Even though the PM had agreed to lock down the remaining Polish units and had weathered the public outcry, Churchill had refused to take any further action against the Polish Government in Exile. Even when its representatives, appeared in Switzerland with inexplicable amounts of cash and began buying up food supplies, he had done nothing. Food aid funded by US-based Polish relief agencies had been held back by ‘administrative issues’ that the Roosevelt administration had placed in its way. By contrast, Churchill had made it clear on occasion that nothing must be done to prevent the flow of humanitarian aid into Europe. In the end however it was all vacillation until this moment; they would soon reach Poland and then they would need to have an official unified approach. Eden doubted that London and Washington would find common ground on the matter.
“PM, I have here a number of option papers, suggesting ways forward in respect of the polish question. I believe it would be good if you could cast your glance over them prior to the cabinet meeting.”
Another coughing fit, “Alright, Anthony. I’ll read this. Any preferences on your part?”
Eden was genuinely surprised, he had not expected Churchill to ask for guidance. “None PM.” It came out stiffer than planned.
“Very well, I have some thoughts and will see if they get stimulated by what your chaps have written.”
Eden could only grit his teeth. In other words Churchill would do this on the spur of the moment. Policy on one of the central issues for post-war Europe would depend on a whim again. He resolved to have a discussion with Clement Attlee before the cabinet meeting. This could not be handled informally. Either way Churchill caught between his romantic desire to help the Poles and his need to placate Roosevelt would have to choose.
6am
31st December
15 kilometers west of Kaunas
Where did these Germans just take the strength from? Borzov was tired and irritated. His Katyusha’s had delivered three hours of intermittent salvos against the two ridges three kilometres in front of him and still the attack of the tanks had ended in disaster. The tanks and the supporting Soviet infantry has moved forward across the open, snow-covered fields and under the cover of the artillery bombardment and begun their attack as the last of the BM-13 rockets had screeched overhead. There was hardly any vegetation left, only a few tree stumps where a small forest had once stood. The Russian artillery had raked the area thoroughly before letting his Stalin Organs do their demoralising job. Then the tanks had surged forward, the infantry in the white winter outfits riding shotgun on their backs. The second wave of infantry stomping more slowly through the foot-deep snow behind them. Overhead the Shtormoviks roared ready to pounce on anything that moved.
Through his binoculars he watched as the tanks, mostly T-34/85s crashed through the area where the first trenches had been. There were sounds of fighting but only sporadic. Then the second wave of infantry reached the trench line, the tanks heading upslope towards the second line. Between them only the white of the Baltic winter landscape with occasional black pockmark signs of war. What limited German infantry had remained seemed to have been brushed aside or melted away. This seemed to be the case more and more often Where once the Germans had stood and fought over every piece of ground, they now played hide and seek, rarely clinging to any particular territory longer than necessary if it meant being overwhelmed. The past weeks had seem dozens of local attacks punch into thin air as the defenders made a quick show, caused some casualties and then ran, only to hit back at some other defendable position.
Then suddenly out of nowhere, the first tanks had started going up in flames. Two, three soon there were six burning wrecks on the slope. Russian infantry hugging the ground near them. Frantically he scanned the ridgeline, where were the blasted targets? The Germans must have had guns dug in. he could not make out any targets. His radio operator was receiving panicked calls from some of the other batteries. ‘Where are the German guns?’
And then he saw them, bursting out of their half-open bunkers six assault guns – Sturmgeschütz IV – came charging. They had not run; they had lain in ambush. Six against a force of nearly fifty Russian tanks. But they had the element of surprise on their side and used it. And it started raining death on the Russian infantry. From somewhere behind the hills German artillery opened up with high explosive. Borzov could not see them but he saw the proximity fuse shells explode about twenty-thirty meters above ground among the bunched Red Army men. Soon there was red on the slope. The Soviet tanks outnumbered the assault guns five to one but still the little monsters kept coming, manoeuvring to keep their sloped fontal armour away facing the enemy. Ivan stared in fury through his binoculars, unable to rain fire on the enemy – the BM-13 was a poor anti-tank weapon. He was certain to kill more of his own than Germans.
As shrapnel kept falling among the Russian infantry, the assault guns suddenly turned and ran. Zig-zagging frantically they sped up the slope past the casemates from which they had come, as Russians shells shrieked around them. One was caught by a bulls eye in the engine compartment and went up in a fireball. Another was hit by a shell near the top of its turtle shaped body just as it crested the slope but the angle saved it. Like a shooting star the shell shrieked harmlessly heavenward. Then they were gone. They had given up the ridge but they had taken the momentum out of the Russian attack.
As Ivan lost site of the action, the remaining forty-odd T-34s pursued the assault guns over the ridge, waiting for the infantry to check for ambushes before revealing themselves beyond the ridgeline. Them one by one the disappeared from view.
“Pack up soldier, and tell the rest of battery they should get ready to move.’ Soon we will have new target co-ordinates.” Borzov tucked away his binoculars and headed for the radio operator to help disassemble the gear. They were somewhat under-strength and he needed to help out. Then suddenly the man held up a hand while the other was pressed against the headphone slung over his ear. His expression changed in a way that Borzov did not like.
“ Commander, there are casualties. The Germans have laid a trap. Our men are in trouble. “ For another few minutes they listened in on the tankers frequency as they heard the cries and over the ridge saw occasional puffs of smoke rising. What they did not see were swarms of German infantry lying in wait with Panzerfausts taking out the attacking Russian tanks. The Panzerfausts were the terror of the Russian tankers and with good cause. Single man with an ample supply of the handheld anti-tank weapon could stop almost any tank. Barely a dozen T34/85 made it back over the ridge. In fury the Brigade commander ordered a renewed bombardment of the German positions, this time blindly into the quadrants over the ridge. Ivan did not know whether it achieved anything. By the time the Russian infantry was dug in along the ridgeline, the Germans were gone, leaving behind only smouldering wrecks.
As night began to fall, Ivan received orders to move closer to the ridge. Around him hundreds of men were advancing, ready to resume the attack the next day. No doubt after another bombardment after which the Germans would no doubt again retreat, once they had extracted another pound of flesh from the Russian tankers. They had been moving westward at a snail’s pace. At this rate it would take them a year to get to Berlin.
With Roosevelt’s death and the advent of the Truman administration, unity between east and west was recognized as a sham; an artificial creation born of anti-Nazism which quickly disintegrated once Nazism had been eliminated.
Barry Turner in Countdown to Victory[104]
I didn’t know whether I could pick up the threads where he left them.
Truman on his succession to FDR
The Russians are as untrustworthy as Hitler and Al Capone.”
Truman in a letter to his wife Bess,
December 30, 1941
12:05 pm
January 2nd 1945
The White House
The pile of papers in the file before him did nothing to brighten his mood, which after the events in recent weeks had been tense at best. Fra
nklin Delano Roosevelt could see his plans unravelling. Britain returning to her old style politics to preserve her colonial empire and European standing, France opportunistically sailing in her lee, Germany managing to slither towards post-Nazi respectability. And Russia, well Uncle Joe had every reason to be unhappy, not just with Britain but also those miserable Poles. Even his own party bosses had been discreetly enquiring about what his administration would do to preserve democracy in Poland, Hungary and all those other little dots on the map that Joe wanted. Under these circumstances his dream of a United Nations was dying.
He had endured the steady barrage of the special interest groups coming in with their sop stories about this or that relative who had been allegedly lost to Stalin’s goons. Well shit happens in the fog of war! These were individuals and the personal problems could not be turned into stumbling blocks for the great goal – the United Nations, the new world body that would bring an era of world peace and collective security. Sure Joe Stalin was no saint, but Roosevelt could remember some pretty unsavoury things he had had to sign off on as President and no-one had called him a dictator. For a change the office was empty, no meeting scheduled for another half-hour. Roosevelt thought of tossing the papers aside thereby willing reality to change. But there was no changing it. He had to deal with it, his aides were forcing him to sign and dictate ever growing amounts of instructions.
He wanted Lucy here, to comfort him. She would know what to say; at least her smile would comfort him, in a way Eleanor could never have done. Lucy Mercer Rutherford, his emotional mistress, a woman with whom he had been romantically engaged before meeting Eleanor. He had never been able to break the contact and despite a pledge to Eleanor never to see her again, Lucy had under various guises, been to the White House or other places to spend time with him. It had been the moments he still lived for at a personal level. But Lucy was far away, the next possible meeting two weeks into the future. Meanwhile politics shoved themselves into his view.
Everyone he turned to ultimately confirmed the simple unalterable fact that the west Europeans and American people had no wish to continue the fight against the new crowd in Berlin. They had demonised Hitler too much and so without him it was hard to sustain the hatred. Not so with the Japanese, there it was straightforward racial antagonism. The German’s propaganda efforts, such as the show trial of the few top Nazis was working, and therefore none of his Generals could push his men into seriously risking their lives advancing at a pace faster than the Germans allowed them. Yes they were on German soil all across the western border and yes, the advance was continuous, but it was slow and barely resembled a military advance. In fact now the Germans were helping them occupy the country as fast as they could, so that the Russians would not do so. The insults he had to stomach from Stalin, his bile rose just at the thought. Of course the Russian leader was not blameless, that blasted puppet government he had created for the Poles had so little legitimacy even the European socialists struggled to take it serious. But it, and the left-wing regimes put in place in Bulgaria and Romania had given London and Paris the excuse to revert to good old fashioned power politics. Something his United Nations were designed to abolish.
His United Nations …. A sudden pain shot through his skull, jerking his head up. His cigarette holder dropped from his mouth as he brought up his hands to his face. Then it was gone again.
For a split second his face relaxed before the pain returned and his vision disappeared. The room went red, then black. Roosevelt slumped forward, his face crashing into the papers with a dull thud. The impact briefly restored consciousness, ‘No !’ It could not end, but Roosevelt instinctively felt that this attack was different ‘Not like this there was still so much to do…!’He moaned. There was no-one there to hear him. But his will could no longer command his body. With that realization FDR slipped away.
When his valet Arthur Prettyman came in to check on the President’s dinner plans four minutes later he found the President barely breathing. The hastily summoned Dr Bruenn, the young Navy cardiologist assigned to monitor Roosevelt’s health, tore open the President’s shirt and injected papaverine and amyl nitrate. The President’s breathing seemed to improve for a few minutes while around him the White House erupted into chaos.
They carried him to the nearest bed and made him comfortable. For an hour this situation persisted but then slowly but surely the breathing weakened. As he felt the patient slipping away, Dr Bruenn injected adrenaline into the Presidents heart but there was no reaction. At 1;35 pm he pronounced the President dead.
There was a brief crisis when former Vice President Wallace, whom Roosevelt had dropped for the fourth term, mounted a brief and opportunistic argument that legally he should be president, even if only for a few days until the actual day of inauguration. But being dropped from the ticket had put him on the exit route and few in Washington liked backing losers. Two and a half hours later a stone-faced rigidly erect Harry Truman placed his left hand on the Bible held by US Chief Justice Stone, raised his right hand an slowly repeated the oath that would make him the thirty-third President of the United States. After the ceremony the cabinet gathered and took their seats at the great table.
President Truman got straight to business, asked them to remain at their posts and accept that for the moment he would continue with President Roosevelt’s policies. Then he asked each of them to prepare a brief note on how they saw the President’s policies in their areas. He did not notice that Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal suddenly shifted uncomfortably. He then asked them to meet him and the Joint Chiefs of Staff the next day. At the end of the meeting Stimson took his new President aside to brief him about the atomic bomb project for until then Truman had not been on the need-to-know-list.
Wide-eyed and impressed Harry Truman headed off to spend time with the former President’s wife before retiring to a quiet office to pray in private yet again. That night he chose to talk to his old political cronies and inform them that it would be business as usual until he had a sense of what the President had been up to in his various policy areas, both domestic and foreign. Unwittingly Harry Truman however took the administration off course that very night, when he resolved to replace the President’s personal staff and servants with his own in due course. Not truly understanding how Roosevelt worked, Truman never appreciated until it was too late, the considerable role that aides, and confidantes played in the execution of Roosevelt’s wishes and initiatives. From his discussions with Eleanor he had come away with a sense that the President had not confided much of significance to his wife in recent years. Having married his high school sweetheart Harry S Truman therefore mistakenly assumed that Roosevelt had relied entirely on the members of his cabinet and the military chiefs. By the time many of the personal envoys and confidantes had fought their way back to the Oval Office, policy shifts had already taken shape on the ground. For Truman, unaware of just how removed Roosevelt had been in the pursuit of his post-war policies from large segments of the cabinet and his party, relied on the official line and the briefings he received. None of them emphasised sufficiently just how tightly the former President had been wedded to the concept of unconditional surrender and the United Nations. Truman more than many others had also been subjected to the barrage of groups that had come calling in favour of opposing Soviet rule in this or that east European place. Using the official placatory statements issued for public consumption by Roosevelt as his guidance Truman had made similar promises and had ended up wondering just where the president had been heading in terms of policy. But in the end he fell back on the familiar phrases he found in both the official speeches and the cabinet briefing papers over the next week.
Unlike the former President, Truman had no boyhood hatred of Germany. Rather he had actually fought Germans very briefly during the First World War. Far more significant was that his personal experience pushed him away from the unconditional surrender concept. “I know what it means to loose”, he
would later record in his memoirs” My own family had been on the losing side in the Civil War. I remember my grandmother telling me stories about the Yankee redlegs who raided her farm and shot her chickens and butchered her pigs and set fire to the hay and the barn. …My mother hated the Yankees till she died, and didn’t want hate to be this war’s gift to the future.”[105]
It was to be an irony of history that just as upon Hitler’s death his leadership style had greatly facilitated the demise of his regime, Roosevelt’s style, which had kept Truman a virtual outsider on any foreign policy issue, ensured the demise of Roosevelt’s vision because it denied Truman an understanding of where Roosevelt’s objectives truly lay.
January 3rd
The Kremlin
Moscow
It was way past midnight in Moscow, when U.S. Ambassador W Averell Harriman personally phoned Molotov with the news of the President’s death. Molotov struggled to control his voice but managed to ask that Harriman come to see Stalin the next day. When the tall US Ambassador, was ushered into Stalin’s office, Molotov, Beria and Stalin looked pale and worried. Via an interpreter Stalin immediately conveyed his condolences and assured Harriman that the Soviet Union would have confidence in Truman because Roosevelt had chosen him as his successor. On his desk he had a stack of black-bordered Soviet newspapers announcing FDR’s passing. The eulogies were heartfelt, Roosevelt had generally been portrayed as a friend of the Soviet Union, disagreements over Eastern Europe notwithstanding. Stalin let this last point sink in, he knew that Harriman disagreed with FDR on Russian policy in almost every aspect. Where Harriman had advocated strength and obstinacy, FDR had sought compromise and engagement. It was curious watching this tall diplomat talk around policy issues at the time of his master’s death. After stumbling through some additional pleasantries, Molotov sought assurance about Truman’s policies. Would he continue the path of Roosevelt that would lead to a United Nations and world peace? Harriman would only answer in generalities. It was clear he had no idea of what Truman would do or how the man thought.
The Valkyrie Option Page 66
