The Allies

by Winston Groom

  When he returned from Quebec, Churchill cabled Roosevelt that he would go and visit Stalin to see what he could do.

  * * *

  ON OCTOBER 9, 1944, Churchill found himself sitting at a conference table in Moscow opposite Joseph Stalin. Present also were the ubiquitous Molotov, as well as the current U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman. Earlier, Churchill and his party had been received in “an extraordinary atmosphere of goodwill.” The Russians had presented them at the Bolshoi and the opera, and wined and dined them late into the night. There was none of the suspicion that had pervaded the Tehran Conference, nor the tension and apprehension, now that the Germans had been pushed back hundreds of miles. Churchill opened by magnanimously informing Stalin that the British “were right in interpreting your dissolution of the Comintern as a decision by the Soviet government not to interfere in the internal political affairs of other countries.” In truth, the Soviets had done no such thing, and Churchill had actually raised the issue in the manner of a hopeful question.18

  He was pragmatic enough to see that once the Soviet armies were in a country, there wasn’t a lot Great Britain or the United States could do about it. His Mediterranean strategy had been designed to get there first, at least in the Balkans and eastern Europe. But that was history now. Then Churchill did an extraordinary thing. He had arrived at what he thought was a second-best solution. “How would it do for you,” he told Stalin, “to have ninety percent predominance in Romania, for us to have ninety percent of the say in Greece, and go fifty-fifty about Yugoslavia?”

  While this was being translated, Churchill tore a sheet of paper in half and scribbled down the ratios of proportional interests in what he had just proposed, as well as similar recommendations for Bulgaria and Hungary, and then carrying on the divvying up into Europe as well. He pushed the paper across the table to Stalin, who stared without picking it up, then took a blue pencil and made “a large tick” upon it before passing it back toward Churchill. “It was all settled,” Churchill wrote afterward, “in no more time than it takes to set down.”19

  There was a long silence. “The pencilled paper lay at the centre of the table,” Churchill recalled. At length Churchill said, “Might in not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper,” he proposed.

  “No, you keep it,” the Soviet premier told him.20

  * * *

  BY THE TIME CHURCHILL RETURNED to London, the Allies were in Paris, which had been abandoned by the Germans. The city had been officially “liberated” by the French general Jacques Leclerc; de Gaulle arrived shortly afterward at the Ministry of Defense and took charge of everything, General Giraud having faded into the background. Churchill was appalled but nevertheless made a point of persuading Roosevelt that, under the circumstances, the insufferable Frenchman was the best person to lead a country so wounded and discouraged as France.

  Ten days before Christmas 1944, American and British troops advanced to the Rhine, having fought their way across all the lurid battlefields of the First World War—Ypres, Belfort, and Verdun. They were poised to cross the river but were held up by floods caused by heavy rains. On December 16, the spearhead of a large German force attacked the center of the Allied line in the heavily forested Ardennes region.

  The blow landed on four unprepared divisions of the American VIII Corps, who were in the area for a period of rest and recreation. Eisenhower and the U.S. intelligence services had suspected that “something was afoot” but “its scope and violence came as a surprise,” Churchill wrote. The German plan was to cut the Allied line in two with armor and capture the port of Antwerp, the supply lifeline of the British and American forces. The enemy assault created a sixty-mile-deep bulge that lent itself to the name of the battle.

  Bad weather kept the Allied air force out of action for the first critical week. Churchill immediately crossed the Channel and went to Eisenhower’s headquarters. Unable to offer more infantry when all he had was fighting there already, Churchill promised eighty thousand Royal Marines from the British navy. The situation was so desperate that Churchill ordered a new draft in England for a quarter of a million men.

  Eisenhower had been trying without success to relieve the pressure by having the Russians start a large offensive on one of their fronts. Churchill offered to use his personal contacts with Stalin to achieve this end. Without hesitation, Stalin came through, promising a major offensive in his central front as soon as weather permitted.

  By Christmas the German offensive had spent much of itself except for a savage Panzer attack on the 101st Airborne that was holding the town of Bastogne. When the Germans came under a flag of truce to demand the 101st surrender, General Anthony McAuliffe replied, “Nuts.”

  George Patton, meantime, was speeding the U.S. Third Army from about a hundred miles in the south to join the fray; by December 26 his tanks had pitched into the German flank. By January 16 the Allied northern and southern wings closed upon the Germans and began forcing them back eastward. The bulge was soon erased, and the enemy’s final offensive of the war was over.

  Churchill sent a large force to Greece to intervene in the vacuum left by the Germans, who were now retreating. They had left an army of irregular “partisans,” dominated by Communists fighting for control of the country. Churchill was determined that the cradle of democracy would not fall to a totalitarian regime. After heavy fighting in Athens and elsewhere, the Communists asked for a truce, and democracy, or something like it, was restored in Greece.

  This did not come without a price to Churchill. The action had “caused a great stir” in both the press and the House of Commons, and nearly undid the fragile coalition government. Churchill defended it, writing in his history of the war, “I saw quite plainly that Communism would be the peril civilization would have to face after the defeat of Nazism and Fascism…When three million men were fighting on the Western Front and vast American forces were deployed against Japan in the Pacific the spasms of Greece may seem petty, but nevertheless they stood at the nerve center of power, law, and freedom in the Western World.”21

  * * *

  BY THE BEGINNING OF 1945 both the Russians and the British-American armies were on the verge of crossing borders into Germany. To Churchill, however, the political situation that was shaping up was less than satisfactory. Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia lay in the Soviet shadow, and Poland, though liberated from the Germans, “had merely exchanged one despotic conqueror for another.”

  Churchill had been pressing both Roosevelt and Stalin for another Big Three conference, and at length one was organized for February 4, 1945. It would be at Yalta, an old Russian resort in the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea, which Stalin could reach by train. This would pose a difficult journey for Churchill, who had developed a fever and was confined to bed aboard his plane—but more so for Roosevelt, who had become gaunt and haunt-eyed. Churchill confided to Harry Hopkins that, “from all the reports I have received about Yalta, we could not have found a worse place for a meeting if we had spent ten years in looking for it.”22

  Roosevelt never shared Churchill’s overpowering distaste for communism, viewing it as a sort of rough but benign philosophy for the edification and improvement of lower classes; this was also the position taken by his Department of State. Before Soviet expansion in Europe and elsewhere, before subversion in the United States, before the Communist takeover of China, and before the Soviets’ atomic bomb, Russia was an ally.

  Not only that, but the president remained mildly suspicious of Churchill’s motives vis-à-vis the far-flung British Empire, an enterprise of which Roosevelt disapproved. Though Churchill had signed the Atlantic Charter back in 1941 calling for people to be able to choose their own form of government, it did not square with colonialism and empires, and Roosevelt saw no signs that the British were
ready to give up theirs.

  Churchill had asked for a preliminary one-on-one meeting with Roosevelt before the Yalta Conference to reach agreement on how to deal with Stalin and his aggressive and expansive ideas. But the president declined on grounds that he didn’t have time. In truth, he simply didn’t want to get into intrigues with the prime minister. Europe was a long ways off across the Atlantic Ocean, and America at great cost had saved it from the scourge of Nazism. The scourges of communism were not on the president’s radar screen.

  However, the president did meet early with Churchill on the island of Malta, the prime minister having arrived in his special American C-54 Skymaster four-engine passenger plane, and Roosevelt on the U.S. cruiser Quincy. In Churchill’s words they “reviewed the whole span of the war,” from European operations, to the Pacific, to German U-boats, to the problems in Greece and the Soviet occupation of eastern European countries.

  That evening the various parties took off for the Crimea, about twenty-five hundred miles distant. Churchill arrived first and watched Roosevelt being carried down the ramp of his own Skymaster, the Sacred Cow. He thought the president looked “frail and ill.”

  Yalta, on the subtropical shores of the Black Sea, was an old czarist resort filled with palaces and palatial villas that had until recently been occupied by Germans—and before that, for twenty-five years, by the Communist elite. Some of these buildings had been damaged by the fighting, and most were musty from disuse, though the Russians had done their best to bring them up to style and comfort. Churchill’s daughter Sarah described their quarters, an 1857 vacation home to one of the Romanovs, as looking “like a Scottish baronial hall inside, and a cross between a Swiss chalet and a mosque on the outside.” The grounds were littered with scores of stone lions in all manner of habituation. The British were warned not to stray off because of uncleared German land mines still in the area.23

  Churchill opened with a hopeful toast. “The whole world will have its eyes on this conference,” he said at a small dinner party hosted by Roosevelt. “If it is successful we will have peace for one hundred years.” But that was not to be. Other than the lavish dozen-course feasts each night, washed down with “buckets of champagne” and endless vodka toasts, Yalta turned out to be a colossal waste of time. There was enough goodwill to fill a thousand Christmas stockings. But in the end all the major agenda matters were postponed. Roosevelt made the stunning declaration that he did not intend for American troops to remain in Europe more than two years after the war, and Stalin, apparently emboldened by that news, lied or prevaricated about his intentions in eastern Europe.

  Roosevelt was anxious to move forward with his United Nations scheme, but a stalemate ensued over how the “Big Four”—the United States, Britain, Russia, and China—would handle voting and vetoing. After days of haggling with Stalin, it was agreed to postpone that question for a future time.

  Churchill made valiant efforts to secure Poland for the Poles, going so far as to point out that England had gone to war over Poland in 1939. But Stalin, whose armies now occupied the entire country, obfuscated his designs and frustrated every question until everyone was ready to march off to the banquets and their relentless rounds of toasts. Roosevelt, who was obviously ill and according to Churchill had “only a slender contact with life,” was of little help. He didn’t want Stalin to feel the Western Allies were “ganging up on him.” The president, Churchill told Lord Moran, “is behaving very badly. He won’t take any interest in what we’re trying to do.”

  For his part, Stalin had at last developed an effective negotiating style to use with the Allies, which is remarkable because he’d never had to negotiate before: what Stalin wanted he got, and vice versa. One ploy was to assert (falsely) that he had to get permission from the Politburo, or the “Supreme Soviet,” or some other Communist council in Moscow, to which he was supposedly answerable. But in fact Stalin was answerable to no one. He reigned supreme.

  Another maneuver was to give way on every small issue but stonewall like hell on the large ones until everyone’s patience was so tried that the matter was postponed indefinitely. Also, he had developed his own peculiar debating definitions for such terms as “freedom” and “democracy,” which he had freely promised for Poland and the other eastern European states as the Red Army cleared out the Germans. Whatever those terms meant to Roosevelt and Churchill, to Stalin—at least when it came to Poland and the other countries that the Soviet army occupied—they meant “freedom and democracy as dictated in Moscow.”24

  * * *

  CHURCHILL RETURNED TO LONDON in time for some of the most devastating RAF bombing raids of the war. Many of these were demanded by the Russian army, which was fighting tough battles against Nazi forces on Germany’s eastern borders and was using interior rail lines to throw in troops at strategic points. The Russians wanted Allied planes to bomb the German rail hubs to prevent this. One rail center, Dresden, was firebombed by a thousand-plane RAF raid, incinerating nearly thirty thousand residents and even setting the Elbe River afire.

  When Churchill inquired about the results of the raid, he was told that Dresden had ceased to exist. This set Churchill to wonder in a memo to the chief of staff whether wreaking such destruction on Germany at this point wasn’t counterproductive. Though in the past he’d never expressed regret or moral qualms over such carnage, Churchill now concluded that with the war almost over it would be best to limit the damage to German cities and civil infrastructure to retain as much self-sufficiency as possible in the country after the war had ended. That way, the Allies would not have to spend their own precious resources coming to the aid of an utterly stricken Germany when they had their own rebuilding to do. Tens of thousands of British homes had been destroyed by enemy bombs and rockets; these continued to fall until April.

  Soviet commissars marching westward and south with Stalin’s armies continued setting up puppet Communist governments in the countries they invaded—Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia—and now they were inside Germany. It was Churchill’s worst nightmare, but there was little he could do. Even though Churchill had agreed on paper with Stalin several months earlier that in some of these countries Russia would have a majority of “influence,” Churchill never envisioned the Soviets taking over their governments entirely. He continued to bombard Roosevelt with telegrams and messages begging for Eisenhower’s armies to move into these countries before the Russians got there, but the president seemed unresponsive. At one point he told Churchill, “I do not get the point.” Churchill responded that they were being “defrauded” by Stalin.25

  When Montgomery’s British army reached the Rhine, Churchill immediately departed London for the combat front: a most unwelcome visitor. Montgomery’s terrified staff had great difficulty getting the prime minister clear of a hot firing area where enemy bullets kicked up sand and water all around him.

  At one point Churchill meandered down to the Rhine and relieved himself in it, fulfilling a promise he had made since the early days of the war. It was undoubtedly a moment of immense satisfaction for the prime minister. Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, recorded that the “Old Man” wore a “boyish grin of contentment.”26

  With the big Soviet push across Germany aimed directly at Berlin, Eisenhower’s focus was far to the south, where it had been reported—by Goebbels, of all people—that Hitler had separate armies in the Bavarian Alps that could fend off the Allies for months, if not years, in the rugged mountain passes. Ike’s strategy from the outset had been to go after enemy armies—not territory, or places. He and his intelligence advisers apparently fell for this myth, spread via radio broadcasts by Hitler’s propaganda minister. Eisenhower headed his forces there instead of Berlin.

  The Russians, however, were under no such illusions and pointed their armies straight toward the German capital. Along the way, they carried out a policy of boiling vengeance—murder, looti
ng, and rape almost unparalleled in the history of warfare. Thousands of women committed suicide, and fathers killed their wives and daughters rather than subject them to the depredations of Russian soldiers. The mayhem was horrifying and affected hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of German women.

  On April 19, Eisenhower told Churchill that George Patton’s Third Army had come across a scene of horrible degradation at a place called Buchenwald. There had been rumors of German slave-labor camps for Jews, Gypsies, and others “undesirable” to the Third Reich, but for the first time these were being discovered by Allied troops. Patton called it “the most horrible sight I have ever seen.”

  The place abounded in dead bodies, lying naked on the ground, stacked in sheds, buried in pits, and sprinkled with lime to decompose them faster. The Germans had tried to destroy the evidence. As the Allied armies neared, they forced some of the inmates to dig up pits filled with bodies and place them on what Patton described as “a mammoth griddle” composed of crisscrossed rail track set on a brick foundation. They then poured pitch on the bodies and roasted them on a fire of coal and pine.27

  There was a “whipping table” upon which men were stretched and beaten with a stick the size of a pick handle. Inmates too weak to move were lying in tiers of bunks like “animated mummies.” “When we went through they tried to cheer but were too feeble,” Patton said. In a large building with tall smokestacks, prisoners were dropped down chutes to a basement where they were strangled with piano wire, then sent by elevator to the second floor where there were rows of furnaces resembling “baker’s ovens.”28

  The American commander ordered that all citizens of the nearby town be “escorted into the camp and forced to see these scenes. After their tour, the mayor and his wife went home and hanged themselves.”29