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

  At a dinner on September 13 attended by Churchill, Roosevelt, Lord Moran, Lord Cherwell, and Admiral Leahy, Henry Morgenthau outlined his plan for Germany’s future: plowing German industry under, destroying its shipyards and coal mines, and converting the country to a pasture. Harry Hopkins was not at the table, nor was he even in Quebec, a source of worry for Churchill, who had always counted on Hopkins to explain and champion his thoughts to Roosevelt. Instead, here was Morgenthau, who had attended none of the previous conferences. When Morgenthau finished his presentation, Churchill objected. He was all for disarming Germany, he said, but not for making it a wasteland. “I agree with [Edmund] Burke,” he said. “You cannot indict a whole nation.” The English people, he warned, will not stand for the enslavement of their fellow working-class Germans. Morgenthau pointed out that destroying the Ruhr could only help British steel exports and Britain’s balance of payments. As Stalin had at Tehran, Roosevelt offered that a German factory turning out steel furniture could be easily converted into an armaments plant. Churchill had no counterplan to offer, but he made clear he would not go along with Morgenthau. His reaction had been “instinctive revulsion,” Moran noted, adding, “He hates cruelty.” But within forty-eight hours Cherwell had brought Churchill around. (It was during these weeks that Churchill told Moran that “if the Ruhr were grassed over it would be good for our trade.”) Roosevelt and Churchill signed off on the Morgenthau Plan on September 15.54

  It was a stillborn concept. Stimson, Hopkins, and Hull thought the plan hideous, and told Roosevelt so. In early October, Hull told Roosevelt it would be inhuman to condemn Germans to starvation, and he read back to the president a transcript from a meeting where Roosevelt had endorsed the severest treatment of Germany: “Looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural in character.” Roosevelt did not recall the quote, but soon after his talk with Hull he scotched the Morgenthau Plan.

  Both Churchill and Roosevelt had come to Quebec, as many of their companions had noted, tired and unfocused. The same could be said of the alliance. Robert Sherwood later wrote, “The Allies were well prepared for war to the death in Europe, but they were ill prepared for the cataclysm of sudden total victory.” The meeting in Quebec had really been called in order that the British and Americans could reach agreement on an agenda for the next gathering of the Big Three, which Roosevelt soon proposed to Stalin. It appeared a meeting of the minds had taken place at Quebec, when in fact it had not. Poland—Stalin’s first priority, and Churchill’s—was not even discussed.55

  When the conference ended on September 17, Churchill, his family, and a few aides journeyed by train to Hyde Park. There, with the pressures of plenary sessions out of the way, Churchill regained his strength, helped in part by a succession of picnics that Clementine described as “rather fun, really,” high praise coming from her. Harry Hopkins was on hand, which greatly cheered Churchill, who believed Hopkins’s absence in Quebec was due to his having fallen out with Roosevelt. In fact, Hopkins had been ill for most of the year.56

  The news from Europe was startlingly good, although Colville noted, “From the American papers one would scarcely believe any British troops were fighting.” Time that week ran a map of the Western Front with the caption “The Yanks are coming.” In fact, after stabbing into a slice of German territory at Aachen, the Yanks had stopped to refit. To Patton’s fury, his gasoline quota was cut to the bone so that Montgomery could be fueled and armed in order to launch Operation Market Garden. This was to be a strike by the paratroopers of the 1st British Airborne Division, supported by a Polish parachute brigade, on the north bank of the Rhine at Arnhem—the supposed gap at his front. The American 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions would likewise drop into Holland near the Wilhelmina Canal and the Meuse River, respectively. Once the bridges over these and four other waterways were taken, the plan called for Allied armor and infantry to roar north through Holland to link up with the paratroopers at Arnhem. Monty intended to exploit the gap—which was closing, if it had ever been wide to start with—in front of the Ruhr. It was the British who were coming. Montgomery began his attack on September 17. By then, wrote Robert Sherwood, the highest authorities in the British and American command believed that “German surrender could come within a matter of weeks or even days.” Churchill did not share that optimism, but the news from Europe was indisputably good.57

  As the Churchill party boarded the Queen Mary in New York on September 20, Colville found the Old Man “looking far, far better—indeed as John Peck would say, ‘in rude health.’ ”58

  By the time Churchill arrived in London on the twenty-sixth, Operation Market Garden had failed, terribly. The weather had worsened and the skies over Holland precluded the arrival of reinforcements or supplies, as well as the bombing of German positions. Allied armored columns clogged the two-lane highway that ran north through Holland (sowed with minefields, and with wetlands on either side). The failure to take the Scheldt Estuary had allowed the Germans to evacuate 60,000 men from there to fill the gap Monty was trying to penetrate. The offensive failed utterly, with the result, Colville told his diary, “The First Airborne Division has been wiped out at Arnhem.” Nobody on the Western Front—British, Canadian, or American—would be going home for Christmas. Three days later, Churchill cabled Roosevelt: “It seems pretty clear to me Germany is not going to be conquered this year.”59

  Churchill tried to put a good face on the Arnhem disaster when he addressed the House on September 28, but it could not be gilded, even by Churchill. “Full and deeply-moving accounts have already been given to the country and to the world of this glorious and fruitful operation, which will take a lasting place in our military annals, and will, in succeeding generations, inspire our youth with the highest ideals of duty and of daring. ‘Not in vain’ may be the pride of those who have survived and the epitaph of those who fell.” As for the foolhardiness of Hitler’s decisions that summer to give up no ground in France and in the east, Churchill offered, “I always hate to compare Napoleon with Hitler, as it seems an insult to the great Emperor and warrior to connect him in any way with a squalid caucus boss and butcher. But there is one respect in which I must draw a parallel. Both these men were temperamentally unable to give up the tiniest scrap of any territory to which the high watermark of their hectic fortunes had carried them.”60

  Since his July 20 visit to Normandy, Churchill had spent more time out of Britain than in. This was a source of worry to deputy prime minister Clement Attlee, who believed the P.M.’s absences were deleterious to getting business done on the home front, including putting into place a plan to rebuild the thousands of houses destroyed since 1940, and by the V-weapons that month. Attlee therefore would have reacted poorly had he known that on the night Churchill arrived back in London, he asked Ismay and Air Chief Marshal Portal to arrange a travel itinerary that would get him to Moscow as soon as possible. With Stalin’s armies in Romania and Bulgaria, and poised to strike up the Danube for Belgrade and Budapest, events in and near the Balkans needed to be addressed. As well, with the Red Army standing idle as Warsaw burned, the issue of Polish freedom had to be addressed.

  On September 29, Churchill informed Roosevelt of his travel plans, and his agenda in Moscow, which included summing up for Stalin decisions made in Quebec, discussions on the Balkans and Poland, and the Pacific Front. As Roosevelt had already told Churchill that he was about to propose to Stalin another meeting of the Big Three, Churchill framed his visit to Moscow only in terms of laying the groundwork for that meeting. He pledged to keep Roosevelt informed as the talks progressed, asking that Averell Harriman be allowed to sit in on the meetings in order that Stalin would conclude that he was in the presence of both of his allies, not simply his British ally.

  Harry Hopkins saw danger—just a little over a month before the presidential election—in the possibility that Stalin and Churchill might make some sort of joint statement that would have the effect of relegating Roosevelt to the s
idelines. Roosevelt, persuaded by Hopkins, sent off a message to Stalin in which he made clear that Churchill was not authorized to speak for the United States. Stalin saw that message, Harriman later wrote, as a sign that his allies lacked cohesion and will, especially regarding Poland. Harriman believed Roosevelt erred by not encouraging Churchill to stress the solidarity of America and Britain while pressing questions of Polish borders and the formation of a democratic Polish government. Consequently, Stalin sensed weakness. Before departing for Moscow, Churchill told Colville that he was making the trip in order “to discourage any idea that the U.K. and the U.S.A. are very close to (as exemplified by the Quebec conference) the exclusion of Russia.” He intended to show Stalin that he was not being left “in the cold.” Yet Roosevelt’s message to Stalin had the effect of putting Churchill out in the cold. It allowed Stalin to conclude, Harriman believed, that any decisions he reached with Churchill were nonbinding.61

  On October 3, Churchill and Clementine attended a performance of Shaw’s Arms and the Man; the next night they attended a stage production of Richard III. It was an astute public relations gambit. As in 1940, Churchill’s ventures out in public told Londoners that he was with them, that he, too, accepted the risks. Although Cherwell calculated that the odds were 648,000 to 1 against a rocket falling on Churchill on any given night, it was a time when only optimists bought green bananas.

  Late on October 7, Churchill boarded his Avro York for the run to Moscow. Churchill’s aircraft was comfortable, but the journey to Moscow was still long and dangerous; Moran, worried about Churchill’s heart, wanted assurances that the plane would not fly higher than eight thousand feet. The Old Man tended to become ill on such pilgrimages. He was just eight weeks shy of turning seventy and was not the robust specimen he had been in 1940. The trip took thirty-six hours—twenty-three of them in the air—with stops in Naples and Cairo. Churchill arrived in Moscow on October 9. He was understandably tired; Stalin was not.62

  Averell Harriman, writing years later, pointed out two errors that Churchill committed when recalling these Moscow days in his war memoirs. The first is insignificant: Churchill wrote that Stalin put him up in a Moscow house, when in fact he stayed in the country again, although a Moscow apartment was made available, and Churchill used it for one night during the next ten days. The second errant recollection was egregious: Churchill wrote that Harriman attended the first session of the talks (code-named Tolstoy). He did not. He thus could not have known (and in fact only learned in bits and pieces over the next three days) of the agreement reached by Stalin and Churchill, a carving up of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence of the very sort Hopkins feared and Roosevelt loathed.

  Alone with Stalin, Churchill sketched their agreement on a half sheet of paper. In Romania the Russians would have 90 percent “predominance,” while the British would exercise 90 percent influence in Greece. Yugoslavia and Hungary would be managed equally by Russia and Britain, and Bulgaria would be 75 percent Moscow, 25 percent Britain and America (which effectively meant Britain, since the United States wanted no part of any such arrangement, either there or in Greece). Stalin studied the paper briefly, and then with his blue pen checked his agreement. The deed done, Churchill asked Stalin, “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we have disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper?” Stalin replied, “No, you keep it.” Before leaving for Moscow, Churchill had told Roosevelt he was glad Harriman would sit in on the meetings, but he had added, “You would not, I am sure, wish this to preclude private tête-à-têtes between me and U.J…. as it is often under such circumstance the best progress is made. You can rely on me to keep you constantly informed of everything that affects our joint interests.” On October 11, Churchill brought Roosevelt up to speed on the talks, cabling “we have considered the best way of reaching an agreed policy about the Balkan countries.” In fact, they had already reached a policy, although in Stalin’s estimation, it, and anything else they agreed upon, was nonbinding.63

  Churchill also told Roosevelt that the next phase of the talks was about to begin—a parley over the Curzon Line among Stalin, Churchill, the London Poles, represented by Stanisław Mikołajczyk (whom Churchill had summoned from London), and Bolesław Bierut, a Communist International veteran and head of the Lublin Poles. Harriman, who on the twelfth sat in as an observer at the first meeting between Churchill, Stalin, and the London Poles, realized within minutes that a serious miscommunication had taken place, the responsibility for which lay with Roosevelt. The president had personally assured Mikołajczyk in June that he had not endorsed the Curzon Line at the Tehran Conference. He had indeed not participated in discussions of the Polish eastern border, but apparently he had told Stalin and Molotov that he endorsed moving the western Polish frontier almost 150 miles west to the vicinity of the Oder, and did so in language that was just imprecise enough to be “warped in translation.” To Stalin’s ears, that implied a shift westward in Poland’s eastern border as well, which is exactly what Churchill had proposed to Stalin over after-dinner drinks at Tehran. But with the American election now less than four weeks away, there was no chance that Roosevelt would clarify those remarks for public consumption.64

  Churchill had for almost a year accepted the Curzon Line or something very close to it as the best demarcation of a new eastern border for Poland. Stalin demanded it, and Lvov as well. When Lord Curzon proposed the line as Poland’s eastern border in 1919, he did so after taking into account the ethnicity of the region’s citizens. Poles lived west of the line for the most part, Russians to the east.

  With that logic in mind, Churchill set to work on Mikołajczyk for the next five days in order to bring him and the London Poles around. In doing so he deployed the same weapons he used in negotiating with his Chiefs of Staff. First he asked; then he pleaded; then he threatened, harangued, and demeaned. In Stalin’s presence he told Mikołajczyk that this would be a poor time for HMG and the London Poles to split. The Old Man held out the prospect of Danzig and East Prussia going to Poland, parts of Silesia and its mineral riches as well, and a 125-mile-wide fertile swath of eastern Germany. Mikołajczyk said he could make no decision, that only the Polish nation could do so. Public opinion, he said, would not allow such a unilateral decision on his part, to which Churchill replied, “What is public opinion? The right to be crushed!” When the Lublin Poles joined the discussions on October 14, it became immediately clear that they were pawns of Moscow. They “seemed creepy” to Eden, who, nodding in the direction of Bierut and another, whispered to Churchill, “the rat and the weasel.” Churchill cabled a report of the talks to King George, and with a directness he would not have employed had the Polish leader in exile been a constitutional monarch (and perhaps a cousin of the King), wrote: “The day before yesterday was ‘All Poles Day.’ Our lot from London are, as Your Majesty knows, decent but feeble.” The Lublin Poles, Churchill told the King, appeared to be “purely tools.” He held out hope of a settlement, but added, “If not we shall have to hush the matter up and spin it out until after the [American] election.” He didn’t get the settlement. Mikołajczyk insisted on Lvov remaining in the new Poland. Churchill dismissed him with the threat that England might well consider its obligations to Poland to have been met, and at an end.65

  When Churchill proposed a fifty-fifty power sharing between the London and Lublin Poles within a new Polish government, Stalin and Molotov refused, demanding instead that 80 percent of power be vested in the Lublin party. And, Lvov was nonnegotiable. Eden, to his diary, confessed, “And so at this time, after endless hours of the stiffest negotiations I have ever known, it looks as though Lvov will wreck all our efforts.” Mikołajczyk, who Eden thought showed “a calm courage” throughout the meetings, returned to London, promising Churchill he would do his best to bring his colleagues around. He said he hoped to return with an answer within a few days.66

  Moscow nights were filled with banquets tha
t stretched into early morning. The luminaries attended a performance at the Bolshoi Theater on October 16. It was Stalin’s first appearance at the theater since the start of the war, and for him to attend in the presence of a foreigner was even more remarkable. When Stalin and Churchill stood in their box to acknowledge the crowd, the audience erupted with a “sound like a cloudburst on a tin roof,” Eden wrote. Between acts, Churchill and Eden hastened to the restroom, where they discussed at length—or Churchill declaimed at length on—a new strategy to deal with the Poles. Eden reminded the prime minister that the show could not continue until they returned, and reminded him again, and again. When they finally returned to the box, their hosts made no mention of their absence, although at dinner the following night in Stalin’s Kremlin apartments, Stalin pointed toward a door and said, “That’s where you can wash your hands if you want to, the place where I understand you English like to conduct your political discussions.” Churchill found himself warming to Stalin, telling Clementine in a cable from Moscow, “I have had vy nice talks with the Old Bear. I like him the more I see him. Now they respect us here.”67