Churchill's Triumph

by Michael Dobbs

  Churchill had only just set foot in the hallway when the door was wrenched open and light flooded in. At first his eyes could see nothing but a silhouette set against the afternoon light—the cap, the greatcoat, the small frame, not much over five foot even in his built-up boots. Yet as things began to fall into focus Churchill couldn’t help but smile to himself, for crowding in behind his visitor came a phalanx of men—generals, ministers, toadies, assorted security men—who bent low and bobbed in their master’s wake like a gang of medieval courtiers. Churchill would later describe them to Clemmie as spaniels and sycophants; he heard Sawyers giggle and call them fart-catchers.

  Sawyers, the wretched man! There he was, at the door, nodding renewed acquaintance with the Marshal, as though he were meeting some fellow at a football match, and getting the first handshake as he helped the Generalissimo off with his plain military coat. Stalin was an unostentatious man for one with such rapacious appetites. One of the pockets of the greatcoat had been clearly and rather clumsily darned, and beneath it his trousers were tucked into the tops of soft boots. He wore no decorations apart from a small gold star upon the left breast of his tunic that identified him as a Hero of the Soviet Union.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you again, Marshal,” Churchill began. Stalin said nothing; he simply smiled and held out his hand. The handshake was surprisingly limp, unimpressive, little more than a passing brush of flesh. The complexion, too, was unimposing, roughened and sallow from the effects of smallpox and too many years spent locked away in the Kremlin. The hair was thinning and, when he did begin to speak, the voice that crept out from beneath the thick moustache was quiet and often difficult to hear, but his eyes made all his meanings clear. They were Oriental, penetrating, sharp, yellow. They carried no flicker of warmth. As cold as the road from Saki.

  “You are looking well, Marshal.”

  “Let us not start with a lie, Mr. Churchill. We are all older.”

  “But with age comes experience. And with experience, wisdom. Let us hope that together we can use our long lifetimes to make this a wiser world.”

  “Let’s first make sure we crush the Fascists, shall we?”

  He was not a man for poetry but, by God, he knew what he wanted. And that was one of the many reasons for the admiration and fear that Churchill felt whenever he met the man.

  “You happy here? Everything to your satisfaction?”

  “I seem to have broken a bedside lamp. But apart from that things seem splendid.”

  “Lamps? We can get lamps, as many as you want.”

  “That I don’t doubt.”

  “There is an old Russian saying—chem bogaty tem i rady—you are welcome to what we have.”

  “Then perhaps I may be allowed to offer you something in return, Marshal. It would give me great pleasure to show you my Map Room. We can see how things in the west are proceeding. May I?”

  Ah, the offensive in the west. Stalin offered a smile, yet there was no humor in it. He had spent two barren years demanding an offensive to relieve the German pressure on the Russian front, and for two years all he’d been given was excuses—“Like kids caught with their hands up their sisters’ skirts,” he had once sneered. And when it had finally arrived it seemed less like a general offensive than a gentle overture: they hadn’t yet crossed the Rhine, and a few weeks ago they’d even been going backwards. The German counter-offensive through the Ardennes had caught the Americans and British with their heads stuck in their Christmas hampers. They were forced to regroup and rearm, and to offer up yet more pathetic excuses while they watched the Red Army in the east grind its inexorable way forward. So—Churchill wanted to show him how “things in the west” were going, did he? Seemed like a good opportunity to get the proceedings off to a suitably humiliating start.

  “Da!” the Russian declared, and the Prime Minister led the way.

  Churchill took his Map Room with him everywhere. In the Vorontsov it was located in a small room beside his bedroom, where it was commanded by the admirable Captain Pim. Maps were pinned upon every wall and marked with the positions of the opposing armies in every quarter of the world. It was all there. The American slog through the Pacific. The lumbering British progress in Italy. The stalled advance upon the Rhine. Only in the east had the land been swept clean of the Wehrmacht. From Russia, of course. And the Ukraine. From Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, and, now, almost all of Poland. And while all of this was going on, Churchill couldn’t even yet claim the Channel Islands.

  As they studied the maps together, the Englishman was overcome with a sudden sense of inadequacy. He felt the need to defend his position. His hand wandered to Paris. “La belle France,” he muttered, in his execrable French, “est encore libre.”

  “And de Gaulle sniffing along behind like a dog on the trail of a free dinner.”

  Stalin didn’t like de Gaulle. Truth was, it was difficult to find anyone who did. The general had an extraordinary capacity for looking down his long Gallic nose and stirring disquiet. But Stalin’s insult wasn’t merely gratuitous: as usual, there was a point to it. “He thinks he is Joan of Arc. But unlike Joan, he has inherited his earth.”

  De Gaulle led the provisional government in liberated France, installed by the British and American armies as reward for being so consistently bloody-minded with the Germans—although in truth he was almost as consistently bloody-minded with the British and Americans themselves. He spread his disdain with a remarkable lack of discrimination.

  “You object?” Churchill asked.

  “It is a matter of no consequence. You can impose de Gaulle or Donald Duck, for all I care. If the French will not liberate themselves, they must take what is given.” He sniffed. “It is the same for Poland.”

  Ah, Poland, of course. Stalin was claiming the same rights over Poland as the Americans and British had exercised in France. Tit for tat.

  “Something we might discuss,” muttered Churchill, but already Stalin had moved on.

  “Your maps interest me. They show the British Empire in red.”

  “It is our tradition.”

  “With us, too. On our maps the Soviet Union is always in red.” Stalin’s hands wiped their way across what seemed like half the globe, from Europe to the farthest stretches of Asia, then swept slowly back to take in many new territories: the Balkans, the Baltic—and Poland. “Our maps will be bigger when this war is over.” It was a statement of fact, but it was also a challenge—or, at least, Churchill took it so. While the Soviet empire would undoubtedly expand, the British empire would not. Its day was done, its map would shrink: that was the thought behind Stalin’s remark. The spoils of war were likely to be spread thinly among those who had been there from the start.

  And once more Stalin’s fingers were racing across the map, like a composer at his score.

  “The Germans throw against us children and old men. They are armed with nothing but pop-guns and home-made mortars. Their only hope”—he stabbed his thick finger at the map—“is to concentrate their defense. Move their best divisions to the great rivers in the east, hold them as long as possible.” His finger was tracing the line of the Danube, the Elbe, the Oder-Neisse, the mighty waterways that lay before the Russian advance. “We must stop them before they can do that. Destroy their communications centers. Berlin. Leipzig. And here.” The finger stabbed forcefully down once more, coming to rest upon the city of Dresden. “Their troops will all go through here. This city is their great crossroads.” He turned to Churchill. “I request that you destroy it. Stop the Wehrmacht. Make sure they cannot reinforce the Russian front.”

  Over the years, Stalin had made so many requests, not all of them unreasonable, and the British had done their damnedest to meet them. They’d sent off desperate Arctic convoys, given up tanks they needed themselves, even ripped apart their own operational Hurricanes to make sure Stalin got the spares he demanded, but he
always wanted more, more and more. Yet now the Luftwaffe was spent, almost smashed, and the skies belonged to the Allies. They could bomb almost anywhere they wanted, with impunity, so there seemed little reason to deny him. Churchill turned to his air-force chief, Portal, who was standing in the background. The Prime Minister raised an eyebrow, the airman nodded, and it was done.

  A few days later the beautiful baroque city of Dresden would be gone, burned to the ground by the overwhelming force of the bombers, and with it would die fifty thousand, perhaps one hundred thousand people, although the devastation was so great that no one would ever know for sure. All on an eyebrow and a nod. Churchill would be troubled by that decision for the rest of his life. It isn’t known if Stalin ever gave it a second thought.

  But now the decision had been taken and Stalin clapped his hands with impatience. “Prime Minister, our time is short. We meet again. In an hour. With Mr. Roosevelt.” Already he was heading for the door. “And I shall send you someone to update your map,” he called, over his shoulder. “You are behind the times. Zhukov is another thirty miles further forward. And Chuikov already has a bridgehead across the Oder.”

  He was making a point, a boast about Soviet superiority, and they both knew it.

  “May God shower many blessings on your British advance. And may you always fight on level ground.”

  Damn his eyes! He could even twist a prayer into a taunt. But still he wasn’t finished. He looked back from the doorway. “You will forgive me rushing. The President has asked to see me before we begin. A personal meeting.”

  Only the flutter of the eyelids betrayed Churchill, but Stalin noticed. And he probably knew; Churchill had asked not once but repeatedly for a meeting in private with the President, and as many times as he had asked he had been refused. There had been any number of excuses. Yet the Russian asks to see Roosevelt and suddenly he has all the time in the world.

  The conference hadn’t yet formally started, and already Stalin was two rounds ahead.

  ***

  “Splendid view, Alec. But they’ve painted over the window-frame. Can’t get the wretched thing open.”

  For a moment Eden banged away at it, but it was a futile gesture. “Life,” he added dispiritedly. “Always filled with sticky windows.”

  He lit a cigarette, trying to fight off his dark mood and concentrate on the panorama. For all its architectural misjudgments, the Vorontsov enjoyed a captivating position. From his first-floor window the view tumbled down across newly manicured gardens to the shore far below, where a dark, smooth sea danced gently round outcrops of stubborn rock.

  “Strange to think some Jerry was standing here, on this very spot, less than a year ago.”

  Cadogan came to join him at the window. “I keep discovering pale marks on the wallpaper where paintings used to hang. The Germans must’ve taken them when they left. I ask myself why? Surely it was clear they were losing the war, that they’d never be able to enjoy their plunder. What was the point?”

  “Are you sure it was Jerry? I sense the Russians themselves have been hacking away. Every bit of bathroom furniture is new, even the lavatory cisterns. Now, I can’t imagine a German dragging away a lavatory cistern, can you? But a Russian. . . ”

  “They are the most awful brigands.”

  “Strange people.”

  “Still stranger allies.”

  “Needs must.”

  “We’re going to have our work cut over the next few days, Anthony, and not just with the Russians.”

  “With Winston, you mean?”

  “No, not him. You and I can always sweep up after him. Heaven knows, we’ve had enough practice. It’s the Americans I’m dicky about. Harry seems so listless. And Ed so. . . ”

  “Useless,” Eden muttered, through a cloud of smoke, finishing the thought.

  “But I rather like him.”

  “Everyone likes Ed. He has that charming capacity for bearing the imprint of the last bottom to sit upon him. But when it comes down to the serious stuff of doing something, he’s quite, quite useless.”

  Edward Stettinius had only recently been appointed as Roosevelt’s secretary of state. He was graceful, easygoing, and irredeemably naïve. Harry Hopkins was none of those things. This informal but hugely influential adviser to the president was a ferret of a man who worked in the shadows and survived on a diet of nicotine and intrigue. He was gaunt, waxy-skinned, desperately frail. That he was still alive was a surprise to his friends, and that he had been able to make the trip to the Crimea a matter for astonishment. It had been almost too much for him. From the moment he had arrived he had been confined to his bed, and with him he had taken the steel wire that bound the U.S. delegation together.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Cadogan conceded. “Ed is always weathercocking. You know I’d done a deal with him? We’d agreed we wouldn’t put any other issue to bed before we’d discussed Poland. Put a bit of pressure on Uncle Joe, force his hand. Then Roosevelt arrives and it’s back to square one. Bricks without straw once more.”

  Outside, the sun was beginning to settle, drawing the colors from the day. The sea became oily, the breeze brittle, mimicking Eden’s mood. Behind his elegant appearance he was a nocturnal pessimist, a man who shone for others in the daylight but who, alone in the dark corners of the night, found too few sticking places for his talents. In his own eyes he’d never truly succeeded at anything. Politics. Marriage. Money. Now he feared, at Yalta, he would find yet more failure.

  “We’ll muddle along somehow, I suppose. As always.” He sighed.

  “You know, Anthony, an uncle of mine once advised me never to go abroad. Said it was a horrible place. I’m beginning to think he was right. Last night I couldn’t find even a scraping of lemon peel. Had to take my gin-and-tonic sans citron. Bloody, I can tell you.”

  “And I fear it will get bloodier still before they let us out of here,” Eden muttered, rattling in vain once more at the stubborn Russian window.

  ***

  Three delegations, three locations. The British with their sticky windows at the Vorontsov, the Russians some distance away at the palace of Yuspov, which had once been the home of a bisexual aristocrat who had helped murder the monk Rasputin. But the grandest of the settings was the Livadia, the place reserved for Roosevelt and the American delegation.

  It was a summer palace built of sandstone and marble earlier in the century by the last Tsar, Nicholas. It contained many bedrooms. The Tsar had been said to use a different room every night for fear of assassination, sometimes changing rooms during the early hours. In the end, it had served no purpose. They had murdered him regardless. Indeed, he might have preferred to be shot in his bed rather than in that dank, dreadful cellar, but in the event the choice had never arisen.

  While the arrangements were necessarily somewhat makeshift, the delegations were met with the highest standards of Russian hospitality. These included constant military patrols in the grounds that were doubled at night and armed soldiers every ten feet to guard the water supply. What it did not include, however, was privacy, a concept with which Soviet citizens were unfamiliar. There was no escaping the presence of Russian servants, imported from the Metropol to cook, to clean, to relight fires, and to lay dining-tables—and, of course, to remake beds. It seemed to matter little if the guests were still in them.

  In a palace where there were often no doorknobs and where more than two hundred Americans had to share just six bathrooms, even the most fussy visitors had to compromise on their privacy. That included the president.

  The first plenary had shown how tired Roosevelt was. It had been agreed that all the meetings of the Holy Trinity should take place at the Livadia to spare the chair-bound President the discomfort of traveling, yet he had already come six thousand miles. He was not at his best. He had been repetitious, dull, wayward. Even the incessant supply of cigarettes had failed to stimulate h
im, and he had a worrying cough. The session had been short, little more than an hour, and nothing of substance had been agreed. Stalin had doodled with a red pen, drawing wolves, Churchill had closed his eyes and contemplated, while Roosevelt simply sagged. Like an old man.

  They had taken him quickly to his room for rest, and that was when Old Fenya had barged in with an armful of clean towels. No knocking—in the Soviet Union it wasn’t customary: there was supposed to be nothing to hide.

  As she entered she saw, lying on the silken counterpane, an emaciated figure clad in nothing but a small towel that lay across his loins. His skin glistened from the oil that his black servant, Prettyman, had rubbed in to soothe the aches and sores of sitting so long, but it served only to emphasize the wasted muscle and wafer white skin. When he coughed she could see the pain trying to break through between the ribs. The pulse in his neck throbbed in protest. From a pad on his arms protruded wires that went to a small machine, over which hovered a man in naval uniform. This was Commander Bruenn, the President’s hard-pressed cardiologist. So intent was he that for a moment he didn’t notice Fenya—Prettyman saw her, but was uncertain what to do: he wasn’t used to giving commands. Roosevelt himself slowly raised his head and stared uncertainly.

  Old Fenya didn’t need to be a physician to understand what she saw. The body was dead from the waist down, the legs little more than bleached matchsticks, and the decay was eating its way through the rest. Twenty-four years in a wheelchair would do that to a man. The eyes were sunken, purple-dark, empty pathways to the exhaustion within.

  Old Fenya was used to suffering. She’d lost one husband to the purges, another to diphtheria and two sons to the war. There had been little enough pleasure in her life and an abundance of pain, but never in one spot as much helplessness as this.

  She turned, weeping, and fled.

  ***

  There were other tears that day, but first there was laughter and excitement.

  Sarah had gone with the other girls to the port of Sebastopol. The “other girls” were Anna Boettiger, Roosevelt’s married daughter, and Kathleen, the daughter of Averell Harriman. They were known as the Little Three, and they shared the ill-defined but vital duties of smoothing parental arrangements and, when necessary, their fathers’ tempers.