by Max Hastings
Churchill said: ‘I know that you are a great nation. By your struggle you have won an equal status among the great powers. But we, the British, are also a proud nation and we will not allow anyone to abuse us and trample upon our interests. I want you to understand that we are profoundly concerned by the current situation. I have ordered that demobilization of the Royal Air Force should be delayed.’ He then abruptly terminated the conversation, apologized for his frankness and departed to discuss with Attlee the forthcoming parliamentary elections.
The Soviet ambassador appended to this dispatch a personal commentary on the meeting:
Churchill was extraordinarily angry, and seemed to be making an effort to keep himself under control. His remarks were full of threats and blackmail, but it was not just blackmail. Following his radio broadcast of 13 May, the English press has adopted a stronger anti-Soviet line in reporting European events. It seeks to interpret all the emerging problems in terms of the USSR’s attitude. Churchill’s speech was an instruction to the press. Polish agents are conducting a bold anti-Soviet campaign in parliamentary circles and demand new debates on the Polish issue. Eden had already announced in the House of Commons that a foreign affairs debate will take place after the holidays. We may expect this to develop into a big anti-Soviet demonstration intended to pressure and threaten the USSR. So far we have no precise information on the purpose of Eisenhower’s and Montgomery’s forthcoming visit to London, but we have reason to think that they have been summoned to discuss and evaluate the Allies’ military position. We should recognise that we are dealing with an adventurer who is in his element at war, who feels much more at ease in the circumstances of war than those of peace.
Gusev’s account of this meeting is unlikely to have been shown to Stalin, because Churchill’s bluntness would have displeased him. In any event, it could have exercised not the smallest influence upon Moscow’s policies. The Russians knew that the Americans shared little of the prime minister’s passion about Eastern Europe. For all Churchill’s bluster, his mutterings to the chiefs of staff about the possibility of launching ‘Operation Unthinkable’, neither Western nation was ready to challenge the Russians by force. The old statesman’s diatribe merely vented his personal bitterness and frustration. He knew in his heart that the tyranny established by the Red Army could not be undone either through diplomacy or by force of arms.
After polling day on 6 July, there was a three-week pause before the election result was announced, to allow the overseas service vote to be counted. Churchill flew to south-west France for his first holiday since 1939, at a château owned by a Canadian well-wisher. Then, on 15 July, he took a plane onward to Berlin for the last great Allied conference, the closing episode of his own war.
Churchill professed confidence about the election outcome. This was shared by Stalin who believed he would be returned to power with a parliamentary majority of at least eighty. Nonetheless, in a most honourable display of his respect for democracy, Churchill invited Clement Attlee, the possible prime minister-in-waiting, to join the British delegation at Potsdam. The Labour leader was waiting to greet him at his appointed villa, 23 Ringstrasse, along with Montgomery, Alexander and Eden. On the 16th, Churchill held his first two-hour meeting with Harry Truman. He emerged much encouraged by what he saw and heard. Truman spoke much more toughly than had Roosevelt in his last months. Later, the prime minister toured the ruins of Berlin, and gazed without animosity upon the Germans foraging amid the rubble. ‘My hate had died with their surrender,’ he wrote later. ‘I was much moved by their desolation, and also by their thin haggard looks and threadbare clothes.’ Gazing on the remains of Hitler’s bunker, he reflected that this was how Downing Street would have looked, had matters turned out differently in 1940. But he quickly wearied of tourism. Now as ever, what seized his imagination was the opportunity to discuss great issues with the most powerful men on earth, if not as their equal in national might, as their acknowledged peer in personal stature.
The Potsdam conference, of which the first formal session took place on 17 July, achieved no meaningful decisions or conclusions. Churchill said of himself: ‘I shall be only half a man until the result of the poll.’ Diplomat John Peck noted with some foreboding that when the prime minister and Attlee inspected a parade of British troops in Berlin, Attlee received the louder cheers. Opening a soldiers’ club, Churchill said: ‘May the memory of this glorious pilgrimage of war never die!’ Yet many of his audience, men of Montgomery’s armies, viewed both their recent past and future prospects in much more pragmatic terms.
Churchill’s first responsibility was to take the measure of Harry Truman, and to lay before the new president his fears for Britain and the world. Truman, in his turn, felt a certain apprehension about the encounter. Harry Hopkins, in Moscow late in May, told Zhukov as he bade farewell before flying to London to see Churchill: ‘I respect the old man, but he is difficult. The only person who found talking to him easy was Franklin Roosevelt.’ Now, in Potsdam, Churchill described to Truman his fears for British solvency, when the country owed £3 billion of external debt. He expressed his hopes of American support. They talked much of Eastern Europe, from which the news daily grew worse. Churchill was much excited by news which reached the president at Potsdam, of the successful atomic bomb test at Alamogordo. He encouraged the president to disclose to Stalin ‘the simple fact that we have this weapon’—a significant and optimistic use of the plural possessive.
Churchill agreed, without consulting his cabinet colleagues, that the Americans would employ the atomic bomb against Japan without further reference to London. He urged that Britain and the US should maintain the closest post-war military links, with reciprocal basing rights around the world. When Truman took refuge in bromides, and declined an explicit commitment, Churchill sallied in disappointment: ‘A man might make a proposal of marriage to a young lady, but it was not much use if he was told that she would always be a sister to him.’ He was rash enough to indulge a tirade against China and its pretensions, which of course irked the Americans. Brooke was indignant that the US chiefs of staff discussed strategy for the final phase of the Pacific war in the absence of the British. What else could he have expected? The most significant British role was to endorse, and marginally to modify, the so-called Potsdam Declaration to Japan, warning of dire consequences if she failed forthwith to surrender to the Allies.
Brooke was exasperated by Churchill’s exuberant display of enthusiasm about the news of ‘Tube Alloys’—the atomic bomb project, and displayed an extraordinary failure of understanding when the prime minister discussed the issue with his chiefs of staff over lunch on 23 July. ‘I was completely shattered by the PM’s outlook!’ wrote the CIGS.
He had absorbed all the minor American exaggerations, and as a result was completely carried away. It was now no longer necessary for the Russians to come into the Japanese war, the new explosive alone was sufficient to settle the matter. Furthermore we now had something in our hands which would redress the balance with the Russians! The secret of this explosive, and the power to use it, would completely alter the diplomatic equilibrium! Now we had a new value which redressed our position (pushing his chin out and scowling), now we could say if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Kuibyshev, Karkhov [sic], Stalingrad, Sebastopol etc. etc. And now where are the Russians!!! I tried to crush his over-optimism based on the results of one experiment, and was asked with contempt what reason I had for minimizing the results of these discoveries. I was trying to dispel his dreams and as usual he did not like it. But I shudder to feel that he is allowing the half-baked results of one experiment to warp the whole of his diplomatic perspective!
If the prime minister failed to perceive the strategic limitations of nuclear weapons, his senior military adviser displayed in this encounter an extraordinary ignorance about the greatest scientific undertaking of the war, indeed the most momentous in history. Here was a manife
station of the manner in which even exalted Allied directors of strategy were slow to grasp the significance of the Bomb. Back in 1940-41, British scientists’ theoretical nuclear research was well ahead of American. Following the joint commitment to build an atomic bomb, and the transfer of all relevant British material and personnel to the US, the Americans adopted an increasingly ruthless proprietorial policy towards ‘Tube Alloys’. It had been agreed that the project should be a partnership. But Sir John Anderson, the responsible minister, soon reported to Churchill that the Americans were concealing information from the British in a ‘quite intolerable’ fashion. At Quebec in May 1943 a new agreement was reached between Britain’s prime minister and the US president, subsequently confirmed in writing at Hyde Park in August. At Hyde Park again in September 1944 Churchill persuaded Roosevelt belatedly to sign a document agreeing that Anglo-American nuclear cooperation and exchange of information should continue after the war. But the Americans nonetheless displayed little inclination to regard atomic research as a shared venture—and impoverished Britain was in no condition to build a bomb of its own. After the war, successive British governments were reduced to pleading with Washington for the honouring of the nuclear agreements struck between Roosevelt and Churchill.
The social nuances of Potsdam were endless. During an Allied reception at Churchill’s villa, the host offered a toast to Marshal Zhukov. The Russian, caught by surprise, responded by addressing the prime minister as ‘comrade’. Then, alarmed by the perils of being heard to use such fraternal language to an arch-capitalist, he hastily amended this to ‘comrade-in-arms’. Next day in Stalin’s office, the soldier was indeed taunted about the readiness with which he had made a comrade of Churchill. Only Stalin, among the Russians, allowed himself freedom to take personal liberties with the Western Allies.
Churchill spent much time—there was one session of five hours—alone with the Soviet warlord. Stalin was in the highest humour. He perceived himself as the foremost victor of World War II. Not for decades would it become apparent that the Soviet Union’s devastation, and the economic consequences of subordinating all other interests to Russia’s vast military machine, had sown the seeds of the communist system’s eventual collapse. In July 1945 the world, like the Soviet leader himself, perceived only that he presided over the greatest power on the European Continent, militarily unassailable. Stalin professed to confide in Churchill as if he was an old friend, apologising for Russia’s failure publicly to display its gratitude for British wartime supplies, and promising that he would make amends at some suitable moment. At a banquet given by Churchill, the tyrant amazed guests by circling the table, collecting autographs on the menu: ‘his eyes twinkled with mirth and goodwill’. He flattered the prime minister shamelessly—and was rewarded with Churchill’s beaming benevolence. Eden wrote in dismay: ‘He is again under Stalin’s spell. He kept repeating “I like that man.”’ Yet the Soviet warlord, inevitably, conceded nothing. The puppet Polish leadership was brought to Potsdam at Churchill’s urging, and listened stonily to his urgings that non-communists should be included in the Warsaw government, and that Poland should moderate its western frontier expectations.
Churchill never doubted the malevolence of Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe, and indeed around the world. But he sustained residual delusions that he himself might influence Stalin, and thus fulfil purposes from which the full commitment of the US was withheld. Sergo Beria, son of the NKVD chief, wrote: ‘Of all the western leaders Churchill had the best understanding of Stalin and succeeded in seeing through almost all of his manoeuvres. But when he is quoted as suggesting that he gained an influence over Stalin I cannot help smiling. It seems amazing that a person of such stature could so delude himself.’
Stalin could be dispossessed of his vast trove of booty only by force of arms. He knew that the Western Allies lacked stomach or means for such a trial. Thus he felt at liberty to divert himself in the company of the old imperialist, who indeed perhaps amused him, as he amused the world. Britain lost nothing by Churchill’s dalliance with Stalin at Potsdam and elsewhere, because nothing could have been said or done to change outcomes. But it was a sad end to so much magnificent wartime statesmanship by the prime minister, that the lion should lie down with the bear, roll on his back and allow his chest to be tickled. Far back in October 1940, Churchill had observed that ‘A lot of people talked a lot of nonsense when they said wars never settled anything; nothing in history was ever settled except by wars.’ In July 1945 it was impossible to pretend that the affairs of Europe had been satisfactorily ‘settled’ by Allied victory in the Second World War.
On the 25th, the British delegation left the Americans and Russians to confer, and returned to Britain to discover the election outcome. Churchill landed back at Northolt that afternoon, expecting to return to Potsdam two days later. Even the Russians assumed this: ‘No one in our conference delegation had the slightest doubt that he would be re-elected,’ recalled Admiral Kuznetsov. At Downing Street, Captain Pim had reorganised the Map Room to display poll results as they came in—a somewhat generous interpretation of his naval duties, on behalf of a political party leader. On the morning of the 26th, Churchill settled himself in front of Pim’s boards, remaining there through the day with the companionship of Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken. It was soon plain that the Conservatives had suffered a disaster. In the new House of Commons, Labour would hold 393 seats. The Tories’ numbers fell from 585 to 213. The Conservative government was at an end. Churchill had lost his parliamentary majority. He could no longer serve as prime minister. At 7 p.m. he said quaintly to Pim: ‘Fetch me my carriage, and I shall go to the Palace.’ He resigned his office. Clement Attlee assumed the mantle, formed his own government, and returned to Potsdam in Churchill’s stead. The Russians were bewildered by Churchill’s defeat. ‘I still cannot comprehend how this could happen that he lost the election!’ said Molotov later. ‘Apparently one needs to understand the English way of life better…In Potsdam…he was so active.’
The fallen leader strove to act manfully. On his return to Downing Street from Buckingham Palace he said to his private secretary Leslie Rowan: ‘You must not think of me any more; your duty is now to serve Attlee, if he wishes you to do so. You must therefore go to him, for you must think also of your future.’ Rowan broke down and cried. When Moran said something about voters’ ingratitude, Churchill responded: ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t call it that, they have had a very bad time.’ Yet the misery of his predicament cut to his heart. For almost six years he had inhabited a universe of fevered action. An almost unbroken stream of reports, minutes, cables and issues for decision flowed through his study, map room, cabinet room, bedroom and even bathroom day and night. Now, instead, with devastating abruptness, there was nothing. The vacancy seemed almost unendurable. ‘The rest of my life will be holidays,’ he said to Moran. ‘It is a strange feeling, all power gone.’
Churchill moved from Downing Street into Claridge’s Hotel. He was confronted with all manner of domestic problems, such as he had been allowed to ignore for six years, not least the need to pay bills. His personal finances during the war years remain somewhat opaque. He received a monthly salary of £449 from the Treasury for his services as prime minister. In addition, his books generated substantial income. There was some post-war political controversy about the fact that throughout the war he gained handsome royalties from sales of collections of his prime ministerial speeches. For instance Into Battle, the first volume, generated £11,172, of which sum the prime minister instructed his bank to divert half to the account of his son Randolph. He received a huge amount of money, £50,000, in October 1943 for the film rights of his biography of Marlborough, and a further £50,000 in April 1945 from Alexander Korda for film rights to his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He was able to adopt a lofty attitude about book contracts and delivery dates with his publishers, Macmillan, because one of its most influential directors was a member of his government. An old friend, Sir He
nry Strakosch, who died in 1943, bequeathed the prime minister £20,000 in his will. Yet punitive wartime taxation, more than 80 per cent, absorbed a large part of these sums. Even on a care-and-maintenance basis Chartwell, his home in Kent, incurred costs. Randolph, the monstrous pelican in the family, represented a major drain on his purse. As prime minister Churchill contributed about £35 a month for his personal share of the costs of Chequers. What is undisputed is that he emerged almost penniless from his experience as the saviour of his nation.
Smuts said, more than two years earlier: ‘Winston’s mind has a stop in it at the end of the war.’ Churchill grumbled: ‘I do not believe in this brave new world…Tell me any good in any new thing.’ Even had he won the election, the great conflict with which he would be inseparably identified for the rest of human history had barely three weeks to run. The nugatory military decisions still at the discretion of a British national leader could exercise little influence upon the manner in which its final operations were conducted. Thereafter, while Churchill might have enjoyed retaining the trappings of power, as all prime ministers do, he was quite unsuited to address the challenges of peace. Isaiah Berlin wrote: ‘Churchill sees history—and life—as a great Renaissance pageant: when he thinks of France or Italy, Germany or the Low Countries, Russia, India, Africa, the Arab lands, he sees vivid historical images—something between Victorian illustrations in a child’s book of history and the great procession painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Riccardi Palace…No man has ever loved life more vehemently and infused so much of it into everyone and everything that he has touched.’
