In the spring and summer of 1942, after Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack had brought the United States into the war and the Soviets found themselves hard pressed to hold the line against a Nazi offensive in the Caucasus, where thousands of Soviet troops were being killed or captured each day, Stalin sent Foreign Secretary Vyacheslav Molotov to London and Washington to press Churchill and Roosevelt to relieve Soviet forces by drawing off German divisions to a second front in Western Europe.
The fifty-one-year-old Molotov was a dour workaholic, who Lenin had nicknamed “Iron-Arse” because of his indefatigable work habits. “Small, stocky with a bulging forehead, chilling hazel eyes blinking behind round spectacles, and a stammer when angry,” he was “Stalin’s closest ally.” They had met in 1911 when they worked as editors for Pravda, the underground Bolshevik newspaper. A devoted Communist who was exiled twice by the czar’s government for revolutionary activity, Molotov came across to some as a “colorless bureaucrat … who always wore a suit and tie.” Leon Trotsky called him “mediocrity personified,” a man of inflexible discipline who was famous for taking thirteen-minute naps. He won favor through his dedication to Stalin and commitment to destroying any and all opponents of their power.
Although Roosevelt understood the near impossibility of launching a successful cross-Channel assault on occupied France in the summer or fall of 1942, he promised Molotov that the Allies would mount such an attack before the end of the year. In a subsequent meeting with Churchill in Washington, he and Roosevelt agreed that the best chance for a campaign that could divert German forces from Russia would be in North Africa, where the British were fighting to maintain the Mediterranean lifeline to their Middle Eastern and Asian colonies.
The conversations involving American and British military chiefs and the president’s and prime minister’s principal advisers reflected the tension everyone was under at the time, as they desperately tried to find a formula to keep Russia in the war until they could strike the Germans in France. In a meeting between Churchill and Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s principal envoy to London and Moscow, the prime minister exploded at Hopkins’s failure to consult him before seeing his staff officers, tearing pages out of a book of army regulations and throwing them on the floor as he shouted at Hopkins.
Hopkins took it in stride. Prima donnas didn’t bother him. He was a tough-minded administrator who took on some of the hardest jobs Roosevelt needed done, from domestic welfare reform to wartime dealings with Stalin and Churchill. A son of the Middle Border, where he attended Grinnell College in Iowa, and then learned his craft as a social worker in the New York City slums, he was, in one description, “a lean, loose-limbed, disheveled man, with sharp features and sardonic eyes…. His manner was brusque and studiously irreverent; his language, concise, pungent, and often profane…. He was at his best under pressure,” notable for a “you-can’t-put-that-over-on-me expression” and a talent for getting things done. Churchill valued Hopkins’s direct line to the president (in 1940, FDR had moved him into the White House) and self-confidence about finding solutions to even the most daunting problems, calling him “Lord Root of the Matter.”
Churchill’s agitation partly came from a commitment to carry a message to Stalin that his allies could not open a second front in Europe in 1942. Traveling to Moscow in August, Churchill “pondered on my mission to this sullen, sinister Bolshevik state I had once tried so hard to strangle at its birth and which, until Hitler appeared, I had regarded as the mortal foe of civilized freedom.” On his flight to Russia to deliver the bad news about holding off a European invasion until 1943, Churchill felt as if he were “carrying a lump of ice to the North Pole.” A British general said, “We were going into the lion’s den and we weren’t going to feed him.”
The Soviet leader Churchill met for the first time in 1942 had a reputation as a brutal dictator who had ruled the Soviet Union since Lenin’s death in 1924. His policies of forced collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization had modernized the Soviet Union at the cost of millions of lives. In August 1942, when Churchill asked him, “Have the stresses of this war been as difficult for you personally as carrying through the policy of collective farms?” “Oh, no,” Stalin replied. “That was especially difficult.” “What did you do with all the rich peasants—the kulaks?” Churchill asked. “We killed them,” Stalin coolly responded. Churchill said later, “With the World War going on all round us it seemed vain to moralise aloud.”
Purges of dissidents in the 1930s had added to Stalin’s image as a ruthless leader who had sent thousands to perish in the gulags of Siberia and forced the relocation of ethnic groups threatening Soviet unity by asking for greater autonomy.
As Stalin himself understood, by World War II, he had become something of a mythological or larger-than-life figure. When one of his sons tried to use the family name to his advantage, Stalin berated him, shouting, “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no not even me!” He and the Bolshevik Party had become one and the same. Stalin embodied the party’s affinity for conspiracies against alleged domestic enemies and the murderous rooting out of anyone suspected of the slightest doubts about Communist goals and power.
Born in 1878 in Gori, Georgia, Stalin was the son of a cobbler and a peasant mother. He had a tumultuous childhood, marred by an abusive alcoholic father who eventually abandoned the family, an attack of smallpox at the age of seven that left him with facial pock-marks that disfigured his appearance, a carriage accident at the age of ten that permanently injured his left arm and exempted him from military service in World War I, and a community in which Stalin participated in gang warfare. An exceptionally bright child who stood first in his class, he was awarded a scholarship to attend an orthodox seminary in Tbilisi. Although spending five years at the seminary, he rebelled against its teachings, becoming a revolutionary and labor organizer and supporting himself by criminal activities that led to three convictions and imprisonments.
In 1913, he published the treatise Marxism and the National Question under the name Stalin, “man of steel,” abandoning his family name of Dzhugashvili. In 1917, after four years in penal exile, he settled in Saint Petersburg, where he joined Lenin, Trotsky, Mikhail Kalinin, and Molotov in working to oust Alexander Ke-rensky’s provisional government, which had just overturned czarist rule. During the subsequent civil war between the Bolsheviks and the anti-Communist White Russians for control of Russia, Stalin was a political commissar in the Red Army. In 1924, in a power struggle after Lenin died, Stalin defeated the party’s Trotskyites, who favored international revolution over Stalin’s “Socialism in one country.” By the time Churchill arrived in Moscow for their discussions, Stalin had controlled the party’s apparatus for eighteen years and had transformed himself into the nation’s indispensable leader.
The man Churchill met was a brusque, self-absorbed character with limited empathy for the suffering of his countrymen, but also an extraordinary talent for reading the public mood. One of the most ruthless and effective tyrants in history, he understood that he was driven by inner demons but took solace in the thought that most other successful political leaders were also troubled by personal conflicts that made them different from people who did not reach for control over their country’s masses. In 1949, after hearing that James Forrestal, the former American secretary of defense, had committed suicide, Stalin described him as one of many “abnormal people” in public life.
There are, however, degrees and degrees of abnormality, and Stalin’s pathology put him at the far end of the scale, alongside Hitler and other ruthless murderers with extraordinary power to act out their worst instincts. Stalin was a Marxist evangelist with a paranoid personality in a paranoid world. Intrigue, brutal repression, plots, and counterplots punctuated his years in power. The purges of the 1930s did little to relieve his suspicions and his drive to destroy his perceived enemies or anyone who failed him. This i
s not to suggest that Stalin couldn’t be cunning and calculating, with a firm grip on reality, but these attributes are not consistently at odds with an untrusting mind. Stalin’s distrust of almost everyone did not prevent him from taking forceful actions that gave him an enduring grip on power at home and in dealings abroad.
During a wartime visit to Moscow of France’s Charles de Gaulle, Stalin, in a drunken scene that offended and horrified de Gaulle, toasted his comrades with banter that must have sent chills down their spines, singling out civil and military officials he promised to shoot or hang if they fell short in meeting their responsibilities. “That’s the custom in our country!” he shouted. “Noticing the distaste on de Gaulle’s face, Stalin chuckled: ‘People call me a monster, but as you see, I make a joke of it. Maybe I’m not so horrible after all.’” De Gaulle knew it was no joke. It was common knowledge that it took more courage for Soviet forces to retreat and face extermination by “interceptor battalions” positioned behind Soviet lines than to advance against the Germans.
The three men who led the Allies through the fighting were at times as much competitors as collaborators. At their first meeting in Tehran in November 1943, Churchill passed a silver cigar case to his two colleagues with the inscription “To Winston: From his fellow conservatives, 1925.” Not to be outdone, Roosevelt sent a silver cigarette case around the room inscribed, “To Franklin from his Harvard classmates, 1904.” Refusing to be one-upped by the two “capitalists,” Stalin offered them cigarettes from a case that had found its way from Budapest into his possession with the inscription “To Count Karoli: From his friends at the Jockey Club, 1910.” Was this Stalin’s way of telling his capitalist colleagues that he remained a good Communist, an advocate of redistributing wealth?
In his initial conversation with Stalin, in which Churchill explained the difficulties of crossing the English Channel in 1942, Stalin sat scowling and impatiently fidgeting as Churchill spoke; he came across as an angry scold. He doubted that he could take anything Churchill said at face value. Earlier in private, he had said, “I dislike and distrust the English. They are skillful and stubborn opponents…. If England is still ruling the world, it is due to the stupidity of other countries, which let themselves be bluffed.”
Stalin chided Churchill by declaring that “a man who was not prepared to take risks could not win a war.” But when Churchill described the air campaign they expected to mount against German cities in the coming months, Stalin brightened. And when the prime minister outlined the planned invasion of North Africa, as a prelude to a European attack in 1943, Stalin, the atheist, exclaimed, “May God prosper this undertaking.”
By the next day, however, with news of continuing losses in the desperate fighting to save Stalingrad pouring in, Stalin had turned unpleasant again, upbraiding Churchill with an attack that described the British navy as having “turned tail and fled from the battle. The British are afraid of fighting,” Stalin said, and urged Churchill not to see the Germans as “supermen.” Churchill responded with a passionate defense of British courage, reminding Stalin that Britain had fought alone for over a year before Russia or America entered the war. Churchill also complained to Stalin that “there was no ring of comradeship” in Stalin’s attitude, and predicted that “victory was certain provided we did not fall apart.”
Stalin softened at Churchill’s spirited defense of Anglo-American commitment to destroy Hitler. But to test Churchill’s goodwill, he promised to share information with Churchill’s military chiefs about Soviet military inventions and asked, “Should there not be something in return … an agreement to exchange information of inventions.” Churchill promised to “give them everything without any bargaining,” but offered no specifics.
Stalin was undoubtedly probing to see if Churchill would tell him anything about Anglo-American efforts to develop an atomic bomb. Soviet sympathizers in the Manhattan Project had already informed Stalin of the work going forward on the weapon. A truly farsighted understanding that such a weapon would principally be used to terrorize an enemy by decimating his population centers rather than on a battlefield, where it could equally destroy opposing forces, should have persuaded the president and prime minister to assure Stalin that they intended to eliminate such weapons after the war, as poison gas had been banned after World War I.
Churchill’s failure to say anything deepened existing suspicions between the Allies. It is unlikely that even if Churchill and Roosevelt had taken Stalin into their confidence on the Manhattan Project, it would have disarmed his doubts about their future intentions toward Communist regimes. He would have suspected some trick on his allies’ part. It was not just Stalin’s personal and, more generally, Soviet paranoia that dominated their thinking. For Stalin and his collaborators, struggle and distrust were constants in their dealings with each other and the outside world. Still, a general word about Anglo-American hopes of developing a super bomb might have slightly eased some of the hidden tensions between them. It would not have required any commitment to share anything, since the A-bomb was nothing more than a hope at that point, but it could have softened some of the suspicions that the Western Allies were not as committed to destroying Hitler’s Germany as Moscow was.
Churchill ended the meeting hopeful that he had convinced Stalin of the wisdom of a second front in North Africa. “It is my considered opinion,” he cabled Roosevelt, “that in his heart so far as he has one Stalin knows that we are right.” They “parted on most cordial and friendly terms,” he also advised the president, and described himself as “definitely encouraged by my visit to Moscow…. Having made their protest,” the Russians “are entirely friendly.” He had every hope that there would be no “serious drifting apart.”
In fact, he and Roosevelt were less than certain. Throughout the fall they were filled with anxiety that the convulsive struggle for Stalingrad in southern Russia might inflict a decisive defeat on the Soviets. Roosevelt promised to speed desperately needed supplies to the Soviet front as fast as possible and assured Stalin that America’s highest priority was not an all-out assault against Japan but Hitler’s defeat as a prelude to beating the Japanese. They also urged Stalin to meet them somewhere in Africa in January to reach “vital strategic decisions” or “to determine a common line of military strategy.” Because they believed that a second front in Europe in 1943 was unlikely, or at best could be mounted in the fall on a limited scale, they wanted a face-to-face discussion in which they could ease Stalin’s disappointment by promising other offensive action that might draw off German divisions from the Russian front.
But Stalin, who explained that the urgency of the current fighting compelled him to stay home, declined the suggestion. While he certainly had his hands full with the current all-out struggle for Stalingrad, he wanted no part of a meeting in which his two allies might try to talk him out of a cross-Channel attack in 1943. In two messages to Churchill on November 28 and December 6, and another to Roosevelt on December 14, he pressed for assurances that a large offensive in the West remained on board for the coming spring.
Russian doubts at the time about their allies expressed themselves in a widely circulated Soviet cartoon depicting “six fat British generals with names like ‘Don’t hurry’ and ‘General what if we get beaten.’” Churchill sat opposite them next to two bottles of whisky. Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, the British ambassador to Moscow, who was in London for conversations in mid-December, warned that a failure to open a second front in Europe in 1943 would sit very badly with Stalin and might join with other circumstances to lead him to make a separate peace with Hitler.
Churchill and Roosevelt decided to go ahead with a meeting without Stalin in Casablanca, Morocco’s largest city, in North Africa. When the president told Churchill that he and Hopkins would travel under the code names Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the prime minister teased, “How ever did you think of such an impenetrable disguise?” Churchill “traveled to the meeting in a blue R.A.F. uniform under the alias Air Comm
odore Frankland. ‘Any fool can see that is an air commodore disguised as the Prime Minister,’” one of his companions joked. Roosevelt’s journey by train to Miami and plane to Brazil, across the south Atlantic to British Gambia, and on to Casablanca took five days.
Despite his absence, Stalin cast a long shadow over the meeting, which went on for ten days between January 14 and 24, 1943. A decision to postpone a limited cross-Channel attack until fall, when sufficient U.S. troops and a larger complement of landing craft had become available, meant convincing the Soviets that an attack on Sicily and then Italy aimed at the collapse of Mussolini’s Fascist government and a diversion of German forces to defend the Italian peninsula would be an appropriate strategy for the coming year. To make up for anticipated Soviet complaints, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to give a high priority to doing “everything short of prohibitive cost” to supply Stalin’s forces. With American military chiefs, however, warning that losses to convoys supplying Russia threatened to impede Anglo-American attacks on Sicily and across the Channel, Churchill declared his intention to tell Stalin “the facts” if the losses became “too great.”
To soften the blow that a limited assault on Western Europe would not come until autumn, Roosevelt prodded Churchill into announcing their intention to aim at unconditional surrender by the three Axis powers. It was a way to assure Stalin that there would be no compromise peace with Hitler, Mussolini, or Japan’s military rulers that would leave the Soviet Union vulnerable to future Axis aggression. Roosevelt was also concerned to blunt criticism in the United States and abroad over a decision to collaborate with Admiral Jean Darlan, the commander in chief of all Vichy forces, to head off French resistance to the U.S invasion of North Africa. In short, an arrangement with Darlan was a temporary expedient; potential arrangements with enemy leaders were out of the question.