by Walter Reid
Churchill read too much into this instance of Stalinist fidelity, and for quite some time cited it as evidence that Russia could be trusted to keep her word. He referred to Stalin in a message to Eden on 3 December as ‘That great and good man’ and on 11 December said, ‘I am increasingly impressed, up-to-date, with the loyalty with which, under much temptation and very likely pressure, Stalin has kept off Greece in accordance with our agreement’.10
The visit to Athens was exciting as well as productive. Part of Churchill’s time was spent on board the cruiser Ajax. There was a fancy-dress party and Archbishop Damaskinos in his black robes and tall hat was briefly mistaken for one of the partygoers. Shellfire and machine-gun fire continued constantly. British fighters strafed communist positions. The Admiral’s barge, carrying Churchill, was almost hit by shellfire as it approached the shore. In a conference room at the Greek Foreign Ministry proceedings were conducted by the light of hurricane lamps and with background noise from rocket fire. Back on the Ajax, Churchill was delighted to authorise the captain to return fire. As he slept, or tried to sleep, depth charges were exploded continuously throughout the night, against the risk of a submarine attack.
By the time he left, the framework for a stable government had been established. The Archbishop appeared able to form an administration and was prepared to do so with or without communist participation. Churchill was reassured, as he told Roosevelt, that the Archbishop was not at all ‘Left Wing in communist sense’. He saw the United States ambassador and was very frank to him about what he considered to be the inadequate support given by America in the whole affair.
He was very moved by the suffering and privation he observed in Athens. He took the opportunity of telling Roosevelt, in his telegram of 28 December, that ‘the poor people [were] all pinched and only kept alive by rations we are carrying to them, often at loss of life’. Britain had lost ‘over 1,000 men … The vast majority of the people long for a settlement that will free them from the communist terror.’
He was impressed also by the courage of the women on the embassy staff and requested that fifteen of them be given the British Empire Medal in the New Year’s Honours List. The proposal was vetoed by the Palace, where Lascelles facetiously referred to the ‘Fifteen Brave Ladies’.11
As always when he was away from Clementine, he sent her countless letters and on his way home tried to mollify her about his absence over Christmas: ‘Hope to be with you at dinner tomorrow. I was feeling lonely.’ Clementine may have felt guilty: she was awaiting him at Bovingdon Airbase when he arrived on 29 December.
Later on the same day he found that the exiled King George II of Greece was unwilling to appoint Damaskinos as regent. At 1.30 a.m. on the following morning he saw the King and told him that ‘if he did not agree, the matter would be settled without him, and that we would recognise the new government instead of him’.
Ultimately, Damaskinos was able to form a government from which the communists were excluded. Churchill was reasonably pleased with what he had achieved. He told Clementine that ‘I am sure in Greece I found one of the best opportunities for wise action that this war has tossed to me from its dark waves’.
But there was much criticism both in America and in London. H.G. Wells attacked him bitterly and daftly, in phrases that owed everything to caricature and nothing to reality:
His ideology, picked up in the garrison life of India, on the reefs of South Africa, the maternal home and the conversation of wealthy conservative households, is a pitiful jumble of incoherent nonsense. A boy scout is better equipped. He has served his purpose and it is high time he retired on his laurels before we forget the debt we owe him. His last associations with the various European Royalties who share his belief in the invincible snobbishness of mankind and are now sneaking back to claim the credit and express their condescending approval of the underground resistance movements that have sustained human freedom through its days of supreme danger, are his final farewell to human confidence.12
There was criticism in the Manchester Guardian and in The Times, where one leader declared that ‘There is no ground for pride or satisfaction in the knowledge that British troops have been engaged in house-to-house operations in a working-class suburb of Athens’. But the Labour members of the War Cabinet and the Labour Party generally, though not a young Major Dennis Winston Healey (who had been the military Landing Officer for the British assault brigade on the beach at Anzio), 13 at the Party Conference14 were entirely supportive.
Foreign policy and the communist threat caused ongoing trouble in Parliament and the War Cabinet through the later months of 1944, when a decision had to be made between seeing Franco as an undisposed-of dictator, or as a bastion of capitalism. Churchill took the latter view, but was faced by a powerful attack from an alliance of Attlee, Eden and Hoare (now Lord Templewood), which only failed to be more serious because Attlee chose not to press it.15
51
Yalta
On 20 January 1945, the day on which Hungary signed an armistice with the Allies and the Red Army entered Germany, Churchill received a letter from Attlee, complaining in moderate tones that the Prime Minister was protracting Cabinet meetings with long soliloquies without having read the papers under discussion. Churchill’s hurt and anger were compounded when he went to Clementine for support and she told him that Mr Attlee was quite right to have written as he did and that she admired him for doing so. Deflated and depressed, Churchill lay in bed all day. But his natural elation could not be long suppressed and eventually he bounded out of bed and telling his staff that they should ‘cast care aside’ and ‘not bother about Attler or Hitlee’, took them all off to watch Bette Davis in Dark Victory.
The next meeting of the Big Three was to be held at Yalta. Churchill went in no triumphalist mood. He wrote to Clementine on 1 February telling her how saddened he was by the plight of German women and children fleeing before the advancing Red Army. ‘I am clearly convinced that they deserve it; but that does not remove it from one’s gaze. The misery of the whole world appals me, and I fear increasingly that new troubles may arise out of those we are successfully ending.’
He saw agony and suffering throughout the world, and he saw it increasing and not diminishing as victory approached, because a common purpose between the Allies was giving way to a new spirit of conflict. This was the theme of Yalta for him, and part of that theme was that his convictions were not shared with Roosevelt. The sense of frustration and despair that was engendered remained with him for the rest of his life. That is why at the end of that life he saw his career as one of failure and not of success. The war from which the West emerged victorious was for him a tragedy.
Churchill met Roosevelt at Saky in the Crimea on 3 February. The President could not leave his jeep, and Churchill walked beside it as he inspected a guard of honour, ‘as in her old age an Indian attendant accompanied Queen Victoria’s phaeton’, said Cadogan. ‘The President looked old and thin and drawn; he had a cape or shawl over his shoulders and appeared shrunken; he sat looking straight ahead with his mouth open, as if he were not taking things in.’ All the observers at the conference made similar remarks, Hopkins, Cunningham and Eden among others. Cunningham said that the President did not appear to know what he was talking about. It was left to Churchill to defend the interests of the West.
He described Roosevelt’s arrival at Saky. He was a ‘tragic figure … He could not get out of the open motorcar, and I walked at his side while he inspected the guard.’ Moran diagnosed hardening of the arteries of the brain, and questioned the President’s will or capacity for judgement and analysis.1 Even at the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944 Colville had noticed that the President’s eyes were glazed and that he had said ‘nothing impressive or even memorable.’2 At Yalta, desperately ill, he sat through many meetings in silence. Moran said that Churchill found the President no longer seemed able to take an intelligent interest in the war and often seemed not even to read the papers he gave
him. ‘We have moved a long way since Winston, speaking of Roosevelt, said to me in the garden at Marrakech, “I love that man”, [but] he is still very reticent in criticism’.3 The problem was that Roosevelt’s prejudices grew stronger as his intellect grew weaker. Hopkins told Moran on the way to the conference, ‘You will find us lining up with the Russians’.
There was no concerted planning between the Western allies. Eden told Hopkins that they 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’.4
Churchill himself had been unwell on the way to Yalta, remaining in bed in his aeroplane at Malta for six hours, but his intellect and wit were as sharp as ever: when he shouted at his valet, ‘Sawyers, where’s my hot-water bottle?’ Sawyers replied ‘You are sitting on it, sir. Not a very good idea’. ‘It’s not an idea’, said the Prime Minister. ‘It’s a coincidence.’5
The first plenary session of what was to be the last meeting of the original Big Three began on 4 February. At the dinner that night Churchill made the very reasonable observation that ‘he was constantly being “beaten up” as a reactionary but that he was the only one of three representatives present who could be thrown out of office at any time by the votes of his own people’.
Yalta was to settle the face and nature of Europe for half a century, but its decisions were reached very speedily. The plenary sessions concluded on 9 February, although a number of separate meetings took place thereafter. The biggest question to be discussed was Poland. Again, Roosevelt took little interest in this matter. He said, ‘Coming from America,’ he took ‘a distant view of the Polish question; the 5 or 6 million Poles in the United States were mostly of the second generation’. Later he said that ‘Poland has been a source of trouble for over five hundred years’. Churchill’s reply was more humane: ‘We must do what we can to put an end to those troubles’.
Stalin continued to insist on a preponderance of power for the Lublin Poles. Churchill managed to obtain an agreement to free general elections in Poland. On that basis, Britain ‘would salute the government that emerged without regard to the Polish government in London’. Stalin agreed and said that the elections could be held within a month. These sentences summarise very briefly negotiations that were long, difficult and tense, but in essence Stalin’s undertaking was the basis of the resolution to the Polish question which Churchill took back to London. It was an undertaking in which he had to believe. Only time would show that it was an undertaking that would not be honoured.
Churchill’s interest in Poland was very real. When he returned to Parliament, and faced criticisms of a sell-out, he wrote to Roosevelt, ‘I have based myself in Parliament on the assumption that the words of the Yalta Declaration will be carried out in the letter and spirit’ … [I]f we do not get things right now, it will be soon be seen by the world that you and I by putting our signatures to the Crimea settlement have underwritten a fraudulent prospectus.’6 After Yalta Roosevelt declined to press Stalin on the issue until Churchill hit on the device of querying the viability of the inaugural United Nations Conference at San Francisco, a project that was dear to the President, if the way to unity had not been paved by a clarification of Stalin’s intentions. Stalin’s reply was not wholly satisfactory, and the conduct of his armies as they moved towards Germany pointed up the problems that lay ahead, but neither Roosevelt nor, initially, Truman shared Churchill’s appreciation of events.
De Gaulle had been excluded from Yalta. Churchill said that his presence ‘would have wrecked all possible progress, already difficult enough’.7 The exclusion still rankles in France, which sees Yalta as a carve-up by Russia and the Anglophone world. For her own self-respect, France cut and pasted pictures to make the absent de Gaulle appear to sit beside the Big Three. But Churchill went out of his way to ensure that France had a zone of occupation in Germany, and a seat on the Control Commission, a concession to a largely non-combatant nation which seemed remarkable at the time and for which he had to fight hard. It was intended to contribute to the rehabilitation of post-war France – all the more necessary as the Foreign Office expected America to desert post-war Europe as they had done in 1918.8
Churchill’s generosity was all the more remarkable in view of the fact that relations between Britain and France were going through yet another very low phase at this time. Looking beyond the war, Churchill and the French Foreign Office at the Quai d’Orsay wanted a British–French alliance. De Gaulle would not consider it, despite all that Britain did for her at Yalta – in the face of considerable opposition from both the Americans and the Russians. Far from showing gratitude, in French proceeded to occupy Stuttgart, which was not even in their zone.
When there was a serious outbreak of violence in the Levant which required British intervention, de Gaulle saw the whole matter as yet another Machiavellian attempt by the British to seize a French possession. He summoned Duff Cooper, now ambassador in Paris, on 4 June 1945 and told him, ‘I admit that we are not in a position to wage war against you at the present time. But you have insulted France and betrayed the West. This cannot be forgotten’.9 And yet it was Churchill alone who insisted on a special role for France in the Levant. When Roosevelt and Stalin agreed that the peace should be made by the Great Powers only, Churchill’s response was that ‘The eagle should permit the small birds to sing and care not whereof they sang’.
The new United Nations Organisation was discussed at Yalta. Indeed, for America, the Pacific war and the United Nations were the main point of Yalta. Stalin was well aware of that, and used America’s preoccupations to gain his own objectives. The United Nations would be run by a Security Council dominated by the Great Powers, but Churchill did his best to enhance the position of the Lesser Powers. He and Roosevelt agreed that the Soviet Union would have three seats in the assembly, one for itself, one for Byelorussia, and one for the Ukraine, a concession that caused dismay when it was revealed to the American public.
Stalin promised Churchill that he would persuade Tito, in Yugoslavia, to give undertakings regarding the future of that country. He was reassuring: ‘when he made a statement he would carry it out’. Earlier there had been a short discussion of Greece where Stalin told Churchill ‘he did not wish to interfere’. Churchill said he was ‘much obliged’.
Debate still continues on how far the West, Churchill and an American delegation led by an ailing President, sold out to Stalin at Yalta. There were certainly substantial concessions to ensure that Russia confirmed what Stalin had promised to Churchill in Moscow, and would break the neutrality treaty and participate in the war against Japan. Eden warned that concessions to Russia in the east could only be made at the cost of friction with China. Churchill thought that this was far outweighed by the ‘thousands of millions of pounds’ which Britain would save as a result of an early end to the Japanese war. He was deluded about the extent to which he could trust Stalin and he continued to overrate his reliability, even if he was more realistic than Roosevelt. As late as 1956–7, Churchill was still saying, referring back to the Percentages Agreement of 1944, that Stalin always kept his word.10 In the immediate aftermath of Yalta he said, ‘Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.’ He told Colin Coote, ‘If only I could dine with Stalin once a week there would be no trouble at all’.11
Roosevelt’s final move at Yalta was to have the Big Three sign a ‘Declaration on Liberated Europe’ which purported to commit them to ‘free elections’ and ‘self-government’ for ‘liberated peoples’. What did he imagine he was doing? Apologists have suggested that he was tricking Stalin into giving a pledge which could later be used against him if need be, but the argument is far too elaborate. Roosevelt knew very well that there was no question of free elections where Stalin’s writ ran, and he was either playing politics or, as seems more likely, simply failing to think through the reality of a piece of idealistic
bombast.
There was nothing really surprising in Stalin’s behaviour at and after Yalta. Russia had carried the real burden of fighting Germany. It was her armies that defeated Germany and it was unrealistic to think that Stalin would not expect to be rewarded. During the war Churchill had often spoken in the strongest, minatory terms about Soviet expansionism. It is clear that part of his mind was focusing on the spread of communism in post-war Europe. Greece was one case in point; his worry about Spain, if Franco were to fall, was another. He tried to persuade himself that one way of containing Soviet expansionism was to limit it by deals done with Russia reinforced by the strength of his personal relationship with Stalin. But for most of the war the issue was very much subsidiary to the primary aim of defeating Hitler: the real showdown could be postponed until victory had been achieved.
The problem was that now that victory was imminent, he could not induce Roosevelt to address the problem in concert with him. Roosevelt thought the problem less pressing than that of detecting and destroying British spheres of influence. Back in May 1944, he had told Harriman, then ambassador in Moscow, ‘that he didn’t care whether the countries bordering Russia were communized’.12 For Churchill there were two levels of concern about Russia after Yalta. One was in relation to Poland and the other in relation to other instances of Soviet aggrandisement. Of the two, Poland was much more acute, largely because of its symbolic importance and the peculiar interest which the ex-Chamber-lainites right took in it. Poland had much less significance for Roosevelt.