by Alan Watson
What was ultimately at stake was spelled out by the British Foreign Office at the very start of Stalin’s blockade of that city. The FCO stated:
If the Soviet Government were to succeed in their efforts to force us out of Berlin, the effect would be extremely grave not only in Berlin but in Western Germany and in Europe at large. It might prove impossible for the Western powers to maintain their position at all in Western Germany if Berlin were lost to them except by heavily reinforcing the military forces there.9
Sir Frank Roberts confirmed to me many times that this was Bevin’s personal conviction. It was unequivocally Churchill’s conviction as expressed in his speech in the House of Commons in June 1948. He followed Bevin in the debate on Berlin saying ‘there can be no doubt that the communist government of Russia has made up its mind to drive us and France and all the other allies out and turn the Russian zone in Germany into one of the satellite states under the rule of totalitarian terrorism’.10 It was because the threat was so grave that the Truman administration authorised the stationing of two B29 bomber groups in Britain during the Berlin crisis. Thus, subsequent events fully justified Churchill’s 1946 crusade.
2
Churchill and Roosevelt
The relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt was a courtship without consummation. On Churchill’s side it was pursued initially with calculation and determination. There was no other choice. He drew not just from the wells of necessity but also from the depths of affection and affinity so real to him. He loved, admired and gained energy from America. Had his father, not his mother, been American he might have achieved the White House himself. He teased Congress with this thought but also teased himself. However, courtships are not without pain and Roosevelt placed daggers in Churchill’s heart. This chapter describes a relationship that ultimately and intimately failed and jeopardised the West.
The seeds of this misfortune were sown early – long before there was any relationship between the two men. Only months after his election as president in March 1933, Roosevelt had revoked America’s post-revolutionary hostility to the USSR. That November he established diplomatic relations between the two nations, signing the official agreement with the Soviet Union’s foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov.
William Bullitt became the USA’s first ambassador to Moscow. Bullitt had a background of some privilege. He was from a wealthy Philadelphian family and was educated at Yale. It was a background that appealed to Roosevelt. He also had a track record at the State Department where he had long argued for the diplomatic recognition of the USSR which, like the president, he saw as ‘a promising experiment in a new form of government’.1
Events in Moscow had persuaded him that Stalin was a tyrant, only too willing and able to rule by terror. Bullitt was sickened by Stalin’s mass arrests, and the show trials preceded by torture, extracting the confessions which then made execution inevitable. Bullitt was realistic. For him, the honeymoon was over.
However Roosevelt ‘clung to the notion that the Soviet Union would eventually develop more democratic institutions and abandon its aggressive notions of spreading communism elsewhere’.2 In 1936, the Roosevelt administration replaced Bullitt with Joseph Davies, a friend of the president’s and a generous contributor to his campaign funds. Unlike Bullitt, he was not in the least dismayed by the Moscow show trials. Indeed he reported that, like most diplomats in the Soviet capital, he believed ‘the accused must have been guilty of an offense which in the Soviet Union would merit the death penalty’ and that consequently ‘the Stalin regime politically and internally is probably stronger than heretofore’.3
When this proved not to be the case in 1941, as the German armies swept into the Soviet Union, Davies was unrepentant. He now had a fresh imperative – to urge the greatest possible flow of Allied aid to the embattled Russians. Here he was more realistic, recognising that Soviet resistance was toughening all the time and the winter could well save Moscow.
That aid to Russia was vital, and Churchill was as committed to it as Roosevelt. But their approach was different. The Arctic convoys tested and demonstrated British courage and commitment, but Churchill never viewed Russia as an ally worthy of unconditional support. The absolute priority was to defeat Hitler and that made Stalin an ally, but not a friend. Bolshevism precluded that; for Churchill, the warnings of Stalin’s menace were writ large on the battlefields and in the summits that concluded the war.
A crucial development for Churchill, both in his detestation of Stalin’s callousness and his growing frustration with Roosevelt, occurred in late July 1944. The Red Army was near to Warsaw. Radio Moscow appealed to the Warsaw Home Army to rise against the Nazis. They did, but instead of coming to their aid the Soviets halted on the Vistula. Some have argued that this was simply because ‘the Russian offensive has reached the end of its tether’ for the time being. Alan Clark, in Barbarossa, accepts this but also admits that once Stalin judged that the Polish Home Army ‘had shot its bolt’, he ordered the communist-led Polish force under Soviet control ‘to enter the battle and fight their way into Warsaw’.4
What cannot be doubted is that Stalin’s priority was to ensure Warsaw’s submission to ‘his’ Poles, and this was the outcome. The rising by the Polish Home Army, and with it all hope of a Polish democracy, was eradicated by the SS with no attempt by the Soviets to halt the massacre.
The rising was therefore wiped out, and the Poles killed or sent to camps. Churchill had implored Stalin to allow Allied aircraft to land, refuel and supply the Poles from Soviet-controlled airfields. He wrote to Stalin, ‘Unless you directly forbid it, we propose to send the planes.’ But Roosevelt would not endorse or join the appeal. ‘I do not consider it advantageous for me to join with you in [your] proposed message to Uncle Joe.’ Stalin had shown his hand but so too had Roosevelt. He was unwilling to offend Stalin who he believed could be won over by Western concessions.5
This combination of outrage with Stalin and disappointment with Roosevelt proved toxic. Churchill was unwilling to accept the accumulating evidence of both Soviet ruthlessness and presidential weakness. In his The Second World War, Churchill sought to play down the widening divergence between the UK and USA over the Soviet Union. It embarrassed him then and later but also energised his crusade. Roosevelt’s concessions to Stalin at Tehran, his slighting of Churchill at Yalta, his ceaseless attempts to parley privately with Stalin, all compounded the prime minister’s frustration and resentment. It may well have contributed to his decision not to attend Roosevelt’s funeral in Washington and certainly motivated him to grasp the opportunity to travel to Fulton with President Truman. The Anglo-American rift had to be bridged if Stalin was to be contained.
What was Roosevelt’s motivation in all this? In 1941 on the battleship Prince of Wales, when Churchill and Roosevelt met in Argentia Bay, Roosevelt shared much of his motivation with his son Elliot.6 Elliot recorded that Roosevelt had a visceral distrust of British imperialism and of Churchill whom he saw as its embodiment. Churchill was hurt, offended and enraged by Roosevelt’s unwarranted strictures on India and alarmed by his vulnerability to Stalin. But his wooing of Roosevelt was as imperative as Roosevelt’s wooing of Stalin was compulsive.
The tension in the relationship between the two Western allies vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was not restricted to the wartime conferences although Churchill’s unhappiness over Poland at Yalta must have been abundantly evident to Roosevelt. The president’s preference for one-on-one meetings between Stalin and himself demonstrated the divergence of approach that so strained his relationship with Churchill.
The differences were also evidenced on the battlefields as the war reached its conclusion, and they were not only between Churchill and Roosevelt. Others were also involved at the highest level. Churchill got on well with Eisenhower, preferring his diplomatic skill and emollient style to the waspish behaviour of his own top commander, Montgomery, whom he described as ‘indomitable in retreat, invincible in advance, insufferable in victo
ry’.7
Nevertheless, Churchill wanted one key victory from Montgomery in the final days of the war and he wanted it even at the risk of deeply upsetting Roosevelt and infuriating Stalin. Churchill was determined that the Soviets be denied the capture of Denmark from the Germans. With the Red Army poised to sweep on down the Baltics he was delighted with Montgomery’s theatrical and opportunistic triumph on Lüneburg Heath on 3 May 1945 and the extraordinary bravado of Monty’s troops in the days following.
Monty’s mobile headquarters – essentially a hub of caravans surrounded by constant activity – was to be the setting for a German surrender that the field marshal and the prime minister wanted to be seen as the German surrender, delivering to the British nearly a quarter of a million German troops including all of those in Holland, Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark.8
When the German delegation arrived at 11.30am on 3 May, led by Admiral von Friedeburg, who by then headed up what remained of Dönitz’s navy, it also included Field Marshal Busch’s chief of staff. Busch commanded the Wehrmacht’s North West Army Group, desperate to be captured by the British and not the Russians. In fact, the admiral was carrying a letter offering to surrender all the German forces facing the Russians between Berlin and Rostock. It was a dramatic if understandable move. With Hitler having committed suicide in Berlin at the end of April and the Soviets occupying the capital, what was the point of the three German armies involved resisting the British? Montgomery held to the Allied agreement. These German armies must surrender to the Russians. ‘Unthinkable,’ blustered von Friedeburg. Monty’s reply was razor sharp: ‘I said that the Germans should have thought of all these things before they began the war, and particularly before they attacked the Russians.’9
But then without a pause Montgomery asked von Friedeburg, ‘Will you surrender all German forces on my western and northern flanks, including all forces in Holland, Schleswig-Holstein, and Denmark?’ Von Friedeburg left to report to Dönitz, Hitler’s nominated successor. The next afternoon he returned and, after keeping the Germans waiting for half an hour, Montgomery accepted his surrender.
It was a triumph. Montgomery’s armies had already occupied Lübeck and Wismar. On 5 May they arrived in Kiel. The next day they liberated Holland. Within days they had freed Copenhagen. It was a stunning achievement but it threw down a gauntlet in front of Stalin. The British had pushed sixty miles across the truce line negotiated with the Russians. Eisenhower was annoyed and alarmed. A victory on this scale was ‘outside Montgomery’s remit’.10 The surrender of Denmark could only take place with Russian representatives. None were invited to Lüneburg Heath. Churchill, who did not in the least share Eisenhower’s trust in Russian assurances, was convinced they planned to take Copenhagen. He backed Montgomery and, with great reluctance, Eisenhower accepted the fait accompli.
The high drama of the closing days of the war, with its exhilarating evidence of a significant British victory and the defiance of Stalin, could not compensate Churchill for what then happened at the war’s last Allied summit – at Potsdam outside Berlin. An Iron Curtain was indeed falling over Eastern Europe and America’s successful testing of its atomic bomb could not reverse the Soviet Union’s occupation on the ground of Eastern Europe. The USSR saw all the lands occupied by the Red Army as destined ultimately to be controlled by Moscow using all the apparatus of the totalitarian Communist Party being installed country by country. The phrase ‘Iron Curtain’ was not in itself original, having been coined by Joseph Goebbels. The process was intended to be irreversible where the Red Army had conquered. But if Russia was not to advance further they could not be stopped by the sort of coup de théâtre engineered by Montgomery in 1945. What was needed was a new Allied strategy – a bold and radical restructuring of the Atlantic Alliance.
Could Churchill be given the chance to play any role in this new act of political creation? The British electorate had rejected him. His ‘black-dog’ mood threatened to extinguish his resolution.
Fortunately he remained determined to woo the USA and its president in Britain’s interest and that of the free world. After Potsdam and the British general election it seemed unlikely that the opportunity would occur, but it did.
3
Berlin 1945
The courtship of Roosevelt’s successor was not on Churchill’s agenda when he met Truman in Berlin for the Allies’ concluding conference of the war. His preoccupation was to seek and, even at this late hour, wrest some concession from Stalin over Poland. Churchill knew what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. When he deployed that phrase with such effect on his American crusade it would cause a sensation – as would his assertion that behind that ruthless division of a continent terrible things were afoot. In truth Churchill, in Berlin, already had a pretty good idea of what was happening. In Poland, and in every country the Red Army had conquered, the USSR was putting in place the essentials of Soviet control. Politicians, often nurtured in wartime Moscow and others approved by the Kremlin, were being positioned for absolute power. Opponents of the Party were being arrested. As Stalin had explained to his aides his social and political system would have an absolute monopoly of control. This was the reality. The promises he had given previously at the Yalta Conference were fiction. There would be no free elections. The people he had conquered would have no more choice of who their rulers would be than the peoples of the Soviet Union.
The conference in the Cecilienhof was to yield two surprises. It was an odd setting – a rambling, country get-away palace built in the English Edwardian style for the Kaiser’s family during the First World War. Its rooms were allocated to the three leaders and their staff. The main hall, later immortalised by the many photographs taken, was dominated by a large circular table and the three great chairs in which Stalin, Churchill and Truman took their places as the ‘Big Three’.
In the 1960s, when I made the BBC’s first documentary on the German Democratic Republic (DDR), I sat in Stalin’s chair to record a piece to camera. It was late and dark outside. I was nervous and had to record the piece several times. The East German officials and minders were far more nervous. What was happening in the pool of light thrown on the scene by the BBC’s technicians was dangerous – an Englishman, the first since Churchill and Attlee, expressing his views across this table and sitting in Stalin’s chair. In the silence, while we were waiting to record, a phone rang from the gloom in one corner of the room. Everyone jumped. It was as if the ghost had chosen to halt the sacrilege. I finished the piece: ‘I am sitting in Stalin’s chair, the very seat from which he witnessed the triumph of his post-war ordering of East and Central Europe. Neither Britain nor America could prevent this.’
And so it had been, but all was not quite as Stalin expected in Berlin in 1945. Early in the conference Churchill had left – recalled to Britain to await the electorate’s verdict. Democracy was to be stifled wherever the Red Army had conquered, but in Britain the votes of its troops hugely swelled the electorate’s rejection of Churchill. He feared the worst and experienced the most traumatic, demoralising defeat of his political life. Stalin must have found it curious. He did not expect it.
The other surprise – but he may have anticipated it – came just before Churchill’s departure. During a break in the conference proceedings Truman told Stalin that in the Nevada desert the Americans had just successfully tested a new bomb of awesome power. He did not say that this weapon could end the war with Japan, thus nullifying Stalin’s ambition to become an occupying power in post-war Japan. Even less did Truman indicate that the atomic bomb might prove the countervailing force in a Europe otherwise dominated by the vast superiority of the Red Army. Truman was characteristically modest and brief. Churchill observed the exchange closely. Stalin showed no surprise, simply murmuring his pleasure that such a weapon was now available. In truth he well knew of the possibility if not the timing. His spies embedded in the Manhattan Project had kept him informed.
Thus Potsdam was not entirely predictable. Churchill
had gone. The Bomb had arrived. A new era was beginning – one later to be named the ‘Cold War’.
Its first real test would follow three years later as Stalin attempted to squeeze the Allies out of Berlin and incorporate their sector of the city. His blockade of Berlin and the breaking of it by an unprecedented airlift led by the United States Air Force and the Royal Air Force was to prove decisive. Stalin was unable to prevent the creation of a free Federal Republic of Germany and its economic recovery symbolised by its new currency, the Deutschmark. From then on Stalin would have to react to a reshaping of Western Europe rather than determine it.
Yet for this to occur, American and indeed British public opinion had to be alerted to the Soviet threat. For containment to be acceptable ‘good old Uncle Joe’ had to be seen for what he was. In July 1945 that seemed unlikely.
PART II
CHURCHILL’S CHANCE
4
Genesis of the Journey
Churchill’s decision to travel to Fulton and make a speech was triggered by an invitation from the president of Westminster College, with a footnote written by hand from the president of the United States. How did both the letter and footnote come to be written?
