either in the White House itself or in the State Department. The instruction to Scobie to act as if he were in a ‘conquered city’ in particular provoked great indignation about intolerable quasi-imperialism when it appeared in the press.

  There were protests on both sides of the Atlantic and Churchill demanded that a debate on the subject be treated as a vote of confidence. ‘Democracy is no harlot, to be picked up in the street by a man with a tommy-gun.’ If the vote went against him he would accept his dismissal; otherwise action against dissidents would continue. Two hundred and seventy-nine voted for the government; 30 were against it. It was a Friday and there was only a two-line whip, so the result was not a bad one for the Prime Minister. Churchill made light of the event in a letter to Hopkins of 10 December 1944 for Roosevelt’s eyes: ‘Do not be misled by our majority yesterday. I could have had another 80 by sending out a three line whip instead of only two. On Fridays, with the bad communications prevailing here, members long to get away for the weekend. Who would not?’2 But James Stuart, the Chief Whip, told Colville that the Greek issue was the first one on which he had seen the House ‘really irritated and impatient’ with Churchill.3

  Churchill’s letter of 10 December was addressed to Hopkins because he needed his help in mollifying Roosevelt. A day later he wrote to him again, thanking him for his ‘mediation’.4 It was needed. American opinion was inflamed. On 10 December the British Embassy in Washington reported that, ‘suspicion of British despotism in Europe is now thoroughly awakened’.5 Roosevelt was furious: ‘Greece. British troops. Fighting against the guerrillas who fought against the Nazis for the last four years. How the British can dare such a thing! The lengths to which they will go to hang on to the past!’6

  From Canada, Mackenzie King was equally unhelpful, telegraphing to ask that no Canadian troops be deployed, and that he should be allowed to announce the fact publicly. According to Lascelles, ‘Winston sent him a strongly-worded rebuke for his poltroonery’, and the following day Mackenzie King telegraphed to say that he had been misunderstood, and had never intended to make a public announcement.7

  Alexander had moved to Greece from Italy and found the situation serious. Macmillan was also in Athens and, with the British ambassador, Reginald Leeper, recommended t
he appointment of Archbishop Damaskinos as regent, with a government under him acceptable to the Commons. But Churchill still had reservations about a government which might well lean to the left.

  By 22 December he decided that he had to go to Greece to sort things out himself. On 23 December he arrived at Chequers, where the family were settled for Christmas, but told Clementine that he would not be staying. She took the news badly and retired to her room in what her daughter, Mary, described as ‘floods of tears’.8

  Clementine’s reaction was an unnecessary burden. Refuelling at Naples on Christmas Day, Churchill sent her a telegram: ‘Love and many thoughts for you all at luncheon today. I’m sorry indeed not to see the tree.’ He also had to worry about the American dimension. He sent a telegram to Roosevelt: ‘Anthony and I are going out to see what we can do to square this Greek entanglement. We cannot abandon those who have taken up arms in our cause, and must if necessary fight it out with them.’ Sir Leslie Rowan described this famous journey as ‘one of his most courageous and lonely acts’.9 Churchill almost alone apprehended what was really happening in Greece. America totally misread the situation, and so did most of the British press and the political left. It is bizarre that the one person who shared a true understanding of the situation was Stalin, and it is all the more to his credit that he kept his word and allowed Churchill to frustrate his plans. It is thus thanks to Stalin that Greece remained on the Western side of the Iron Curtain.