Churchill 1940-1945: Under Friendly Fire

by Walter Reid

  Yalta was a messy compromise from which no one nation emerged triumphant. But it is wrong to say, as de Gaulle and the French did, that but for Yalta Europe would not have been divided up into two armed camps. President George W. Bush at Riga in 2005 described the conference as ‘an attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability’,13 but he was as far adrift as the largely Conservative backbenchers who, after Yalta, put down an amendment to the motion before the House, regretting ‘the decision to transfer to another power the territory of an ally’. Yalta was in any event intended only to be a provisional arrangement ahead of the great Peace Conference. It merely recognised facts.

  In the course of the history of the parliamentary truce which Churchill later called ‘the Grand Coalition’ there was a number of occasions on which the participants recognised the historic nature of the bond that held them together, apart from and above the level of party rancour and strife. One such occasion was at the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, when the Cabinet in London reviewed and approved what the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary had achieved in the Crimea. At Attlee’s suggestion a telegram was sent to them: ‘War Cabinet send their warmest congratulations to you and the Foreign Secretary on the skill and success with which you have conducted discussions at Crimean Conference and on the most satisfactory result you have achieved, and wish you a safe journey home’.14

  On his way home from Yalta Churchill asked his pilot to circle the island of Skyros, on which lay the body of Rupert Brooke whom he had known well in the earlier war: his vivid sense of place as well as of history was always with him. He then made a stop in Athens, where the peace he had established still held. He visited the Regent, Archbishop Damaskinos, and went on to Constitution Square. There he was greeted by a crowd that Harold Macmillan estimated at 40,000. Macmillan and Churchill too had never seen anything like the reception he received, a vindication of what he had done the previous December, and perhaps the intervention of 1941 was also remembered. He received the Freedom of the city that is the birthplace of democracy and the cradle of oratory.

  After his travels in the eastern Mediterranean, Churchill arrived in London on 19 February, in much better health than when he had left for Yalta. One of the aspects of the conference which had been specifically noted with approval by the War Cabinet before he left the Crimea was the agreement on ‘the difficult matter of Poland’; but he returned to be greeted by a mood of great hostility to the Yalta agreement as it touched that country. The Chief Whip, James Stuart, had already warned Eden by telegram of what might be expected.15

  There still remained a small band of right-wing Conservatives, supporters of Chamberlain who had never reconciled themselves to Churchill. These Jacobites found a rallying point in Poland. Having been attacked in the past by Churchill as appeasers, they now attacked him for the same reason. They may have been sincere. Chips Channon said that ‘The conscience of the gentlemen of England and of the Conservative Party has been stricken by our failure to support our pledged word to Poland’.16 It was a bit rich that Churchill should have been accused of appeasement by what was very much the Munich Second Eleven, and he might well have been bitter. In fact his main reaction was to appreciate the humour of the situation. Harold Nicolson said that ‘Winston is as amused as I am that the warmongers of the Munich period have now become appeasers, while the appeasers have become warmongers’.17 Lord Dun-glass, Chamberlain’s Parliamentary Private Secretary at Munich, and later Lord Home, spoke against Yalta. Lord Cranborne, the Dominion Secretary, later Lord Salisbury, told Churchill on 3 April that the Polish aspect of Yalta was ‘a fraud which will very soon be exposed’. Four government Ministers abstained in the vote and two resigned. The rebellion was easily quashed: only 25 Conservatives voted against their government. On 3 April, Churchill told ‘C’, the Head of British Intelligence, to find out if some of the Tory rebels were in the pay of the Polish government in exile.18

  The rebels were unreasonable. As Eden told Colville on his return to London, ‘the Tories had no right to complain about Poland. The PM had not sold the pass. On the contrary the Curzon Line was a boundary proposed as fair by H.M.G. after the last war.’19 Cadogan took a similar view: ‘The PM and Anthony are well satisfied – if not more – and I think they are right. Of course Poles in London, and extreme right-wing MPs, criticise and grumble. All I can say is that, in the circumstances, I think we did much better by Poland than I, at least, could have thought possible before we left.’20

  Of course everything depended on Stalin, and there were no sanctions that could be applied to him at Yalta, given America’s position. But Churchill committed himself, as he told Roosevelt, to advising Parliament if ‘the spirit of the Yalta declaration’ were not applied ‘in the business of setting up a new Polish government etc’.21

  In the debate Churchill said that he was sure that Russia wanted ‘to live in honourable friendship and equality with the western democracies. I feel also that their word is their bond.’ Later, when he wrote the history of the war, he glossed that statement by saying that: ‘I felt bound to proclaim my confidence in Soviet faith in order to procure it. In this I was encouraged by Stalin’s behaviour about Greece.’22 But even at the time, Churchill’s eyes were open. He wrote to the Prime Minister of New Zealand, ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating. We are only committed on the basis of full execution in good faith of the terms of the published communiqueé.’23 He told the War Cabinet that if Stalin did not implement his undertakings in regard to the Polish elections, Britain’s commitment would be at an end.

  Very soon, alas, Churchill’s hopes were dispelled when Stalin failed to implement the Yalta agreement in relation both to Poland and to Romania. On the basis of the Percentages Agreement and Greece, Churchill wanted Roosevelt to tackle Stalin on these breaches of the agreement. That did not happen.

  Churchill’s message to Roosevelt of 13 March 1945 captures his mood of frustration:

  We can of course make no progress at Moscow [regarding Poland] without your aid, and if we get out of step the doom of Poland is sealed … A month has passed since Yalta and no progress of any kind has been made … I do not wish to reveal a divergence between the British and the United States Governments, but it would certainly be necessary for me to make it clear [to the House of Commons] that we are in presence of a great failure and an utter breakdown of what was sorted out at Yalta, but that we British have not the necessary strength to carry the matter further and that the limits of our capacity to act have been reached.24

  Roosevelt’s reply was simply to deny that any divergence existed. His responses over Poland were drafted by the State Department, but he saw them and approved them. He accepted the State Department line that America had to continue to work with Russia.

  Between 8 and 18 March, Churchill sent no less than ten telegrams to Roosevelt, urging him to stiffen his resolve against the Soviets. On 6 April 1945 Roosevelt telegraphed from Warm Springs, Georgia, in more encouraging terms than hitherto. He was in ‘general agreement’ with Churchill. ‘We must not permit anybody to entertain the false impression that we are afraid’. Soon the allied armies will be ‘in a position to permit us to become “tougher” than has here before appeared advantageous to the war effort’.25 The message has sometimes received more attention than it deserves.26 On the face of it, as the editor of the Churchill–Roosevelt correspondence says, ‘For the first time during the war Roosevelt seemed to place politics ahead of military cooperation with the Soviet Union’. But it really centred on the narrow issue of allegations from Stalin about an understanding between Alexander and the German Kesselring at Berne. It was drafted by Leahy to support Harriman and received scant attention from Roosevelt.27 It did not signal a momentous change in American foreign policy.

  Roosevelt was sadly in no condition to exercise any restraint on Stalin. He was far sicker than Wilson had been at one stage in Paris in 1919, and the consequences for the world were more serious. Churchill described himself lat
er at Yalta ‘talking to a friendly but darkening void’. Hopkins doubted if the President had heard more than half of what went on around the table and told Churchill that hardly any of the President’s final messages to him were truly his.28 He was suffering from congestive heart disease, high blood pressure, chronic anaemia and a consequent inadequate blood supply to the brain. It was tragic that this great and vigorous man, in domestic matters the most effective President of the twentieth century, inventive, innovative and original, should end his career baffled and deluded in the midst of foreign policy matters of which he knew little. Four days after sending his telegram from Warm Springs came that ‘terrific headache’. The President suffered his fatal cerebral haemorrhage and died on 12 April 1945.

  How far Roosevelt, in full vigour, would have behaved differently we shall never know. Even before his final decline he had tended to a more idealistic interpretation of Stalin than Churchill and indeed seemed to regard the Russian leader as closer to him than the imperialist English aristocrat. His penultimate message to Churchill of 11 April 1945, for which he was personally responsible, said that ‘I would minimise the general Soviet problem as much as possible, because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day, and most of them sort themselves out …’29

  There was a fear, not just on Roosevelt’s part, but shared by his advisers, even Hopkins who parted company with Churchill on this issue, that what the Prime Minister was trying to do was to restore the ‘unsavoury status quo ante’.30

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  The Disintegration of Unity

  In these last months Churchill had only limited control over the fighting. On 22 February 1945 he tried to have Alexander appointed as Deputy Theatre Commander in France. Eisenhower would have none of it. The concept of British generals pulling the strings, while Americans occupied honorific positions, the stratosphere theory, had completely gone. Churchill was reduced to a plaintive response: ‘I am sure you would not wish to deny us the kind of representation on your Staff in respect of military matters which is our due’.1 The Americans had jettisoned the principle of equality of command.

  Increasing suspicions about Stalin prompted Churchill to press Eisenhower to push towards Berlin, and to capture it before the Russians got there: ‘I deem it highly important that we should shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible’. He received no support from Roosevelt. Eisenhower was worse. He not only departed from directly targeting Berlin, but he told Stalin what he was doing. To make matters worse, he did so without informing his British deputy, Tedder, or the combined Chiefs. Eisenhower’s innocence contrasted with Stalin’s deviousness. The Russian played along with American naïvety, cabling Eisenhower to say that Berlin had ‘lost its former strategic importance’ and that he would only send some second-rate forces, sometime in May. Simultaneously, however, he sent Zhukov and Koniev off to the city in a race of savage rivalry. Churchill was furious on a number of counts, and not only because Berlin was being handed over to the Soviets. A coding error in the telegram led him for some time to understand that Montgomery was to play a negligible part in the advance. Additionally he was annoyed about Tedder. Tedder was supposed, in his view, to promote British interests at Supreme Headquarters, whereas Churchill felt he had gone native. He wrote a savage attack on Tedder for the Chiefs of Staff, which Brooke thought outstandingly wrong-headed: ‘He must have been quite tight when dictating it’. But Brooke and the Chiefs of Staff were as angry as Churchill about Eisenhower’s change of plan.

  This was Churchill’s last great argument with Eisenhower. On Churchill’s eightieth birthday Eisenhower was prompted to write to a friend on the subject of greatness. He concluded that Churchill ‘came nearest to fulfilling the requirements of greatness in any individual that I have met … I have known finer and greater characters, wiser philosophers, more understanding personalities, but no greater man.’2

  While the Prime Minister was travelling back from Yalta to London, the bombing of Dresden had begun. Dresden arose out of a revived Joint Intelligence Committee proposal for Operation THUNDERCLAP, designed originally to destroy German morale as the war came into its final phase. THUNDERCLAP had been intended for Berlin; the revived plan was for raids on Chemnitz, Leipzig and Dresden, critical points in the German transport system, together with targets that would assist the Soviet offensive in the east. The Americans were all for the raids. Portal and Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Secretary of State for Air, wanted to concentrate on oil targets. It was Churchill, heading for Yalta, who insisted that revised THUNDERCLAP go ahead. It would put him in a stronger negotiation position with Stalin. Dresden was targeted at the specific insistence of the Russians at a time when they were suspicious of allied intentions.

  Colville found Harris alone in the Great Hall at Chequers on the night that thirty-six hours of bombing ended. He asked him what the news was of Dresden. Harris replied, ‘There is no such place as Dresden’.3

  The material damage and loss of life, the fires and terror of Dresden, were appalling, but Germany was able to make it seem even worse. They inflated the losses. They stigmatised it as an inhumane assault on the civilian population of a town that was without strategic significance, although the city contained critical elements of Germany’s war industry and was an important railway junction. In his famous speech in the House of Lords on 14 February 1943, Dr George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, had denounced the bombing policy; Richard Stokes attacked it in the Commons. As early as 28 March 1945, Churchill, appalled by what the policy amounted to, sent the Chiefs of the Air Staff a memorandum in which he referred to Dresden as ‘a serious query against the conduct of allied bombing’. The Air Chiefs were horrified by Churchill’s turn-around, and a further memorandum was sent in substitution on 1 April 1945 with a call simply for the review of bombing policy ‘in our own interests’. Another minute, of 19 April, consisted simply of the sentence, ‘What was the point of going and blowing down Potsdam?’ On 6 April bomber command was told to stop attacking industrial centres.

  It remains difficult to know how the moral, humane and military arguments should have been balanced at the height of these hectic days, and it was difficult for the West alone to gauge proportionality. At this time there was never more than 25 per cent of the Wehrmacht in the West.

  On 29 April, just two months after the champagne toasts at Yalta, dismayed by what he saw happening in Poland and Yugoslavia, Churchill sent an important appeal to Stalin:

  There is not much comfort in looking into a future where you and the countries you dominate, plus the Communist Parties in many other States, are all drawn up on one side, and those who rallied to the English-speaking nations and their associates or Dominions are on the other. It is quite obvious that their quarrel would tear the world to pieces, and that all of us leading men on either side who had anything to do with that would be shamed before history … [Do] not, I beg you, my friend Stalin, underrate the divergences which are opening about matters which you may think are small to us, but which are symbolic of the way the English-speaking democracies look at life.4

  On the same day, Russia set up a Provisional Austrian government without consulting the West, who were not allowed to send representatives to Vienna.

  Churchill protested against the Austrian démarche. On this occasion he was supported by the new President, Truman. Truman did not however support him on 30 April, when Churchill heard that Eisenhower had told the Soviet High Command that he would advance no further than Linz and that indeed the Americans would withdraw up to 140 miles from their present positions in Germany once the war was ended, in order to comply with the Yalta agreement which the Russians were already being seen to dishonour.

  Truman, for all that he had recognised the likelihood of succeeding to the Presidency, had taken no trouble to prepare for the eventuality so far as knowledge of foreign affairs was concerned. On his succession he claimed to know what was required on the domestic front, but no more than that: a serious omission in
the circumstances. He could of course learn nothing of what Roosevelt had been thinking. Even Stettinius, who had been drafting much of Roosevelt’s paperwork latterly, did not know what subtleties, qualifications and evasions had been lodged in the late President’s mind.

  By degrees Truman came to see what the reality of the situation was. He saw the world in black and white and fairly simple terms, and that was no bad thing when looking at the rights and wrongs of what Stalin was doing. On 14 April in just his second message to Churchill, he said that Stalin must understand that the Lublin Poles could not dictate who should negotiate the new government of Poland. On 15 April Churchill told Eden that he had wanted a lead from the United States and now it had come.5

  The aspect of American foreign policy which certainly did remain constant as between Roosevelt and Truman was the desire for the conference in San Francisco to pave the way for the establishment of the United Nations Organisation. This had been at the heart of Roosevelt’s later foreign policy. The comparison between Roosevelt’s intervention in the Second World War and Wilson’s in the First World War is obvious: both justified intervention not as involvement in the power-politics of the old world but as, and only as, part of a scheme to replace that dirty system with a more idealistic world order. Wilson’s aims had been thwarted and discredited when the negotiations at Versailles proceeded on the basis of European business as usual; America turned its back on the League of Nations and watched as Europe descended into the squalor of fascism and appeasement. Roosevelt was clear that things must never be the same again, and between his final election success and his death his policy was directed to avoiding a return to the old order. To sell the United Nations settlement to America, Roosevelt needed to be able to convince American opinion that the new organisation had no taint of secret deals and covert spheres of influence. Roosevelt’s thoughts about foreign policy can only be understood by studying these last few months of his life.