The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

  Churchill warmed to Madame Chiang, telling Clementine by letter that he withdrew “all the unfavourable remarks which I may have made about her.” (Madame had voiced strong criticism of British imperial policies during a visit to India the previous year, inciting Churchill to “breathing fire and slaughter against her” to the Foreign Office.) The Chiangs had come out of the shadows to light up the Cairo conference, Madame Chiang by her very presence, but they did so at the expense of Anglo-American cohesion. The meetings with Chiang, Brooke told Marshall, were “a ghastly waste of time,” to which Marshall replied, “You’re telling me.” Still, Roosevelt brought Churchill around on the need for action in Burma, but Churchill’s initial support for Buccaneer evaporated when he realized that the landing craft needed for Burmese operations would come from the Mediterranean. Within ten days, as a result of Churchill’s counterarguments, Roosevelt overrode his military chiefs and conceded that Buccaneer was dead. Not until April 1945, with American Marines and U.S. soldiers fighting on Okinawa, just 325 miles from the Japanese homeland, would Allied troops finally reopen the India-China road links in northern Burma and retake Rangoon in the south, too late to make a difference in the war against Japan.311

  After the disagreeable first meetings with Chiang, the conference only went further downhill. The Americans stunned the British by again arguing for an American supreme commander in Europe, an issue Churchill considered settled. The British flatly rejected the proposal. Lest the Americans pursue the question, Churchill pointed out that because of the long-held understanding between the Allies that theater commanders came from the partner with the most forces in the theater, a supreme commander for all of Europe would have to be British because Britain had more men, planes, and ships in Europe than the Americans did. Roosevelt dropped the issue, but he stuck to his Burma plans, which Brooke coldly and methodically dismantled during a meeting of the military chiefs. Admiral Ernie King, enraged by Brooke’s demeanor, rose from the table as if to settle the issue with fists. Stilwell, who witnessed the scene, wished King “had socked” Brooke. Pug Ismay thought King’s ongoing animosity threatened the cohesion of the Combined Chiefs, and told King so. King replied, “Look here, General, when there’s a war they send for the sons of bitches, and that’s me.” Churchill, meanwhile, argued for his Aegean plans, cautioning Roosevelt that Overlord must not be spelled T-Y-R-A-N-T, a display of rhetoric Brooke thought “masterly.” Even the irascible King showed signs of supporting Churchill, but only because if the British navy stayed in the Mediterranean, it couldn’t get in his way in the Pacific. Churchill pushed his Aegean strategy with flights of oratory: “His Majesty’s government cannot have its troops standing idle; muskets must flame,” and Rhodes was the place they must flame. That display led Marshall to smack the table with his fist and exclaim, “Not one American soldier is going to die on that goddamned beach.” Marshall’s outburst quieted the room, including Churchill, who did not again mention Rhodes in Cairo. But the issue had not been resolved; Churchill carried his Aegean hopes to Tehran.312

  The British had taken over the grand Mena House hotel in Giza, where Churchill and T. E. Lawrence had stayed two decades earlier when they created new states in the Middle East. The hotel’s grandiosity had moved Lawrence to remark that it made him a Bolshevik. Churchill loved it. There, he and Brooke hosted evening dinners as jovial as the afternoon meetings were disputatious. “King was as nice as could be and quite transformed from his afternoon attitude,” wrote Brooke after one such meal. Roosevelt’s dinner companions included Harry Hopkins and Hopkins’s son, Robert, a U.S. Army war photographer who had seen action in Italy. General Edwin M. (“Pa”) Watson, Roosevelt’s old friend and political adviser, was on hand, as was Roosevelt’s son-in-law, Major John Boettiger. Colonel Elliott Roosevelt joined the party, a case of nepotism, but only fair as Alexander Cadogan remarked to his diary, “I suppose we can’t talk if we trail Randolph around with us.” As always, Roosevelt’s squad of Filipino mess men were on hand to produce his meals, including a turkey on Thanksgiving Day, which Roosevelt carved “with masterly, indefatigable skill.” A small dance followed, the music supplied by gramophone. All the young men danced with Sarah; Churchill danced with Pa Watson. The gathered sang Home on the Range. It was a jolly evening, although tears were visible on his cheeks when Churchill toasted the president. Churchill’s cold had abated; the bright Egyptian skies invigorated him, and his spirits brightened, as evidenced the next night when his small party dined and chatted until 1:30 in the morning. “P.M. talked to the whole table from 8:30… to 1:35,” recorded Cadogan, “then expressed surprise at having a sore throat.” Dickie Mountbatten fell asleep during Churchill’s oration, and even Sarah had trouble keeping her eyes open.313

  The congeniality reached a high point when Churchill and Sarah suggested to Roosevelt that they all take a drive out to the pyramids, which the president had never seen. The idea so enthused Roosevelt, recalled Sarah, that “he leaned forward on the arms of his chair and seemed about to rise,” but of course could not, “and sank back again.” While the president readied himself, Churchill and Sarah waited outside, where Sarah noted that her father’s eyes “were bright with tears.” He turned to her and said, “I love that man.” Such was Sarah’s recollection two decades later. At the time she failed to mention the tears or the affection in a letter to her mother, but she did write, “It really is wonderful how they both get on—they really like and understand each other. The outing, like the evening festivities, had been a smashing success.”314

  The staff meetings were not. Roosevelt, Churchill offered to Anthony Eden, who had arrived on the fourth day of talks, “was a charming country gentleman” but deficient in “business methods.” The conference had been planned on short notice, and it showed. Eisenhower had flown in for the second plenary session and confounded Marshall (while pleasing Churchill) by suggesting that the greatest support Alexander’s Italian army could give to the European campaign would be to successfully sweep into the Po Valley. Then, as Eisenhower saw it, Alexander could either strike toward southeast France, or turn northeast toward Trieste and Vienna. Given the conditions in Italy, Eisenhower thought one of these thrusts could be undertaken—and accomplished—by the summer of 1944. Inadvertently, Ike had given new life to Churchill’s Mediterranean strategy, which Marshall all week had been trying to knock down. After five days of talks, the British and Americans had reached no final agreement on any of their respective strategies, in Europe or the Pacific. That they had agreed upon goals in the Pacific, but not on the means for reaching them, was evidenced by the wording of the Cairo Declaration, issued by the three leaders at the end of the conference. It called for Japan’s unconditional surrender and its expulsion from the Asian mainland. It called for an independent Korea and mandated that all Japanese conquests in China, including Taiwan, be restored to China. But the declaration made no mention of how any of this would come to pass.315

  Just after sunrise on November 27, Roosevelt boarded his Douglas C-54, which Admiral Leahy had anointed The Sacred Cow. Churchill climbed into his Avro York. They were heading, unprepared and in fundamental disagreement, to Tehran and the most important meeting to date in the life of the alliance. But Stalin was prepared for them. Harry Hopkins told Moran that if Churchill proved obdurate in Tehran in regard to the second front, Roosevelt would back the Russians. “I am not looking forward to the next few days,” Brooke told his diary.316

  Alec Cadogan thought the weather in Tehran lovely. The skies were Persian blue, the sunshine golden. Tehran, however, came in for a dose of his cynicism: “a squalid town of bad taste…. Bazaars quite good—as a sight. Nothing in them.” Churchill found Persian security sadly lacking for the advent of three such prestigious personages. A column of mounted Iranian cavalrymen lined the streets, which only showed “any evil people that somebody of consequences was coming, and which way.” The cavalry would prove useless if “two or three determined men with pistols or a bomb” attempted t
o rush the automobiles that carried the distinguished guests. Still, to Inspector Thompson’s chagrin, Churchill, who had been warned his life might be threatened, “was very excited, even pleased.” As the crowds pressed up against the car, “he looked into everyone’s face with the happiest sort of suspicion.” Thompson had been told by his army contacts that British agents had rounded up several German evildoers who had parachuted in for the occasion. Meanwhile, the Soviets, who claimed to have uncovered the plot, suggested it might prove beneficial to Roosevelt’s health for him to stay at the fortified Soviet legation, next door to the British, rather than at the American legation, two miles removed from the city. Roosevelt made the move on November 28. Ismay thought the Soviet story “a trick” and believed the Soviets had already planted microphones in the walls of Roosevelt’s apartments.317

  Churchill considered it vital that he and the president confer before they met with Stalin. Roosevelt did not think likewise. He was determined that Uncle Joe not feel ganged up on, and equally determined not to be pinned down by Churchill over his Rhodes scheme. Roosevelt meant to see Stalin first, and to see him alone. Shortly after 3:00 P.M. on the twenty-eighth, Stalin paid the president a brief private visit. Forewarned by Ismay that Churchill’s exclusion had caused “storm signals” to be run up among the British delegation, Harriman strolled over to “calm the waters.” He found Churchill “in a grumbling but whimsical mood.” The Old Man told Harriman he would “obey orders” but that he had a right to chair the upcoming meeting because he was the most senior leader, because his name came first alphabetically, and because of the historic importance of the “British Empire, which he represented.” He insisted that if nothing else, he host a dinner on the thirtieth, his sixty-ninth birthday, where “he would get thoroughly drunk… and leave the next day.”318

  Stalin and Roosevelt meanwhile were getting along famously. The president announced that Russia deserved a warm-water port at the end of the South Manchurian railroad, and that some of the British and American merchant fleets should be transferred to Russia after the war. “That would be a fine thing,” Stalin replied. Roosevelt had not consulted Churchill on either matter. The subjects of France and de Gaulle came up; both leaders agreed that de Gaulle was out of touch “with the real France.” The real France, Stalin offered, was busy helping the Germans and would have to be punished after the war. Roosevelt agreed, and added that no Frenchman over the age of forty should be allowed to participate in postwar French affairs. They moved on to Southeast Asia and India, where almost one billion people—Roosevelt often called them “brown people,” “of short stature,” and “not warlike”—lived under British and French subjugation. Roosevelt proposed that the Allies hold French Indochina in trust after the war, as America had held the Philippines. India, Malaya, and Burma, Roosevelt proclaimed, should be “educated in the arts of self government.” He suggested “reform from the bottom” in India “somewhat on the Soviet line.” Stalin replied that reform from the bottom would result in revolution. India, he told the president, was “a complicated society.” Harriman thought Stalin “showed rather more sophistication than the president.” The two leaders agreed that the subject of India should not be brought up with Churchill. Roosevelt’s clearest signal to Stalin had to do with Poland. The president made no mention of Poland.319

  Harriman had earlier in the day offered an impromptu lecture to Eden and Cadogan on the art and science of properly conducting an international conference, leading Cadogan to proclaim to his diary, “I’ve forgotten a great deal more about that than he [Harriman] ever knew.” The waters were anything but calm, and the conference had yet to begin.320

  As the Big Two broke the ice, Churchill took himself to his villa’s garden to shuffle through official papers, including memos to Home Secretary Herbert Morrison. The previous week Morrison had ordered that the Blackshirts Oswald and Diane (Mitford) Mosley be released from prison and placed under house arrest, a decision Morrison made for humanitarian and health reasons. The Mosleys had been held without trial for three years under the special powers granted HMG by section 18B of the legal code. The response to Morrison’s decision among workingmen was immediate; ten thousand marched through London’s streets to protest what they saw as favoritism. The Commons erupted as well. To Clementine, Churchill wrote, “If I were at home I’d blast the whole [18B] blasted thing out of existence.” He offered that Morrison could “sweep it [18B] away” if he followed the “overwhelming arguments I have mentioned to him.” Indeed, Churchill made clear to Morrison the constitutional peril of 18B, his loathing of the law, and his desire that 18B be abolished. Yet, he also advised Morrison to argue that although the special powers were deplorable, “the time has not yet come when it [18B] can be fully dispensed with, but we can look forward to that day.” In fact, the day had come; the peril of invasion had long passed, but Churchill was not yet willing to give up this extraordinary power; 18B stayed on the books. The British electorate took note.321

  Brooke stopped by the garden to propose that Churchill offer the Americans the Andaman operation in exchange for American guarantees in the Mediterranean. Churchill vetoed the idea, telling Brooke, correctly, that any such promise would prove impossible to keep. Once the large landing ships left the Mediterranean for the Pacific venture, they would never return. By now Churchill’s cold had worsened and his voice had almost abandoned him. “He is not fit,” Brooke concluded, “and consequently not in the best of moods.” That was because his friend Franklin Roosevelt was meeting privately with Uncle Joe. When word reached the British concerning the substance of Roosevelt’s meeting with Stalin, Brooke told Moran, “This conference is over when it has only begun. Stalin has got the President in his pocket.”322

  The first plenary session was convened at four o’clock in a large room in the yellow-brick Soviet legation. The principals gathered around a grand round table covered in green baize. Heavy draperies blocked the Persian sunshine. Admiral King and Harry Hopkins were there, but Generals Marshall and Arnold had somehow gotten their wires crossed and were off sightseeing in Tehran, thus leaving Roosevelt to his own devices. Churchill had his full complement of chiefs in attendance. Stalin was accompanied by only an interpreter and Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, a sixty-two-year-old career officer and Stalin toady who had led the (unsuccessful) assault against the Finns in 1939 and had been replaced by Zhukov at Leningrad in 1941 after allowing the Germans to surround that city. Voroshilov, Brooke wrote, would supply Stalin “nothing in the shape of strategic vision.” But then, in Brooke’s opinion, Stalin had no need of advice: “He [Stalin] had a military brain of the highest caliber,” Brooke recalled, and could grasp “all the implications of a situation with a quick and unerring eye…. In this respect he stood out when compared to his two colleagues.”323

  Roosevelt, as the only head of state, was nominated by Stalin to serve as chairman. After the president delivered a long summary of the Pacific war (“a lot of blah-flum” according to Brooke), Stalin announced that as soon as Germany was defeated, the Soviet Union would multiply its forces in Siberia and join in the war against Japan. This unexpected turn had the effect Stalin intended. He knew that his Siberian airfields and troops could help the U.S. bring Japan to bay much faster than the Chinese nationalists, who in the seven years since the rape of Nanking had yet to defeat a Japanese army or bomb a Japanese city. And although Churchill had always pledged to throw all of Britain’s resources into the war against Japan upon the defeat of Germany, Britain was running out of resources. Both Roosevelt and Churchill believed—and continued to believe throughout 1944—that the Pacific war would go on for at least eighteen months, perhaps two years, after Germany was defeated. Stalin’s announcement was therefore most welcome, but it was clearly conditional upon Anglo-American armies going to France in May 1944 in order to shoulder their share of the burden. Then, and only then, would the Red Army march with them to Tokyo. Left unsaid was the possibility, always present in the back of Anglo-American m
inds, that a failure to get into France by May would place the Soviet Union in untenable military straits, that is, would foster an atmosphere conducive to a negotiated peace. Stalin had leveraged that fear for two years, and did so again, in masterly fashion, over the next three days.324

  He spoke quietly, as he had done the year before in his first sessions with Churchill. He doodled on a notepad and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, which he kept loose in his breast pocket. His brown eyes gave away nothing. He had changed his wardrobe since they last met, discarding his comrade ensemble of “grey-brown cloth tunic buttoned to the chin and the trousers of the same material, tucked into knee-boots.” He had “blossomed out into a multi-coloured uniform” designed, it seemed to Moran, by a tailor who “has put a shelf on each shoulder. And on it has dumped a lot of gold with white stars.” A fat red stripe ran down the marshal’s creased trousers. When he spoke, he gazed into the distance and looked no one directly in the eye. “Stalin would have made a fine poker player,” Ismay later wrote. “His expression was as inscrutable as the Sphinx.”325