by Lynne Olson
As it turned out, many of Churchill’s own countrymen were also upset about the prime minister’s actions in Greece, which they considered anti-democratic. Indeed, the chief government whip in the House of Commons told John Colville it was the first time he had seen the House “really irritated and impatient” with Churchill. But the British saved most of their indignation for what they considered the sanctimonious moralizing of the United States, which admonished Churchill while showing little interest in getting involved in postwar European affairs itself. In a conversation with Averell Harriman, Roosevelt had underscored that lack of interest when he said that “European questions were so impossible that he wanted to stay out of them as far as practicable.”
The Economist, an influential British political and international affairs journal, gave voice to Britons’ burgeoning sense of resentment against the United States in a scalding leader (editorial) that sparked a furor at home and across the Atlantic. “What makes the American criticisms so intolerable,” the leader declared, “is not merely that they are unjust, but that they come from a source which has done so little to earn the right to postures of superiority…. It would be insufferable enough to a people struggling through their sixth winter of blackout and blockade and bombs, of queues and rations and coldness—but when the criticism comes from a nation that was practicing cash and carry during the Battle of Britain, whose consumption has risen through the war years … then it is not to be borne.” The article—written by Barbara Ward, a young economist who later would win global prominence for her writings on developing nations—argued that Britain must put an end “to the policy of appeasement which, at Mr. Churchill’s personal bidding, has been followed with all the humiliations and abasements it has brought in its train.”
Ward’s editorial was greeted by a chorus of approval throughout Britain. “We do not mind being lectured by Americans within reason,” noted the Yorkshire Post, “but we want to know how far we can rely on them in the future for the maintenance of peace…. They freely tell us what we ought to do. What are they willing to do?” While many in the United States rejected the premise of the Economist article, a few prominent Americans said it had merit. Until the United States demonstrated a genuine willingness to share in the responsibility of creating a new world order, said Representative J. William Fulbright, “there is good reason for the skepticism of our allies.”
THE COMPOSITION of that postwar world was the main subject under discussion at the second and last Big Three summit of the war, held in the Black Sea resort town of Yalta. Once again, Stalin had successfully resisted efforts by Churchill and Roosevelt to hold the meeting at a place more geographically convenient for them. In considerably worse health than they had been fourteen months earlier at Tehran, the Western leaders found the trip to Yalta to be a heavy strain.
Both had come down with serious illnesses after Tehran. After Roosevelt failed to shake off the effects of what was thought to be a bad case of the flu early in 1944, doctors examined him and discovered he was suffering from several life-threatening diseases, including congestive heart failure and severe hypertension. Afflicted by chronic headaches and fatigue, he seemed increasingly withdrawn, irritable, and uninterested in what was going on around him, including his own successful third reelection bid. “He just doesn’t seem to give a damn,” said one aide. After a meeting with FDR, Vice President Harry Truman told an assistant, “Physically, he’s just going to pieces.”
When Roosevelt, Churchill, and their aides met briefly on the island of Malta before proceeding to the Black Sea, British officials were shocked by the president’s marked physical deterioriation since they had last seen him. His hands trembled, his eyes were glassy and sunken, his face was gaunt, his body frail. In a draft copy of his memoirs, Churchill wrote that conversing with Roosevelt at Malta and Yalta was like “talking to a friendly but darkening void.” In fact, the president had only ten weeks left to live.
According to members of Churchill’s entourage, the prime minister’s own physical and mental vitality had also ebbed significantly in the previous year. He had barely survived an attack of pneumonia immediately after Tehran, and his health never fully recovered; during the meetings at Malta and Yalta, he ran a fever and spent considerable time in bed. Like Roosevelt, too, Churchill was having more and more trouble concentrating on key wartime and postwar issues. “The P.M.’s box is in a frightful state, with scores of urgent papers demanding a decision,” John Colville wrote a few weeks before Yalta. “He has frittered away his time in the last week and has seemed unable or unwilling or too tired to give his attention to complex matters…. Result: chaos.” In late January 1945, Alan Brooke fumed: “I don’t feel that I can stand another day working with Winston; he is quite hopeless … incapable of grasping any military situation and unable to give a decision.”
According to their aides, neither Churchill nor Roosevelt was well prepared for the Yalta conference. The prime minister, said a young Foreign Office official, “was tired and below his form. He also suffered from the belief that he knew everything, and need not read briefs. Stalin and foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, always very well briefed, would put pointed questions. ‘What’s the answer to that?’ the prime minister would say, turning round with difficulty to his advisers sitting behind him. We could not say, ‘If you had read our brief, you would know.’ ” Sir Alexander Cadogan, meanwhile, wrote in his diary: “I must say I think Uncle Joe much the most impressive of the three men…. The President flapped about and the P.M. boomed, but Joe just sat, taking it all in and being rather amused.”
Just as at Tehran, Roosevelt resisted all attempts by Churchill to coordinate Anglo-American strategy or even to exchange views before they met with the Soviet leader. He did not want Stalin to think he and Churchill were conspiring against him. After declining the prime minister’s invitation to stop in Britain on the way to the Crimea, Roosevelt had finally agreed to the brief meeting at Malta, but he avoided any serious conversation about the talks to come.
When the summit finally got under way, Roosevelt agreed with Stalin on most of the major issues under discussion; once again, Churchill felt very much the odd man out. “It was two to one against us” throughout much of the meeting, a senior member of the British government recalled. Another close Churchill associate noted: “That the President should deal with Churchill and Stalin as if they were people of equal standing in American eyes shocked Churchill profoundly.” At one plenary session, Roosevelt and Stalin began conferring before Churchill arrived. When the president was told by an aide that the prime minister was waiting outside, FDR’s response was a blunt “Let him wait.”
Thanks to the Red Army’s successes, there was no question that Stalin held the initiative at Yalta. By the time of the conference, Soviet forces had swept German troops out of most of Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, and were in effective control of Bulgaria and Romania. They had marched into Czechoslovakia and Austria and advanced deep into Germany. Indeed, Russian units were now on the Oder River, just forty-five miles east of Berlin. For Churchill, the rapid advance of the Soviets across Eastern and Central Europe was nothing short of a nightmare. As Cecil King, editor and publisher of the Daily Mirror, put it, “We went into the war … to check Germany’s policy of expansion, which looked as if it might soon absorb the whole of Europe. The actual effect has been a radical shift in political power away from western Europe” toward the Soviet Union. “We have now created a Frankenstein monster that dominates the European-Asiatic land mass from Vladivostok to Vienna and beyond.”
Roosevelt, seemingly unconcerned about leaving the Soviet Union as the Continent’s dominant military and political power, made matters worse, in Churchill’s view, by telling Stalin at Yalta he planned to pull all U.S. troops from Europe, including Germany, after two years. To thwart such Soviet dominance, Churchill “fought like a tiger” at the summit to make sure that France’s postwar role in Europe was as strong as possible. By doing that, he thought,
both Britain and France could serve—to some extent, at least—as counterweights to Russia. Under heavy pressure from the prime minister, who was supported by Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt and Stalin reluctantly agreed to make France one of the occupying powers in Germany.
However, when the discussion turned to the question of creating an independent government in Poland, Churchill, who repeatedly had promised the Poles in London he would win back their freedom, did not put up the same kind of fight as he had for France. True, his position had been undercut earlier in the conference when Roosevelt declared that “coming from America,” he had a “distant view on the Polish question” and made plain that his interest in it was essentially limited to its effect on his own political fortunes.
The question of Poland dominated Yalta, taking up more time and causing more friction than any of the other subjects on the agenda. Nonetheless, the discussions were an exercise in futility. As much as Churchill tried to convince himself otherwise, Poland’s fate was already settled. Soviet troops now occupied most of the country, and Stalin made plain that the puppet government he had established in the eastern Polish city of Lublin in 1944 would take control of Poland after the war. A protesting Churchill declared: “We could never accept any settlement which did not leave [Poland] free, independent, and sovereign.” Yet, faced with Stalin’s obduracy, he and Roosevelt did accept such a plan, albeit one with some democratic window dressing. Under the agreement, the Lublin government would be enlarged to include several leaders from “Polish émigré circles,” and free elections would be held as soon as possible to create a permanent government. Stalin, however, refused to allow British and American officials to supervise the elections, and Roosevelt and Churchill didn’t argue the point. They decided to take the Soviet leader’s word that the voting would be free of coercion, even though the Soviets had never allowed a free election in their own country.
Other key decisions taken at Yalta were the establishment of operating procedures for the new United Nations, as well as Stalin’s pledge to enter the war against Japan in exchange for possession of the Japanese-held Kuril Islands and Port Arthur, a seaport on the coast of northeast China. At long last, the Big Three also ratified German surrender documents and a protocol outlining the division of Germany into three occupation zones. (At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that France’s zone would be carved out of the German territory that their countries would administer.) Berlin would also be split into Allied zones of occupation.
Approval of those provisions was a close-run thing. Although the British in late 1944 had signed off on the agreements, which were drafted by the European Advisory Commission, the American government had not. Just days before the Yalta conference began, Winant, who had not been invited to Yalta, forcefully pointed out to the president, Hopkins, and Edward Stettinius, who had succeeded Cordell Hull as secretary of state, the growing dangers of procrastination over Germany. Western Allied forces, the ambassador noted, had not yet entered Germany, while Russian troops were nearing the outskirts of Berlin. Unless the Big Three formally adopted the agreements on occupation zones, he declared, the Red Army “might reach the border of its zone and then keep on going.” Agreeing with Winant that the matter was “of the greatest urgency,” both Hopkins and Stettinius joined the ambassador in urging prompt ratification. Their efforts were successful: on February 1, Stettinius informed Winant and the European Advisory Commission that the United States was finally on board. Russian approval was given five days later. Thanks in large part to pressure from Winant, the Roosevelt administration also agreed to participate in the occupation and control of postwar Austria—a commitment that the president had previously opposed.
At the same time, other thorny issues relating to Germany were left unresolved at Yalta. The three leaders could not agree on whether or how to dismember Germany; as was their wont on difficult questions, they created a new committee to study the idea of partition. There also was no decision on a Soviet demand for $20 billion worth of reparations from Germany. And, although the Big Three approved the placement of Berlin in the Soviet zone of occupation, they failed to settle the question of specific U.S. and British access routes to their zones within the city. Noting that the Soviets had agreed to provide these routes, Winant pressed the president to consent to the proposal. He did not. On this issue, as on the others, “I think our attitude should be one of study and postponement of the final decision,” Roosevelt told the ambassador.
Having made clear to the president how unhappy he was at being excluded from Yalta, Winant was invited to join Roosevelt in Egypt after the conference and to accompany him by sea as far as Algiers. During his three days with the presidential party, the ambassador tried to impress upon Roosevelt the urgent need to devise a comprehensive, long-range policy for dealing with the Reich after the war. The president, however, was too exhausted to focus on the subject and changed the discussion to his travels in Germany when he was a boy. It was the last time Winant would see FDR.
LESS THAN TWO WEEKS after the Yalta agreements were signed, Stalin signaled that he had no intention of abiding by them, at least as far as Poland was concerned. The Soviet government rejected virtually every non-Communist Polish leader proposed by Harriman and British ambassador Archibald Clark Kerr to participate in talks on creation of a new Polish government. The Soviets, Churchill remarked, “clearly wanted to make a farce of consulting the ‘non-Lublin Poles.’ ” In notes he made as talking points before a meeting with the Soviets, Harriman wrote: “Looks as if you have taken hold of Poland & excluded all leaders who were not ready to take orders. Why is it necessary to dominate Polish life?” The U.S. ambassador urged the Roosevelt administration to get tough with the Soviets. If it didn’t, he warned, “the Soviet Government will become convinced that they can force us to accept any of their decisions on all matters, and it will be increasingly difficult to stop their aggressive policy.”
The Soviets also reneged on a pledge they had made at Yalta to allow foreign observers into Poland, including Anglo-American military teams who were to help in the repatriation of American and British prisoners of war held in German camps there. To Churchill, it became increasingly apparent that the Soviet government wanted to delay for as long as possible the circulation of British and American eyewitness accounts of its tightening grip over the country. “There is no doubt in my mind,” the prime minister told Roosevelt, “that the Soviets fear very much our seeing what is going on in Poland.”
In Churchill’s view, Poland was the measure of whether the Big Three’s postwar alliance would succeed or fail. For the next month, until Roosevelt’s death, the British leader bombarded FDR with urgent cables, proposing that the two of them join forces to intervene forcefully with Stalin over Poland. The president’s response was to hold off taking any action that Stalin might interpret as a threat. Under the best of circumstances, Roosevelt’s tendency was to delay difficult, controversial decisions. Frail and weak as he was in the early spring of 1945, he was even more inclined toward postponement. He thought it best, he told Churchill, to go slow on personal intervention.
Churchill sharply disagreed. Poland was on the brink of total Soviet domination, and his repeated promises of independence to the Poles were about to turn to ash. There was no time to waste. Pushed hard by the prime minister, Roosevelt, in the last weeks of his life, finally began to express concern about the fate of the Yalta accords. He voiced indignation, too, over the shabby Soviet treatment of American POWs as well as Stalin’s sudden announcement that Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov would not attend ceremonies in San Francisco marking the birth of FDR’s dream, the United Nations. When the Soviet leader accused the Western Allies in early April of colluding with the Germans to arrange a separate peace, Roosevelt dispatched a sharp cable expressing his “feeling of bitter resentment” over the charge. Startled, Stalin backed off, declaring he never doubted Roosevelt’s trustworthiness and integrity. His apologetic response put FDR in a much more concili
atory mood. On April 11, the day before he died, he wrote Churchill that he planned to “minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible, because these problems, in one form or another, seem to arise every day, and most of them straighten out.”
IN EARLY MARCH, Eisenhower’s forces began crossing the Rhine and pouring into Germany. On his own initiative, the SHAEF commander informed Stalin that his troops would not compete with the Red Army for the trophy of Berlin. Instead, Ike said, he hoped the two Allied forces could meet at the Elbe River, some forty miles west of the German capital. In a cable to the Combined Chiefs of Staff telling them of his decision, Eisenhower declared that “Berlin has lost much of its former military importance.” Capturing Berlin, he believed, was not worth the massive troop losses that such a drive would incur; Omar Bradley estimated that SHAEF casualties would exceed 100,000 in an Allied push toward the city.
Stunned by Eisenhower’s unilateral move, Churchill fought hard to overturn it, exchanging a series of indignant cables with the American commander and urging Roosevelt to intervene. The ailing president declined to do so, and Marshall endorsed Eisenhower’s decision. “Churchill’s anger that Berlin was to be forsaken as a prize,” Max Hastings wrote, “reflected the deeper grief which haunted the last months of his war, that Hitler’s dominance of eastern Europe was now to be supplanted by that of Stalin.”
Still, the fact remained that no military action in the spring of 1945, however symbolically important, could have changed in any significant way the postwar settlements to which the prime minister and Roosevelt had agreed at Tehran and Yalta.
