Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  Even when King informed Cunningham that he did not intend to assign the British Pacific Fleet to the first phase of Operation Iceberg–the capture of the Ryukyu Islands south of Japan–claiming that he was ‘uncertain of what MacArthur is going to do’, Cunningham concluded: ‘I doubt he is up to his usual game of trying to keep us out of it.’ Although the next day Cunningham professed himself ‘rather disappointed’ at missing Iceberg, in the event the Royal Navy was fortunate to have escaped involvement in its terrible first phase, which comprised the capture of the island of Okinawa and which led to 7,374 American soldiers and 4,907 sailors being killed, and 31,807 soldiers and 4,874 sailors wounded, 36 ships being sunk and 368 damaged, and 763 aircraft lost–the highest number of American casualties in any single campaign of the war against Japan.

  When they got back for lunch at the Vorontsov Villa after that morning’s Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting, the British Chiefs found that a group from the Foreign Office had ‘pinched’ their luncheon room. When they tried to walk in anyway, a young official came up and told them ‘to hold off’. No one ever talked like that to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and ‘He got properly set about’ by Brooke, much to Cunningham’s amusement.

  An indication of how strained the Roosevelt–Churchill relationship had become by the time of Yalta might be gleaned from an incident that took place one afternoon. When the Prime Minister arrived at the fifth plenary session on Thursday 8 February, ten minutes before the 4 p.m. meeting, he ‘seemed a bit surprised’ to hear that Stalin and Roosevelt had already been conferring for twenty minutes. He was ushered on his own into the President’s suite to wait until his delegation had shed their hats and coats. Edward Stettinius, the new US Secretary of State, suggested that Admiral Leahy tell the President that Churchill was waiting outside. The admiral dutifully delivered the message and was back in a few moments. ‘What did the President say?’ asked Stettinius. ‘Let him wait,’ answered the blunt Leahy, indifferent to the presence of the Prime Minister’s delegation. Stettinius was embarrassed, Hopkins seemed amused. Stettinius then apologized to Eden, who did not seem at all put out, assuring the Secretary of State that he ‘thoroughly understood the whims of their masters and not to be upset about it’.17 Perhaps Eden ought to have taken this act of casual rudeness on the part of the President as yet another sign of his willingness to appear somewhere between grandly nonchalant and simply offhand towards Churchill.

  With Roosevelt’s permission the Joint Chiefs of Staff held joint Staff sessions with the Russian Chiefs of Staff on 8 and 9 February, on the same days that the Combined Chiefs held their 187th and 188th sessions. These showed the shape of things to come. Of the Americans’ argument that they did not want the world to break down into ‘spheres of influence’, Lord Halifax–who did not attend Yalta–wrote to his Foreign Office friend Charles Peake, Eisenhower’s political adviser at SHAEF, that it seemed ‘astonishing nonsense’, because they were ‘altogether ignoring that they have the biggest of all through the Monroe Doctrine. If any people have the gift of ignoring the beam in their own eye, it is surely them. But I have no doubt they think just the same about us.’ Over such questions as India, Singapore and Hong Kong, they did indeed.

  On Friday 9 February, after Churchill and Roosevelt had accepted the Combined Chiefs’ final report at their plenary session at noon–for which Roosevelt was ‘over half an hour late and not in good shape’–the photographs were taken in the courtyard at the Livadia.18 Iconic though they are today, Cunningham thought them ‘Very badly organized. Various people were fed into the picture at intervals behind the three great men,’ including him.19 For all the smiles in those photographs, the number of issues on which Churchill and Roosevelt found themselves ranged on opposite sides seemed to increase as victory neared, and by February 1945 these included the future of the Italian monarchy, the purchase of Argentine beef, civil aviation rights, Middle Eastern oil, Polish election supervision, Western involvement in the Balkans and the future of Greece.

  Because he is usually accredited the victor at Yalta, it is sometimes forgotten that Stalin made a number of concessions there. He gave a firm date of entry into the Japanese war (three months after the German surrender); agreed to observe the provisions of the Atlantic Charter in eastern Europe by signing the Declaration of Liberated Europe, which affirmed ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’; assented to France sitting on the Control Commission for Germany, and agreed that the USSR would join the new United Nations Organization, largely on Roosevelt’s terms. Taken together these seemed significant, yet in reality they amounted to relatively little. The Soviet Union offered no written commitment that the United States could have the air and naval bases she needed in the war against Japan, and Stalin’s commitment to the Japanese war arose largely out of his wish to be present at the division of spoils; the provisions of the Atlantic Charter and Declaration of Liberated Europe were never going to be seriously implemented in eastern Europe; France’s zone in Germany had to be carved out of the Anglo-American zones, not Russia’s; and it was objectively in Russia’s interests to have a founding say in the United Nations.

  Speaking in 1974, Ed Hull made the sensible but rarely heard argument that:

  All that Yalta did was to recognize the facts of life as they existed and were being brought about…The only way we could have in any way influenced that in a different way was not to have put our main effort into France or the Low Countries but to put it into the Balkans…It might have meant that Bulgaria, Rumania, and possibly others of those Eastern European countries that are now Communist-dominated would have other type of control at present. But…it would also mean that all of Germany and probably a good portion of the Low Countries, Belgium, Holland and even France, might have Soviet influence over them rather than Western influence. To me there was no choice to make.20

  The only way the Western Allies could have prevented the Soviet domination of eastern Europe was to have invaded the Continent in 1943, but that would have been to risk catastrophe in Normandy, and thus probable eventual Soviet domination of the entire Continent. Before criticizing Roosevelt and Churchill over the European endgame of 1945, it is important to recognize how limited were their options. When the Yalta Conference broke up, Brooke returned to London, Churchill left Saki airfield for Athens, Alexandria and Cairo, and Roosevelt and Marshall went back to Washington. The four of them were never to meet all together again.

  Between noon on 21 June 1942 and the morning of 10 February 1945–when Brooke said ‘all the necessary goodbyes’–Western strategy-making between the four principals had brought the British and American armies to Africa, Sicily, Rome, Normandy, Paris and almost into the heart of Germany. In all they had met seven times–twice at Washington, at Casablanca, at Teheran, twice at Quebec, and at Yalta–and at these hard-fought meetings had hammered out a victorious strategy. There had been some individual defeats and disappointments in battle against the Axis, of course, but no campaign reversals. Above all, the contentious decision over the timing of the greatest amphibious assault in history had been justified by the only truly unanswerable criterion of warfare: success. A different quartet from Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Brooke might have taken different decisions, but it is unlikely that any would have significantly shortened the Second World War.

  In Britain, a small number of Conservative MPs threatened to abstain during the parliamentary debates on the Yalta agreements, prompting Cunningham to write: ‘One sympathises with the dissidents but they do not face facts. The most outstanding one being that Russia is in occupation of Poland and can do just what she likes there without us or the USA being able to stop her.’21 The Commons debate on Yalta was won by the Government by 413 votes to nil with about thirty (mainly Tory) abstentions.

  It is hard to be naive and cynical at the same time, but Roosevelt was both when it came to Stalin and the fate of the Poles. ‘Of one thing I am certain,’ he told the Polis
h Prime Minister-in-exile Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, ‘Stalin is not an imperialist.’ To the former American Ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, he also said: ‘I have a hunch that Stalin doesn’t want anything other than security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.’ To the British minister Richard Law in late December 1944, the President said that ‘he was not afraid of Communism as such. There are many varieties of Communism and not all of them are necessarily harmful.’22

  Yet if Roosevelt was wrong about Stalin’s intentions, to the point of believing that Soviet expansionism would no longer pose a serious global threat, then so too was Churchill, who told the War Cabinet at its first meeting after he arrived back in Britain from Yalta that it was:

  Impossible to convey the true atmosphere of discussions between the [Big] Three. Stalin I’m sure means well to the world and Poland…The military situation has undergone extraordinary change, in three weeks the Russian army crossed the River Vistula to the Oder. Stalin has offered the Polish people a free and more broadly based government to bring about an election; I cannot conceive any government has the right to be treated like that. Stalin about Poland said ‘Russia has committed many sins about Poland–pacts and partitions–it is not the intention of the Soviet Government to do such things but to make amends.’ President Roosevelt was very feeble–but when he showed he did not want a thing to be done, Stalin withdrew his request. Very important other matters were settled, including an agreement signed re: Japan on the basis that Russia gets back what she lost in the Russo-Japanese War subject to agreement with Chiang Kai-shek. Stalin had a very good feeling with the two Western democracies and wants to work quite easily with us. He was not jarred by the United States and us speaking the same language. My hopes lie in a single man, he will not embark on bad adventures. Re: Greece–Stalin was jocular…He does what he likes in Bulgaria, Roumania–and leaves us alone in Greece. He held his own people off; he made a bargain with them and they have a great desire to keep it. Russian troops have a wonderful bearing.23

  The rest of Churchill’s report had an almost what-I-did-in-my-holidays quality to it. ‘Saw the Lion of Judah’, he said of the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, ‘not good impression. I reminded him we liberated his country.’ Then he met King Farouk of Egypt, but was much more impressed with Ibn Saud, the first king of Saudi Arabia, whom he thought a ‘marvellous figure, splendid looking man, boasts of his virility and how often he attends to his harem. He must keep a card index.’ Churchill was proud that although Ibn Saud’s retinue came to Alexandria on an American destroyer, ‘we sent them back on a cruiser’. There were sheep on board and a member of the entourage made coffee in the destroyer’s magazine, which ‘alarmed the Americans’. Churchill was amused by the way the retinue in Ibn Saud’s hotel suite included an astrologer, a fortune-teller and slaves. He thought the meeting ‘went off very well. I drank Mecca water–I’m not apt to taking it on occasions like that.’ His party were presented with ‘£100 worth of perfume’, as well as ‘presents we have got to discuss with chancellor of the exchequer, diamonds and pearls’. Churchill ‘Pleaded the case of the Jews’, but Ibn Saud brought up the assassination the previous year of the British Minister in the Middle East by Stern Gang terrorists, saying: ‘If they murder Lord Moyne, what do you expect them to do to the Arabs?’

  The ‘high spot’ for Churchill had been Athens–his visit of 14–15 February codenamed Operation Freehold–where he had ‘never seen such a mass of people, jammed together. Tremendous.’ It would have been easy, so slowly did the crowds allow him to move, for someone to ‘have a pot shot at you’, after which there would have been a by-election, he joked, but nonetheless his antagonist Aneurin Bevan ‘would not stand a chance’. The last comments were almost Pooterish considering the great events Churchill had been describing: ‘Well, very enjoyable I must say.’ He had brought back goldfish from Moscow to swim in the pond at Chartwell, and had ‘Maintained one’s own against the bugs–got it a bit in the gut at the banquet…Left Cairo at 2 a.m. this morning. I’m not the slightest bit tired.’24

  Although the official Cabinet minutes reported over three-and-a-half pages, it might almost have been a different meeting altogether from that verbatim account we have thanks to Lawrence Burgis. Churchill’s naivety about Stalin was still present in the official record–‘Premier Stalin had been sincere. He [Churchill] had a very great feeling that the Russians were anxious to work harmoniously with the two English-speaking democracies’ and ‘He was struck by the desire of the Russians to meet the President half way on points to which they thought he attached real importance’–yet there was unsurprisingly no mention of the agreement to allow Stalin to do ‘what he likes’ in Bulgaria or Roumania, let alone Roosevelt’s feebleness or how Churchill’s hopes for peace ‘lie in a single man, he will not embark on bad adventures’. Three years later, at the time of the Berlin Blockade, these forecasts were looking myopic.

  The official minutes did record Churchill saying that ‘There was no question that the Russian Army was a formidable machine,’ which of course explains why the best that Churchill and Roosevelt could have hoped for was Stalin’s goodwill, since nothing else could dislodge the Red Army from Poland at that time.25 Both the official minutes and Burgis’ verbatim transcriptions nonetheless absolve Roosevelt from the criticism that he was the only Western leader who was naive about Stalin’s real post-war intentions towards eastern Europe. In the historical discussion about Roosevelt’s supposed naivety versus Churchill’s supposed cynicism, the truth is more complex. Churchill was more naive than he liked later to maintain, but neither man’s beliefs made the slightest difference when faced with a vast Red Army stationed squarely over Poland and East Prussia. (Churchill was also rather endearingly naive about his own popularity, telling the Cabinet that when he landed at RAF Lyneham that day, after his fourteen-hour flight from Cairo, ‘I was very thirsty and we stopped at a railway hotel for a whiskey and soda, which was most welcome. But, do you know, they wouldn’t let me pay for it!’)26

  The British plan for Alexander to replace Tedder as Eisenhower’s deputy had been agreed to by Eisenhower himself, who nonetheless spotted the dangers of its being perceived as a British attempt to slip a land commander between him and his other senior officers. As he told Marshall on 20 February, ‘Since Public Relations often cause me the biggest headaches, I wanted to make sure the CIGS clearly understood what might occur.’ The whole idea was then downplayed by Brooke, who wrote a ‘My dear Monty…Yours ever Brookie’ letter on 7 March saying he thought he had settled ‘the Alex business’ by having ‘got in with Ike before the PM saw him and had long talk with him…I told him to be quite frank with PM and tell him exactly what his fears were, and not allow himself to be overridden. As a result PM told me afterwards that he had had doubts as to the wisdom of the change.’27

  Brooke advised Churchill to leave things as they were, and soon afterwards Churchill wrote to Roosevelt and Marshall (with a copy to Brooke) withdrawing the proposal due to ‘the progress of the war’, which was a pretty broad catch-all. Brooke also told Montgomery that since Tedder ‘manages the whole air business on the Western front in Eisenhower’s name’ it wouldn’t have worked anyway, and he wanted Alexander to occupy Austria after the surrender instead. Tedder later told Pogue that the whole move had originally been ‘started by Monty, backed by Winston and Brooke’, because he, Tedder, kept supporting Eisenhower over Montgomery. ‘We didn’t happen to support [Monty] against Ike,’ Tedder told Pogue. ‘He couldn’t understand that we should be loyal to our commander.’28 Whereas Tedder fought coalition warfare as it needed to be, Montgomery–and to an extent also Brooke–consistently saw it in terms of Anglo-American competition. Eisenhower’s attitude was that he did not mind one officer calling another a ‘useless sonofabitch’ so long as the epithet did not include the
word ‘British’ or ‘American’.

  Montgomery’s reply to ‘My dear Brookie’ claimed that he was ‘delighted that the Alexander business has been postponed: and I hope this will lead to a cancellation. The change would have upset matters, without any doubt. We are now on a very good wicket; Ike has learnt his lesson and he consults me before taking any action.’29 Small wonder that the Americans thought of him as they did.

  Brooke had already warned Montgomery that Churchill was ‘determined to come out for the crossing of the Rhine and is now talking of going up in a tank!’ Brooke thought that it would be safest to find ‘some reasonably secure viewpoint (not too far back or there will be hell to pay)’ from which the Prime Minister could watch what was happening. Montgomery replied that he would invite Churchill to stay with him in his camp, since that way he would ‘be able to keep an eye on him and see that he goes only where he will bother no one’. When he went out later that month, Churchill assured Montgomery that his entire party would consist only of Brooke, his aide Tommy Thompson and Sawyers, ‘four in all’. (Of course no one could have expected Churchill to see the Allies crossing the Rhine without his valet being present.)