American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  • • •

  Livadia Palace, Roosevelt’s home for the next eight days, was a Romanov family mansion that had been converted into a seaside resort after the Bolsheviks revised Russia’s organization chart. Built of white Inkerman granite in the Florentine style, the fifty-room palace commanded spectacular views of both sea and mountain. But for its more recent history, the palace would have made a picturesque setting for a gathering of world leaders.

  Livadia had been occupied by the German Eleventh Army headquarters staff in 1941, and its Teutonic guests proved to be more than a little unruly. The palace had been stripped of its furniture and all ornamentation by the time the Red Army served its eviction notice in April 1944, and a few short weeks before the arrival of the Big Three, it remained a lice-ridden, filthy shell.25

  Then Stalin’s men went to work. With an urgency typical of Soviet wartime operations, workers had the palace deloused, scrubbed, furnished, and staffed in magnificent style. In less than three weeks, cars, dinnerware, linens, and furniture from hotels across Russia were shipped in on 1,500 railway cars and arranged by a regiment of bellhops, chambermaids, chauffeurs, cooks, and concierges drafted from Moscow’s Metropol Hotel.26

  Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, contributed to the palace renovations by installing hidden listening devices in the American quarters, and they transported a pool of bilingual women to the Crimea to transcribe recordings of each day’s conversations. Those transcripts were reviewed daily by Commissar Lavrentii Beria, the NKVD head, and Stalin himself reviewed the important ones.27

  During his stay, Franklin Roosevelt lived in reasonable comfort in a bedroom suite built for Tsar Nicholas II, just off the main ballroom where the main conferences would be held. His lieutenants were billeted in the tsarina’s suite, on the second floor, while the British and Soviet deputations lived outside the palace, commuting to Livadia each day.

  Up a flight of stairs, Marshall was assigned Tsarina Alexandra’s main bed-room, while King was lodged in her boudoir. Marshall amused himself by making sure everyone knew King was sleeping in a room with a secret staircase reputedly built for Rasputin, the mad monk who held sway over the tsarina.

  King took the ribbing in stride. “George,” he asked, “what the hell would you do if Rasputin came through that window?”

  “I’d call [Sergeant] Powder,” said Marshall, referring to his burly enlisted orderly.28

  No one found the bathroom arrangements amusing, however. The palace had been designed for the pious Nicholas without vodka toasts or heavy drinking in mind, and it was woefully short on lavatories. Only FDR had a private bathroom; everyone else had to stand in line. Each person carried at all times a card identifying the bathroom he was permitted to use. “Supplementary facilities,” the Soviet information bulletin dryly informed them, “include outdoor latrines and as many wash basins, pitchers and buckets for bedrooms as are available.” General Kuter later remarked, “Excepting only the war, the bathrooms were the most generally discussed subject at the Crimean Conference.”29

  • • •

  On the afternoon of February 4, Stalin arrived at Livadia with Commissar Molotov and his military retinue. Surrounded by a phalanx of guards cradling submachine guns, he entered the palace and stopped by Roosevelt’s study for a courtesy call.30

  Believing, as always, that personal trust would be repaid in kind, FDR tried to set Stalin at ease by hinting at weakness and divisiveness within the Allied ranks. Turning over the same old card he played at Tehran, he tried to ingratiate himself with Stalin by complaining that the British were “peculiar people” who wanted to strengthen France artificially. He also paid a compliment to the Red Army by telling the dictator he had made a bet that the Russians would be in Berlin before the Americans captured Manila. Stalin mildly predicted that Roosevelt would lose his bet, as the Germans were fighting ferociously along the Oder River line.*31

  After a few minutes, Roosevelt was wheeled into the palace ballroom. As stone-faced guards circled the upper balcony, burp guns at the ready, the “Big Three” took their seats at a large round table, flanked by foreign ministers, commanders, and interpreters. The first plenary session of the Yalta conference came to order.32

  • • •

  Germany was a comparatively easy issue. FDR observed that the European Advisory Commission had proposed a three-way partition of Germany between the Soviet Union in the east, the United States in the southwest, and Britain in the northwest. Churchill advocated an occupation zone for the French Provisional Government, to be carved out of Britain’s territory. With some remonstration, Stalin agreed. Germany would be divided into four parts.33

  Stalin’s demands for reparations were as heavy as the Soviet heart. He wanted a two-year right to remove all factories, machine tools, rolling stock, and other means of production from Germany. Over ten years, Germany would be required to send its manufactured goods east. Steel, electrical, chemical, and military production would be eliminated. The cost of the reparations to Germany, he estimated, would be around ten billion dollars, and he was prepared to approve a similar scale of compensation for the west.34

  A tired FDR said little, while Churchill argued that Stalin’s demands were unrealistic. A stripped-down Germany would be unable to make manufactured goods or pay its debts. Much as he despised the Nazi leaders, said Churchill, “If you wished a horse to pull a wagon, you would at least have to give it fodder.”

  Stalin replied, “That was right, but care should be taken to see that the horse did not turn around and kick you.” The Soviet government would take enough fodder to keep the horse thin and weak.35

  • • •

  At the second meeting Roosevelt announced that the Americans would not occupy Germany for long. “I can get the people and Congress to cooperate fully for peace but not to keep an army in Europe for a long time. Two years would be the limit,” he said.36

  It was no impromptu remark by a tired old man. America had a war to finish in the Pacific, and Roosevelt refused to maroon American soldiers in Central Europe. America’s fate would be linked to Europe diplomatically, economically, and through a world peace organization, but the United States had no interest in pinioning itself to a burned-out battlefield.

  Churchill was horrified at Roosevelt’s announcement. American might, he believed, was the West’s best leverage against the Russian bear. Churchill had battled Bolshevism since 1917, and while he remained loyal to Stalin as an ally against Germany, he understood that gratuitous gestures and displays of weakness were a coin the Russians would never recognize, and the West could never redeem. Having lost more than fifty million citizens since 1914, they recognized strength and brushed aside sentiment.

  Privately, Roosevelt’s military leaders subscribed to Churchill’s view. “The Russians are tough traders,” King had told his confidants after the Tehran conference. “They do not become angry at the most direct talk or the toughest attitude on our part. If we are soft, they regard us as fools and they expect the other fellow to look out for himself—fully. If he doesn’t, it’s his own fault.” Major General John Deane, head of the American military mission to Moscow since 1943, told Marshall the Russians “simply cannot understand giving without taking, and as a result even our giving is viewed with suspicion. Gratitude cannot be banked in the Soviet Union. Each transaction is complete in itself without regard to past favors.” In Deane’s view, “The party of the second part is either a shrewd trader to be admired or a sucker to be despised.”37

  FDR’s hopes for a lasting peace transcended the “every man for himself” approach that had dominated geopolitics. He had won over antagonists like Joe Kennedy and Wendell Willkie, and the optimist in Franklin Roosevelt believed he could build a personal rapport with Stalin, a trust necessary to give him what he most desired—a world security institution.

  Stalin, a tyrant without peer, had a soft spot in his granite heart for the c
apitalist leader. He later called Roosevelt “a great statesman, a clever, educated, far-sighted and liberal leader who prolonged the life of capitalism.” He respected Roosevelt’s broad vision and took a kind of rough pity on his inability to walk. After leaving Roosevelt’s room one afternoon, he turned to Ambassador Gromyko and asked, “Why did nature have to punish him so? Is he worse than other people?”* No personal goodwill could change the decades-old struggle of two colliding economic and political systems, but Stalin was willing to give Roosevelt’s experiment with a peace institution a try.38

  Roosevelt had conceived of the “World Organization” as a gathering place for all nations, a forum where grievances could be aired and solutions worked out. The world’s military power would be vested in the “Big Four”—the United States, USSR, Britain and China—and charter membership would be held by the “United Nations,” those countries that had signed the declaration of war against Germany. Others that maintained relations with the Axis, such as Ireland, Denmark, or Argentina, would be excluded from the first round but permitted to join later, and eventually all states would be granted membership to the general assembly. Stalin and Churchill agreed, and the Big Three scheduled a conference to inaugurate the world organization in San Francisco at the end of April.39

  • • •

  Of all the issues on the Crimean agenda, Poland proved the most intractable. It had been the opening battleground of the current war, and if the Big Three were not careful, it could become the first battleground of the next one.

  It wasn’t Poland’s fault. The Polish people of the 1930s were industrious, intelligent, and democratic. They cut their military strength to levels that couldn’t possibly threaten their neighbors, and did everything in their power to avoid giving offense that would encourage either Hitler or Stalin to invade their country. Which, of course, encouraged both Hitler and Stalin to invade their country.

  In early January, Churchill had supported a power-sharing arrangement between the communist Polish resistance movement based in Lublin, in southeastern Poland, and the Polish government-in-exile that had fled to London in 1939. But to his shock, a few weeks before the Yalta summit the Red Army rushed into Warsaw, and the Soviet Union recognized the Lublin faction as the new provisional government of Poland.40

  Churchill was obliged to champion the Polish cause. Poland had been Britain’s casus belli in 1939, and England had given the exiles refuge. As a matter of British pride, Churchill could not let the London Poles be displaced by a communist puppet government. The prime minister argued vehemently that any government recognized by Britain must be installed on the basis of universal suffrage, secret ballot, and fair and free elections. Poland was, he told Stalin, a matter of Britain’s national honor.

  Stalin replied that to Russia, Poland was not just a matter of honor; it was also a matter of national security. During the war’s final phases, the Red Army must keep all potential anticommunist partisans—including the London faction—from committing sabotage in its rear. After the war, he said, Poland would resume its place as a cordon sanitaire between Germany and the Soviet Union. Simply put, Stalin trusted the Lublin Poles and did not trust the Poles of London.41

  Roosevelt saw Poland as a sideshow and said little. He favored free elections in Poland, as in other liberated countries, but while he paid lip service in deference to Polish-American voters, he would not fight hard or trade too much to preserve Poland’s western borders or wring guarantees of fair elections from Stalin. To Roosevelt, the United Nations organization was far more important than the fate of any Eastern European country. Besides, with the Red Army occupying most of Poland, he and Churchill had few cards to play, and everyone there knew it.42

  After several days of discussions among the leaders and their foreign ministers—Stettinius, Eden, and Molotov—the conferees agreed to free elections in which a broad sector of Polish leaders, including the London émigrés, would participate. They agreed to retain Poland’s eastern border more or less at the boundary drawn after the First World War. For the western boundary, they discussed incorporating East Prussia into Poland and setting Poland’s western border as far as the Oder and Neisse rivers. But they would study the matter and defer specifics to another time.43

  The Polish formula drafted by the ministers rang with ambiguous precepts such as a “strong, free and independent Poland,” “universal suffrage,” a “secret ballot,” and “free and unfettered elections.” The western leaders also agreed to hand over thousands of Red Army prisoners liberated from German camps, together with a host of anticommunist partisans, White Army officers, and other “Soviet citizens” whom the NKVD would sort out and probably liquidate before they reached Russia.44

  To Roosevelt, these concessions, affecting millions of lives, were the price of Soviet support, and he would swallow that price without complaint. Sitting at Roosevelt’s side, Admiral Leahy took one look at the documents and whispered, “Mr. President, this is so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it.”

  Roosevelt turned to his chief of staff and whispered back, “I know, Bill, I know it. But it’s the best I can do for Poland at this time.”45

  • • •

  Roosevelt’s only important military issue was Soviet entry into the war against Japan. Stalin’s was what the USSR would get in return for its help.

  To compensate the Soviet Union for opening up another war, Roosevelt offered Stalin the Kuriles and the southern half of Sakhalin Island, a Japanese possession since the Russo-Japanese War. Stalin said Roosevelt’s concession was appreciated, but it would not be enough. The Soviet people understood why they had to go to war against Germany, but Japan had not declared war against them. Stalin claimed he and Molotov would have a difficult time convincing a war-weary nation to begin a new war. The price of his support, he said, was a warm-water port—somewhere along the Chinese coast—and use of the Manchurian railways running to the port of Darien on the Kwantung Peninsula, near Korea.

  In private, the two men exchanged informal thoughts on the rest of eastern Asia. Roosevelt felt Korea should be placed in an international trusteeship, with no permanent troops stationed there. He also objected to giving Indochina back to the French—“the French had done nothing to improve the natives,” he said—and Stalin predicted that the British similarly would be incapable of holding Burma.46

  By week’s end, Stalin agreed to enter the war against Japan within three months of Germany’s capitulation. He would also support Chiang’s Kuomintang faction and keep the Chinese communists from disrupting Chiang’s war against Japan. In return, the Soviet Union would receive Sakhalin and the Kuriles, a naval base at Port Arthur, access to Darien, a lease of the Manchurian railway, and the continued independence of pro-Soviet Outer Mongolia.47

  • • •

  Marshall and King felt the price of Soviet participation against Japan was high, though at the time none of the chiefs expressed any regrets over Roosevelt’s concessions. Marshall’s staffers had foreseen Russian dominance over Central and Eastern Europe, though King believed Stalin was “too damn smart” to try to overrun Europe beyond eastern Poland.48

  To Marshall, the big concession—Soviet entry into the war against Japan—was all that mattered; questions of Lend-Lease and postwar spheres of influence were political, not military concerns. Before the conference ended, Secretary Stettinius, standing on the Livadia Palace steps, said to him, “General, I assume you are very eager to get back to your desk.”

  To this Marshall replied, “Ed, for what we have got here, I would have stayed a month.”49

  Yet Leahy, who attended both military and political meetings, saw dark clouds in the offing. Mark Twain once quipped that the difference between a man and a starving dog is that a dog won’t bite you after you feed it. Leahy agreed. He told his diary, “One result of enforcing the peace terms accepted at this confere
nce will be to make Russia the dominant power in Europe, which in itself carries a certainty of future international disagreements and prospects of another war.”50

  • • •

  As the discussions dragged on, most observers saw in Franklin Roosevelt a physically exhausted man whose mind was still sharp. “Chip” Bohlen, Roosevelt’s interpreter, thought him up to the task of negotiating with the two most powerful men in the world, and Stalin’s interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, recalled, “Everybody who watched him said that in spite of his frail health, his mental potential was high.”51

  But the mind can only act through the body, and FDR’s body had been crumbling for some time. After the session on Poland, his pulse became irregular and his color grew pale. Dr. Bruenn limited his workday, and his daughter, Anna, frightened at the deterioration of her father’s heart, fought off all unnecessary visitors.52

  • • •

  The final agenda item was publicity, a matter dear to every politician’s heart. On the afternoon of February 9, a battalion of photographers and cameramen assembled in the Livadia Palace courtyard to take a series of group portraits—the Big Three, the Big Three with diplomats, the Big Three with military, and so on—that would have their own page in history’s enduring scrapbook.

  The Crimean weather was blustery and overcast that day, and Roosevelt clutched his favorite navy boat cloak tight around his shoulders and drew heat from a cigarette. He was tired, and he looked it as his valet wheeled him to the center chair. He shifted himself into place as servant and wheelchair withdrew.

  As the military commanders took their places behind the three leaders, a few photographers began snapping pictures as Roosevelt was in the process of adjusting his legs, suit, and cloak for a more natural look.

  Without warning, FDR lit up in a rage. News cameramen had never been allowed to photograph him in his wheelchair, or being carried by Secret Service agents, or on crutches, or shifting from car or wheelchair to his seat. For nearly twenty-five years, he and his entourage had jealously guarded his public image, and he expected photographers to wait until they were told to begin. Blue eyes blazing, he barked out orders to stop all photographs.