The Allies
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*1The FBI file asserts that Army counterintelligence officers who were surveilling Lash because of his radical associations made a recording of the two having intercourse in Lash’s Chicago hotel room. Some historians and experts have questioned the veracity of the account.
*2There had been talk of deporting the population of Ukraine—all 50 million people—but it was dropped after calculations showed there were insufficient rail facilities.
*3It has been said by various sources that Beria’s successor at the secret police, now known as the KGB, stuffed rags into his mouth to keep him from screaming before he shot him between the eyes. Interestingly, all of the Soviet secret police heads, leading back to the 1917 revolution, had also been executed by their successors.
*4Many companies were nationalized under the Labour government during the late 1940s. Many of these were “privatized” once more under the government of Margaret Thatcher, 1979–1990.
*5German prisoners had been used to look after the place during the war.
*6It would not be published for another decade.
EPILOGUE
Today Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin appear almost like dinosaurs: giants who ruled the earth in their time. Although the passing years fade their memories, they can never diminish the impact these three leaders had on the world. Two of them were good, honest men who suppressed pangs of regret for sending millions of men into battles where death was a constant companion. The third—Stalin—seems to have had no pangs of regret to suppress. But he was nevertheless steadfast in holding the line against the likes of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi hordes.
Although Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s lives were forged in the crucible of the shared British and American experience of the First World War—Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy and Churchill as first lord of the British Admiralty—their countries were far from natural allies. The Americans had fought the British in a war of rebellion and revolution, and again thirty years later over some of the same issues. Forty-five years after that, during the American Civil War, Great Britain entertained strong notions of siding with the Confederacy against the United States, and declined to do so only as the tide of battle turned against the South. One might have thought from this past record that Americans would have recoiled from association with anything British. But fifty-two years after the Civil War the two nations were fighting side by side against the Germans in the squalid trenches of the Western Front. War, like Shakespeare’s “misery,” makes strange bedfellows.
Stalin sat out the Great War in a Siberian camp to which he’d been banished by forces of the czar. When danger arose twenty years later as Hitler’s cult gripped an aggressive Germany, Stalin became an eager ally of the vicious Nazi regime until Hitler stabbed him in the back by attacking the Communist empire. During this time the United States sat by as a “neutral” nation until it, too, was drawn into the struggle when the Japanese attacked Hawaii.
Given this tangled web of diplomatic relations it would be surprising if any of these three men fully trusted the others. And indeed they did not. Roosevelt distrusted the British because of their colonial empire, of which America had once been a part. Churchill distrusted the Americans’ commitment to the European war and he detested Stalin’s Soviet Communist state. Stalin, who had risen to the top by killing off his opposition, distrusted everyone.
They nevertheless found themselves inextricably bound as the war progressed. Churchill was a hands-on style of leader who didn’t order his commanders to attack or withdraw by certain dates or times. But he let his feelings and wishes be known, and he visited the battle areas as much as possible. He was able to influence Roosevelt to invade North Africa and join the Sicilian and Italian campaigns (these last two were for better or worse as the Allies were still fighting the Germans in northern Italy when the war ended). But Churchill was a terrific wartime leader; his stirring radio speeches resound clearly today with a resolve and bellicosity that saw the British people through the worst of the aerial Blitz and other indignities.
Roosevelt, on the other hand, acted more like a referee, deferring most decisions to George Marshall, his military chief of staff, but reserving the final say for himself. It was Roosevelt, for example, who decided in 1942 to join the British and invade North Africa, when his generals sought instead to concentrate everything on a cross-Channel invasion of France. And it was Roosevelt who decided—against the wishes of his U.S. Navy commanders—to let Douglas MacArthur invade the Philippines in 1944.
Stalin was a strange but tenacious wartime leader. He deferred to but distrusted Zhukov, by far his best general. He made few wartime speeches, even while the entire Communist system arrayed itself along a flood of propaganda. One thing about a dictator is that he gets to make the rules, and Stalin made rules that would cause even Nazis to cringe—including summary execution of retreating soldiers and banishment of prisoners of war and their families. He even denied having a son when his son was captured by German soldiers. In the end, Stalin had the luxury—if that is the word for it—of such excessive manpower that he could sacrifice whole armies to the Germans just because he had more whole armies waiting in the wings to finish the job.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Stalin was his ability to hang on as dictator of Soviet Russia amid the conniving gang of ambitious cutthroats who made up the Soviet government. In fact, he was able to develop such a cult of leader worship that his death brought genuine tears to the masses. It was only after his crimes were exposed and he was publicly denounced that the Russian people realized the truth.
Whatever the underlying makeup, these three men presided over three of the most powerful countries on the planet. Together, they saw and lived through the deadliest conflict in history from its beginning until its end. Even Roosevelt, who died a month before Germany surrendered, had the satisfaction of knowing that the end was coming. Each in his own way had high hopes for the brave new world that would arise from the ashes.
NOTES
Chapter One
1. William Manchester, The Last Lion, vol. 1, Visions of Glory (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983).
2. Winston Spencer Churchill, My Early Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996 [1930]).
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Randolph S. Churchill, companion, part 1 (documents) to vol. 1, Winston Churchill (London: Heinemann, 1967).
6. Ibid.
7. Randolph Churchill, companion, vol. 1, part 1, Winston Churchill.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Churchill, My Early Life.
12. Ibid.
13. Randolph Churchill, companion, part 1, Winston Churchill.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Manchester, Last Lion, vol. 1.
18. Randolph Churchill, companion, part 2 to vol. 1, Winston Churchill.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Churchill, My Early Life.
23. Quoted in Manchester, Last Lion, vol. 1.
24. Churchill, My Early Life.
25. Randolph Churchill, companion, part 2, Winston Churchill; Manchester, Last Lion, vol. 1.
26. Dennis Kincaid, British Social Life in India (London: Routledge, 1973).
27. Churchill, My Early Life.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.; Randolph Churchill, companion, part 1, Winston Churchill.
30. Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malak and Field Force (London: Longman, 1898); Con Coughlin, Churchill’s First War (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2014).
31. Churchill, My Early Life.
32. Ibid.; Churchill, Malakand Field Force.
33. Churchill, Malakand Field Force.
34. Ibid.
35.
Ibid.
36. Churchill, My Early Life.
37. Ibid.; Churchill, Malakand Field Force.
Chapter Two
1. Churchill, My Early Life; Churchill, Malakand Field Force.
2. Randolph Churchill, companion, part 2, Winston Churchill.
3. Ralph G. Martin, Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969); Churchill, My Early Life.
4. Martin, Jennie; Churchill, My Early Life.
5. Randolph Churchill, companion, part 2, Winston Churchill; Churchill, My Early Life.
6. Churchill, My Early Life.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Winston Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (London: Longman, 1899); Churchill, My Early Life.
10. Churchill, River War; Churchill, My Early Life.
11. Frederick Woods, ed., Young Winston’s Wars: The Original Despatches of Winston S. Churchill War Correspondent, 1897–1900 (New York: Viking, 1973).
12. Woods, Young Winston’s Wars.
13. Churchill, My Early Life.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Randolph Churchill, companion, parts 1 and 2, Winston Churchill; Churchill, My Early Life.
18. Randolph Churchill, companion, part 2, Winston Churchill; Churchill, My Early Life; Simon Read, Winston Churchill Reporting (Boston: Da Capo, 2015).
19. Read, Churchill Reporting.
20. Churchill, My Early Life.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid. (The account of Churchill’s escape is taken from his autobiography and from his contemporary dispatches to the Morning Post, which are substantially similar except where noted. Supporting documents, including a reward poster, are contained in his son’s biography, part 2. These are by far the most reliable primary evidences of what occurred.)
24. Manchester, Last Lion, vol. 1.
Chapter Three
1. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (New York: Knopf, 2007). Montefiore has done by far the most exhaustive academic research into the Tiflis robbery of 1907 and I have relied on his account above various news stories of the day.
2. Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin (New York: Doubleday, 1996); Montefiore, Young Stalin.
3. Radzinsky, Stalin.
4. Montefiore, Young Stalin.
5. Ibid.
6. Ronald Hingley, Joseph Stalin: Man and Legend (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974); Emil Ludwig, Stalin (New York: Putnam, 1942).
7. Hingley, Joseph Stalin.
8. Ibid.
9. Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).
10. Montefiore, Young Stalin.
11. Ibid.
12. Radzinsky, Stalin.
13. Montefiore, Young Stalin.
14. Radzinsky, Stalin.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Montefiore, Young Stalin.
18. Ibid.
19. Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913–1914 (New York: Scribner, 1989).
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Khlevniuk, Stalin.
23. Ibid.
24. Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005).
25. Radzinsky, Stalin.
26. Khlevniuk, Stalin.
27. Radzinsky, Stalin.
28. Ibid.
29. Khlevniuk, Stalin.
Chapter Four
1. Geoffrey Ward, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of FDR (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
2. Ibid.
3. Alonzo Hamby, Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century (New York: Basic Books, 2015).
4. Geoffrey Ward, Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
8. Frank Ashburn, Peabody of Groton: A Portrait (New York: Coward McCann, 1944).
9. Ibid.
10. Ward, Before the Trumpet.
11. Ibid.
12. Hamby, Man of Destiny.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Joseph Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (New York: Norton, 1971).
17. Hamby, Man of Destiny.
18. Ibid.
19. Alfred B. Rollins Jr., Roosevelt and Howe (New York: Knopf, 1962).
20. Troy (New York) Record, March 4, 1912.
21. Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2017—January 10, 2018.
Chapter Five
1. Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill, vol. 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Manchester, Last Lion, vol. 1.
6. Ibid.
7. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 1 (London: Butterworth, 1923).
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill As I Knew Him (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965); Churchill, World Crisis.
11. Bonham Carter, As I Knew Him. Italian reporter quote in Manchester, Last Lion, vol. 3, Defender of the Realm (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995).
12. Bonham Carter, As I Knew Him.
13. Winston Groom, A Storm in Flanders (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002).
14. Ibid.
15. Churchill, World Crisis.
16. Bonham Carter, As I Knew Him.
17. Paul Johnson, Churchill (New York: Viking, 2009).
Chapter Six
1. Johnson, Churchill.
2. Winston Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures (London: Butterworth, 1932).
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Manchester, Last Lion, vol. 1.
8. Ibid.
9. Johnson, Churchill.
10. David Lough, No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money (New York: Picador, 2015); Manchester, Last Lion, vol. 1; Mary Soames, Clementine Churchill (Boston: Mariner Books, 2003).
11. Lough, No More Champagne, vol. 1.
12. Ibid.
13. Manchester, Last Lion, vol. 1.
14. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).
15. Manchester, Last Lion, vol. 1.
16. Johnson, Churchill.
17. Daily Mail, December 28, 1931.
18. Manchester, Last Lion, vol. 1.
19. Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1 (London: Cassell, 1948); Roy Jenkins, Churchill (New York: Penguin, 2001).
20. Hansard.millbanksystems.com, March 16, 1936.
21. Jenkins, Churchill.
22. Edward Rothstein, New York Times, March 29, 2003.
Chapter Seven
1. Rothstein, New York Times, March 29, 2003.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Lev Lurie, New York Times, May 7, 2012.
6. Radzinsky, Stalin.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Hingley, Joseph Stalin.
10. Julianna Pilon, Wall Street Journal, April 29–30, 2017.
11. Hingley, Joseph Stalin.
12. Ibid.
13. Manchester, Last Lion, vol. 1.
14. Stalin, speech to the Politburo, November 1931.
15. Service, Stalin.
16. Ibid.
17. Hingley, Joseph Stalin.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. S. J
. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
21. Radzinsky, Stalin.
22. Kevin Kosar, Moonshine: A Global History (London: Reaktion, 2017).
23. Ibid.
24. Service, Stalin.
25. Susan Butler, My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
Chapter Eight
1. Joseph E. Persico, Franklin and Lucy (New York: Random House, 2008).
2. Ibid.
3. Jonathan Daniels, Washington Quadrille: The Dance Beside the Documents (New York: Doubleday, 1968).
4. Persico, Franklin and Lucy.
5. Ibid.
6. Joseph Lash, Love, Eleanor (New York: Doubleday, 1982); Ward, A First-Class Temperament.
7. Lash, Love, Eleanor.
8. Daniels, Washington Quadrille.
9. Ibid.; Persico, Franklin and Lucy.
10. Ward, A First-Class Temperament.
11. Freidel, A Rendezvous with Destiny.
12. Persico, Franklin and Lucy.
13. Ibid.
14. Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, An Untold Story (New York: Putnam, 1973).
15. Freidel, A Rendezvous with Destiny.
16. Ward, A First-Class Temperament.
17. Ibid.
18. New York Times, June 28, 1928.
19. Freidel, A Rendezvous with Destiny.
20. Ibid.
21. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956); Ward, A First-Class Temperament; Freidel, A Rendezvous with Destiny.
22. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957); Burns, Lion and the Fox.
23. Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Freidel A Rendezvous with Destiny; Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order.
29. Persico, Franklin and Lucy.
30. Hamby, Man of Destiny.
31. Roy Jenkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Times Books, 2003).
Chapter Nine
1. U.S. Department of State bulletin. Office of the Historian, Milestones 1921–1936, Recognition of the Soviet Union 1933.