by Max Hastings
The Allied leaders’ arrival in the Crimea on 3 February was inauspicious. After the planes carrying the great men landed, Roosevelt had to be assisted into a jeep to inspect a Russian guard of honour, with Churchill walking beside him. There followed a nightmare six-hour trip to Yalta, along terrible roads. The prime minister looked around him without enthusiasm. ‘What a hole I’ve brought you to!’ he said to Marion Holmes. Later, he described the resort bleakly as ‘the Riviera of Hades’. Generals found themselves billeted four to a room, colonels in dormitories of eleven. From national leaders downwards, all complained about the shortage of bathrooms. On 4 February there was a pre-conference dinner of the principals. Eden wrote: ‘A terrible party, I thought. President vague and loose and ineffective. W., understanding that business was flagging, made desperate efforts and too long speeches to get things going again. Stalin’s attitude to small countries struck me as grim, not to say sinister.’ Security around the Soviet leader was so tight that he arrived for a photocall almost invisible amidst a phalanx of armed guards.
Despite all the criticism of Churchill in the US during past months, few Americans at Yalta doubted the power of his personality.
C.L. Sulzberger wrote in the New York Times that among the ‘Big Three’, Roosevelt was ‘certainly blander than either of his colleagues’, while Churchill ‘with his romantic conceptions, his touch of mysticism, his imperialism, his love of uniforms and color, is something of a Renaissance figure. He combines more talents than either Stalin or Roosevelt—more than almost any political figure who has ever attained his stature.’
Polls in America continued to report widespread personal respect for the prime minister, and a renewed faith that Britain would prove a reliable post-war ally. But enthusiasm for Churchill’s country was importantly qualified. Most Americans—70 per cent—were implacable in their belief that at the end of the war the British should repay the billions they had received in Lend-Lease supplies. Even when told that their ally lacked means to do this, 43 per cent of respondents said that they must do so anyway. It was a perverse and unhelpful compliment to Britain that the United States, its leaders and people alike, still overestimated the wealth of Churchill’s nation. Few grasped the extent of its moral, strategic and financial exhaustion. Finally, of course, the war had done nothing to diminish US anti-imperialism. A March OWI survey reported: ‘During the past year, Britain…has been under severe attack by an active minority for its alleged failure to play its proper role in the “Big Three Team”…During December and January dissatisfaction with Big Three cooperation was…directed chiefly at Britain…[which was] chiefly blamed for “not living up to the Atlantic Charter”. The attitude of the unusually large anti-British minority…found striking expression in a widely-publicized article in the Army and Navy Journal. In a stinging passage, equally critical of Russian and British policy, the Journal accused Britain of “showing greater preoccupation in Italy, Greece and Albania to protect her life-line through the Mediterranean to India than in achievement of the prime objective of our American armies—prompt defeat of Germany”.’ The survey concluded: ‘A shift in the allocation of chief blame from Russia to Britain is revealed by recent polls.’
All this should be considered in the context of the miracle that, thanks to the statesmanship of George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, Alan Brooke, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, the Western Allies preserved to the end of the war a façade of unity. Given the shortcomings of every alliance in history, the Anglo-American working relationship remains remarkable. But Roosevelt made policy during the last months of his life in the knowledge that the American people supported his own post-war vision, and felt scant sympathy for that of Churchill. Britain could draw upon only a meagre credit balance of sentiment in the United States.
The Western leaders’ first meeting with Stalin, at the Livadia Palace where the conference convened, briefly revived Churchill’s spirits. Stalin, the affable host, deployed his only English phrases: ‘You said it!’, ‘So what?’, ‘What the hell goes on around here?’ and ‘The toilet is over there’—all except the last presumably garnered from American movies. Churchill wrote later, describing the sensation of finding himself among the three most powerful men on earth, now gathered together: ‘We had the world at our feet, twenty-five million men marching at our orders by land and sea. We seemed to be friends.’ Such romantic illusions were soon banished. For the British at least, the Yalta experience became progressively more distressing.
Churchill opened on an entirely false note, by expounding to the first plenary session his hopes for an Allied drive from north-east Italy through the ‘Llubjanja Gap’. This idea had been dead for months in the minds of everyone save the prime minister. It seemed otiose now to revive it. With Eisenhower’s armies approaching the Rhine, Churchill sought to flatter the Russians by inviting their advice on large-scale river crossings. Stalin, in his turn, asked Roosevelt and Churchill what they would like the Red Army to do—for all the world as if their answer might cause him to alter his deployments. He declared sanctimoniously that he had considered the launching of Russia’s vast January offensive ‘a moral duty’, after the Anglo-Americans requested action to relieve pressure from the German offensive in the Ardennes. In reality, it is unlikely that the timing of the Soviet assault was advanced by a single day in deference to Western wishes.
Churchill told Stalin that Eisenhower’s forces wanted the Red Army to do only one thing: keep going. The Soviets always knew, however, that British dollops of flattery masked a fundamental hostility to their objectives, while the US president was much less intractable. ‘Our guards compared Churchill to a poodle wagging its tail to please Stalin,’ wrote Sergo Beria. ‘We shared friendly feelings towards Roosevelt which did not extend to Churchill.’ Yet Soviet cynicism was evenly apportioned between the two. Molotov quoted an unnamed colleague who said of Roosevelt: ‘What a crook that man must be, to have wormed his way to three terms as president while being paralyzed!’ Soviet eavesdroppers laughed heartily when they heard Churchill complain that he could not sleep at night because of the bedbugs.
Each day, the principals met at 4 p.m. for sessions which lasted four or five hours. In between, there were lunches, dinners and tense national consultations among the delegations. Stalin was astonishingly amiable, as well he might be, as the most conspicuous profiteer from the war. Roosevelt drifted in and out of consciousness of the proceedings. When he engaged, it was most frequently to press for delay—for instance, in settling German occupation zones—or to accede to Soviet views. Again and again, the British found themselves isolated. Churchill opposed the ‘dismemberment’ of Germany, to which Stalin was committed, and also argued against imposing extravagant reparations on the vanquished. He reminded the conference of the failure of such a policy in 1919: ‘If you want your horse to pull your cart, you had to give him some hay.’ But the Americans and Russians had already settled on a provisional figure of $20 billion, of which the Soviet Union was to receive half.
The Americans joined with the Russians in resisting Churchill’s proposal to give France a seat on the Allied Control Commission in Germany. At British insistence, however, France was grudgingly conceded a zone of occupation. Churchill’s bilateral meetings with Roosevelt were fruitless. At lunches and dinners, platitudes were exchanged, but no business was done. The combination of Roosevelt’s mortal languor and disinclination to indulge Britain was fatal to Churchill’s hopes. There is little doubt that, at Yalta as at Tehran, the president deliberately sought to reach out to Stalin by distancing himself from the prime minister. It is hard to suggest that this tactic did Western interests substantial harm, for Stalin’s course was set. But it certainly conferred no discernible advantage.
Churchill, returning to his villa on the night of 5 February, was irked to find that no intelligence brief had arrived from London. John Martin wrote: ‘It has gone to my heart to hear “Colonel Kent” calling again and again for news and being offered only cavi
ar.’ That night, before he went to sleep, Churchill said to his daughter Sarah, ‘I do not suppose that at any moment in history has the agony of the world been so great or widespread. To-night the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the World.’ Churchill’s fund of compassion towards the enemy, incomparably greater than that of his peers at Yalta, was among his most notable qualities. ‘I am free to confess to you,’ he wrote to Clementine, ‘that my heart is saddened by the tales of the masses of German women and children flying along the roads everywhere in 40-mile long columns to the West before the advancing Armies. I am clearly convinced that they deserve it; but that does not remove it from one’s gaze. The misery of the whole world appals me and I fear increasingly that new struggles may rise out of those we are successfully ending.’ Amid such phrases, allegations crumble against Churchill ‘the war-lover’.
The US president and British prime minister have often been criticised for agreeing at Yalta to transfer to Stalin all Soviet subjects detained in Europe. Of those who returned, even from German captivity, some were shot and most were dispatched to labour camps. Almost all who had served in enemy uniform were liquidated. Yet, on the repatriation issue, it is impossible to see how the Anglo-Americans could have acted otherwise. The Soviet Union had borne the overwhelming burden of the land war against Hitler. The Western Allies were still soliciting the assistance of the Red Army to complete the defeat of Japan. The price of Soviet military aid, of so much Russian blood spilt while so much American and British blood was saved, was acquiescence in a large measure of Soviet imperialism. Churchill expressed to the Soviet warlord his anxiety for the return of British PoWs, whom the Russians were liberating in increasing numbers. In a world which, as Churchill so vividly described, was consumed by suffering, it was hard for the Anglo-Americans to demand much priority of sympathy for Soviet subjects who had served the Nazi cause. The integrity of Allied purposes in the Second World War was inescapably compromised by association with the tyranny of Stalin to defeat that of Hitler. Once this evil was conceded, lesser ones remorselessly followed. Among these was the surrender of hundreds of thousands of perceived Soviet renegades.
The foremost business of Yalta, above all in Churchill’s eyes, was the future of Poland. Stalin wanted recognition of its new frontiers
—the so-called ‘Curzon line’ in the east, the Oder-Niesse in the west. Churchill made plain that he was now less concerned with territory than with the democratic character of the new Polish government. He sought to exchange Western recognition of the frontiers Moscow wanted for some shreds of domestic freedom for the Poles. He could not, he said, accept that Moscow’s ‘Lublin Poles’ represented the will of the nation. Stalin riposted that the new Warsaw regime was as representative of the Polish people as was De Gaulle’s new government of France. Roosevelt sought to adjourn the session, but Churchill insisted that the Polish issue must be resolved. The president observed impatiently that ‘Poland had been a source of trouble for over 500 years’. The prime minister said: ‘We must do what we can to put an end to the trouble.’ Here was another exchange sorely damaging to British purposes. Roosevelt’s apparent indifference was once more flaunted before Russian eyes.
Overnight, however, some reinforcement was secured for the Polish cause. Roosevelt signed a letter to Stalin saying that the US—like Britain—could not recognise the Polish government as then composed. At the conference’s third plenary session on 7 February, the president described the Polish issue as of ‘very great importance’. There was more talk of occupation zones in Germany. Agreement was reached about respective states’ voting rights at the proposed new United Nations. On 8 February, Churchill reasserted the urgency of settling Poland. Molotov said that the new communist government had been ‘enthusiastically acclaimed by the majority of the Polish people’. Churchill pressed for immediate free elections, which prompted Stalin again to raise comparisons with France, where no poll was scheduled. Then, however, the Russian leader conceded that an election might be held in Poland within a month. There was still no visible anger in the conference chamber. There followed, indeed, more exchanges of compliments between the principals. But that night Churchill said bleakly: ‘The only bond of the victors is their common hate’ towards Hitler.
Anglo-American leverage with Stalin derived solely from Lend-Lease supplies. Even had Roosevelt threatened to suspend shipments unless the Western powers gained satisfaction about Poland, the Russians would not have bowed. Stalin had shown himself implacable in imposing his territorial demands since 1941, when Western aid was much more important than in 1945. From start to finish he grasped the fact that the Anglo-Americans needed Russia’s vast human sacrifice even more than Russia needed Western supplies. Even had the president himself been willing to exercise such pressure—as, of course, he was not—neither the American nor the British people would have supported sanctions. Popular enthusiasm for a common front against the Axis still ran high. Attempts to impose Western wishes upon the heroic Russians would have commanded sympathy only with a small minority of people who grasped the reality of looming East European servitude.
At the fifth plenary session on 9 February, Churchill said that diplomatic observers must monitor the Polish election. The Russians responded smoothly that this was perfectly acceptable to them, but the Warsaw government must be consulted: the presence of such observers might wound the Poles by implying that they were not trusted. Likewise, when Churchill said that a British ambassador should be sent to Warsaw, the Russians deferred the matter to Polish arbitration. With his usual serpentine skill, Stalin reminded the prime minister of his debt to Moscow by asserting that he had ‘complete confidence’ in British policy in Greece.
Next day, the 10th, Roosevelt caused consternation to the British by announcing that he would leave Yalta on the following morning. When the president had cabled the prime minister back in January, asserting his intention to spend only five days at Yalta, Churchill expostulated to his staff that even the Almighty had allowed himself seven to make the world. Now, in British eyes, the summit had yet to achieve decisive conclusions. But the president was thus far right, that even had he lingered it was unlikely anything further would have been accomplished. The chasm was unbridgeable between Russian intentions and Western aspirations in Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, an agreement had been reached about Poland which, if Stalin kept his word, might sustain some figleaf of democracy. Churchill professed satisfaction. He could do little else. He spent 12 February as a tourist, visiting British battlefields of the Crimean War and gazing on the ruins of Sebastopol. Next day, he rested aboard the British liner Franconia, anchored off the coast at his pleasure, then flew to Athens.
The contrast could not have been greater between his previous visit, amid gunfire, and the hysterical applause with which he was received on the afternoon of 14 February. Vast crowds thronged the streets of the Greek capital, offering a vindication that was sweet to him. He elected to make a further brief stop in Cairo. ‘A wandering minstrel I,’ he sang to himself, a ditty from his beloved Gilbert and Sullivan, ‘a thing of threads and patches.’ He landed back in Britain on 20 February. Beaverbrook was among those who offered extravagant congratulations on his alleged ‘success’ at Yalta, which ‘followed so swiftly on the heels of the Greek triumph, that you now appear to your countrymen to be the greatest statesman as well as the greatest warrior’.
Even by Beaverbrook’s standards, this was a travesty. In the House of Commons there was profound anxiety about the outcome of Yalta, and its implications for the Poles. The concluding communiqué by the ‘Big Three’ had asserted that Poland’s provisional government should be ‘reorganized on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad’. The new government ‘shall be pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible…In these elections all democratic and anti-Nazi parties shall have the right to take part.’ The cession of eastern Poland to Russia was ack
nowledged, in return for indeterminate territorial compensation in the west, which should ‘thereafter be determined at the peace conference’.
Churchill told the war cabinet that he was ‘quite sure’ Stalin ‘meant well to the world and to Poland’. Likewise, facing fierce criticism in the House on 27 February, he cited the fact that ‘most solemn declarations have been made by Marshal Stalin and the Soviet State’ about Polish elections. ‘I repudiate and repulse any suggestion that we are making a questionable compromise or yielding to force or fear…The Poles will have their future in their own hands, with the single limitation that they must honestly follow…a policy friendly to Russia. That is surely reasonable.’ Fortified by the fulfilment of Stalin’s promise of non-interference in Greece, he clung to the hope that the Soviet warlord would keep his word about Poland: ‘I know of no government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government. I decline absolutely to embark here on a discussion about Russian good faith.’
Over a drink in the smoking room afterwards with Harold Nicolson and Lord de la Warr, he said that he did not see what else he could have done at Yalta, save accept Stalin’s assurances. On the night of the 28th he told Jock Colville that he would refuse to be cheated over Poland, ‘even if we go to the verge of war with Russia’. He voiced aloud his fear that he might be deceived by Stalin, as Neville Chamberlain had been deceived by Hitler—then dismissed it. He was exultant when an amendment on Poland moved by Tory right-wingers in the Commons was defeated by 396 votes to twentyfive. But eleven ministers abstained, and one resigned. Eden, lacking confidence in Russian good faith, remained deeply depressed. General Anders, for the Poles, told Brooke that ‘he had never been more distressed since the war started…He could see no hope anywhere.’