Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  It was against the background of repeated American snubs that Churchill now embarked upon his most controversial wartime journey. He determined to fly to Moscow for bilateral talks with Stalin. It is impossible to perceive this mission as other than a gesture of desperation. Having failed to enlist American support for any of the purposes which now mattered most to him, instead he sought to achieve them by going head-to-head with the Russians. Yet Stalin bargained only for advantage. Britain could offer nothing of interest to him. He well understood that the Americans had distanced themselves from Churchill’s nation. The prime minister’s behaviour can only be explained by acknowledging that he still nursed an exaggerated self-belief in his ability to reach personal understandings with Stalin. There was a pathos about his flight to Moscow in October 1944, well understood by those who worked most closely with the tired old prime minister.

  He paused briefly in Italy, hearing from his commanders a tale of inadequate resources and sluggish progress. He saw Georgios Papandreou, and embarrassed the Greek prime minister by subjecting him to a long lecture on the virtues of monarchy. On October 9 he arrived in Moscow and was driven to Molotov’s dacha, his residence for the visit. At the first meeting with Stalin, he plunged immediately into a demand that Britain should have the principal voice in determining the future of Greece. He soon made it plain to the Soviet warlord that he spoke for himself, for Britain, and not for its transatlantic partner. Stalin observed silkily that Roosevelt “demanded too many rights for the United States of America, leaving too little for the Soviet Union and Great Britain.” Churchill produced what he called a “naughty document.” This was the draft of what became known as the “percentages agreement,” in American eyes the most notorious piece of chicanery in Churchill’s premiership. In Romania, Russia was to be recognised as having a 90 percent interest, while “the others” had 10 percent. In Greece, these figures were to be reversed. In Yugoslavia and Hungary, interests would be shared fifty-fifty. In Bulgaria, Russia would have a 75 percent interest, “the others” 25 percent. Churchill pushed this half sheet across the table to Stalin, who glanced at it, added a large blue tick, and passed the paper back across the table.

  During the hours and days that followed, there was much general talk between the two men: about Greece and Yugoslavia, where Stalin agreed with Churchill that they should seek to prevent civil war between rival ideologies; about Italy, where the prime minister requested that Moscow should not “stir up Italian communists;” and about monarchs—Churchill said that nowhere would Britain seek to reenthrone a ruler against the will of the people. He made it plain that Britain would not support mass executions of defeated Nazis, though he hoped that as many as possible would be killed on the battlefield. He asserted his belief that no ideology should be imposed on small states, which must be free to decide their own destinies. Meanwhile, Eden haggled with Molotov about details of the percentages agreement, with the Russian foreign minister demanding, for instance, 90 percent influence in Bulgaria.

  On October 11, Churchill sought to resolve such matters in a long missive to Stalin which he drafted, then showed to Averell Harriman, now U.S. ambassador in Moscow. Harriman said that Roosevelt and Cordell Hull would certainly repudiate the letter, if it was sent. Instead, the prime minister telegraphed to the president, urging the importance of acting swiftly to prevent an eruption of civil wars in the Balkans. Already, Communist partisans in Albania had rejected the return of King Zog, exiled from the country since 1941.

  Then Churchill’s delegation set forth for the British embassy, to host a dinner for Stalin and Molotov. There, Stalin told his host that it had not been policy, but military realities, which had prevented the Red Army from succouring the Warsaw Poles. The prime minister asked Lazar Kaganovich, the commissar for railways, how he made his nation’s transport trains run on time. When an engine driver failed in his duty, said Kaganovich with a wolfish grin … then he drew his hand across his throat. Churchill rarely displayed anxiety about his own safety, but in Moscow he was furious to discover that his plane was left overnight in the hands of Russian guards. He insisted that thereafter a member of its RAF crew must remain aboard the aircraft around the clock. It is hard to suggest that this represented paranoia.

  As always at these meetings, talking continued into the small hours. The Russian mood seemed unreservedly benign. Churchill cabled to Roosevelt about “an extraordinary atmosphere of goodwill.” To Clementine, he wrote on October 13: “The affairs go well987. We have settled a lot of things about the Balkans & prevented hosts of squabbles that were maturing. The two sets of Poles have arrived & are being kept for the night in separate cages … I have had v[er]y nice talks with the Old Bear. I like him the more I see him. Now they respect us here & I am sure they wish to work with us. I have to keep the President in constant touch & this is the delicate side.”

  In almost all of this Churchill was mistaken. Unaccustomed Russian civility, even warmth, was inspired by a new self-confidence, born of battlefield triumph. Virtually none of the assurances Stalin offered had substance. He had no intention of honouring them. What he wanted in the Balkans, he would take. Stalin could always raise a laugh from his obeisant courtiers by saying, as he often did: “We fucked this England!”988 The prime minister could claim only one success which proved enduring: Greece. Stalin recognised the strength of British sentiment about the country, together with the reality of Western Allied dominance of its airspace and surrounding seas. All the rest of the Balkans was within the Soviets’ grasp. Though strife lay ahead in Greece, the Russians made no attempt to promote Communist victory. Thus far, and thus far only, Churchill may have accomplished something useful in Moscow.

  His most notable failure was the attempt to save Poland. He summoned from London a Polish exile delegation, led by Prime Minister Mikolajczyk, who attended under threat from Churchill. Days of icy roundtable discussion followed, with the Russians half amused and half embarrassed by the slavish puppet show put on by their own “Lublin Poles.” Churchill wrote to the king from Moscow, “Our lot from London are, as Your Majesty knows989, a decent but feeble lot of fools, but the delegates from Lublin seem to be the greatest villains imaginable.” Between sessions, Churchill made desperate efforts to induce the London Poles to accept the proposed new frontiers for their country, which would cede territory to Russia in exchange for land carved from eastern Germany. Blandishments and threats alike failed to move Mikolajczyk and his colleagues, who remained obdurate. Stalin dismissed a compromise proposal advanced by the British. When the Polish leader returned to London and put the final Soviet offer to his colleagues, it was decisively rejected. He then resigned as prime minister. Churchill found himself accepting commiserations from Stalin, because “his” Poles had rejected a deal. It was apparent that, in these circumstances, Moscow’s appointees would rule the country.

  It would have suited Stalin to gain Mikolajczyk’s acquiescence both in the new borders and in accepting a marginal role in the new government. But, since there was no possibility that non-Communists would be granted real influence, far less power, the London Poles lost nothing and preserved their honour by rejecting Stalin’s proposals. Churchill, however, was left to nurse despondency and failure. He thought the Poles almost demented in their refusal to make terms with Moscow. When General Anders, Polish corps commander in Italy, expressed hopes that the Allies would free Poland by force once Germany was beaten, Churchill said despairingly: “This is crazy. You cannot defeat the Russians.” In his perception, Mikolajczyk’s stubbornness had handed his country to Stalin. “The Poles’ game is up,”990 he said tersely to Moran. Better, he thought, to accept a Russian mess of pottage than nothing at all.

  Posterity should surely be moved in recognising that Churchill cared so much about Poland, where Britain had no selfish interest whatever. He waged a long, thankless struggle on behalf of the nation which had become the victim of Nazi aggression at the outbreak of the Second World War. It seemed to him unbearably tragi
c that impending Allied victory should merely offer a new servitude to the people on whose behalf Britain had declared war on Germany. Yet this was the case, and would have been so even had Roosevelt entered the lists in support of Churchill. The Russians were on the Vistula, while the Anglo-Americans were not yet at the Rhine. “Far quicker than the British991 and also the Americans,” Sir William Deakin has written, “the Russians grasped the inner logic of the situation, namely that at the final victory the fate of the occupied countries of Europe … would be decided neither by the Resistance leaders themselves on the spot nor their representatives … in London and Moscow, but along a frontier between the armies of the Western Allies on the one hand and the Russians on the other.”

  The Moscow visit ended with the usual round of banquets. Churchill told Stalin that he favoured some grouping of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia after the war, which the Russian leader cared for not at all. Stalin surprised Churchill by expressing a passionate hatred for Switzerland. But the Russians displayed no hostility to the British, as they had so often done in the past. On the contrary, Churchill and Stalin talked with freedom and, on the Russian side, unembarrassed mendacity. On October 18, Churchill addressed a press conference at the British embassy. The next morning, Stalin not only came to the airfield in the rain to see the prime minister off, but condescended to inspect the interior of his York aircraft. The two men parted with every evidence of cordiality. On the afternoon of October 22, Churchill landed back in Britain.

  The world was allowed to suppose that his Moscow visit was merely a routine meeting of allies. It inspired in Churchill a brief surge of illusion, that he had forged an understanding with Stalin which might yield fruits such as he had failed to harvest from Roosevelt. The U.S. president, by contrast, was irked. He was in no doubt about Churchill’s purpose. Britain’s prime minister was attempting to achieve what the United States was absolutely committed to resist: the creation of spheres of influence in postwar Europe and the Balkans. The divide between British and American policy had never been greater since December 1941.

  For all their public expressions of mutual regard, it is hard to suppose that, by this time, Churchill or Roosevelt cherished much private affection for each other. Their objectives were too far apart. The president’s world vision was more enlightened than that of the old imperialist prime minister, yet even less realistic. He pinned his faith for the future upon the new United Nations organisation, the rise of Chiang Kai-shek’s China, and a working partnership between America and the Soviet Union. His motives were exalted. Churchill’s impassioned commitment to freedom excluded the world’s black and brown races, as that of the president did not—though he shocked his own staff by domestic references to “the nigger vote.” But, while Churchill had a quixotic strand of personal humility intermixed with his vanity, Roosevelt had none. His faith in his own power, as well as that of his nation, was unbounded. His unwillingness to acknowledge his own mortality, which was even more pressing than that of men threatened by death on the war’s battlefields, was a grievous omission in the last months of his presidency. He might at least have ensured, as he did not, that Vice President Harry Truman was admitted to the secrets of the Grand Alliance.

  It seems mistaken to be surprised, however, by Washington’s cavalier treatment of both Britain and its prime minister. Beyond the new hubris of the United States, on many matters of strategy and policy the British had displayed poor judgement in 1944. They were wrong about Overlord, about Italy both militarily and politically, and were dilatory and confused about the Japanese war. On the battlefield their soldiers performed adequately rather than impressively. Churchill allowed himself to be distracted into pursuit of self-indulgent whims, such as a proposal that some aged British naval guns mounted at Dover should be shipped to the Continent to aid Eisenhower’s campaign. British attempts to ignore their own impoverishment and retain a giant’s role in the world inspired pity among their American friends, contempt among their American enemies. Churchill told Smuts: “You must remember … that our armies992 are only about one-half the size of the Americans and will soon be little more than one third … It is not as easy as it used to be for me to get things done.” Churchill often asserted that, far from owing a huge cash debt to the United States when the war was over, Britain should be recognised as a creditor, for its lone defence of freedom in 1940–41. This was never plausible. When the war ended, the world would assess Britain’s rightful place by reading its bank statement. Informed British people recognised this, and feared accordingly.

  On October 27, Churchill reported to the Commons on his visit to Moscow. He now commanded an affection among MPs which transcended partisan loyalties. “How much depends on this man993 nowadays,” wrote Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam, for so long a sceptic. “Without Winston’s prestige and personality, where should we be with Roosevelt and Stalin? They are tiresome enough as things are—but how could Anthony Eden, or Attlee, stand up to them? No—I have never been a Winstonian, but I do realize that today if a man ever be indispensable, Winston is that man.”

  When Attlee told MPs that Churchill was again in Moscow, Labour members were seen shaking their heads in mingled admiration and sympathy, saying: “He oughtn’t to do it994. Poor old boy, he really oughtn’t to do it.” There was a readiness to indulge him, almost unique in parliamentary experience: “He is not of course995 as vigorous or pugnacious as in 1940,” wrote Harold Nicolson. “But he has no need to be. He is right to take the more sober tone of the elder statesman.” Conservatives who had spurned Churchill in 1940 recognised him in 1944 as offering the only political hope for their party, which was profoundly unpopular in the country. The old ruling class perceived that the electorate yearned for its dispossession, as soon as ballot papers were offered to them at a general election. In Nicolson’s words: “The upper classes feel that all this sacrifice996 and suffering will only mean that the proletariat will deprive them of all their comforts and influence, and then proceed to render this country and Empire a third-class State.” Yet the prime minister himself was far from immune from the effects of public alienation. Nicolson was shocked one day to notice scrawled graffiti in a station lavatory: “Winston Churchill is a bastard.”997 When he remarked upon it to an RAF officer standing beside him, the airman shrugged, saying, “Yes. The tide has turned. We find it everywhere.”

  “But how foul. How bloody foul!”

  “Well, you see, if I may say so, the men hate politicians.”

  “Winston a politician! Good God!”

  On October 27, the prime minister delivered a brilliant speech about his experiences in Moscow. Then he adjourned to the smoking room, and addressed the barman: “Collins, I should like a whisky and soda998—single.” After sitting down for a moment, he struggled out of his armchair and returned to the bar. “Collins, delete the word ‘single’ and insert the word ‘double.’” “Then,” in the words of an MP, “grinning at us like a schoolboy, he resumed his seat.” Here was another of those impish miniatures which help to explain why love for Churchill ran so strong among most of those who worked with him. For all Alan Brooke’s exasperation with his master at this time, he wrote fondly of a scene that winter, as the two men visited the snowbound French battlefront in the Vosges. The prime minister arrived for lunch with de Gaulle “completely frozen999, and almost rolled up on himself like a hedgehog. He was placed in a chair with a hot water bottle at his feet and one in the back of his chair. At the same time good brandy was poured down his throat to warm him internally. The results were wonderful, he thawed out rapidly and when the time came produced one of those indescribably funny French speeches which brought the house down.”

  But the British people had by now hardened their hearts towards their rulers, even the greatest. Many felt less gratitude to those presiding over victory in the most terrible conflict in history than implacable resentment against the politicians whom they held responsible for getting them into it in the first place. Even if Churchill had not hi
mself been among the guilty men of the 1930s, he was now their political standard-bearer. And for all his giant stature as Britain’s war leader, millions of voters sensed that his interest in the humdrum domestic troubles of peace was perfunctory. An anonymous officer of the Second Army, fighting in Holland, wrote in the Spectator about the mood of the British soldier under his command: “[He] is fighting for the future of the world1000 and does not believe in that future … He asks a lot of the future, but he doesn’t expect to get any of it.” The writer perceived his men as chronically mistrustful of all authority, institutions and politicians, but Tories most of all: “It is, perhaps, encouraging that Tommy, 1944, will not be foozled by facile talk of a land fit for heroes. He wants deeds, not words.” Few among such men perceived Winston Churchill as the national leader likely to fulfil such hopes once victory came.

  NINETEEN

  Athens:

  “Wounded in the House of Our Friends”

  GERMAN WITHDRAWAL from the Balkans precipitated a crisis for Churchill which severely damaged his standing in America, engaged him in bitter political dispute at home, and provided the last perilous military adventure of his life. Experience at the end of World War II demonstrated that it is much more difficult to order the affairs of liberated nations than of defeated ones. This is because it is undesirable, if not impossible, to arbitrate their affairs with the same ruthlessness. If Washington’s twenty-first-century neoconservatives had possessed a less muddled understanding of the experience of 1944–45, had studied more closely Allied difficulties managing liberated territories in the Roosevelt-Churchill era, they might have inflicted less grief upon the world in our own times by their blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan.