Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  Their opening remarks were entirely in character. Roosevelt began lightly: as he was the youngest of the three he welcomed his elders to the table. Churchill was almost absurdly grandiloquent: ‘In our hands we have the future of mankind.’ Stalin, speaking softly, almost indistinctly, as he did for much of the conference, said simply: ‘Now let us get down to business …’5 There were other contrasts. Stalin’s habit was to sit very still, to make few gestures, and to speak only when necessary. He occupied himself by doodling with a thick blue pencil, which he carried around with him all the time. Roosevelt was affable and talkative. He acted as an informal chairman, removing his pince-nez and waving them in the air to underline his remarks. Churchill was ill for much of the conference, and obviously ill-at-ease. He fidgeted at the table, scribbled notes and passed them to his colleagues, and talked at such length without pausing that his interpreter was hard pressed to reproduce what he had said. The one habit they had in common was smoking, Stalin a pipe or a cigarette, Roosevelt cigarettes, and Churchill a recalcitrant cigar which he lit and re-lit throughout the discussion.

  Beneath the outward show of bonhomie there were strong currents of distrust and uncertainty. The three leaders were united in what was popularly called the ‘Grand Alliance’, but their three states were not even allies in any formal sense. Britain and the Soviet Union had signed an alliance of cooperation in May 1942, against Churchill’s better instincts, but the United States refused to enter into fixed agreements with either of their fellow combatants. The Soviet Union was not even at war with Japan. The coalition survived through a common interest in the defeat of Germany, and little else. There were differences between them even on this central ambition. The Soviet delegation arrived at Teheran determined to force the west to enter into an unambiguous commitment to open a Second Front in France, after almost two years of delays. Churchill and his staff were just as determined to assert the British preferences for further action in the Mediterranean theatre. Stalin would have preferred to meet Roosevelt on his own. He let the President know before the meeting that he and Churchill ‘got into each other’s hair’.6 Only Roosevelt, who had long hoped to meet Stalin face to face, travelled to Teheran with the expectation of smoothing the rough edges of collaboration.

  For all the President’s notorious charm, the first contacts were awkward. He wrote to his wife of the atmosphere of ‘great distrust’ emanating from Stalin when they first met. Arnold, Roosevelt’s air force Chief-of-Staff, was struck by Stalin’s patronising treatment of the British, ‘half-humorous, half-scathing’.7 Roosevelt decided to side with Stalin in these exchanges in order to break the ice. At the plenary meeting on the second day of the conference the President began by ignoring Churchill and chatting to the Soviet delegates; he began to poke fun at the British, and the more Churchill scowled the more Stalin smiled. When Stalin finally burst out laughing at Churchill’s discomfiture, the tension between the two leaders was broken. Though Roosevelt later recalled that they now talked ‘like men and brothers’, he strained the relationship with Churchill, who had to accept not only the jibes of his partners but their strategy as well. For at the second session Stalin at last got his commitment to the Second Front, even from Churchill.8

  By the evening of the second day there was a more affable mood. Dinner was held at the Soviet Embassy, and was by the traditions of Soviet hospitality both lavish and long. But Stalin could not leave Churchill alone. Throughout the evening he returned to the theme that the Prime Minister wanted to treat the defeated Germans too kindly. When Stalin suggested shooting fifty thousand German officers as an example Churchill, red in the face, rose indignantly from the table and denounced his host with a passionate ill humour; Roosevelt smilingly agreed to 49,000 and with that Churchill swept out of the room. Stalin hurried after him and persuaded him to return and the baiting ended.9

  The following day the seal was put on the coalition’s strategy for the defeat of Germany. In the evening the British Legation hosted a birthday dinner for Churchill. With the Second Front secure, the Soviet delegates shed their inhibitions. Stalin refused the offer of cocktails, for which he had an unexplained distrust, but attacked the whisky, and then a great deal of champagne, which he was less used to drinking. Churchill decreed that the party would adopt the Russian habit of endless toasts and speeches. He toasted ‘Stalin the Great’ with more than a touch of irony, and ‘Roosevelt the Man’. Stalin hailed ‘my fighting friends’, but added the sting: ‘if it is possible for me to consider Mr Churchill my friend’. Later Stalin accused Churchill’s Chief-of-Staff, General Brooke, in front of the whole dinner party of being ‘unfriendly’ towards the Soviet Union. Both Churchill and Brooke gave as good as they got in reply, but the aspersions gave an unfortunate edge to an occasion generally remembered by all present to have been an optimistic expression of real partnership.10

  By the end of the evening the sour note was drowned out. Stalin was unusually intoxicated, moving from one guest to another and clinking glasses, and then forcing the disconcerted waiters to drink with him too. Roosevelt ended the proceedings by calling on the three coalition partners to work as ‘a harmonious whole’, with ‘the traditional symbol of hope, the rainbow’ before them in the skies of war. Churchill – who of all of them had the most to regret from the conference – went to bed that night satisfied that ‘nothing but good had been done’.11 The following day, 1 December, the spirit of the birthday party was embodied in a public communiqué signed by all three leaders. They announced a ‘common policy’ directed at ‘the destruction of German forces’. The final line betrayed its American authorship: ‘We leave here, friends in fact, in spirit and in purpose’.12 Roosevelt returned to Washington confident that the foundation for a firm personal relationship with Stalin had been secured, and that this was essential for the defeat of Germany and the rebuilding of the postwar world. Neither Stalin nor Churchill saw the meeting in such rosy terms. In Moscow the commitment to a Second Front was treated sceptically right up to its final launch, on 6 June 1944. Churchill, aware of how his influence in the coalition had been diminished, drew away from the close relationship with Roosevelt established earlier in the war, and continued to distrust Stalin. None the less, the one solid achievement of the conference, a mutual commitment to the final defeat of Germany, was forcefully and publicly stated. This final coalition, which had been fragile and embryonic since 1941, was an essential condition for the eventual victory of the Allies.

  * * *

  The coalition was from the first a product of necessity rather than deliberate intention. The relationship between Britain and the United States was far closer throughout the war than the relationship of either with the Soviet Union. Yet even Anglo-American collaboration was difficult to secure before Pearl Harbor, and was marred by friction thereafter. The roots of western collaboration went back to the early summer of 1940 when Britain faced certain defeat in Europe, and Churchill, recently appointed Prime Minister, appealed to Roosevelt to throw American assistance into the Allied scales. American opinion was divided on the issue. The President was forced to take account of strong anti-war sentiment, and a powerful residual distrust of British imperialism. Nineteen-forty was also election year. Roosevelt was ambitious for an unprecedented third term in office, and would not run risks with public opinion. He was sympathetic to the British cause, but he was by nature, he told Averell Harriman, ‘a compromiser’. He promised the American people that he would keep their country out of war, while agreeing to provide some of the material assistance Churchill wanted. In November 1940 Roosevelt was re-elected. A few weeks later, following an impassioned plea from Churchill for real aid, Roosevelt took the risky step of proffering more American goods and weapons. The scheme of provision was named Lend-Lease, to preserve some spurious notion that goods were on extended loan and might one day be returned. The British saw it as a lifeline. ‘This is tantamount to a declaration of war by the United States,’ Churchill declared to his private secretary. He regard
ed the economic alliance as ‘the most important thing’ next to winning the war.13

  Lend-Lease provoked a political storm in the United States, but Roosevelt stuck steadfastly to the commitment. In March 1941 the proposal passed through Congress. Churchill now worked to turn American economic aid into active belligerency. The US navy gradually extended its activities out into the Atlantic to protect the sea-lanes from submarine attack; American servicemen were stationed in Greenland and Iceland. Beyond that Roosevelt would not go. He was, remarked the journalist Dorothy Thompson, ‘attempting to win a war without fighting it’.14 Whether Roosevelt would ever have declared war on the Axis states if American non-belligerency had not been swept aside by Pearl Harbor remains unanswerable. Churchill regarded the Japanese attack as Britain’s salvation. He recalled in his memoirs the emotion he felt at hearing the news: ‘We had won the war … Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious.’15 Though Churchill had failed to secure America’s active participation sooner, he did succeed in securing the moral support of both the President and a good fraction of American opinion. When the United States entered the war there already existed a framework for close cooperation between the two states. Unlike in the First World War, when the United States refused to integrate its war effort closely with Britain and France, the two western powers swiftly established an exceptional degree of collaboration.

  It has become fashionable to see this as the time when Churchill, half-American himself, sold out to his richer cousins, leaving the future of the British Empire hostage to American wishes. Churchill recognised, however, sooner than many of his countrymen, that without American help Britain was not going to win the war. The alternative was a negotiated peace with Hitler, with the odds stacked heavily in Germany’s favour. Churchill, of all people, would never have countenanced agreement with Hitler, hence his single-minded pursuit of a ‘special relationship’ with Roosevelt, something, he told the Commons in February 1942, ‘I have dreamed of, aimed at and worked for …’16 Churchill was without doubt right. The Soviet Union was an unknown quantity, and its survival in 1941 very much in doubt. For all the hollow rhetoric of English-speaking brotherhood, there did exist more in common between the two democracies than between Britain and authoritarian Europe. Roosevelt was not taken in by Churchill’s sentimentality, but he understood the real danger to American interests if Britain were isolated and defeated, leaving the United States ‘an island of peace in a world of brute force’ facing the ‘contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents’.17 The decision of both men to build a common cause between their two states ranks as perhaps the most important political explanation of ultimate Allied success.

  The association was intimate from the start, and took its lead from the personal contacts between Churchill and Roosevelt. At regular summit meetings the two leaders argued out Allied strategy and coordinated their productive and technical efforts. By November 1942 Churchill confessed to his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden: ‘My whole system is based upon partnership with Roosevelt.’18 There were strong differences of opinion; neither statesman was entirely candid with the other. The warmth of the relationship is easy to exaggerate, and Roosevelt for one seems to have seen through Churchill’s florid personality and mercurial intelligence. ‘He has a hundred [ideas] a day, and about four of them are good,’ he told his Secretary for Labour.19 He teased Churchill ruthlessly, and remained wary of climbing into bed with a Tory grandee. Both men continued to defend national self-interest throughout the war, but the chief among those interests was the common pursuit of victory.

  Anglo-American collaboration took its lead from Roosevelt and Churchill, but it soon developed a momentum of its own. At every level the two states combined their activities. In December 1941 it was agreed to hold common strategic discussions in a Combined Chiefs-of-Staff Committee. An intricate network of bodies for sharing intelligence and technical information and for pooling industrial and shipping resources was established during 1942. By the end of that year there were over nine thousand British representatives in Washington, reproducing there the pattern of Whitehall deliberations, with which the American administration was much less familiar. This produced a good deal of friction, since British officials were generally much better briefed, and much more versed in detailed committee work. General Dykes, acting for the British Chiefs-of-Staff in the American capital, found his opposite numbers ‘completely dumb and appallingly slow’.20 American representatives found the British patronising and elusive. A Senate report in 1943 painted a lurid picture of ‘smart, hard-headed’ Britons, ‘daily outwitting, ousting and frustrating the naive and inexperienced American officials’.21 Even Roosevelt complained that he came away from any discussion with his ally with 20 per cent, while they kept 80. Over the course of the war American negotiating skills improved with the establishment of effective secretariats and a fuller domestic committee structure. By the time of the Teheran Summit American officials felt they were at last a match for the British.22 By 1944 the balance in the alliance tilted more obviously towards the United States as its military power and political experience ripened.

  If the two partners squabbled and bickered, their marriage survived none the less. With the Soviet Union marriage was out of the question. It was difficult to find a more unlikely associate. Diplomatic relations between the three states in the 1930s were tenuous. The legacy of the Russian Revolution threw up a barrier between communist east and capitalist west that was difficult to penetrate even in the name of expediency. When Stalin made his pact with Hitler in August 1939 the western democracies added the Soviet Union to the number of their potential enemies. The Soviet war on Finland in December 1939 provoked a ‘moral embargo’ on all trade with the Soviet Union. In the six months before Barbarossa relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were, according to one Soviet view, ‘growing worse and worse’.23 Stalin remained impervious to all warnings from the west of impending German attack, assuming that Britain was trying to provoke a struggle between communism and fascism, hoping to profit by it. When Germany actually invaded, Stalin was completely uncertain how Britain would react.

  The immediate response from the west was, under the circumstances, surprisingly favourable. Churchill, one of the most outspoken critics of the Soviet system, who had sent British troops in 1919 to help the counter-revolution, gave an immediate pledge of support. It was a very personal gesture, made, he told his private secretary, only because his single purpose, above all others, was the destruction of Hitler. On the evening of 22 June he broadcast his decision without even showing the text of his speech to the Foreign Office. He did not disavow his unalterable hostility to communism but he spoke instead of the innocent Russian people battling against Hitlerism. He promised all the economic and technical assistance in Britain’s power to provide.24

  Roosevelt’s response was just as personal. Though no friend of communism, his close associate, the wealthy lawyer Joseph E. Davies who was American ambassador in Moscow from 1936 to 1938, gave him glowing testimonials on the young Soviet society and its remarkable leader. When news of the invasion arrived Roosevelt told his cabinet that the priority was ‘to give help to the Russian people’. Unlike Churchill he did not publicly announce the commitment from fear of popular hostility but he worked hard to begin an active aid programme against the strong advice of many of his close colleagues and his military leaders.25 Without the whole-hearted support of Churchill and Roosevelt neither the economic aid nor moral comfort given to the Soviet Union would have been possible. They insisted on the commitment in the face of strong opposition. Neither the British Foreign Office nor the State Department was happy with their new co-belligerent in the early weeks of war. The British censors were instructed that the Soviet Union was to be described for the time being not as an ally, but as an associate.26 General Pownall, chief of the Home Army, confided to his diary his view of the Russians: ‘a dirty lot of murdering thieve
s themselves, and double crossers of the deepest dye’.27 The prevailing view was that the Soviet Union would collapse in a matter of weeks, and that any aid the western powers sent her would quickly fall into German hands. Even Roosevelt and Churchill, for all their sudden enthusiasm for the Soviet Union, recognised that their prime interest was in the damage the Red Army could inflict on German forces, ‘killing Huns’ as Churchill bluntly put it.28 Economic aid, Roosevelt told Stimson in August, should only be sent as long as the Soviet Union ‘continues to fight the Axis powers effectively’.29

  The commitment to supporting the Soviet Union was sustained by a small circle of political supporters around the Prime Minister and the President. Roosevelt’s coterie included Harry Hopkins, his personal adviser, who travelled to Moscow in July to see whether the Red Army could hold out. After two days, in which he neither met Red Army leaders nor discussed military affairs in detail, he reported back to Roosevelt that ‘the morale of the population is good’. Hopkins felt ‘ever so confident’ about the Soviet front.30 The news tipped the scales in Washington. On 2 August Roosevelt announced publicly that although the Soviet Union would not qualify for Lend-Lease – which was technically only for democracies fighting aggression – she would be given ‘all economic assistance practicable’. Two weeks later the Soviet Embassy provided a detailed list 29 pages long of everything they wanted.31 In September a schedule of deliveries was finally agreed, and the following month Roosevelt personally pledged a billion dollars for Soviet aid. On 7 November, as German forces were advancing on Moscow, the American President finally persuaded Congress to grant the Soviet Union full Lend-Lease facilities, not because of her democratic credentials, but because Soviet survival was ‘vital to the defense of the United States’.32