That day Churchill instructed the cabinet to prepare legislation for a national insurance plan and a national health service. This was not cynical posturing; Churchill had supported both programs since he put Sir William Beveridge on the case more than three decades earlier. As for the fate of the coal mines, since the General Strike of 1926 he had been much more sympathetic to the miners than to the mine owners. Churchill did not hate Labour programs; he hated the intellectual arrogance of the left—of Bevan, Cripps, and Laski. Churchill, Colville later wrote, was “never anything but hostile to Socialist theory.” He had certainly made that clear during the campaign. In any case, voters were unaware of Churchill’s instructions to the cabinet when they went to the polls on July 5.27
On July 7, Churchill, Mary, Clemmie, Lord Moran, and Colville made for the Basque coast of France near St-Jean-de-Luz for a one-week vacation before Churchill undertook the next order of business: the Big Three conference due to open in Potsdam on the sixteenth. Churchill himself had code-named the conference Terminal, a curious choice given that the final phase of the war against Japan had yet to begin and the atomic bomb, which might hasten the end of the Pacific war, had yet to be tested. Many military men, including Franklin Roosevelt’s chief of staff, Admiral Leahy, who gave odds and took bets, believed it would not work.
Churchill’s valet, Sawyers, made the journey to France, as keeper of the Old Man’s brushes and palettes and paints. It was intended as a beach and painting vacation, and the absence of paperwork and urgent telephone calls ensured an air of quietude. The Old Man spent his mornings swimming about “like a benevolent hippo” off a sandy beach while a squad of French gendarmes dog-paddled around the Great Man to provide a cordon sanitaire between the P.M. and curious locals. So complete was Churchill’s rest and relaxation that he utterly failed to prepare for the Potsdam Conference. To make matters worse, neither had Anthony Eden, who had returned from San Francisco with a duodenal ulcer and, under Lord Moran’s orders, had spent much of June in bed resting. Churchill—with the election always intruding on his thoughts—had no heart for the upcoming Potsdam parley, telling his doctor, “Nothing will be decided at the conference… I shall only be half a man until the result of the poll. I shall keep in the background at the conference.” A report from Max Beaverbrook arrived that lifted Churchill’s spirits; the Beaver now predicted a Conservative majority of one hundred. And although Churchill now believed that he might have lost the service vote, he told Clementine he was quite sure the servicewomen were for him. When Clemmie reminded him that early in his career he had opposed giving women the vote, he replied, “Quite true.”28
On July 15, Churchill, Sawyers, Mary, and Moran flew on to Berlin, while Colville and Clementine returned to London. Attlee and Ernest Bevin also journeyed to Potsdam; it was Churchill’s wish that the British present a unified front to the Americans and especially to Stalin. When Churchill told the House of his desire to bring Attlee to Berlin, a Labour MP called out, “Is the right honourable Gentleman going to take the Gestapo with him?” The Old Man thus arrived at his lodgings in Babelsberg, about six miles from Potsdam, with a hostile House waiting in London, a hostile Stalin waiting in Potsdam, and without any guarantee from President Truman that the Americans were prepared to play hardball with Stalin on the matter of free Polish elections.29
Truman also arrived in Babelsberg on the fifteenth, and took up residence in a grand town house two blocks from Churchill’s residence. Elements of the British, American, and Red armies—out in force—guarded both houses. The next day at dawn—early afternoon in Berlin—the Americans successfully detonated an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. On the seventeenth, before the first plenary session with Stalin, Henry Stimson shoved a piece of paper across a table to Churchill. On it Stimson had scribbled, “Babies satisfactorily born.” Churchill did not understand, until Stimson made clear just what had taken place in New Mexico. Of this news, Churchill later wrote, “Here then was a speedy end to the Second World War, and perhaps to much else besides.” In that moment, Churchill saw no further need to seek Russian help against Japan, and he saw a possible solution to the Soviet tide rolling westward in Europe. The Prof—Lord Cherwell—beheld a way to make this horrific new weapon even more terrible. Knowing that the initial burst of such a bomb would blind anyone who happened to be looking skyward at the moment it detonated, Cherwell advised that preliminary pyrotechnics be set off as the bomb made its descent in order that the optimum number of Japanese were looking skyward at the moment of truth.30
Churchill had anticipated the fate of Japan more than three years earlier. Weeks before the fall of Singapore, with the British Empire reeling from the Japanese blows in the Far East but fully appreciating that the home islands of Japan were the key to the Pacific theater, as much as England was to the European, Churchill communicated to the Chiefs of Staff his strategy: “The burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs will bring home in a most effective way to the people of Japan the dangers of the course to which they have committed themselves.” The word “incendiary” jumps from the memo. He does not propose the use of parachute bombs or four-thousand-pound high explosives. He does not envision bringing Japan to bay with commandos, sabotage, or trickery. He goes straight to the most efficient solution. He would set Japan ablaze, literally, for Japanese cities were built of paper and wood. That strategy now fell to Truman to implement.
The first plenary session opened late on July 17 at the Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, originally built for Crown Prince Wilhelm (“Little Willie”). Eden and Alec Cadogan both found Truman to be “quick and businesslike.” And both thought Churchill’s performance was a disaster. Eden: “W. was very bad. He had read no brief & was confused & wooly & verbose.” Cadogan: “Every mention of a topic started Winston off on a wild rampage…. So it was a pretty useless meeting, but these conferences always have their infantile complaints.”31
Several issues were on the Potsdam agenda—a warm-water port for Russia, Russian participation in the Pacific war, the withdrawal of Russian troops from northern Iran, the fate of the German fleet—but only two items were of abiding concern to Churchill: free elections in Poland, and the western Polish border. On the former, Stalin, as he had at Yalta, simply promised free elections—a lie—and Churchill chose to believe him. On the latter, Stalin (and the Lublin Poles) would not budge; the occupation of eastern Germany was a fait accompli, and Stalin was of no mind to withdraw from any part of this fertile swath of conquered territory. Churchill had believed since Tehran that the new Polish frontier should be delineated by the Eastern Neisse River where it fed into the Oder, in compensation for the Poles agreeing to the Curzon Line. Stalin claimed the Western Neisse. More than one million Germans lived between the two rivers, and Stalin and the Lublin Poles demanded they be packed off to Germany, to make room for Polish settlers. Had Churchill and Stalin scrutinized a map at Tehran when they first proposed shifting Poland westward toward the Oder (and checked off their acceptance as they had with the “naughty” memo in October 1944, when they divided the Balkans into spheres of influence), they might have avoided the current predicament. And had Roosevelt displayed resolve at Yalta rather than, as described by Eden, “playing it by ear,” a more concise accord might have been reached. And, had Harry Hopkins been on hand in his role as presidential fixer, he might have guided Truman to more resolve. But Hopkins was an ill man, and he had severed his connection with the U.S. government early in the month. In any case, the Lublin Poles in essence had become the fifth occupier of Germany.
Churchill believed his tête-à-têtes with Stalin would yield results. Eden did not. After Churchill enjoyed a five-hour dinner with Stalin, Eden told his diary: “He [Churchill] is again under Stalin’s spell. He kept repeating ‘I like that man.’ I am full of admiration of Stalin’s handling of him.” Full of foreboding for Poland, Eden wrote a long memo to Churchill, ending it with: “I am deeply concerned at the pattern of Russian policy, which becomes more clear as
they become more brazen every day.”32
During the conference, Churchill attended nine plenary sessions, with detours to the usual nightly banquets and to dispiriting one-on-one talks with the Lublin Poles (“Communist creatures,” Eden called them). The Old Man also spent an afternoon in Berlin, where hungry Berliners cheered when he alighted from his automobile in front of Hitler’s Chancellery. Churchill strolled into the crowd. “My hate had died with their surrender,” he later wrote. “I was much moved… by their haggard looks and threadbare clothes.” After a brief tour of Hitler’s bunker and the pit where the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were disposed of, Churchill looked about and declared, “Hitler must have come up here to get some air, and heard the guns getting nearer and nearer.” He also spoke at the opening of the Winston Club, a nightclub and cabaret opened for British servicemen. There he received a cool reception from the gathered troops, who had voted weeks prior in early balloting.33
On the matter of the atomic bomb, Churchill enthusiastically endorsed Truman’s decision to use it. Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed in 1943 that both the U.S. and Britain must approve the bomb’s use. Yet, although a Royal Navy carrier task force was then attached to Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet, and Churchill was determined to do his part in Japan, the decision to drop the bomb was Truman’s alone to make, by virtue of the overwhelming role America would play in the planned invasion of Japan. When Churchill suggested that the Japanese be forewarned that their country would be as utterly destroyed as Germany and that their only chance to preserve lives and honor would be to surrender now, Truman replied that the Japanese had had lost any claim to honor at Pearl Harbor. Still, the Allies sent an ultimatum—the Potsdam Declaration—to Tokyo in which they guaranteed the Japanese rights of free speech and religious assembly, and promised that they had no intention of enslaving the Japanese or destroying Japan as a nation. The declaration ended with: “We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.” Tokyo ignored the statement.34
Eden later recalled that he and Churchill had discussed the delicate matter of telling Stalin of the atomic bomb, and the more delicate matter of refusing Stalin the “know how” of the bomb’s technology if he asked for it. They advised Truman to inform Stalin before the bomb was dropped on Japan. Truman, in his memoir, Year of Decisions, recalls that on July 24 he “casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian premier showed no special interest.” Truman did not tell Stalin of the “atomic” nature of the new weapon. Churchill and Eden stood a few feet away as Truman spoke with Stalin. As recalled by Churchill, in his memoirs, “I was sure that he [Stalin] had no idea of the significance of what he was being told. Evidently in his immense toils and stresses the atomic bomb had played no part. If he had the slightest idea of the revolution in world affairs which was in progress his reactions would have been obvious…. But his face remained gay and genial and the talk between these two potentates soon came to an end.” But as recalled by Marshal Zhukov in his memoirs, “Stalin did not betray his feelings and pretended that he saw nothing special in what Truman had imparted to him. Both Churchill and many other Anglo-American authors subsequently assumed that Stalin had really failed to fathom the significance of what he had heard. In actual fact, on returning to his quarters after this meeting Stalin, in my presence, told Molotov about his conversation with Truman. The latter reacted almost immediately. ‘Let them. We’ll have to talk it over with Kurchatov and get him to speed things up.’ I realized that they were talking about research on the atomic bomb.”35
Churchill, meanwhile, told Brooke that the new bomb made it “no longer necessary for the Russians to come into the Japanese war, the new explosive alone was sufficient to settle the matter.” Churchill, Brooke told his diary, “was completely carried away” by the news from New Mexico and believed the bomb could “redress the balance with the Russians!” Churchill, “pushing his chin out and scowling,” declared that “now we could say [to Stalin] if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Kuibyshev… Sevastopol etc. etc. And now where are the Russians!!!” Brooke tried to “crush his [Churchill’s] over-optimism” and to “dispel his dreams” based on “the half-baked results of one experiment,” but Churchill stood firm. Yet Britain did not have an atomic bomb, and Truman would have been as shocked as Brooke if Churchill had proposed dropping one on the ally that had made the largest sacrifice in the war against Hitlerism.36
One other matter occupied Churchill at Potsdam—Lend-Lease. He stressed to Truman the British desire—and need—for a continuation of the program; food was in short supply, and London needed assurance that it could parcel out Lend-Lease matériel to European countries on an as-needed basis. “The president said he would do his utmost,” Churchill wrote in his memoirs, “but of course I knew the difficulties he might have in his own country.” A month later Truman told his closest advisers that “he was dead set against the U.S. adding to its reputation as a Santa Claus; he wanted Lend-Lease cut to a minimum now, liquidated as soon as possible.”37
Churchill left Potsdam without an agreement on Poland. The Red Army was in control of central Europe. Not since 1814, when Russian troops entered Paris, had a Russian army thrust so far west into Europe. With SHAEF decommissioned that week, with Truman sending his armies home and his air forces to the Pacific, and with British troops outnumbered by the Red Army by more than three to one, the fate of not only Eastern Europe but Western Europe rested with Joseph Stalin. It was this state of affairs that led Churchill eight years later to title the sixth and final volume of his war memoirs Triumph and Tragedy.
Churchill returned to London with Mary late on July 25 in order to learn his electoral fate. If Beaverbrook’s optimistic predictions proved correct, Churchill would be going back to Potsdam in a few days. Father, daughter, son, and Clementine dined together that evening in the Storey’s Gate Annexe. Churchill’s brother, Jack, joined the party; Beaverbrook and Bracken dropped by. Churchill retired early (for him), shortly after 1:00 A.M., sanguine in his belief that he would receive his electoral mandate. He later wrote that he awoke just before dawn “with a sharp stab of almost physical pain. A hitherto subconscious conviction that we were beaten broke forth and entered my mind…. The power to shape the future would be denied me. The knowledge and experience I had gathered, the authority and goodwill I had gained in so many countries would vanish.” He slept until nine, late for Churchill, and was in his bath when, shortly after ten, Captain Pim requested he make for the map room, where charts of battlefronts had been replaced by lists of constituencies. Colville, Bracken, and Beaverbrook joined Churchill there. The P.M., attired in his siren suit, sprawled in his chair, cigar in hand, as had been his habit in 1940 while he waited for the howl of the air-raid alarm to announce the fireworks.38
The first results were unfavorable, and the numbers only worsened as the morning wore on. Early reports showed forty-four Labour gains to just one for the Conservatives. Alexander Hancock, a farmer and unknown Independent crackpot who advocated a one-hour workday, had opposed Churchill in Woodford, a new district carved out of Churchill’s old Epping district. The new Epping seat went to a Labourite, and Hancock took 35 percent of the vote in Woodford. Churchill kept his seat, as did Eden. But Bracken lost his, as did Duncan Sandys, Harold Macmillan, and Randolph. The only satisfying news to come over the transom was that Sir William Beveridge and Leslie Hore-Belisha, both Liberals, had lost. Labour took 393 seats in the new Parliament, the Conservatives 213 (down from 585 in 1935). Had not the Liberals, who ran more than three hundred candidates, siphoned away Labour votes, the Tories would have fared even worse. The Liberals in the end won just twelve seats and were reduced to distant third-party irrelevancy. The New York Times declared the Tory defeat
“one of the most stunning electoral surprises in the history of democracy.” The London Times held Churchill accountable for his own political demise: “Mr. Churchill himself introduced and insisted upon emphasizing the narrower animosities of the party fight.” The Daily Telegraph attributed the results to “a revulsion of feeling against the government rather than to an excess of support to the Socialist policy.”39
Lunch at the Annexe that day, Mary told her diary, took place “in Stygian gloom.” Sarah “looked beautiful and distressed.” All in the room “looked stunned & miserable.” “Papa struggled to accept this terrible blow—this unforeseen landslide.” At some point, Clementine said of the defeat, “It may well be a blessing in disguise.” To which Churchill replied, “Well, at the moment it’s certainly very well disguised.” Neither his sense of humor nor his dignity deserted him. When Lord Moran wandered onto the scene, Churchill asked, “Well, you know what has happened?” Moran replied that he knew, and added something about the ingratitude of the people. “Oh, no,” Churchill answered, “I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very hard time.” Moran had been so sure that Churchill would be given his mandate and that they’d return to Berlin that he had left his luggage there.40
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 Page 138