Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

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  While all this was happening, Churchill had visited Moscow and on his own authority made a spheres-of-influence agreement with Stalin that left Greece to the West, divided Yugoslavia evenly, and conceded Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria to the Russians. Except perhaps for Hungary, the movement of the armies was going to accomplish this anyway, but Roosevelt did not want to legitimize Soviet occupation of any of these countries. Czechoslovakia wasn’t mentioned. Franklin D. Roosevelt was re-elected to a fourth term as president, with Harry S. Truman of Missouri as vice president, over Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, 54 per cent to 46 per cent (his majority reduced by a vote of Republicans and Southern Democrats to exclude most members of the armed forces from voting, because the Republicans knew most would vote for the commander-in-chief, and the Southern Democrats were afraid of adding to the voter rolls a million African-American servicemen whom they had largely excluded from voting at home). Roosevelt hinted clearly that civil rights was an idea whose time was coming.

  On December 16, 1944, Hitler launched what would prove to be his last throw in the war as his enemies closed in on him. Taking advantage of poor winter weather to evade Allied air superiority, he massed five hundred thousand men, about twenty-five divisions, and they erupted out of the Ardennes in an attempted replication of the great success there of 1940. The plan was to overrun Allied supply stores and use them, especially tank fuel, to proceed all the way to the coast at Antwerp and roll back the Allied offensive. Allied intelligence had some warning of an attack, and Eisenhower had very prudently pulled supplies back. The Germans achieved tactical surprise and advanced about fifty miles in the first week and surrounded the famous American 101st Airborne Division in the Belgian fortress city of Bastogne. General George S. Patton’s Third Army, in a remarkable recovery, crashed into the southern flank of the Germans on Christmas Day and relieved Bastogne the following day. Montgomery, reinforced by the American Ninth Army, temporarily allocated to him by Eisenhower, attacked in strength from the north on January 2, and the Allied line had regained its original position by January 21. Germany had taken about 120,000 casualties to 90,000 Allied, 77,000 of them Americans. Germany lost about a third of its air force, which was now down to approximately three thousand planes, after the weather lifted at Christmas. The Germans, as always, fought bravely and with ingenuity, but they were heavily outnumbered and outgunned, and the senior Allied commanders, Eisenhower, Patton, Omar Bradley, and Montgomery, all performed admirably. The Canadians, to the north, were not directly involved. Hitler would not be able to continue in the war for more than a few more months. The Allies were unstoppable on every front, and the battle now was to bring most of Europe as well as Japan into the West and not allow the Russian bear too far into Europe.

  Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met for the second time, at Yalta, in the Crimea, for a week starting on February 4. The conference has been much criticized, but the Western leaders got everything they sought; the problems arose in subsequent Soviet non-compliance. Until it was known whether atomic weapons would actually work, Roosevelt was beseeched by his service chiefs to get the Russians to take a share of what were expected to be a million casualties subduing the home islands of Japan. Stalin pledged to enter the Pacific War within three months of the end of the European War, and all was agreed for the setting up of the United Nations at San Francisco even before either theatre of war was pacified. The conference declarations on Poland and on liberated Europe pledged democratic government and free elections with, in Poland, stipulation of “universal suffrage and secret ballot.” France would be recognized as a fourth power on the Allied Control Commission and would be given a part of the British occupation zone in Germany.

  The conference ended cordially and the protagonists returned to direct their final offensives to secure the unconditional surrenders of Germany and of Japan. Eisenhower’s armies prorupted into the Ruhr valley on February 23, attacked at a number of points across the Rhine in late March, and completed Eisenhower’s double envelopment of the Ruhr by April 18, capturing 325,000 German prisoners. Roosevelt had been correct that once the Germans saw they were defeated, they would surrender in the west but continue to fight with their usual tenacity in the east to avoid capture by vengeful Russians at the end of the Russo-German war, which saw more than six million prisoners of war and many millions of civilians murdered. Roosevelt had been correct to resist a demarcation of spheres of occupation in Germany but was outnumbered by Stalin and by Churchill, who was afraid that with much the smallest number of forces in Germany of the Big Three, Great Britain would have an inordinately small zone. Canada was not involved in all this and was only sketchily informed of any of it. With six divisions and two armoured brigades engaged in the northwest and Italy combined, Canada’s contribution was well below the summit consultation threshold but did add significantly to Churchill’s status. De Gaulle, who eventually clambered up to the Big Three to make it the Big Four (after it ceased to meet or function), wrote King in October 1944 that “he realized he owed the freedom of France in large part to Canadians.”87 Conscription was finally fading as an issue when on April 3 the cabinet agreed with a silent nodding of heads that there would be no conscription for the Japanese war.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, aged only sixty-three, and was generally hailed as a gigantic and benign figure of modern world history. More than two million people stood beside the railway track to see his funeral train pass on its way from his winter home in Georgia, where he died, to Washington and on to Hyde Park. King, who had enjoyed an excellent, if uneven, relationship with him, mourned the deceased president and attended the funeral. On the same day, he determined to dissolve Parliament and lead the Liberal Party into a general election for the seventh time. The date was fixed for June 11, the same day on which Ontario would vote.

  Mussolini was summarily executed by Italian partisans on April 28, after being taken off a German army truck disguised in a German army uniform as he fled Italy. His corpse and that of his mistress, Clara Petacci, were hung upside down in a service station in Milan and mutilated, as were the corpses of several of his senior collaborators, who were first made to watch Il Duce’s final humiliation for a while before they themselves were executed (to popular acclaim), hung upside down, and their corpses too were mutilated. Anxious to avoid an undignified fate, Hitler and his wife of several days, Eva Braun, committed suicide by poison and pistol fire on April 30 and had their corpses burned outside the Führerbunker as the Red Army approached to within a few hundred yards. Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies on May 8. King’s only reflection in his diary on the deaths of Mussolini and Hitler, both of whom impressed him when he met them, was that that left Stalin and himself as the only national leaders of major combatants at the start of the war who were still in place, and “I have, of course, led my party longer than Stalin has his.”88

  The San Francisco Conference to establish the United Nations opened on April 25 and continued to June 25. King led the Canadian delegation of Louis St. Laurent, CCF leader Major James (M.J.) Coldwell, and a strong group of civil servants and diplomats, including future senior politicians Lester B. Pearson and Jack Pickersgill. On his arrival, King attended a meeting of the Commonwealth delegations chaired by Eden, where Eden shared a message just received from Churchill that Himmler, the chief of the Gestapo, had offered surrender in the West but that Churchill had advised that there would be no separate arrangements from the Russians.89 King was suffering from a cold, which was aggravated by the San Francisco climate, and he spoke little at the opening sessions of the conference, but when the European war ended, he addressed Canadians, as did St. Laurent in French, in remarks carried also in the United States and by shortwave transmission to Great Britain and all fighting fronts. He had the benefit also of a very generous and gracious message from Churchill praising the Canadian war effort, and King personally. His last act before leaving San Francisco was an extensive conversation
with Edward Stettinius, the secretary of state (Cordell Hull had retired in the autumn of 1944 for health reasons after nearly three terms, like his chief the longest-serving holder of his position in U.S. history). King responded to Stettinius’s urging that he come back for the closing of the conference, which was then expected at the end of May, with reflections on the fact that “one of the greatest assets I had in the public life of Canada had been my friendship with President Roosevelt. It would be very helpful to me to have the public see that I was carrying on that relationship with President Truman.” Despite the terrible inconvenience, “It might nevertheless be the most important step I could take in the campaign to win popular approval and to have the nation realize the influence that I have and the position in which I am held by the Government of the United States.” King was rarely so forthright, even in his diary, on matters of rank political opportunism. He meant “perceived influence,” as there is no evidence that he altered the intended conduct of Roosevelt a jot, but he was always amenable and they got on well, though Roosevelt found him an odd person, hardly an inaccurate judgment.90 King left California on May 14 and went to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, via Vancouver and Edmonton, to open his campaign for re-election, personally and as leader of the government. He delighted in the company of “these simple, direct, humble, honest, and genuine folk.”91

  On receiving a note from Sidney Smith, principal of University College at the University of Toronto (and later secretary of state for external affairs), inviting him to the fiftieth anniversary celebration of his graduation, but adding that, if that were not possible, all in attendance “will be felicitating the most distinguished graduate of the institution,” King “almost broke down … thinking first of the joy these words would have brought to my father, but even more how little truth, in reality, there was in them, whatever there might be to appearances because of position. I have not measured up to my job as I should have and would have, had I gone about it more in earnest from the start.”92 King always rejected the criticism of others but was often self-critical to a fault. On May 24, he gave a nationally broadcast speech from Winnipeg in which he called for a distinctive Canadian flag. The reception to the idea was cool, and it did not move again for nearly twenty years. Most of King’s election speeches were mixtures “of gentle nationalism, attachment to King and Crown, rejection of ‘special interests,’ pleas for national unity, hints of new social welfare programmes, and pride in the government’s war record.”93 President Truman’s invitation to King to visit Washington in the first week of June was impossible to accept, but King did seek “permission to have word of the invitation made public.”94 Truman replied happily that he knew something about elections and agreed at once.

  The Liberals could not replicate their tremendous victories of 1935 and 1940, and on June 11, 1945, the government lost 59 MPs but still won 118 seats, and lost 11.5 per cent of the popular vote but retained 39.8 per cent. The Progressive Conservatives moved up from 39 to 67 MPs and yet lost 2.8 per cent of the vote to come in at 27.6 per cent. The CCF rose from 8.3 per cent to 15.6 per cent, and from 8 to 28 MPs. And Social Credit moved from 2.5 to 4 per cent of the national vote, and from 10 to 13 MPs. Mackenzie King was defeated in Prince Albert (by the “simple, direct, humble, honest and genuine folk” he revered in his diary), but he had suffered that fate before with equanimity, in 1911, 1917, and 1925. More disappointing was the defeat again of McNaughton, still being punished by the misguided conscriptionism of much of English Canada (as his leader was). But King had clearly been re-elected, as he could certainly bring a number of independents and, if necessary, the CCF with him on divisions. He was re-elected personally in Glengarry, Ontario, on August 6, the fifth constituency in the third province he had represented.

  The Potsdam Conference opened on July 16, with Truman the newcomer, not known to either Churchill or Stalin. Eisenhower had opposed continuing to entice the Soviet Union into the Japanese war and had also opposed using the atomic bomb on the Japanese, as he acknowledged that Russia would take what it wanted but felt the Japanese were already defeated and they could be starved or conventionally bombed into surrender. While Truman was touring the ruins of Berlin (though he declined to visit Hitler’s bunker to avoid the semblance of “gloating”), the first atomic test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, was a success, producing a gigantic fireball and a “light not of this world.”95 Truman and war secretary Henry Stimson described it to Churchill the next day, who called it “the second coming in wrath.”96 At the July 21 conference session, Truman and Churchill refused to recognize Stalin’s puppet governments in Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, or even the neutralist regime of Finland, until the Yalta pledges to democratic government were adhered to; Roosevelt had already held back his $6.5-billion aid package for the Soviet Union pending that compliance, and Truman added that there would be no discussion of reparations either until that matter was resolved. The success of the atomic test had greatly strengthened his hand, and he enjoyed full support from Churchill. The leaders went at the same points again on July 24, after Truman and Churchill had agreed between them that the atomic bomb would be dropped on Japan within two weeks if that country did not surrender, and that the likeliest target was the city of Hiroshima, with a population of about one hundred thousand, the southern headquarters for Japan’s home defence forces. The differences of perception became clear. Stalin said, “If a government is not fascist, it is democratic.”97 Churchill, supported by Truman, was having none of it, and contrasted Italy, a free society with a free press, with Romania, where the British embassy was like a prison. “All fairy tales,” said Stalin. At the end of that session, Truman casually walked around the table and said to Stalin and his interpreter that the United States had “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Stalin expressed the hope that it would be used on Japan and showed no curiosity and did not raise the matter again at the conference. He was already working on a similar weapon and being fed information on the atomic program by the scientist Klaus Fuchs, who was at the test centre in New Mexico. That evening, Stalin ordered acceleration of his own nuclear program,98 Canada having provided the uranium for the atomic bomb. King was kept reasonably current on the state of development and the approach of the bomb’s debut. When Japan rejected the Allied ultimatum to surrender that emanated from the Potsdam Conference on July 27, King wrote in his diary, “I feel that we are approaching a moment of terror to mankind, for it means that under the stress of war, men have at last not only found but created the Frankenstein which conceivably could destroy the human race. It will rest with those in authority to decide how it can later be brought to serve instead of destroy mankind.”99

  The extent of King’s political achievement at home was emphasized when Winston Churchill was summoned back from the Potsdam Conference to hand over the government to Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, who had severely defeated Churchill’s Conservatives in the general election. As Roosevelt had warned at Tehran, it was not a referendum on Churchill’s war leadership, which won very wide support and gratitude. There had not been an election since 1935, and the Conservatives carried the can for appeasement and had entered into the election with no vision of social reform or the transformation of the Empire. Mackenzie King wrote in his diary, “I am personally very sorry for Churchill. I would like to have seen him continue his coalition until the Japanese war was over and then drop out altogether. I think he has made a mistake in running again. My own belief is that a man of Truman’s stamp is much nearer giving the kind of example which the people want. Back of it all of course is the hatred of the mass of the people for Toryism and the knowledge that Churchill is a Tory at heart though he has broad Liberal sympathies in a way, but it is the old Whig style of Liberalism. Then, too, people do not like any man to become a God. The higher a man rises on all counts, the more humble-minded he should become.” He also thought it a mistake for Churchill’s son, Randolph, and son-in-law Duncan Sandys also to stand as MPs in the same election.
Then King’s Low Church Canadian envy, though not without its intuitive grasp of envious electoralism, crept in: “I do feel that there has been far too much expenditure of public money on these great gatherings; too much emphasis on the sort of Big Three business,” by which of course King meant that he was grumpy not to have been invited. “The press in the States were against Roosevelt because he lent himself to drastic extravagances. His infirmity, though, kept him in touch with the people. What above everything else is at the back of this is the feeling of the people that if this war is to mean anything it has to mean a social revolution and that the great body of the people are going to have a larger share of their own lives.” (In fact, Roosevelt had the support of the great majority of the media and saw the coming socioeconomic changes more clearly even than King, but he knew, and his electors appreciated, that the chief of state and government in the United States had the trappings of a monarch, especially when he was a natural aristocrat, as Roosevelt was.* King, the first minister of an overseas monarch and at the head of a self-conscious and politically ambiguous country, was self-effacing, tactically and because of his indistinct public personality, but perceptive withal, and took his own remarkable political longevity as a greater confirmation of his virtue and prescience than it was, though those qualities were not lacking.100)