by Cita Stelzer
13. Pawle, London 1963, p. 146
14. Gilbert, Churchill, Volume VII, p. 18
15. Gilbert, Churchill, Volume VII, p. 9
16. Richardson, Diary, p. 88
17. Leasor (ed.), War at the Top, The Experiences of Sir Leslie Hollis, p. 29
18. Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, p. 301
19. Time magazine, 5 January, 1942
20. Roberts, Masters and Commanders, p. 84
21. Fields, My 21 Years in the White House, p. 81
22. Goodwin, p. 302
23. Stiegler, Sam, interviews. From Medford Afro-American Remembrance Project, p. 7
24. Fields, p. 51
25. François Rysavy as told to Frances Spatz Leighton, A Treasury of White House Cooking, p. 79
26. Lady Williams, In conversation with the author, April 2010
27. Macmillan, Tides of Fortune, p. 322
28. Graebner, My Dear Mr. Churchill, p. 53
29. Harriman papers, Box 446, Folder 2
30. Nesbitt, Henrietta, White House Diary, p. 30
31. Nesbitt, p. 273
32. Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography, p. 672
33. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929-1969, p. 143
34. Burns, Roosevelt, The Soldier of Freedom, 1940-1945, p. 178
35. Nesbitt papers, Library of Congress
36. Whitcomb, John and Claire, Real Life at the White House, p. 306
37. McGowan, Norman, My Years With Churchill, 1958, p. 70
38. Roberts p. 68
39. Roberts, p. 69
40. Jenkins, p. 672
41. New York Times, 11 January 1942
42. Bercuson and Herwig, One Christmas in Washington, p. 154
43. Goodwin, p. 302
44. Gilbert, Volume VII, p. 27
45. Ibid.
46. Gilbert, Volume VII, p. 28
47. Richardson, p. 91
48. Bercuson and Herwig, p. 164
49. Moran, p. 12
50. Roberts, Masters, p. 84
51. Pawle, p 155
52. Roberts p. 77
CHAPTER 4
Dinners in Moscow August 1942
“The food was filthy.”1
“It was my duty to go.”2
Churchill believed that his persuasive powers and personal charm would be effective not only with a well disposed ally like Roosevelt, but even with a far less congenial one like Joseph Stalin. Which is why he launched his usual first-phase tactic, one that had worked so well with Roosevelt: a personal letter-writing campaign. This began in June 1940, when he used the occasion of the appointment of Sir Stafford Cripps as British Ambassador to the Soviet Union to contact the Soviet leader directly.
Churchill had reason to regard this exercise of personal diplomacy a success: by July 1941 he and the Soviet leader were exchanging birthday greetings,3 and Stalin immediately responded affirmatively to Churchill’s request for a meeting.
Getting to Moscow required stopovers at Gibraltar, Cairo and Teheran for refuelling. As usual, Churchill turned these stops on an arduous journey to his advantage, finding time at Teheran for both his beloved baths and lunch with the Shah. In Teheran, amid an “atmosphere of deck chairs and whiskey and soda”, Churchill escaped the “continuous hooting of the Persian motor cars”4 and the heat by spending the night at the British summer legation high in the mountains above the capital. Not every Churchill whim was catered to. The Prime Minister’s request that his bed at the legation in Teheran be dismantled, carted up to the cooler mountains and there reassembled, was refused. One of Churchill’s wartime private secretaries, Leslie Rowan, and Commander Thompson spent the night in “a magnificent Persian tent in the garden” of the summer legation.5
Dinner at the legation featured turkey with all the trimmings.6 A British bodyguard recalls the dessert served up by the kitchen staff. A large plate of fresh Persian peaches with the tops cut off were filled with melted chocolate and topped with whipped cream. Then the top was replaced “at a jaunty angle”.7
On his arrival in Moscow on the evening of 12 August 1942, after the usual airport ceremony, Churchill promptly went to his villa eight miles outside Moscow. He was, as he put it “regaled in the dining room with every form of choice food and liquor, including caviar and vodka, but with many other dishes and wines from France and Germany, far beyond our mood or consuming powers”.8
The 67-year-old Churchill, despite the long flight, insisted on an immediate appointment with Stalin – though he did take some time to bathe. He also took time to feed the goldfish at the villa Stalin had assigned him. Alexander Cadogan, the Foreign Office’s permanent Under-Secretary, ever interested in food, noted there were excellent raspberries growing in the gardens of the villa.
Churchill had two reasons for anticipating a tough slog in Moscow. First was his long-standing and well-known hostility to Communism, Bolshevism, and all that the Stalin regime represented. He had made no secret of his desire to see the regime toppled in 1919, and had cooperated with efforts to overthrow it. But in 1942, as he put it, “If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons”.9 Stalin was to be wooed, but at dinner the Prime Minister would presumably dine with a rather long spoon.
His second reason for anticipating a difficult meeting was the news he was bringing to Stalin: there would be no second front in Europe in 1942 to ease the pressure on Soviet forces fighting on the Eastern front. Before the meeting, Churchill had written obliquely to the Soviet leader: “We could … survey the war together and take decisions hand-in-hand. I could then tell you plans we have made with President Roosevelt for offensive action in 1942.”10 That action was Operation Torch in North Africa, rather than the cross-Channel invasion that Stalin favoured.
So worried was Churchill about this visit that he had decided to take Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s emissary, with him. He had written to the President: “Would you be able to let Averell come with me? I feel that things would be easier if we all seemed to be together. I have a somewhat raw job.”11 Roosevelt promptly agreed.
The food laid out on his arrival at his dacha was not the only display of Stalin’s hospitality. One aide recalls the breakfasts the Soviets provided: “caviar, cake, chocolates, preserved fruit, grapes, none of the normal breakfast dishes. Fortunately coffee and an omelette appeared and all was well. Leslie Rowan told me that when he asked for an egg and bacon, they produced four eggs and nine rashers of bacon – all very nice except that one remembers that the vast majority of the population are practically starving”.12 This may be why Churchill later described his quarters as being “prepared with totalitarian lavishness”.13
Churchill set off for his first meeting with the man he called “the great Revolutionary Chief and profound Soviet Union statesman and warrior”.14 The meeting, not a dinner, lasted from seven to eleven p.m.
Although it began badly, as Churchill had anticipated, in the end, after Stalin reacted positively to tales of the British bombing of Germany, it ended on a sufficiently cordial note for Churchill to tell Sir Charles Wilson: “When I left we were good friends and shook hands cordially. I mean to forge a solid link with this man.”15
That left Churchill to dine alone. “It was now after midnight, and the PM, who had had no dinner, proceeded to eat a huge meal. Presently, he put his half-finished cigar across the wine glass. He was plainly very weary.”16 It is unclear whether an entirely new feast had been prepared, replacing what had been set out earlier, as original records may have been destroyed by the Ninth Directorate of the KGB, which was then in charge of serving the elite.17
Discussions the following day proved fruitless. Churchill could pry no response from Stalin other than a repeated demand for a second front, prompting a disgruntled Churchill to announce to his staff that further meetings would be useless. He did, however, feel compelled to stay for Stalin’s closing official banquet for his own staff and the British guests – some hundred in all – the following night.
> The menu did not reflect any wartime food shortages in the hard-pressed Soviet Union.
HORS D’OEOEUVRES (Cold)
Caviar (soft). Caviar (pressed). Salmon. Sturgeon.
Garnished herrings. Dried herrings. Cold ham. Game
Mayonnaise. Duck. Soused sturgeon. Tomato salad. Salad
Payar. Cucumber. Tomatoes, radishes. Cheese.
HORS D’OEOEUVRES (Cold)
White mushrooms in sour cream. Forcemeat of game.
Egg-plant meunier.
DINNER
Creme de poularde
Consommé borsch
Sturgeon in champagne
Turkey chicken partridge
Potato purée
Suckling lamb with potatoes
Cucumber salad cauliflower
Asparagus
Ice-Cream fruit ices
Coffee liqueurs
Fruit petit fours roast almonds18
“The dinner dragged on,” moaned Churchill’s doctor, “the list of toasts – 25 of them – appeared interminable.”19 Churchill later told Sir Charles: “The food was filthy.” As was the Prime Minister’s changeable mood. Being assigned the place of honour on the Soviet leader’s right was no compensation for the abuse to which Churchill felt he and his entourage were still being subjected. Unusually, Churchill wore his siren suit to this dinner instead of the traditional black tie that he often wore for such formal banquets.
At seven o’clock the next evening, after a day of staff meetings, Churchill went to see Stalin to say goodbye as he planned to leave Moscow early the following morning. The possibility that his ally would leave contemplating an open breach had its intended effect on Stalin, who quite unexpectedly invited Churchill to his Kremlin apartment for drinks. “I said that I was in principle always in favour of such a policy,”20 responded Churchill.
Drinks became dinner, and what a dinner it was. This dinner was as close to the one-on-one, table-top diplomacy that Churchill preferred as anyone was ever likely to get in the Kremlin. It included interpreters, both A.H. Birse (stepping in at the last minute for Churchill) and Vladimir Pavlov (for Stalin), and, at Stalin’s suggestion, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Even the serving staff was minimal: this apparently impromptu dinner was on a serve-yourself basis. Stalin brought in his daughter, Svetlana, to meet Churchill, and uncorked various bottles, “which began to make an imposing array.”21
At first, Stalin ate very little. The Prime Minister reported that even after some three to four hours of talk – just the sort of substantive conversation that Churchill had always assumed would more likely produce results in the informal setting of a private dinner than in a meeting room – “there was no response from this hard-boiled egg of a man.”22
New allies. With Stalin, Moscow, 14 August 1942
Churchill later recalled:
Dinner began simply with a few radishes, and grew into a banquet – a suckling pig, two chickens, beef, mutton, every kind of fish. There was enough to feed thirty people. Stalin spoilt a few dishes, a potato there, an oddment there. After four hours of sitting at the table, he suddenly began to make a hearty meal. He offered me the head of a pig, and when I refused, he himself tackled it with relish. With a knife he cleaned out the head, putting it into his mouth with his knife. He then cut pieces of flesh from the cheeks of the pig and ate them with his fingers … Of course we waited on ourselves.23
Perhaps any disgust on Churchill’s part was tempered by his life-long fascination with the exotic, and undoubtedly by his sense of triumph at breaking through the frost that had characterised Soviet–UK relations. He cabled Clement Attlee, the Deputy Prime Minister, in London: “I have just had a long talk, with dinner lasting six hours, with Stalin and Molotov alone in his private apartment … We … parted on most cordial and friendly terms …”24
The Prime Minister returned to his villa at a quarter past three on the morning of 16 August, convinced his special brand of personal diplomacy, practised at a private dinner, had succeeded. We “ended friends,”25 Churchill told Wilson as he left for a four-thirty flight to Teheran, and reported to the Cabinet, with a copy to President Roosevelt, that he had had “an agreeable conversation” with the Soviet leader. “I am definitely encouraged by my visit to Moscow.”26
Once in Teheran, Churchill again rested in the British summer legation. Then on to Cairo, and, after recuperating from understandable fatigue, inspecting the troops, several meetings and a visit to Montgomery’s forward position, back to London.
The meeting must be classified as a success, at least from Churchill’s point of view. Stalin remained unhappy with the refusal of the US and Britain to create a second front, but did in the end respond positively to Churchill’s detailed description of plans for Operation Torch by saying: “May God prosper this undertaking.”27
On his way home, Churchill was happy to discover that the picnic basket that the Kremlin had packed for the flight was full of caviar and champagne. This more than made up for the ruckus on the flight into Moscow when Churchill demanded mustard for the ham sandwiches prepared for the flight by the British in Teheran. None was found and Churchill declared “… no gentleman eats ham sandwiches without mustard”.28
Another mustard story: on his 1929 American tour, he had been invited to stay at the Virginia Governor’s mansion. At one dinner, a favourite Virginia ham was served – but no mustard. When Churchill asked for some, the butler replied that there was none. The Governor’s wife offered to have someone go down to the store and buy mustard, to which, much to her irritation, Churchill agreed.29 Dinner was delayed.
Notes
1. Moran, p. 60
2. Telegram from Churchill to the Cabinet, copied to Roosevelt, August 15, 1942. CHAR 20/79A/36-38
3. Blake and Louis, Churchill, p. 314
4. JACB 1/16 p. 56
5. Pawle, p. 193
6. Mander, Danny, Winston Churchill’s Bodyguard, The Teheran conference 1943, p. 19
7. Mander, Danny, p. 16
8. Churchill, The Second World War, The Hinge of Fate, Volume IV, p. 477
9. Colville, p. 404
10. Churchill, Volume IV, p. 409
11. Gilbert, Volume VII, p. 1
12. JACB 1/16 p. 84
13. Churchill, Volume IV, p. 425
14. Churchill, Volume IV, p. 429
15. Moran, p. 55
16. Moran, p. 56
17. Leon Aron, Russian Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, consulted Sir Rodric Braithwaite, the last UK ambassador to the USSR and the first ambassador to post-Soviet Russia, who confirmed a report from Director of the Federal Archival Service, Professor Vladimir Kozlov and Molotov’s grandson, Vyacheslav Nikonov, that the Ninth Directorate “periodically destroys everything in their archives after a decade or so.” Memo to the author from Leon Aron, 6 September 2005.
18. Thompson, W.H., I Was Churchill’s Shadow, p. 98
19. Moran, p. 59
20. Churchill, Volume IV p. 442
21. Gilbert, Volume VII, p. 200
22. Moran, p. 63
23. Gilbert, Volume VII, p. 205
24. CHAR 20/79A/36.
25. Moran, p. 64
26. Gilbert, Volume VII, p. 191
27. Gilbert, Volume VII, p. 181
28. Harriman and Abel, Special Envoy, p. 152
29. Sandys, Celia, “Around the World with Winston”, Daily Mail, 6 September 2008
CHAPTER 5
Adana January 1943
“We are grateful to the hospitality of the Turkish government … and also to the Director-General of Gastronomy.”1
Ambassador Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen.
In January 1943, Churchill travelled to Turkey to “make a new effort to have Turkey enter the war on our side”.2 This meeting with President Ismet Inönü would be code-named Operation Satrap. Not for the first time, and not for the last, the Cabinet opposed the trip, although conceding: “Your special trips have been recognised to be of
the highest importance.”3 That opposition notwithstanding, Churchill, accompanied by a large staff that included Cadogan, General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and a bevy of top brass, flew to Adana, a city in southern Anatolia, close to the Mediterranean coast. In his newly outfitted B-24 Liberator, equipped up front with side blister windows that could be opened to vent the inevitable cigar smoke,4 Churchill could sit in the co-pilot’s seat and puff away. The Prime Minister, always attentive to the details of these personal meetings, left his many military outfits behind as a sign of respect for Turkey’s neutrality. On meeting President Inönü, Churchill handed him a letter reminding him that when he had been in Turkey in 1909, he had met “many of the brave men who laid the foundations of the modern Turkey”, including Atatürk.5
From the airport at Adana, he was driven to a railway siding where an “extremely comfortable” special train waited,6 complete with lunch. This then steamed a few miles to the Yenice station, fifteen miles outside of Adana, where it was coupled to the President’s train, nicknamed by Churchill the enamel caterpillar.7 All the houses along the train route had been whitewashed before the dignitaries passed by.
After lunch in the President’s railway carriage, the meetings started, meetings made easier by the fact that President Inönü spoke English, but more difficult by the fact that he, his Prime Minister and his Foreign Minister were all a little deaf. The British party “shouted cheerfully” throughout.8
After a long meeting, dinner was served, consisting of Turkish cuisine that a contemporary observer characterises as “very curious … rich and varied … open to improvisation”.9
The railway station near Yenice is today a small museum with a plaque commemorating the railway meeting.
Chicken soup was the starter, followed by a cheese pie with a flaky pastry, steak with side dishes, lettuce, and cauliflower in a white sauce. The dessert of chocolate pudding followed by fruit may not have been of interest to Churchill whose taste in desserts seem to have favoured ice cream.