The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  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 charge 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.”
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br />   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, hooray!

  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.

  “Papa, genial and sprightly like a boy out of school, his homework done, walked from room to room saying, ‘Come, come on,’” wrote Sarah Churchill. Stalin, she added, “like some genie, just disappeared.”

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  “I am a bit exhausted but really all right,” Roosevelt wrote Eleanor as he headed back to Washington. His spirits were high enough to mimic both Stalin, in a faux Slavic accent—“I had not thought of it. It is a good idea. I will sign”—and Churchill, whom he imitated putting up his hands defensively, like a boxer on the ropes. “Churchill is acting now as if he is always afraid of getting hit,” the president said. But there would be no rest for the weary, not yet. After a night aboard a Navy ship in Sevastopol, Roosevelt boarded the Sacred Cow at Saki airfield on Monday morning, February 12, and flew to Egypt. He had proposed a rendezvous with De Gaulle in Algiers, but the Frenchman—said by the U.S. embassy in Paris to be “in a sulky mood” at being excluded from ARGONAUT—brusquely declined.

  Instead the president again boarded Quincy, moored adjacent to the Suez Canal, and welcomed a succession of potentates whose influence, he suspected, would expand in a postwar, postcolonial world. First came young King Farouk I of Egypt, wearing a fez and sunglasses, followed by the diminutive Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, and descendant of Solomon and Sheba. Finally the destroyer U.S.S. Murphy pulled along Quincy’s starboard flank to deliver the imposing, black-robed King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, with an entourage that included a fortune-teller, a food taster, bodyguards carrying scimitars, a royal coffee server and his deputy, nine slaves, and a herd of sheep whose numbers diminished with each bloody butchering on Murphy’s fantail. A Navy navigator provided bearings to Mecca for the proper positioning of prayer rugs. The king presented Roosevelt with a gold knife, perfume, and Arab robes, including “harem attire” for Eleanor; the president reciprocated with a wheelchair—the monarch was barely ambulatory—and a supply of penicillin. “2 Kings & 1 Emperor in 2 days,” Roosevelt wrote his secretary. “All goes well but again I need sleep.”

  Escorted by a cruiser and seven destroyers, Quincy steamed for home. The president spent much of the voyage basking in a sun with little power to brighten his eye or bronze his cheek. “He had,” as Churchill would write in his memoir, “a slender contact with life.” At nine A.M. on February 28, he would arrive back at the White House, completing a journey of 13,842 miles. “It’s been a global war,” he told Eleanor, “and we’ve already started making it a global peace.”

  * * *

  “We really believed in our hearts that this was the dawn of the new day we had all been praying for,” said Harry Hopkins, who suffered from liver disease and had less than a year to live. “We were absolutely certain that we had won the first great victory of the peace.” Other delegates shared his exuberance. “For what we have gained here,” Marshall said, “I would have gladly stayed a whole month.” Even Brooke was chipper, telling his diary, “Conference is finished and has on the whole been as satisfactory as could be hoped for, and certainly a most friendly one.”

  Roosevelt and Churchill warranted Marshal Stalin’s good faith. “Stalin doesn’t want anything other than security for his country,” the president said. “He won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.” The prime minister would tell his war cabinet, “Stalin I’m sure means well to the world and Poland.… He will not embark on bad adventures.” He added, “I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin,” whom he had called “that great and good man.”

  Public reaction was overwhelmingly favorable once the joint communiqué revealed the first details of ARGONAUT. The New York Times claimed the agreements “justify and surpass most of the hopes placed on this fateful meeting.” Polling results given the White House in mid-March would show that only 11 percent of Americans surveyed deemed the conference “unsuccessful”; although 38 percent knew too little to have an opinion, a solid majority agreed that the Polish arrangement was “about the best that could be worked out.” In a spasm of optimism, Time averred that “all doubts about the Big Three’s ability to cooperate in peace as well as in war seem now to have been swept away.”

  Within weeks the bloom had left the rose. Churchill sat listening to The Mikado on a gramophone, lamenting “the shadows of victory” and fretting that he had trusted Stalin as Neville Chamberlain had once trusted Hitler. “We had the world at our feet,” he mused. “Twenty-five million men marching at our orders by land and sea. We seemed to be friends.” Provisional agreements made at Yalta soon came unstitched. The Western Allies effectively scuttled the deal t
o dismember Germany and to extract reparations collectively. Moscow in turn consolidated its grip on eastern Europe, installing a Communist regime in Bucharest and deporting tens of thousands of ethnic Germans to the Ural Mountains as slave laborers. Polish leaders deemed anti-Soviet were arrested in utter disregard of the “declaration on liberated Europe”; exiled Poles in London decried the “partition of Poland, now accomplished by her allies.” The sentimentality of ARGONAUT quickly faded, along with delusions that Russian xenophobia and Leninist dogma could be sweet-talked away. Marshall alerted the Joint Chiefs to reports of “increasing Russian non-cooperation with U.S. military authorities,” and Roosevelt would complain in mid-March, “We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” To a friend in Washington he added, “I didn’t say the result was good. I said it was the best I could do.”

  Recriminations followed, inflamed by the eventual revelation of secret concessions regarding United Nations membership and the enticements that had induced Moscow to make war on Japan. A stigma soon stained Yalta, “a connotation of shameful failure, if not outright treason,” as one British historian wrote, “matching that attached to the Munich Conference of September 1938.” For decades the Western delegates would be blamed for everything from the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe to the rise of Communist regimes in China, northern Korea, and Indochina.

  Roosevelt’s frailty came to be seen as both the proximate cause of craven negotiating and a metaphor for the West’s weak answer to Stalin’s belligerence. “The shrewdness has gone, and there is nothing left,” Moran wrote of Roosevelt during the conference. “The president’s opinions flutter in the wind.” Yet those working in closest proximity found, as Churchill later told the Commons, “an extraordinary effort of the spirit over the flesh, of willpower over physical infirmity.” The president evinced both a reasonable command of complex issues and, the historian S. M. Plokhy would write, “his trademark ability to make alliances, strike deals, and maneuver in order to achieve his main goals.” Eden wrote that although Roosevelt “gives the impression of failing powers … I do not believe that the president’s declining health altered his judgment.” Photos from Yalta would show a wasting man, gray and thin; U.S. Navy color movie footage shows a man indeed gray and thin, but also animated and plainly alert. Reporters ferried to the Quincy for the 992nd press conference of Roosevelt’s presidency found him articulate, droll, and quick; asked whether the conference had laid a foundation for an enduring peace, Roosevelt replied, “I can answer that question if you can tell me who your descendants will be in the year 2057.… We can look as far ahead as humanity believes in this sort of thing.”