The Allies

by Winston Groom

  Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, came by bus and by train from all parts of the Soviet Union in a tremendous outpouring for the man hailed for decades as “the greatest living human.” More than two hundred people were trampled to death trying to pay their respects to the remains.

  It had been decided to place Stalin’s corpse next to Lenin’s in a glassed-in coffin. Newspapers extolled his virtues, citing grand economic programs and the victory over the Nazis. It was written that Stalin had “been born into a Russia that used wooden rakes and left it with an atomic pile.”

  Khrushchev almost immediately began initiating reforms and innovations, most of which were kept secret from the people but that loosened the constant aura of terror always on everyone’s mind. Cultural expression was permitted to some extent. The Korean War was ended. By 1956 Khrushchev was denouncing Stalin as a monster and a criminal, which set off angry strikes, protests, riots, and an anticommunist revolt in Hungary that was put down by Soviet tanks. By 1961 Stalin had been so discredited, and so many of his misdeeds uncovered, that by secret order his body was removed in the dead of night from the Lenin mausoleum and buried below the Kremlin Wall. As far as the Communists were concerned, Stalin’s chapter in their great Marxist experiment was closed.

  If Stalin had a legacy to be proud of, it was that he’d transformed Russia from an agrarian society to an industrial one—but at a terrible cost in lives and respect for the normal human condition. Mere peasantry had been replaced by a society in which mostly semi-impoverished state functionaries lived and worked with perhaps a slightly higher standard of living. But they lived in constant fear of their lives, and were instructed to worship the Communist state—and Joseph Stalin—instead of the god of their choice.

  Life was cheap in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The “state” was everything and, for Stalin personally, power was everything. Nowhere was this more evident than in the victory over Nazi Germany. Russia had three times the manpower of Germany; Stalin simply produced infantry division after infantry division to be slaughtered before finally overwhelming the foe. It wasn’t pretty but it worked—that’s about the best that can be said for the strategy. On the other hand, as one of Stalin’s favorite Marxist-Communist doctrines held, revolutionary ends could justify even the most terrible means.

  * * *

  WINSTON CHURCHILL LIVED two decades longer than Franklin Roosevelt, and more than a decade longer than Stalin. But these weren’t years of leisure and pasture as he had most deservedly earned; they were more the playing out of a great historical drama that had run for almost a century. His life was so rich, and so filled with energy and import, that it continued to enliven and inspire (and often exasperate) anyone who came within his radius.

  When the European war ended, there remained the matter of Japan; Churchill plunged into that vicissitude with his usual vigor. The British did not take a great part in the battles that at last had cornered the Japanese on their island nation, but they had been victimized in 1942 by Japanese invasions of their colonies in Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, and Burma, featuring great loss of life, treasure, and massive incarceration of British prisoners in the brutal Japanese POW system.

  As the war against Hitler ended, the British, like the Americans, began to mobilize their troops in Europe, Italy, and North Africa for the long journey to the western Pacific and the final battles against Japan. At the same time, Churchill was alarmed that this rapid demobilization in Europe would encourage the Soviets to invade and occupy even more nations.

  In July 1945, the Big Three conference at Potsdam was meant to solve the questions of whether Stalin would accept reinstallation of the former Polish government and allow free elections in the European states Russia had occupied during the defeat of the German army. As well, there was the critical issue regarding which Allied country would occupy which part of the defeated Germany.

  On the morning of July 24 Churchill met with President Truman at Number 2 Kaiserstrasse, Truman’s residence at Potsdam, and there the final plans were made for the use of nuclear weapons against Japan. Churchill would later maintain that the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan had already been agreed upon by all parties. By this point the only questions that remained were when and where. Churchill assured the president that he favored using the weapon if it might help bring an end to the war. Truman informed Stalin later that day that the Allies had decided to use a new weapon of incredible force against Japan within the next few weeks, though he declined to specify technological details to the Soviet dictator. The Allies had been firebombing Tokyo and other major Japanese cities for some time, but a handful of targets had been deliberately spared from conventional attacks in order to demonstrate the true destructive power of the atomic bomb—including Hiroshima, which held an important military base.

  * * *

  AIR RAID WARNINGS SOUNDED in Hiroshima early on the morning of August 6, 1945. But by 8 a.m. the all-clear was given; only a single enemy plane had been sighted, and it was assumed to be on a reconnaissance mission. In fact there were three planes: the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay—piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets—and two others carrying measuring instruments and photographic equipment. The bomber’s cargo was a nuclear weapon code-named “Little Boy,” but only Tibbets, his copilot, and the plane’s bombardier knew what they were carrying. Tibbets and his crew had been training for the mission for months, and he was sanguine about it.

  Just a short while later, at 8:15, a brilliant flash and earsplitting crack just above the city erased the lives of at least eighty thousand Japanese citizens and some military personnel. Twenty thousand more would later die of injuries or radiation poisoning.

  When the atomic bomb detonated the Enola Gay was already ten miles away. But the shock wave shuddered through the plane as if it were being shaken by a giant hand. The crew had been given special dark glasses to protect their eyes from the flash that was bright as the sun itself. One of them later described the explosion and the giant mushroom cloud that followed as “awe inspiring.”

  The bombing came at a critical time in the war. The surrender of Germany on May 7 had ended the fighting in Europe, but Japan refused to concede the “unconditional surrender” that Roosevelt had called for at the Casablanca Conference in 1943. By the time of the Hiroshima bombing the Allies had conquered all of the outlying islands of Japan at a terrible cost in lives. Still, the Home Islands remained fiercely defended, with many Japanese ready to take up arms against any invaders, including various militias and reservists. General George Marshall estimated that it would cost up to 1 million American casualties to take the Home Islands by force. Marshall and President Truman had further predicted, based on a consensus of military and policy experts, that an invasion of Japan would cost more Japanese lives than atomic bombs, because a ground war would likely go on for at least two more years.

  President Truman, aware of the condemnation the United States would receive in some quarters for using the atomic bomb, was unwilling to accept the enormous U.S. casualty figures that was the alternative and he ordered the air force to proceed with the mission. After the bombing Colonel Tibbets told reporters he believed the action had saved lives by shortening the war.

  After Little Boy detonated over Hiroshima there was a wary silence from the Japanese. In fact, authorities in Tokyo didn’t know what had happened. All communications with Hiroshima were suddenly silenced. The Japanese sent a small plane with a low-ranking officer to fly down for a look-see. He came upon an enormous fading mushroom cloud of smoke and debris and a scene below of unimaginable destruction.

  Still the Japanese refused to surrender. Allied radio published accounts of the blast and threatened more to come, but the Japanese militarists were unmoved. They knew something of nuclear physics, and stupidly concluded that the United States possessed only one of the devices and would not be able to produce more for an extended period of time.

  M
eanwhile, Stalin decided at long last to declare war on Japan, hoping for last-minute territorial gains. The Allied vice was beginning to squeeze, but the Japanese held out for conditions: no Allied occupation of their country, the return of their outlying islands, no Allied trials for war crimes, and their emperor would retain his throne. For Truman, this was also unacceptable, and he ordered another nuclear attack to be unleashed on the port city Nagasaki.

  The second bomb struck on August 9. Because Nagasaki’s many hills absorbed a major portion of that blast, it was not quite as deadly as the first. Still, there was tremendous loss of life and destruction of property. The city, which existed mostly for military manufacturing, was almost obliterated.

  Emperor Hirohito finally interceded with the military and called for a surrender on Allied terms. This caused several bloody insurrections among the hard-core militarists’ ranks—but in the end the emperor delivered a surrender statement that contained two of the finest examples of understatement and overstatement ever fashioned in a single paragraph. The first was that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage,” and the other was that if the Americans kept dropping atomic bombs on Japan “it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”

  So the Japanese surrendered and lived to thrive another day. Peace once again descended upon the planet. But not for long. Stalin’s spies—notably Klaus Fuchs, an English scientist and secret Communist agent—soon turned over critical information on building a nuclear weapon to the Soviet Union.

  The Communists promptly began their own atomic bomb program, which in 1949 produced a successful blast in the desert of what is modern-day Kazakhstan. They immediately began to threaten the United States and other Allies with nuclear holocaust, and the world once more shivered at the ghastly prospect of a war not too far off the mark from Emperor Hirohito’s dire prediction.

  * * *

  THE DAY AFTER THE FATEFUL MEETING in Kaiserstrasse, on July 25, Churchill returned home to discover the election results. Then came the breathtaking news: the Conservatives had lost. Churchill was out of a job. People worldwide were astonished when the British voters suddenly rejected the man who so prominently led them through the war. Clementine said to him immediately after they received the news, “It may well be a blessing in disguise”—to which Churchill replied, “If it’s a blessing, at the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.”25

  After lunch he went into his study and composed a statement that he sent to the BBC: “The decision of the British people has been recorded in the votes counted today. I have therefore laid down the charge that was placed on me in darker times. I regret that I have not been permitted to finish the work against Japan…It only remains for me to express to the British people, for whom I have acted in these perilous years, my profound gratitude for the unflinching, unswerving support which they have given me during my task, and for the many expressions of kindness which they have shown toward their servant.”26

  The Churchill historian Brian Gardner called it “perhaps the most gracious acceptance of democratic defeat in the English language.”

  What had caused this amazing “act of ingratitude” (as one observer put it)? The immense sense of relief when the war finally ended had led people to reflect on all of their remaining privations. Food rationing, clothing rationing, coal rationing, durable goods rationing: there was almost universal scarcity, so tremendous was the effort put into the war. The opposing party spoke of the socialist utopia and railed that greedy owners of railroads, coal mines, oil and gas utilities, and other major industries were living in luxury while workingmen toiled for pittances in the mines and factories. Labour promised to socialize, or nationalize, these “central businesses” so that they would become owned and run by the state; everyone’s paycheck would go up, people were told. For the masses, it was a message too tempting to resist.*4

  Churchill spent the weekend at Chequers after the election results were announced. There, he attempted to make merry with family and friends and ward off the black cloud caused by the extraordinary political blow. They watched The Wizard of Oz and played records, croquet, and cards, but the gloom continued to hover. Finally, at Sunday dinner, Churchill (after a robust serving of good champagne) announced, “It is fatal to give in to self-pity.” He might be out of power, he said, but he was still a member of the House of Commons—and as such he would enthusiastically lead the opposition. Somebody had to lead the opposition. The notions of the Labour Party were fundamentally wrong to him, and dangerous.27

  * * *

  WHEN CHURCHILL WALKED INTO the House of Commons and took his place on the opposition bench for the first time in more than a decade, the Conservative Party members arose and serenaded him with “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Labour members tried to drown them out with “The Red Flag,” a socialist anthem. But for a change the Tory vocalists had their way.

  As a member of the opposition Churchill had few, if any, peers in speech-making abilities. And he did not stand idly by as the Labour government nationalized the coal, petroleum, and steel industries, the Bank of England, railroads, national trucking, and British Airways and installed a socialized medical system—all of which required nearly half a million new bureaucrats to oversee. These civil servants, Churchill told the House, constituted “a mighty army…that has been taken from production and added, at a prodigious cost and waste, to the oppressive machinery of government and control. Instead of helping national recovery, this is a positive hindrance.

  “The queues are longer, the shelves are barer, the shops are emptier,” he went on. “The interference of government departments with daily life is more severe and more galling. More forms have to be filled up, more government officials have to be consulted. Whole spheres of potential activity are frozen, rigid and numb.”28

  Churchill was preaching to the choir, of course, and he knew it. His tirades might have been comforting to Conservatives but Labour had a mandate, which it full well knew. No matter what Churchill said, the socialization of Great Britain rolled inexorably forward. This would not be forever, and Churchill understood this. Someday Labour would be out of power and the vast engine of government ownership they had assembled could be repealed—as in fact it was. But that was more than a decade into the future.

  To suggestions within his own party that it might be time for him to retire, Churchill had this to say to his personal physician Lord Moran: “A short time ago I was ready to retire and die gracefully. Now I’m going to stay and have [the socialists] out. I’ll tear their bleeding entrails out of them. I’m in pretty good fettle,” he thundered, explaining that it was the “Jerome side” of him—his mother’s people—that propelled him into this belligerent attitude.29

  In the meantime, Churchill concluded that he needed to reinvent himself, which he did as an international statesman, traveling to world capitals to give political speeches and urge the formation of, of all things, “a United States of Europe,” he told an audience in Zurich in September 1946. This, he explained, would unify the continent in a way “never known since the Roman Empire.”30

  This notion had become a recurring theme in Churchill’s thinking after it became apparent that the Soviet Union was going to remain in control of Eastern Europe. It was the biggest modern land grab since the German rampage, and Churchill was fearful that Stalin wouldn’t stop there.

  Churchill’s European union—including Germany—would presumably provide for a common defense, an idea that did not immediately go over well in France, given that nation’s firsthand experience of what a rearmed Germany could do. (It almost certainly, however, did not envision the present European economic union with its capital in Brussels, from which Great Britain is presently in the process of seceding.)

  In light of his decade-long rhetorical screeds against Germany it seems incongruous that Churchill was willing to invite the Germans back into the community of natio
ns. But it was completely in character. He was “remarkably free from any grudges, let alone malice,” wrote Paul Johnson, one of his biographers. For example, as bitter as his invective was against the Labour Party’s socialism, Churchill was never hateful toward individual members of the opposing party; in fact, when the Labour members resigned in 1945 against his pleas to keep the coalition government together, he threw them a champagne going-away party when their departure became inevitable. For all of his long life, Churchill had lived by a simple dictum: “In war, resolution. In defeat, defiance. In victory, magnanimity. In peace, goodwill”—and he sincerely meant it. His friend the newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook said of him, “Winston is never vindictive.”31

  On March 5, 1946, when Churchill gave a speech in the small college town of Fulton, Missouri, forty thousand people gathered hoping to get a glimpse of the famous British statesman. President Harry S. Truman, a Missourian who had succeeded to the presidency upon Roosevelt’s death, accompanied him on the podium at Westminster College. Truman had read a draft of Churchill’s speech on the train ride from Washington and predicted that it was going to “create quite a stir”—which turned out to be a vast understatement.

  “A shadow has fallen on the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory,” Churchill began, referring to the Soviet Union. “Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies…It is my duty, however, for I am sure you would wish me to state the facts as I see them, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.

  “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill scowled, “an iron curtain has descended on the Continent”—a phrase that would resonate for the rest of the century. “Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia—all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another—not only to Soviet influence, but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”