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

  Stalin had come to Tehran seeking assurances on only two matters: Overlord and his western borders. He left Tehran with both. Roosevelt had arrived believing Stalin to be, in his own term, “getatable.” The president left believing he had got at Stalin, although he told reporters that Stalin proved “tougher than he had expected.” Robert Sherwood called the end of the Tehran Conference the “supreme peak of Roosevelt’s career.” Perhaps, but Roosevelt had paved his chosen path to Stalin’s good graces over his friendship with Churchill. Alec Cadogan concluded that Churchill’s lack of guile was as vital to the alliance as was Roosevelt’s wit and homespun charm. Churchill was as he appeared; Franklin Roosevelt was not. Cadogan believed Churchill “has very few reticences; U.J. is shrewd enough to spot that, and must, I think, have satisfied himself that he was reading an open book, that there was no concealment or duplicity, and he could have faith.”357

  Stalin indeed thought he was reading an open book, but the conclusions he took from it were not at all those Cadogan had in mind. Four months later, Stalin regaled Milovan Djilas, Tito’s third in command, with stories of the Tehran Conference. Djilas, in Moscow as head of a Yugoslavian diplomatic mission, arrived at the Kremlin at about the same time Randolph Churchill and his mission arrived at Tito’s headquarters. “Perhaps you think,” Stalin told Djilas, “that just because we are allies of the English we have forgotten who they are, and who Churchill is. They find nothing sweeter than to trick their allies…. And Churchill? Churchill is the kind who, if you don’t watch him, will slip a kopeck out of your pocket. Yes, a kopeck out of your pocket. By God…. And Roosevelt? Roosevelt is not like that. He dips in his hands only for bigger coins. But Churchill? Churchill—even for a kopeck.” At a later meeting, even the wooden Molotov displayed a stunted sense of humor when he recounted a toast Stalin had made to Churchill, a salute to the importance of secrecy in the coming invasion. But the toast, Molotov allowed, was actually a backhanded slap at Churchill’s 1915 gambit in the Dardanelles, where the “failure occurred because the British lacked sufficient information.” The irony escaped Churchill who, Molotov said, had been “in his cups.” Djilas concluded that “Churchill had left a deep impression on the Soviet leaders as a farsighted and dangerous ‘bourgeois statesman’—though they did not like him.” Nor did they have faith in him. Cadogan had it backwards.358

  Of Tehran Churchill later wrote: “On my right sat the President of the United States, on my left the master of Russia. Together we controlled practically all the naval and three-quarters of all the air forces in the world, and could direct armies of nearly twenty million men, engaged in the most terrible of wars that had yet occurred in human history.” Yet Churchill understood that the United States and the U.S.S.R. accounted for the vast majority of that awesome power. With an American soon to command the largest of the Western armies and Stalin in command of the Eastern, Churchill’s influence over the management of the war could only diminish. Churchill had arrived in Persia secure in his nineteenth-century belief in England’s imperial destiny; he left having learned a cold lesson. He now had no choice but to regard the status of his small island nation from a mid-twentieth-century vantage point, and it was one of declining geopolitical might. He had always been good at adapting to changing conditions, political or military, but this was different: the sun was setting on an entire era.359

  The magnitude of the shift in power taking place was captured in an offhand remark made to reporters a few weeks after Tehran by Harold L. Ickes, the American secretary of the interior. It had nothing to do with Polish borders or the autonomy of Greece or France, or the fate of Germany, or the restoration of continental monarchs. It had to do with the resource that powered the great powers, a commodity Britain had monopolized and taken for granted for almost a quarter century. “Tell me the sort of agreement that the United Nations will reach with respect to the world’s petroleum reserves when the war is over,” Ickes proclaimed, “and I will undertake to analyze the durability of the peace that is to come.” This cautionary note stemmed from the fact that America, which produced 95 percent of Allied aviation gas (from its domestic oil supply), was, according to Ickes, “on the verge of becoming a net importer of oil.” Of the current oil production in the Middle East, America controlled about 15 percent, Britain 85 percent. That, America could not abide. The war was being fought in Europe and the Pacific, but the spoils would be found in the Middle East. Of the future, Time reported, “the oil-conscious British are fearful.”360

  Churchill later told his old friend Violet Bonham Carter, “I realized at Tehran for the first time, what a small nation we are. There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey who was the only one, the only one of the three, who knew the right way home.”361

  Despite a growing awareness of his diminishing role within the alliance, Churchill departed Tehran fully intending to find the right way home. As always, the path led through the Mediterranean.

  5

  Pilot

  DECEMBER 1943–JUNE 1944

  On December 1, the day they departed Tehran, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt put their signatures to a statement of intent. Issued to the world on December 6, it became known as the Tehran Declaration. In it the three leaders pledged: “No power on earth can prevent our destroying the German armies by land, their U-boats by sea, and their war plants from the air. Our attack will be relentless and increasing.” Reuters called it a “death sentence for the Axis.” No mention was made of dividing Germany into four, five, six or more demilitarized duchies, or of reparations; no call was made for Germans to throw off their Nazi leaders to avoid annihilation. The Big Three pledged their “determination that our nations shall work together in war and in the peace that will follow.” The declaration included the remarkable line, “We look with confidence to the day when all peoples of the world may live free lives, untouched by tyranny…. We leave here, friends in fact, in spirit and in purpose.” Harriman later wrote that the declaration “was an astonishing statement for Stalin to have signed…. His ideas of tyranny were quite different from ours. Tyranny, for him, did not exist in the Soviet Union.” Rather, tyranny for Stalin “was capitalism exploiting the downtrodden.” Churchill, in his memoirs, explained that he and Roosevelt could see no decent alternative: “It would not have been right at Tehran for the Western democracies to found their plans upon suspicions of the Russian attitude in the hour of triumph and when all her dangers were removed.”1

  That is a generous enough sentiment, but after Tehran—and for the duration of the war—Churchill pondered ways to check the Soviets in the event Stalin abrogated agreements made in good faith. Roosevelt, meanwhile, began to voice his intent to avoid postwar European entanglements. Indeed, in an early February telegram, the president told Churchill what he had told Harriman in mid-1943: other than maintaining a zone of occupation in Germany, American troops would be coming home after victory. “I am absolutely unwilling to police France and possibly Italy and the Balkans as well,” Roosevelt wrote, adding, “after all France is your baby and will take a lot of nursing in order to bring it to the point of walking alone.”2

  Even before the secret talks in Tehran had finished, Stalin made public his demand that several million German laborers and all German industry be shipped to Russia after victory in lieu of 1.6 billion gold marks in reparations, demands that led Goebbels to snort to his diary, “We would rather defend the last remnants of our walls than to accede to such a demand.” The English, wrote the little doctor, “would like to use this occasion to sell out the entire German future.” Actually, it was Roosevelt and Stalin who led the charge to do so, although Churchill’s post-dinner comments to Stalin certainly indicate that he now endorsed the harshest possible treatment of Germany.3

  Then Goebbels expressed a prescient thought: “Nobody in England seems to recognize that once the Soviet Union is in
Europe, it will be a much more dangerous opponent of the British Empire.” Churchill’s proposal to cede eastern Germany to the Poles in exchange for Stalin getting eastern Poland had been leaked to and reported by the yellow press in London. “I can hardly imagine that the leading English statesmen are so stupid and shortsighted,” wrote Goebbels, “as to put that sort of an estimate on Bolshevism. Stalin won’t think of fulfilling obligations entered upon with England and America.” At least one old Englishman was not so stupid and shortsighted.

  While the Big Three had been laying plans in Tehran, Jan Smuts delivered a speech in London that Goebbels thought “sensational.” Smuts predicted that following the erasure of the Reich from the map (“nothing new,” wrote Goebbels), the “Russian colossus would dominate the entire European Continent. England would come out of this war with honor and glory but poor as a beggar. The United States would in large measure be the heir to the British Empire.” Why, Goebbels asked himself, would the British pursue such a ruinous policy? He was truly befuddled. Every Allied bomb that fell on Berlin reminded Goebbels and Hitler—indeed, all Germans—that their English and American cousins considered the sins of the Reich to be far more egregious than the sins of Stalin and his Asian Bolshevik hordes. Goebbels and Hitler could not understand how this could be and (until their final moments on earth) remained hopeful that England and America would see the light.4

  On December 2, two tired old men along with their military chiefs and aides arrived back in Cairo to resume their talks. Three days later Roosevelt and Churchill signed a statement of purpose. Foremost, nothing would be allowed to interfere with Overlord. Churchill offered that he was committed to the operation “up to the hilt.” Likewise, nothing would be allowed to interfere with Anvil, the curtain-raiser for Overlord in southern France. Yet in Tehran, Brooke and Churchill had gained the vital endorsement that they should reassess Anvil in the spring, based on the availability of landing craft. Anvil, as Churchill saw it, was not written in stone. During their talks, to Churchill’s great relief, Roosevelt agreed to kill Buccaneer, the operation in Burma that Roosevelt had promised Chiang. It died in part because Mountbatten had demanded 50,000 troops for the task when Churchill expected a request for 15,000. As well, and as usual, no landing craft could be spared for the adventure. Mountbatten would have to make do with what he had for the foreseeable future. Finally, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that nothing would interfere with operations in the eastern Mediterranean, if Turkey entered the war. In pursuit of that objective, President nönü and the Turks arrived for three days of talks, during which neither Roosevelt nor Churchill could move them into the Allied camp. nönü “pleaded his country’s unpreparedness” but “expressed his readiness ‘in principle’ to come into the war.” The most the Turks would accede to was use of their airfields by Allied airmen. General Marshall was well satisfied with that; he feared Turkey’s entry on the Allied side would “burn up our logistics right down the line.” Weeks later Jock Colville found Churchill smoking a Turkish cigarette, the first time Colville had seen the P.M. indulge that habit. Churchill, holding the cigarette aloft, declared, “They were the only thing [I] ever got out of the Turks.”5

  Churchill also took up the problems of Yugoslavia and Greece. In each country a civil war was being fought between Communist and non-Communist partisans. All sides in each conflict were being armed by Britain. In both countries the Communists fielded the more powerful force, Tito in Yugoslavia, and the ELAS in Greece. In late November Tito set up a provisional government in Bosnia; one of its first acts was to forbid King Peter to return to Yugoslavia. Churchill and Eden, concluding that Tito’s partisans would rule Yugoslavia once the Germans were expelled, believed King Peter’s only hope for a role in future Yugoslavian affairs was to repudiate Draja Mihailovic and his Serbian Chetniks, who were colluding with the Germans in the fight against Tito. But the Chetniks were also working closely with the Americans and harbored dozens of American airmen—hundreds by summer—shot down during raids on Romanian oil fields. It was a dicey situation. Churchill, with his man in Yugoslavia, Bill Deakin, acting as intermediary, began negotiations with Tito. In coming weeks the Old Man offered significant military assistance in return for Tito’s keeping an open mind on the subject of a working accommodation between himself and King Peter. Churchill was offering a great deal with no guarantees in return.6

  The situation in Greece, Cadogan wrote, “bore unpleasant similarities to that of Yugoslavia.” All the Greek partisans despised King George of the Hellenes. Here, in obverse of their treatment of Tito, Churchill and Eden decided to cease aiding and arming the Greek Communists. That alone would not help King George, because the non-Communist EDES loathed him as much as did the ELAS. The solution, Churchill concluded, was to persuade the king to agree to not return to Greece until and unless asked to do so by the electoral choice of the Greek people. As with King Peter, compromise was King George’s only hope; his best chance for seeing a royal government installed under Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou was to stay out of Greece and above the fray. Eden brought the reluctant king around during two days of long talks. Then to Eden’s disbelief, Franklin Roosevelt wandered onto the scene and told King George to stick to his guns and to not make any declaration. The president’s intervention, Eden later wrote, was “irresponsible,” more so because Eden had briefed Winant and Hopkins on the British policy. But they had failed, in turn, to brief Roosevelt. King George, convinced that “the British now wanted to get rid of him,” took Roosevelt’s advice to heart and refused to give the public pledges Churchill had demanded. The Greek civil war continued until an uncertain cease-fire was patched up in February.7

  Jock Colville later wrote, “It would be hard to find two worse advertisements for hereditary monarchy than George of Greece and Peter of Yugoslavia.”8

  On December 4, Roosevelt, in one of the most difficult and most momentous decisions of his presidency, chose Dwight Eisenhower to command Overlord. Roosevelt informed Churchill, who told Brooke over dinner, but Marshall did not learn of the decision until the next day, when Roosevelt summoned his Army Chief of Staff and told him, “I feel like I could not sleep with you out of the country.” Marshall, disappointed but as always dutiful, immediately sent a radiogram to Eisenhower, but the wording in the cable was so garbled that Eisenhower “was unable to deduce his [Marshall’s] meaning with certainty.” Eisenhower knew only that the president would be arriving in Tunis late on the seventh or early on the eighth. In his memoirs he wrote, “There can be little doubt that the President felt that the command only of ‘Overlord’ was not sufficient to justify General Marshall’s departure from Washington.” Churchill saw the appointment of Eisenhower as validation of his belief that Overlord was to be but one operation among many, and not necessarily the biggest or most critical. Overlord, so far, was just a name on a piece of paper. In fact, during December, both Churchill and Eisenhower directed their efforts toward Italy, where a real battle with real consequences was being fought.9

  On December 5, Roosevelt drafted and Churchill initialed a memorandum to Chiang outlining the decisions made in Tehran. There was no mention of Stalin’s promise to join the Pacific campaign once Germany was defeated (it was thought security at Chiang’s headquarters was far too lax for such news to be divulged). One line in the memo underscores Roosevelt’s state of mind: “Conference with Stalin involves us in combined operations on European continent in late spring giving fair prospect of terminating war with Germany by the late summer of 1944” (italics added). Throughout the coming year, such optimism infected the thinking of many Allied military and political leaders. Churchill harbored no such illusions.

  General Spaatz and Bomber Harris were two of the leading optimists. They believed that if enough bombers were sent often enough, Germany would be reduced to rubble, its people rendered incapable of resistance. They believed that Germany might crack by March, certainly by midyear, because the RAF and Eighth Air Force were erasing German cities and the
ir inhabitants from the landscape. In late November, the Daily Mirror crowed: RAF WENT OUT AGAIN; KNOCKOUT ASSAULT STARTS. In December, the Daily Express proclaimed that airpower meant “no more Passchendaeles.”10

  The optimism was also fed by the Russian winter offensive, which began the first week of December when the Red Army struck westward in the Kiev sector along a front that stretched from the Pripet Marshes south to the Black Sea. In the southern Ukraine, the Germans fell back toward the Bug River. Just 150 miles beyond lay the Prut River and Bessarabia, a former czarist dominion in eastern Romania. Within weeks an entire German army in the Crimea found itself bypassed by the Russians, and cut off. In mid-January, the Red Army struck in the Leningrad sector, relieving that city on January 27 after almost three years under siege. The Soviets then turned west, and drove the Germans back to the Estonian frontier. The overall length of the Russian front remained the same, close to 1,200 miles, but as German manpower shrank, defense of the front became more difficult. The Russian strategy, wrote Liddell Hart, “provided the clearest possible demonstration of the decisive importance of the ratio between space and force.” The Russians “could live where any Western army would have starved.” The Red Army “rolled on like a flood, or a nomadic horde.” A German officer wrote, “The advance of a Red Army is something Westerners can’t imagine. Behind the tank spearheads rolls a vast horde, largely mounted on horses. The soldier carries a sack on his back, with dry crusts of bread and raw vegetables collected on the march…. The Russians are accustomed to carry on for as long as three weeks in this primitive way, when advancing.” But in German troops “weakness and wide spaces produced a feeling of helplessness.” Stalin intended to exploit those feelings until he reached Berlin.11