Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  ‘We left Malta in the darkness,’ recalled Donnelly thirty-four years later, ‘like migrating swans.’ Because of the short, 5,000-feet runway at Luqa airfield, the four-engined C-54s took off from 1.50 a.m. with flaps all the way down, fuel mixture at ‘full rich’ and throttles wide open, one plane every ten minutes. The night was dark and cloudy and, as the planes roared down the runway past the operations office, ‘eerie bluish flames poured out of the exhausts and the noise was deafening’.28

  Marshall arrived at Saki airfield in the Crimea, south-east of Tarkhanhut Cape, in the early hours, to find large tents with tables full of vodka, caviar and Russian wine for breakfast. He took one look and merely said, ‘Let’s get going,’ leaving the banquet for others. They were driven to their quarters in the conference meeting place, the murdered Romanov family’s former holiday residence, the Livadia Palace. At 50 to 100 yard intervals along the 90 miles of the overland route across the peninsula, male and female Russian soldiers stood to attention, saluting each car as it passed. The three British Chiefs of Staff landed at 9.30 a.m. and, after breakfasting in one of the tents, went off in one car to the Vorontsov Villa overlooking the Black Sea at Alupka, 12 miles from Yalta. ‘A sort of Scottish baronial Moorish mixture’, opined Cunningham. ‘The place is very crowded, bathrooms few and far between.’

  Brooke, Cunningham and Leathers shared one bathroom, and the Chiefs of Staff office was situated in the library. Cunningham was delighted to find a history of Hampshire that described the ruins of the medieval Waltham Palace, on whose site he lived in a modern house. It was believed that the villa–built by one of the British Empire’s greatest architects, Edward Blore, in 1837–had been given to Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, commander of Army Group South, by Hitler as a reward for taking the Crimea, which was why it was more or less intact.

  If the British thought themselves somewhat crowded at Yalta–which they pronounced to rhyme with ‘Malta’–the Americans at the Livadia Palace had sixteen colonels sharing one room.29 Donnelly and six other Planners were accommodated in the Romanov children’s classroom on the second floor; although none of the seven snored, he recalled that there were bedbugs, that ‘bathing and toilet facilities were very primitive’ and that only FDR had a private bathroom. Just as the bedbugs were impervious to sprays, according to Harry Hopkins’ son Robert, so too did electronic bugs abound at Yalta, as the secret policemen of the NKVD listened in to delegates’ conversations.

  George Marshall did not have to share a room: he had the Tsar and Tsarina’s bedroom on the second floor all to himself. Space considerations apart, great efforts had been made to accommodate the American delegation comfortably: accoutrements from Moscow’s luxurious Metropol Hotel had been moved en masse to the Livadia–even the maids’ uniforms had ‘M’ on them–and as the conference opened a Soviet briefing paper entitled ‘Notes on the Crimea’ was distributed to the American delegation tracing the area’s history and geography. A slightly contentious account of the Crimean War put the Allied capture of Sevastopol entirely down to the French, and of course did not mention that the Russians lost that war. Of the Livadia Palace it said: ‘General Marshall is occupying the Imperial bedroom and Admiral King the Tsarina’s boudoir,’ but without referring to the circumstances of the change of ownership.

  Downstairs, Roosevelt and his daughter Anna Boettinger occupied rooms close to the plenary meeting room on the ground floor, with Harriman and the secret service detail stationed near by. (Security was continuously tight. When Roosevelt’s secret service contingent, Churchill’s military protection unit and Stalin’s bodyguards with short repeating rifles slung across their chests all crowded into the same room before Big Three meetings, Ed Hull ‘couldn’t help but feel that if someone had set off a firecracker all hell would have broken loose’.)30

  There was some entertainment in the evenings for the US Chiefs of Staff, including a preview of the movie National Velvet starring Mickey Rooney and Elizabeth Taylor. The British were entranced by unrationed breakfasts that featured caviar, salmon, tangerines, butter and even Stalin’s favourite naturally aerated Georgian mineral water, Borzhoni.

  Stewart Crawford, Portal’s private secretary, agreed about the idyllic atmosphere and remarked upon ‘The splendid scenery along the coast near Yalta. The pleasant cypress-studded slopes covered with villas from the Tsarist days…wonderful colouring in light neutral tints’.31 Yalta’s colouring was indeed light and neutral, but the results of the conference were anything but. Few suspected it at the time, and it was perhaps inescapable, but the decisions taken there were to reduce the eastern half of the Continent of Europe to a state of modern vassalage that was to last nearly half a century.

  21

  Yalta Requiem: ‘They were ending the war in no friendly spirit’ February–May 1945

  States which have no overseas colonies or possessions are capable of rising to moods of great elevation and detachment about the affairs of those who have.

  Winston Churchill, February 19421

  Although the Yalta Conference had many issues to discuss which were of lasting consequence to the post-war world–including the future of eastern Europe (especially Poland), reparations from and the partition of Germany, the founding of the world organization called the United Nations, Anglo-American representation on the Control Commissions of Roumania and Bulgaria, the future of Iran and China, and the timing of Russia’s declaration of war against Japan–these mostly concerned politics more than grand strategy. The disputes between various politicians and diplomats were in the spotlight at Yalta, unlike earlier conferences where it was squarely trained on Marshall and Brooke. The military questions that remained to be settled were mostly administrative, such as over POWs and the demarcation of areas to be bombed. Even some political questions that had military overtones, such as Roosevelt’s decision to let Russia take Japan’s Kurile Islands, were not discussed with the military advisers, possibly, in that particular case, because they would have recommended very strongly against it.

  During the wide-ranging political discussions at Yalta, Marshall and the other Chiefs rarely said a word, but stuck closely to their military briefs. After the war Marshall was unfairly accused by the McCarthyites of playing a major political role in appeasing the Soviets at Yalta, an accusation he understandably resented. He had not even been present at many of the political meetings and dinners, and had concentrated solely on the military issues. The extensive documents recording these discussions–principally the relevant Foreign Relations of the United States volume of official papers–fully bear Marshall out over this, although they were not published in time to exonerate him.

  Marshall was well aware that politicians had to look at issues through a different prism from soldiers. ‘Of course, Mr Churchill and the President were the dominant factors in all arrangements and all guidance,’ he said. ‘And they were the great political leaders of their countries, but they were also the military leaders and it was quite a delicate issue back and forth, particularly in matters like the Mediterranean, the soft underbelly of Europe, the Balkan states, the march on Berlin, and things of that sort.’ Marshall insisted to Pogue that, other than the shortage of landing craft, there was nothing that the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed more than political factors, at least among themselves. ‘But we were careful, exceedingly careful, never to discuss them with the British…because we were not in any way putting our neck out as to political factors, which were the business of the Head of State.’2

  When the conference opened, on Sunday 4 February 1945, the Red Army had crossed the River Oder and were only 40 miles from Berlin. Under orders to seize as much territory as possible in the last moments before the Big Three met, they were badly over-extended and unable to commence their next, albeit final, assault for another ten weeks, although of course the Western Allies did not know that. It was hardly surprising, therefore, with the battle of the Bulge won only a week earlier, that senior American diplomats advised Roosevelt to ratify
the Occupation zones of Germany as soon as possible.3

  Churchill’s comments to Colville, Moran and others about Roosevelt’s state of health the previous year proved prescient. Marshall said the President ‘looked very, very tired’ at Yalta; ‘I was quite shocked by his looks.’4 Ismay thought that FDR ‘was more than half gaga’ there.5 Of course there might well be plenty of hindsight in the almost unanimous testimony about how Roosevelt appeared, but it was pretty unvarying. Donnelly found him ‘gaunt, his eyes sunken deep in his lined face; he looked very tired and ill, as though he were existing on pure iron determination to see the war to the end.’6 Hull agreed: ‘The President looked dreadful when he was wheeled into the room–sagging jaw, drooping shoulders. He appeared almost oblivious of his surroundings and of his guests. After several strong martinis, however, he seemed to come to life.’7 Brooke’s interpreter Hugh Lunghi recalls that he watched FDR’s plane touch down at Saki and saw the President, ‘waxen cheeked, looking ghastly, his familiar black naval cloak over his shoulders, hat-brim turned up in front, being helped into a jeep’. Stewart Crawford wrote three months after the conference that Roosevelt had looked ‘half dead with grey sunken cheeks and little spark of vitality’.8 Nonetheless, Admiral Emory S. Land, the chairman of the US Maritime Commission, told Sir Alan Lascelles that Roosevelt was not so ill at Yalta as the photos of him there might suggest, but was merely ‘having trouble with his dentures’, which had ‘affected his speech and caused his face to fall in unduly’. In the unlikely event that spin-doctors ever find themselves in need of a patron saint, they should choose Admiral Emory S. Land.

  Between Sunday 4 and Sunday 11 February there were eight plenary sessions, five Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings, three Combined Chiefs of Staff meetings, two bilateral meetings between the US and Soviet Chiefs of Staff and numerous other convocations of smaller, more specialized groups. The Combined Chiefs met at Stalin’s HQ, the Yusopov Villa at Koreis, 6 miles from the Livadia Palace. By the end of the conference all the issues facing the Allies had been fully talked through; for all that historians still debate the outcomes of Yalta, few deny the sheer reach of the discussions there.

  Although victory over Germany was no longer in doubt, the nature of the post-war world order certainly was. The question of Poland took up much time, with the Soviet Union supporting the claims of her Polish puppet government, the Lublin Committee, for territorial compensation against Germany, by moving the new Polish–German border to the Oder–Neisse line, which the Western Allies accepted. Churchill and Roosevelt did manage to win an agreement for the Polish Government to be formed ‘on a broader democratic basis’, including members of the London-based Polish government-in-exile, one of a number of Soviet promises that was not subsequently acted upon. Yalta confirmed the unconditional-surrender policy, mapped out zones of control in Germany for each of the Big Three powers, and established an Allied Control Council to administer national policies for the country as a whole. This Council would consider issues such as reparations and the punishment of war crimes that the conference failed to agree upon.

  As the price for Stalin agreeing to declare war on Japan three months after the German surrender, the Western Allies secretly promised that Russia could have the territories she had lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, but she was also offered further concessions concerning Port Arthur, Mongolia and Manchurian railways that were strictly speaking in China’s gift rather than theirs, and the Chinese were not present at Yalta. Equally secret were the decisions over the size, extent and relative voting strengths in the General Assembly and Security Council of the United Nations. The number of seats each great power would have, and the veto rights, were the subject of much political horse-trading.

  Agreements were also made at Yalta over transfers of prisoners-of-war from West to East, which became highly controversial once it was recognized that thousands of non-Soviet and non-Yugoslav citizens who had fought for Hitler, such as the Cossacks, had been forcibly returned to Stalin and Tito by the British and subsequently murdered. Because these were political rather than strictly military questions, however, politicians and diplomats dealt with them rather than Marshall, Brooke and their respective Staffs. There is no indication that Churchill and Roosevelt differed over the (misnamed) ‘repatriation’ policy concerning the Cossacks.

  Roosevelt conferred with Marshall and others prior to the opening plenary session at the Livadia. On the question of direct day-to-day liaison between Eisenhower and the Red Army, Marshall said that ‘the difficulty had been, not with the Russians but with the British who wish to effect the liaison through the Combined Chiefs of Staff’, and he argued that with the Russians so far inside East Prussia ‘there was not time enough’ to go through that process. Since there had been time enough to go through it during Overlord itself, and indeed the Americans had crossed the Atlantic so that they could do just that, this sounds suspiciously like an ex post facto rationalization for the fact that the Americans wanted direct bilateral military relations with the Soviets that excluded the British. Realpolitik demanded nothing less by that stage in the war. Power had shifted. Financially and economically Britain was close to bankruptcy. ‘To put it crudely,’ as one economic historian has, ‘in the end the net aid the United Kingdom received [from the United States and Canada] amounted to the equivalent of at least one full year of its own peak total war effort.’9 Canada was pliable and supportive as ever, but the Americans could no longer be cajoled. If they wished to meet the Russian Chiefs of Staff bilaterally, Combined Chiefs of Staff rules would not be invoked to prevent them.

  At the first plenary meeting at the Livadia Palace at 5 p.m. on 4 February, Roosevelt was asked by Stalin to take the chair. Marshall then summarized the post-Bulge situation in the west, stating that the Rhine would be crossed soon after 1 March, that 75,000 tons of supplies were coming through Antwerp daily, and that area bombing was destroying German capacity to fight back, having reduced German oil production to 20 per cent of its original capacity.10 Although Cunningham thought Marshall ‘went rather beyond his brief’ in covering British air and naval matters, it seemed to impress Stalin.

  The Russian dictator then said that, because of the Ardennes Offensive, the Soviets had started their winter offensive earlier than intended, and had done so in comradely duty and not because they were asked to by their allies. ‘The President, who is undoubtedly in bad shape and finding difficulty in concentrating,’ noted Cunningham, ‘did not rise to the occasion but the PM did brilliantly…Stalin was good and clear in his points, the PM also very good but the President does not appear to know what he is talking about.’11

  Other than this first plenary session, Marshall did not attend the Big Three meetings. He was present with Roosevelt among dinner guests on 5 February and at a Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting four days later with Churchill, and then finally on the day that the famous photographs were taken in the courtyard of the Livadia (which is entirely unchanged today). ‘My God! How tired I am of it all!’ wrote Brooke in characteristically peppery mood. His loathing of official banquets and especially the speeches made at them–‘insincere, slimy sort of slush!’–was very evident throughout. On 6 February he summarized the Burmese campaigns for the Russians, and Marshall reported that ‘in the face of unparalleled difficulties’ 44,000 tons of supplies had been flown over the Himalayas the previous month, which he described, somewhat hyperbolically, as ‘the accomplishment of the greatest feat in all history’, and beside which he said inter-Staff co-operation ‘should be relatively easy’.12 One problem frequently encountered was the reluctance of even high-ranking Russian military officers to commit themselves to anything, however minor, until it had been referred back to Stalin; the hitherto short life-expectancies of marshals of the Soviet Union made that a sensible precaution.

  On Wednesday 7 February there was a tour of the city of Sevastopol, where hardly a dwelling had been left intact by the long siege in 1941–2 and subsequent fighting in 1944, and there wer
e three stops for Crimean War battlefields. Lunch with the Soviet admiral commanding the Sevastopol naval base consisted of ‘many dishes of stale fish and only vodka to drink’.13 Although Balaklava mattered much to men like Churchill and Brooke who had grown up with Tennyson’s poem, the Prime Minister complained that the local Russian guides had shown ‘no sort of feeling’ there. ‘Either they thought they had won the battle or they had never heard of it.’14 Shortly afterwards the Countess of Ranfurly in Cairo received a letter from a member of the British delegation saying: ‘I wish you could have seen Sir Alan Brooke, with a school history book in one hand, explaining the battle of Balaclava to an audience of field marshals. We stood on a little ridge on the end of that famous battlefield where the Charge of the Light Brigade took place. All around us were the twisted remains of German anti-tank guns.’15

  Because there were now, for the very first time since Brooke and Marshall first met, no significant strategic differences between the two men–or at least none that Brooke could do anything about–relations ran smoothly. At the noon Combined Chiefs meeting on Thursday 8 February, Cunningham, quoting Byron’s Childe Harold on the Duchess of Richmond’s eve-of-Waterloo ball, reported that ‘everything went as merrily as a marriage bell’, and less poetically that there was ‘complete agreement on all matters on the agenda’. In the past this had been the harbinger for a furious bust-up, but not this time. Even Admiral King defended the British, at least after his own fashion. At the first tripartite military meeting, the Commander-in-Chief of the Red Navy, Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov, had criticized the Royal Navy for its lack of support in convoying supplies to northern Russia, and Admiral King asked him, ‘rather sharply’, what the Soviet Navy had achieved against the German Navy. He ‘received an ambiguous reply’. (That was because during the first six months after Barbarossa the entire Russian Navy had managed to sink only one German cargo ship, the 3,700-ton Baltenland. The 3.6 million tons of enemy shipping Soviet propaganda claimed to have sunk between 1941 and 1945 is estimated to be around twelve times the genuine figure.)16