Finest Years (72 page)

There seemed no limit to the troubles sent to vex him. Montgomery gave an outrageously hubristic press conference following his modest personal contribution to the Bulge battle. This excited new American hostility, and correspondingly exasperated the prime minister. Churchill was obliged to recognise that there was no more chance of
restoring King Peter of Yugoslavia to his throne than King Zog of Albania or King Carol of Romania to theirs. Roosevelt agreed to Stalin's proposal for a February summit at Yalta in the Crimea, causing Churchill to cable: ‘I shall be waiting on the quay. No more let us falter! From Malta to Yalta! Let nobody alter!' In reality, however, the British complained bitterly about the inconvenient venue. They remained resentful that Roosevelt was unwilling to visit their own country, or to accept Churchill's alternative suggestion of a meeting in Iceland. The prime minister sent congratulations to Stalin on the Russian Vistula offensive, all the more fulsome because of his anxiety for Soviet goodwill in Greece and Poland. Brooke expressed relief that Churchill seemed finally reconciled to the fact that there could be no Adriatic amphibious landing, nor a drive on Vienna. Churchill brusquely dismissed De Gaulle's demand that he should attend the Yalta conference in the name of his country. ‘
France cannot masquerade
as a Great Power for the purposes of war,' he told Eden.

The prime minister said to Marion Holmes: ‘
You wouldn't like my job
—so many different things come up which have to be settled in two or three minutes.' At a time when many of his own ministers were wearying of Churchill, Holmes paid a tribute which reflected the passionate affection and loyalty he retained among his personal staff: ‘
In all his moods
—totally absorbed in the serious matter of the moment, agonized over some piece of wartime bad news, suffused with compassion, sentimental and in tears, truculent, bitingly sarcastic, mischievous or hilariously funny—he was splendidly entertaining, humane and lovable.' While ministers and commanders complained with increasing impatience about the prime minister's failing concentration and outbursts of irrationality, he remained a unique repository of wisdom. Consider, for instance, his words to Eden, who had been pressing him about arrangements for post-war Germany:

It is a mistake to try
to write out on some little pieces of papers what the vast emotions of an outraged and quivering world will be either immediately after the struggle is over or when the inevitable cold fit
follows the hot. These awe-inspiring tides of feeling dominate most people's minds…Guidance in these mundane matters is granted to us only step by step, or at the utmost a step or two ahead. There is therefore wisdom in reserving one's decisions as long as possible and until all the facts and forces that will be potent at the moment are revealed.

Likewise, on 18 January he delivered to the House of Commons a report on the war situation which some thought as glittering a display of oratory as he had produced since 1940. In a two-hour speech, he said of Greece:

The House must not suppose that, in these foreign lands, matters are settled as they would be here in England. Even here it is hard enough to keep a Coalition together, even between men who, although divided by party, have a supreme object and so much else in common. But imagine what the difficulties are in countries racked by civil war, past or impending, and where clusters of petty parties have each their own set of appetites, misdeeds and revenges. If I had driven the wife of the Deputy Prime Minister out to die in the snow, if the Minister of Labour had kept the Foreign Secretary in exile for a great many years, if the Chancellor of the Exchequer had shot at and wounded the Secretary of State for War…if we, who sit here together, had back-bitten and double-crossed each other while pretending to work together, and had all put our own group or party first and the country nowhere, and had all set ideologies, slogans or labels in front of comprehension, comradeship and duty, we should certainly, to put it at the mildest, have come to a General Election much sooner than is now likely. When men have wished very much to kill each other, and have feared very much that they will be killed quite soon, it is not possible for them next day to work together as friends with colleagues against whom they have nursed such intentions or from whom they have derived such fears.

Churchill said to Colville in those days, speaking of the South African prime minister, ‘
Smuts and I are like
two old love-birds moulting together on a perch, but still able to peck.' He ‘pecked'
to incomparable effect. After his difficult passages with MPs about Greece in December, he had now restored his position. Yet he told one considerable untruth to the Commons on 18 January, denying that events in the Mediterranean were in any way influenced by rival notions about ‘spheres of influences'. In reality, in his gratitude for Stalin's forbearance on Greece, he was desperate to be seen to keep his own side of the Moscow bargain. He was exasperated to hear that British diplomats in Romania had been protesting about Soviet actions there, and wrote angrily to Eden: ‘
Why are we making a fuss
about the Russian deportations in Roumania of Saxons and others? It is understood that the Russians were to work their will in this sphere. Anyhow, we cannot prevent them.' He told Colville on 23 January: ‘
Make no mistake
, all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be bolshevized; and there is nothing I can do to prevent it. There is nothing I can do for poor Poland either.'

If Churchill often displayed greatness on great matters, his ministers and commanders were increasingly sensitive to ‘the old man's' limitations. His rambling dissertations at cabinets, often about papers which he had not troubled to read, exasperated colleagues. So too did his willingness to invite and accept ill-informed opinions across the table from Brendan Bracken and Beaverbrook, in preference to the considered views of cabinet committees. Clement Attlee wrote him a note of protest about his behaviour, which fired the prime minister's wrath, but which his own staff and Clementine agreed to be both courageous and just. Attlee had typed the note with his own fumbling fingers, to ensure that no other eye saw it. Yet Churchill vented his spleen by reading it aloud down the telephone to Beaverbrook. Private secretary John Martin said: ‘That is the part of the prime minister which I do not like.' Jock Colville agreed. The prime minister was eventually persuaded to reconsider his first thought, of an angry riposte to Attlee. He responded temperately. Then he said: ‘
Let us think no more
of Hitlee or of Attler: let us go and see a film.' If he was sometimes roused to stand high upon his dignity, he seldom retained the posture for long. If he sometimes behaved unworthily, he had earned the right to be readily forgiven.

Almost every day of the war that he was not travelling, Churchill visited his map room. Captain Richard Pim RN, the lanky Welshman who presided there, was a key figure in the Downing Street entourage, often accompanying the prime minister on his journeys to maintain the flow of battlefield news he craved. Churchill still intervened constantly in matters of detail concerning the armed forces. Britain's falling troop strength was a preoccupation. He deplored the dissolution of some units to fill the depleted ranks of others. There were wearisome wrangles about the respective manpower claims of the army, RAF and coal mines. Churchill was anxious that soldiers dispatched to the Far East at the end of the German war should receive additional pay. He followed with the keenest interest the commitment of Germany's new advanced U-boats to the Atlantic, British progress towards producing jet fighters to match those of Hitler, and efforts to counter the V2 rocket bombardment which continued to inflict distress on southern England.

But these were all minor matters, by comparison with the great strategy decisions of earlier years. The Allied armies were advancing across Europe with little opportunity for the prime minister to influence their courses. He hailed successes, chafed in familiar fashion at setbacks and delays, but knew that power resided at Eisenhower's headquarters and in Washington. Oliver Harvey wrote, somewhat patronisingly: ‘
As the purely military problems
simplify themselves, the old boy's tireless energy leads to ever closer attention to foreign affairs.' Almost all Churchill's thoughts were now fixed upon the
post-war settlement of Europe, which might be critically influenced by the Yalta summit. ‘
I have great hopes
of this conference,' he told the House of Commons, ‘because it comes at a moment when a good many moulds can be set out to receive a great deal of molten metal.' Nonetheless, he complained to Harry Hopkins, who was in London, that if the Allies had spent ten years researching a possible rendezvous, they could not have devised a less convenient one than the Crimea. It was farcical that a desperately sick US president should be obliged to travel 6,000 miles to suit the whims of Soviet doctors who had allegedly told Stalin not to venture abroad. As for the prime minister himself, on 29 January he arrived at Malta, Anglo-American staging point for Yalta, with a temperature of 102°.

The combined chiefs of staff held an unpleasant preliminary meeting, its atmosphere poisoned by personality clashes entwined with the north-west Europe campaign. Montgomery's boorish behaviour towards Eisenhower sustained friction. Brooke was distressed to find that Marshall refused even to enter into argument with the British about strategy. America's course was set, for a measured advance to the Elbe. Franklin Roosevelt arrived aboard the cruiser
Quincy
on 2 February. If Churchill was feverish, the British were shocked to perceive in the leader of the United States the wreck of a man. It was a grim prospect to set off for a summit with an American president unfit for important business. After the delegations' first dinner together at Malta, Eden fumed about lack of serious discussion: ‘
Impossible even to get
near basics. I spoke pretty sharply to Harry [Hopkins] about it…pointing out that we were going into a decisive conference and had so far neither agreed about what we would discuss nor how to handle matters with a Bear who would certainly know his mind.' Human sympathy for Roosevelt was eclipsed by dismay about the implications of his incapacity to defend the interests of the West.

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 caviar.' 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.