The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  At 8:30 P.M., Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and eleven others adjourned to dinner “in very good humor,” according to Bohlen’s notes. Great care had been taken not to have thirteen at table lest the number discomfit the superstitious Roosevelt. Filipino mess boys served caviar, sturgeon, beef and macaroni, fried chicken, fruit, and layer cake, washed down with vodka and five types of wine. “The world will have its eyes on this conference,” Churchill declared. “If it is successful, we will have peace for a hundred years.” The prime minister was described by one diplomat as “drinking buckets of Caucasian champagne”; Stalin sipped only half his vodka during the innumerable toasts before discreetly recharging his glass with water.

  Not until the final half hour did political issues arise, when table talk turned to the postwar epoch soon to come. “We three have to decide how to keep the peace of the world,” Stalin said, “and it will not be kept unless we three decide to do it.” Surely it was “ridiculous to believe that Albania would have an equal voice with the three great powers who had won the war,” he continued, adding that the Soviet Union would “never agree to have any action of the great powers submitted to the judgment of the small powers.”

  Roosevelt agreed that “the great powers bore the greater responsibility,” and should dictate the peace. But smaller nations could hardly be ignored. “We have, for instance,” he said, “lots of Poles in America who are vitally interested in the future of Poland.”

  “But of your seven million Poles, only seven thousand vote,” Stalin interjected, apparently concocting his statistics from thin air.

  Great nations, Churchill declared, “should discharge their moral responsibility … with moderation and great respect for the rights of the small nations.” Rising to his feet, he proposed a toast to “the proletariat masses of the world,” then added, “The eagle should permit the small birds to sing and care not wherefore they sing.”

  Shortly after eleven P.M. the gathering dissolved. Much work lay ahead, but president, prime minister, and marshal agreed they had made a good start. Not everyone agreed. “A terrible party I thought,” Anthony Eden noted in his diary. “President vague and loose and ineffective.” Churchill had “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.”

  * * *

  Stalin’s attitude toward Germany was far grimmer. He made this clear when the conference reconvened late Monday afternoon, February 5. “I should also like to discuss … the dismemberment of Germany,” he told Roosevelt and Churchill, reminding them that at Teheran the president had proposed carving the Fatherland into five lesser states. “Hasn’t the time come for decision? If you think so, let us make one.”

  “We are all agreed on dismemberment,” Churchill said, “but the actual method, the tracing of lines, is much too complicated a matter to settle here in five or six days. It requires very searching examination of geography, history, and economic facts.… We reserve all rights over their land, their liberty, and their lives.… It is not necessary to discuss it with the Germans.”

  “No,” Stalin agreed, “simply to demand from them.”

  Roosevelt asserted that he still favored “the division of Germany into five or seven states,” but in fact the Anglo-Americans had backed away from such draconian solutions since their brief flirtation the previous fall with Henry Morgenthau’s agrarian scheme.

  “We are dealing with the fate of eighty million people and that requires more than eighty minutes to consider,” Churchill said. Whatever the Allies decided must not leak to the enemy, he added. “Eisenhower doesn’t want that. That would make the Germans all the harder. We should not make this public.”

  “No,” Stalin said, a cigarette jutting from his mustache, “these questions for the moment are only for us. They should not be public until the time of surrender.”

  Glancing at a note slipped to him by Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt proposed deferring the matter until the three foreign ministers could devise a method for secretly studying dismemberment options. On the related issue of how postwar Germany should be occupied, the president observed that zones had been agreed upon by the European Advisory Commission in London but not yet approved by the Big Three governments. With a shuffle of paper he passed around a crude, hand-drawn map showing the tripartite division of Germany, including a jointly administered Berlin.

  Churchill now raised the question of giving France an occupation zone, perhaps carved from the British and U.S. sectors, since the “French might be able to be of real assistance” in a protracted postwar period.

  How long would U.S. forces likely remain in Europe? Stalin asked Roosevelt. “I can get the people and Congress to cooperate fully for peace but not to keep an army in Europe for a long time,” the president replied. “Two years would be the limit.”

  “Germany should be run by those who have stood firmly against Germany and have made the greatest sacrifices,” Stalin said. “We cannot forget that in this war France opened the gates to the enemy.”

  Churchill could hardly let the marshal’s shabby amnesia pass unchallenged. (“He loves France like a woman,” Moran told his diary later that evening.) But rather than remind Stalin of his 1939 nonaggression pact with Hitler, and of Moscow’s congratulatory telegrams to Berlin following every subsequent Wehrmacht victory, the prime minister slyly mused that every nation had “difficulties in the beginning of the war and made mistakes.” In postwar Europe, he insisted, “France must take her place.”

  But who should pay for the catastrophe? Much of the Soviet Union lay in ruins—Roosevelt and Churchill had seen that for themselves in the Crimea—and rebuilding would require many years. Since shortly after the German invasion in 1941, Stalin had pressed for reparations. Now, he said, the Soviets had a specific plan: German heavy industry would be reduced by 80 percent through confiscation of aviation plants, synthetic-oil facilities, and the like, and the Soviet Union would require payment from Berlin of $1 billion in German goods annually for a decade, with a like sum to the Anglo-Americans.

  On this issue, too, Washington and London had second thoughts. Roosevelt said the United States now coveted nothing from postwar Germany. (U.S. officials privately estimated that whatever German assets survived the war would be worth at most $200 million.) Yet he also did not want Germans to have a higher living standard than the Soviet people. Churchill’s opposition was stouter; privately he considered Stalin’s reparations plan “madness.” Germany, like France, would be an important counterweight to Soviet power in Europe, and he was also reluctant to bankrupt a future trading partner.

  Recalling the oppressive conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the prime minister told Stalin that he was “haunted by the specter of a starving Germany.” If the victors wanted a German dray horse to pull their wagon, he added, they “would at least have to give it fodder.” Stalin scoffed. “Care should be taken,” he said, “to see that the horse did not turn around and kick you.” This matter was likewise deferred: a commission would be appointed to examine reparation issues.

  * * *

  On it went for six more days of hammer-and-tongs work, the three leaders and their lieutenants like smiths attempting to forge a new world. Roosevelt privately complained of Churchill’s protracted monologues—“now we are in for ½ hour of it,” the president scribbled on a notepad when the prime minister launched into another allocution. As Churchill’s rhetoric soared, swooped, and pirouetted, Air Marshal Portal reported, “he ran away from the interpreter & was untranslatable.” Other delegates sought brief respites from the conference hall. One evening the U.S. chiefs watched National Velvet, a new film starring Mickey Rooney and a twelve-year-old actress named Elizabeth Taylor. Moran visited the villa once owned by his fellow physician Chekhov, admiring a wooden stethoscope and a bronze bust of Tolstoy. A clutch of British generals toured Crimean War battlefields, where Brooke attempted to make sense of the Light Brigade’s char
ge at Balaclava by thumbing through old maps and a guide to the campaign.

  Back at the Villa Livadia, no issue occupied the Argonauts more than Poland’s fate, which was discussed in seven of the eight plenary sessions. The United States and Britain currently recognized a Polish government-in-exile in London—“a decent but feeble lot of fools,” in Churchill’s opinion—while Moscow supported a provisional, pro-Soviet regime in Warsaw. “If we separate still recognizing different Polish governments, the whole world will see that fundamental differences between us still exist,” Churchill asserted. “The consequences will be most lamentable.” Some 150,000 Polish soldiers fought alongside the Western Allies, but with ten million Red Army troops in eastern Europe and all of Poland now occupied, Stalin held trump.

  Rising from his chair, Stalin called Poland “the corridor through which the enemy passed into Russia. Twice in the past thirty years our enemies, the Germans, have passed through the corridor.” Unpersuaded, Churchill reminded the marshal that Britain had gone to war in 1939 to restore Polish sovereignty. “We could never be content with any solution that did not leave Poland a free and independent state,” he said. Roosevelt, seeking to mediate, asked the Soviets, “How long will it take you to hold free elections?” Molotov replied: “Within a month’s time.”

  In the event, elections would not be held in Poland for two years, and they were hardly free. But no confrontation short of armed conflict was likely to reverse Stalin’s conviction that stupendous Soviet losses in the Great Patriotic War had purchased the right to determine eastern Europe’s political contours, as the historian Warren F. Kimball would later observe. “All the Balkans except Greece are going to be Bolshevized, and there is nothing I can do to prevent it,” Churchill had lamented even before Yalta. “There is nothing I can do for poor Poland either.” Poland’s eastern and western borders eventually would be shifted west. By annexing eastern Poland—an area roughly the size of Missouri—the Soviet Union gained a wider buffer; in turn, much of Pomerania, East Prussia, and Silesia would be peeled away from Germany and appended to western and northern Poland. Following the war, Soviet puppets would rule in Warsaw, and the Red Army troops who had reentered Poland in 1944 subsequently remained for almost half a century. “Terrible and humbling submissions must at times be made to the general aim,” Churchill later wrote.

  For Roosevelt, two paramount concerns shaped his views on Poland and other matters. The first reflected a January memorandum from the Joint Chiefs, declaring that prompt Soviet entry into the war against Japan “is necessary to provide maximum assistance to our Pacific operations.” In the Philippines, MacArthur had yet to capture Manila. In the central Pacific, the next American assault—against the flyspeck island of Iwo Jima—was not scheduled until mid-February. In Burma, the British remained months away from capturing Rangoon. And in New Mexico, there was no guarantee that the atomic bomb, a secret not shared with Moscow, would work. If the Pacific war were to last eighteen months after the victory in Europe—with huge American casualties, as feared by the Pentagon—Soviet help in tying down the Japanese in Manchuria and providing air bases in eastern Siberia would be vital to the Joint Chiefs. By entangling Moscow in Asia, the United States might also curb Soviet ambitions in Europe.

  Stalin at the Teheran conference had tentatively committed the Soviet Union to war against Japan; now he firmly agreed to shift twenty-five divisions to the Far East and provide additional military aid within three months after Germany’s surrender. In exchange, Moscow would receive territories lost by imperial Russia in 1905 after the Russo-Japanese War, plus the Kuril Islands and guarantees regarding ports and railroads in the Far East. These penalties and others to be imposed by the Western Allies would ensure that Japan forfeited its entire empire. To preserve the illusion of Soviet neutrality in the Pacific and to forestall a preemptive Japanese attack, the agreement, formally signed on February 10, would for now remain secret, locked in a White House safe. Chagrined U.S. negotiators complained that in “trading with the Russians you had to buy the same horse twice.”

  The second issue preoccupying Roosevelt, and the matter nearest his heart, was creation of a world organization capable of keeping the peace by balancing the security requirements of the great powers against the rights of small nations. He entertained what one adviser termed “pet ideas” of building strategic military bases around the globe controlled by what he called the “United Nations”; the U.N. would keep the United States committed to the wider world after the war, and offer a forum for Soviet engagement with the West. An elite security council within the organization would give smaller nations a voice while providing the great powers with a veto. Earlier discussions on the United Nations had stumbled over the precise configuration of that council, and over Moscow’s insistence on individual memberships for all sixteen Soviet republics. Molotov at Yalta agreed to pare the number to two or three extra votes. “This is not so good,” Roosevelt wrote, likening the demand to giving individual membership to all forty-eight U.S. states. But in the end he relented, ceding Moscow two extra votes in a future general assembly, for Ukraine and Belorussia, in addition to a seat on the security council for the Soviet Union. This deal also would remain secret.

  * * *

  ARGONAUT staggered to an end. They were “tired all through,” in Churchill’s phrase, not least from two more grand banquets that closed out the conference. Stalin hosted the first, at nine P.M. on February 8, in the Yusupov Palace, a Moorish Revival villa once owned by the prince who had helped orchestrate Rasputin’s murder. Bohlen counted forty-five toasts, while mosquitoes stung exposed ankles under the table and one inebriant repeatedly barked, “Drink it down!” Stalin hailed Churchill as “the bravest governmental figure in the world … a man who is born once in a hundred years.” Churchill in return called Stalin “the mighty leader of a mighty country.… We regard Marshal Stalin’s life as most precious to the hopes and hearts of all of us.” The prime minister invoked a beguiling image of “standing on the crest of a hill with the glories of the future possibilities stretching before us.”

  Roosevelt, who had tossed down two cocktails before dinner, toasted Stalin as the “chief forger of the instruments which had led to the mobilization of the world against Hitler”; “the atmosphere of this dinner,” he added, “[is] that of a family.” Guests hopped around the table clinking glasses; only the foolish had failed to heed Russian advice to coat their stomachs with butter and oily salmon before the first sip of vodka. A huge man in a black alpaca jacket stood behind Stalin’s chair, advising the marshal on what to eat and drink. When Roosevelt asked the identity of a pudgy Soviet guest sporting pince-nez, Stalin replied, “Ah, that one. That’s our Himmler.” It was Lavrenty P. Beria, the sadistic murderer and rapist who served as chief of the secret police.

  Churchill hosted the final dinner at the Villa Vorontsov on Saturday, February 10, the last night of ARGONAUT. Soviet agents arrived early to peer behind the walls and under the table, flipping chairs and chests. A British honor guard in regimental finery lined the front steps to welcome the nine guests; for half an hour the three leaders loitered in Churchill’s map room, studying battle lines east and west. Churchill broke into song, a rousing version of “When We’ve Wound Up the Watch on the Rhine,” and Roosevelt joked, “This singing by the prime minister is Britain’s secret weapon.” During the lavish meal—the menu included sturgeon in aspic, suckling pig, white fish in champagne, mutton shashlik, wild goat of the steppes, quail, and partridge—Churchill stood and lifted his glass to Stalin. “The fire of war has burnt up the misunderstandings of the past,” he said. “We feel we have a friend whom we can trust.” The president added, “We are here at Yalta to build up a new world, which will know neither injustice nor violence, a world of justice and equity.” Stalin daubed his eyes with a handkerchief. As he departed the villa behind his booted bodyguards, the British staff gathered in the foyer to be led by their prime minister in three rousing cheers for the marshal. Hip, hip, h
ooray!

  They were done. A communiqué approved by the three leaders on Sunday morning affirmed their “sacred obligation” to maintain in peace the same Allied unity that had prevailed in war. A “declaration on liberated Europe” within the statement also endorsed “a world order under law” and “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” “We will meet again soon, in Berlin,” Roosevelt told Stalin in a farewell from the Villa Livadia at 3:45 P.M. He gave the marshal a book titled Target: Germany, published by the Army Air Forces, with vivid photographs of bomb damage. Two Russian servants arrived bearing Georgian wine, caviar, butter, oranges, and tangerines for the Americans. Stalin also promised to ship to Washington the desk Roosevelt used at Livadia because he had “worked so hard there.”

  Churchill had begun the day in a querulous mood, sourly singing snatches of “The Soldiers of the Queen” after breakfast. He lamented both his failure to safeguard Poland—he decried the communiqué as “this bloody thing”—and the unmistakable decline of British influence in shaping the postwar world. But the prospect of sailing home from Sevastopol aboard Franconia cheered him. A former chef from the Queen Mary had been press-ganged to cook on the return voyage, and Stalin’s couriers delivered bulging hampers of gifts: seven kilos of caviar, seventy-two bottles of champagne, eighteen bottles of vodka, a case of chocolate, seven cases of fruit, and various wines, liqueurs, and cigarettes.