LONDON, WASHINGTON, MOSCOW, ATHENS, PARIS, CHUNGKING NOVEMBER 1944 - JANUARY 1945 ‘All would therefore rapidly disintegrate as it did last time’
CHURCHILL
HIS RE-ELECTION VICTORY meant that Roosevelt had won ‘the referendum of 1944 for American participation in a stronger United Nations’, as his biographer John MacGregor Burns put it. The spectre of a renewal of isolationism after victory receded. But, while the Democrats picked up twenty-two new seats in the House of Representatives, they lost one place in the Senate, meaning that the President would have to continue to contend with a conservative majority there.1
The war in the Pacific was going well. MacArthur’s troops had landed in the Philippines and the Japanese navy had been defeated once more in the Leyte Gulf. But the deterioration of Roosevelt’s health meant that a race was on between his survival and his ability to shape the postwar world. Though he had campaigned vigorously, he had lost 23 pounds; his hands shook; his shoulders stooped. He would suddenly grow pale, his jaw slack, his eyes glassy. Frances Perkins likened him to ‘an invalid who has been allowed to see guests for the first time and the guests had stayed too long.’ Though Admiral McIntire continued in denial, the patient was becoming more aware of his condition. ‘Well, what did you expect?’ he asked his son when Elliott showed his shock at his father’s appearance.
After the election, he went to Warm Springs in Georgia for treatment. At giving, he began carving the turkies at a dinner
Attended by 110 other patients. They found him looking old and ill, coughing and shaking as he told his usual string of stories. Though he could be bright and engaged, at times he looked awful, falling asleep in his chair, and complaining of headaches. His blood pressure was still very high, he continued to lose weight, his teeth troubled him, and his appetite was poor—Dr Bruenn prescribed egg-nogs. Though keen for another summit, he said this should be after he was inaugurated for a fourth term in January.
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Poland does not seem to have swayed many votes in America— Roosevelt did well in cities with high Polish immigrant populations. But Churchill was keen to close the running dispute with Moscow. On 2 November, he called in the government-in-exile to urge it to reach agreement with Moscow. ‘Like a big sheep-dog, watchdog, rather, he barked imperiously at his Polish flock, who were spared neither warning bites nor shafts of sarcasm,’ the ambassador Count Raczynski wrote. London would withdraw its guarantees to Poland if he did not get their accord on the Curzon Line, Churchill warned. The Poles stuck to their rejection of Stalin’s conditions.2
Nor did Mikolajczyk get any help from Washington. When he wrote to Roosevelt raising Molotov’s assertion about his attitude at Teheran, the reply said US policy was to decline to guarantee any specific frontiers, which would be the concern of the future world organisation. Talking to Harriman, when he visited Washington, the President said once more he considered European problems so impossible that he wanted to stay out of them as much as he could, except for Germany.
Still, he added that he could act as an arbitrator between the USSR and Poland and Finland. But only one aspect of the Polish issue seemed to interest him—the future of Lvov — as he evolved a fantastic notion of an international authority for the city of Poles on Ukrainian territory. Finally, he said he would not object to the Curzon Line if the Poles, Russians and British all agreed to it. At the embassy in Moscow, the tough-minded George Kennan, who felt that the West should have had ‘a full-fledged and realistic political showdown’ with Moscow over its failure to help the Warsaw Rising, grieved that there was ‘something frivolous about our whole action on this Polish question. I reflected on the lightheartedness with which great powers offer advice to smaller ones in matters affecting the vital interests of the latter.’ When a former US ambassador to Warsaw urged Roosevelt to take a strong line, the
President sighed: ‘Do you want me to go to war with Russia?
Caught between the extremist hawks among the London Poles, Stalin’s obduracy and lack of support from the West, Mikolajczyk resigned on 24 November. Meeting him a few days later, Churchill assured him, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll never forget Poland.’ But the British leader wrote to Stalin that London would take a ‘cold’ attitude towards the new government-in-exile, headed by an old socialist who had fought the Russians in the First World War and had been smuggled out of his homeland. When Churchill expressed a hope that Mikolajczyk might return, Stalin dismissed him as ‘incapable of helping a Polish settlement. Indeed, his negative role has been revealed.’
As Kennan had put it that autumn, the USSR was set on becoming the dominant power in central and eastern Europe while being committed to a vague policy known in the West as collaboration. ‘The first of these programmes implies taking. The second implies giving,’ Kennan wrote with unfashionable realism. ‘No one can stop Russia taking, if she is determined to go through with it. No one can force Russia to do the giving, if she is determined not to go through with it.’
In one instance, however, Stalin did give—on a tough-minded calculation of Soviet interests. When the 50,000-strong Greek Communist army tried to seize power in December from the London-backed government installed in Athens, Moscow told it to expect no help. Showing fealty to the percentages agreement, he also demonstrated that he was ready to subordinate indigenous Communists to broader Soviet interests—in Yugoslavia, he delayed recognising Tito’s movement as the legitimate government until he established that this would not alienate the Western Allies. Greece was marginal for him. If he could get British acceptance of Soviet control of much more important Romania, he would sacrifice the Greek Communists.3
Still, the revolt in Greece went well at first. The small British contingent was besieged as fighting flared through the streets of Athens. Leftist forces spread out across the country. Alexander flew in, and decided to send reinforcements from Italy. It was the only time when Western troops fought to prevent Communist rule in a European country, a demonstration of realpolitik by Churchill with Stalin’s acquiescence.
This aroused criticism in Britain—though a vote of confidence in the Commons was won by 279 votes to 30. On Christmas Eve, Churchill decided to fly to Athens—driving Clementine to tears at the abandonment of the family celebration. He, Eden and Moran drove to Northolt aerodrome outside London to travel via Naples from where the Prime Minister sent a cable home with his Christmas love—‘I am sorry indeed not to see the tree,’ he wrote. Arriving the following evening, the British party travelled by armoured car to a cruiser, the Ajax, which was to be its headquarters.
At discussions attended by Macmillan, Alexander reported that British troops were advancing slowly in house-to-house fighting. Churchill said the only way out was a round table with the Greeks, including the leaders of the revolt.
In the morning, shells landed near die cruiser before he was driven to the British Embassy. As he arrived at the legation, a woman was shot dead in the street. Clambering out, Churchill stood gazing up at a house, his fingers raised in a V-sign to people looking out of the windows.
The British group went on to the Foreign Ministry where they were met by an old man who showed them to a room with a huge table on which hurricane lamps flickered. The Archbishop of Athens sat in the centre. The Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, and his government were opposite. The extremely tall, black robed, long bearded cleric rose with a welcoming speech—Churchill reckoned that, with his hat, he stood seven feet high. The Prime Minister replied that Britain would not shrink from preserving Athens from anarchy.
At that point there was a knock on the door. Three men from the Elas Communist movement came in, their leader wearing a grey waterproof coat and brown muffler over a British uniform. Papandreou did not look at them. Moran noted that the Communists seemed much more lively than the haggard, scrawny ministers. Churchill told the meeting Britain wanted no territory in Greece, but could not leave until the crisis had been settled. The Communist leader, Partsalides, said the rising had been undertaken because those involved ‘believed in the destruction of Fascism, in the right to live free upon a basis laid down in the Atlantic Charter’. He referred to Britain as ‘our great ally’ even as his men were fighting its soldiers in the streets outside.
Having brought the warring Greek parties together, Churchill said it was time for him to withdraw to let them try to find a solution. He walked round the table, shaking hands with the members of the government.
Forgetting his previous vows not to do the same with the Elas representatives, he grasped their hands too. On the way back to the ship he said they were different from the Lublin Poles. Had they not wrung his hand? If the three of them could be got to dine with him, all difficulties might vanish. Of one thing he was sure, he wrote to his wife, the hatred among the Greek factions was so intense that ‘a frightful massacre would take place if we withdrew’.
The next day, the archbishop told Churchill all the parties had agreed he should become regent in place of the king, a deeply divisive figure. Churchill accepted this, despite fears that the cleric might become a second de Gaulle. Back in London, the Prime Minister and Eden talked to the monarch-in-exile till 4.30 a. m., finally getting him to submit to the regency and to undertake publicly not to return home unless a plebiscite showed he was wanted. The British gained the upper hand over the rebels in Athens, and advanced into other cities, while anti-Communist Greek forces were victorious in the north. In mid-January, the Communists gave up. Rightists in the army and police took their revenge with a ‘white terror’ that sought to destroy the remnants of their organisation— unsuccessfully since left-wing guerrilla attacks began in 1946 and the country then descended into civil war, which would produce the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine on limiting the spread of Communist by force, if necessary.
That was being far from the American attitude at the end of 1944, and the British intervention came in for heavy criticism across the Atlantic, arousing all the old fears about British imperialism, Churchill’s bellicosity, and spheres of influence. Linking Poland and Greece, the new Secretary of State, Stettinius, told Eden that events in the two countries were ‘causing great resentment’ in the United States. ‘Military people were going so far as to say that we ought to withdraw from Europe and “go to the Pacific now and win the war there”.’ Press reports presented the Communists as resistance fighters being attacked by Britain on behalf of Greek reactionaries and in pursuit of its own east Mediterranean ambitions. Warsaw, it could be argued, was on the road to Berlin; Athens led nowhere, and was important only in the scheme of British designs for the region.
‘It grieves me very much to see signs of our drifting apart at a time when unity becomes ever more important, as danger recedes and faction arises,’ Churchill cabled Hopkins. On 9 December, Admiral King had commanded American landing craft to stop helping British forces in Greece. Learning of this, Churchill drafted a message to Roosevelt warning of ‘a disaster of the first magnitude’ threatening to ‘endanger all the relations between Great Britain and the United States’. He was, he added, sure the President had not seen the naval orders and would ‘have them stamped upon at the earliest moment’. Deciding not to send the message, Churchill telephoned Hopkins, using his cover name of John Martin. The line was so bad that the aide could not understand what he was talking about. The following morning, Hopkins became aware of the Admiral’s decision, and suggested to Leahy that it should be reversed. The White House Chief of Staff agreed. Hopkins told Churchill Roosevelt had not been aware of what King had done.
There was also concern in Washington when Churchill referred to the agreement to leave territorial arrangements for a post-war peace conference, except for ‘changes mutually agreed’. This raised the question of whether such mutual agreements had been made by London in secret. Another storm broke out when Churchill’s secretary, John Colville, sent a message from the Prime Minister to the British commander in Athens, calling the Greek capital ‘a conquered city’. Colville should have marked the message with the notation ‘Guard’ used for messages relating to purely British matters which should not go to the Americans. But, sending the cable to the Foreign Office for despatch at 5 a. m., Colville forgot. Leaked to the Washington Post, this aroused fresh criticism of Britain which Churchill tried to calm by a note to Hopkins assuring him that ‘I certainly do not want to fight another war.’
‘British troops fighting against the guerrillas who fought the Nazis for the last four years. How the British can dare such a thing! ’ Elliott recalled his father saying in private. ‘The lengths to which they will go to hang on to the past! Killing Greek guerrillas! Using British soldiers for such a job!’ To London, he was much more moderate, explaining that the adverse reaction in American public opinion meant he could not ‘stand with you in the present course of events in Greece’.
Churchill’s response showed his disappointment: ‘We desire nothing from Greece but to do our duty by the common cause. In the midst of our task of bringing food and relief and maintaining the rudiments of order...we have become involved in a furious, though not very bloody, struggle. I have felt it much that you were unable to give a word of explanation for our action but I understand your difficulties.’ Six weeks later, he wrote to his wife that ‘the bitter misunderstandings which have arisen in the United States, and in degenerate circles at home [over Greece], are only a foretaste of the furies which will be loosened about every stage of the peace settlement.’
While the Greek crisis blew up, the Western Allies had to face their first major reverse on the European battlefield. On 6 December, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt of ‘the serious and disappointing war situation’ as their troops fell behind schedule in the move to the Rhine. Ten days later, things got worse when 250,000 German troops attacked in the Ardennes, advancing 60 miles. By Christmas, the offensive had been halted and the progress towards Germany resumed. In the east, despite tough resistance, the Red Army was steadily moving to the German frontier.
Against this background, a briefing paper by the State Department argued that tension was rising in Europe because of Moscow’s suspicions that Britain was promoting right-wing, anti-Russian regimes while London viewed ‘with apprehension the possibility that the Soviet Government will endeavour in its turn to install and support left-wing totalitarian governments’. In the circumstances, it added, Washington should be ready to take part in inter-Allied commissions to ensure free elections, civil liberties, and economic and social reforms. A Provisional Security Council for Europe should be established made up of the US, the USSR, Britain and France, to guarantee that provisional governments in liberated countries represented the broad sweep of opinion, and that free elections were held.4
Roosevelt was getting increasingly rigorous advice as to what lay over the rainbow he had evoked in Teheran. George Kennan thought that the line should be drawn with the USSR though he did not say where. There would be fireworks but ‘should the Western world stand firm...Moscow would have played its last real card.’ Noting that Stalin was making no practical distinction between countries which had sided with Germany and those whose governments-in-exile had backed resistance, Harriman reported that the USSR was using ‘occupation troops, secret police, local communist parties, labor unions, sympathetic leftist organizations, sponsored cultural societies and economic pressure to assure the establishment of regimes which...actually depend for their existence on groups responsive to all suggestions emanating from the Kremlin.’
The US Embassy in Moscow found that military success was making the Soviets overbearing. Stalin dragged his feet when asked for more information on his intentions and did not divulge plans drawn up by the Soviet High Command for a forty-five-day advance on Berlin. The
Secrecy about Red Army plans in the Far East was such that a war game room was set up in the American embassy ballroom where officers took on the roles of Japanese and Soviet commanders to try to see what each side would do.
In a letter to Marshall in December, John Deane, head of the US military mission, expressed the frustration built up over the three years in Moscow. ‘I have sat at innumerable Russian banquets and become gradually nauseated by Russian food, vodka and protestations of friendship,’ he wrote. ‘Each person high in public life proposes a toast a little sweeter than the preceding one on Soviet-British-American friendship. It is amazing how these toasts go down past the tongues in the cheeks. After the banquets, we send the Russians another thousand airplanes, and they approve a visa that has been hanging for months. We then scratch our heads to see what other gifts we can send, and they scratch theirs to see what else they can ask for.’
In this context, the State Department noted that ‘American interests require that every effort be made by this Government to assist France...to regain her strength and her influence...with a view toward enabling the French to assume larger responsibilities in connection with the maintenance of peace.’5
The shape of de Gaulle’s policy was already evident. Though France was anchored in the Western camp, the general sought leverage by positioning himself between Washington and Moscow, pursuing policies he would follow until the late 1960s. He gained ground in obtaining an occupation zone in Germany and in getting favourable frontier arrangements. France was admitted to the European Advisory Commission. Washington agreed to equip eight French divisions to join the final fight in the west. Hopkins went to Paris to see de Gaulle, who was chilly because he was going to be excluded from the next Roosevelt-Stalin-Churchill summit. The American envoy suggested a subsequent rendezvous with the President which the French leader accepted.
At the end of 1944, de Gaulle visited Moscow for talks with Stalin to establish his country’s international position and sign a Franco-Soviet friendship treaty. He did not inform Churchill or Roosevelt in advance -they learned of the proposed treaty from the Kremlin.
The Russians did not make the journey easy, refusing to let de Gaulle fly in to the capital and forcing him to take a four-day train journey in the bitter cold. But Harriman noted that Stalin treated the
Frenchman with respect. Learning that the Soviet leader was pressing the visitor to recognise the Lublin Committee as the price for agreeing to the treaty, Harriman went to see the general to warn him of the adverse reaction this would provoke in Washington. At a reception later in the day, de Gaulle took the ambassador aside to say he had told Stalin he would take no action on Poland without consulting Washington and London. All he would agree to was to post a military officer to the Soviet backed group. [De Gaulle had gone to Poland in 1919 as part of a Western military mission to help Warsaw fight the Bolsheviks. Unlike Churchill’s recurrent references to his support for intervention in Russia, there is no record of this having been mentioned during the Moscow talks.]
He added that, after the war, smaller European nations would have to rally round France to avoid Soviet domination. Britain was an island; America was far away; so France would assume a leadership role.
In a toast at the final banquet, the Soviet leader urged the visitors to ‘drink more wine and then everything will straighten out’. His guest was one of those moderate drinkers he distrusted. He raised his glass to Roosevelt as ‘the great leader for peace as for war’ and Churchill as ‘a man of indestructible fighting spirit’ but ignored the Frenchman. Drunk, the Georgian went round his entourage saying they would be shot if they did not perform satisfactorily. Seeing Molotov and the French Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, discussing details of a new draft of the Franco-Soviet treaty, he cried out: ‘Bring the machine guns. Let’s liquidate the diplomats.’
After the meal, de Gaulle sat through the usual film, but left when a second was shown. In the early hours, he was called back to the Kremlin, and presented with the original version of the friendship pact to sign. ‘France has been insulted,’ the furious general replied, starting to stalk from the room. Stalin told Molotov to get a new draft, which was signed at 6.30 a. m. As the Frenchman left, Stalin called after his interpreter:
‘You know too much. I’d better send you to Siberia.’ On his way out, de Gaulle looked back; Stalin was sitting alone at a table, eating again.
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In January 1945, as the British gained the upper hand in Greece, the Lublin Committee proclaimed itself Poland’s provisional government, winning peasant support by breaking up estates and distributing land. Stalin promptly recognised the new administration. There was no point in dealing with emigre groups, he advised the West. Though there should have been nothing surprising about this, Roosevelt told the Kremlin he was ‘disturbed and deeply disappointed’ that the Soviets had not waited until the Big Three had had a chance to discuss the situation. The State Department defined US policy as aiming at ‘the eventual establishment by the Polish people of a truly democratic government of their own choice’. Churchill told Stalin he was ‘distressed’.6
The ensuing border changes gave the Soviet Union 70,000 square miles of territory, with 10 million inhabitants, according to the last census which did not take account of wartime deaths. Poland gained 27,000 square miles of land in East Prussia, Danzig, Pomerania and Silesia, containing some 15 million people, the overwhelming majority of them German, many of whom fled westward in one of the biggest population movements Europe had seen. Absorbing the new territory would make Warsaw even more dependent on Soviet help, while the huge refugee influx would place an added burden on Germany. As the logic of their Polish policies played out, Roosevelt and Churchill could only hope that Stalin would prove more flexible when the Big Three met.
Apart from Poland, Moscow had taken over the Baltic States, and held Finland in thrall. A ‘Fatherland Front’ was installed in Bulgaria after the Red Army invaded that country. Stalin got his quid pro quo for Greece when Romanian Communists took power in Bucharest, supervised by Vyshinsky—Churchill sent Eden a memo saving Britain must not ‘press our hand too far’ there, and adding: ‘Remember the percentages we wrote out on paper...It is an awful thing we cannot have it both ways.’ Though the installation of controlled regimes in Hungary and Czechoslovakia would take longer, the future of the first appeared to have been determined, and the second teetered on a knife edge. Tito was on his way to controlling Yugoslavia, and the National Liberation Army had taken over from the departing Germans in Albania.
Stalin had enough. Austria’s neutrality, presaged at Teheran, was respected; it was treated as the first of Hitler’s victims, rather than a country where the union with Germany in 1938 had been widely welcomed. West European Communist parties were told to disband resistance forces, and join the democratic process. This was the message Togliatti had taken back to Italy from Moscow in the summer. Seeing the French party leader Maurice Thorez, Stalin instructed him to ‘pursue a left bloc’ line in a form appropriate for France, not to defy de Gaulle, to cultivate socialists and moderate parties, and to back the rebirth of a militarily and industrially powerful France, with a united army in which he should try to get good positions for Communist resistance veterans.
Despite his annoyance over Moscow’s recognition of the new government in Warsaw, Roosevelt was still focusing on improving relations with Stalin. So, when Molotov resurrected the matter of a loan, first mooted at the beginning of 1944 but dropped for technical reasons, Washington reacted positively. The Foreign Minister handed Harriman a note mentioning a $6-billion credit. Dropping earlier Treasury objections, Morgenthau raised this to $10 billion—his pro-Soviet feelings were still strong. Then the State Department brought the proposed amount back down to the Soviet figure. Talks began through the embassy in Washington, and Harriman expected it to figure at the next Big Three summit. But, for some reason, it did not, and his hopes that it might offer both leverage and business for US companies came to nothing.7
At the end of 1944, the President repeated to Churchill his intention of bringing troops home as rapidly as possible once the fighting ended. That, the Prime Minister replied, ‘causes me alarm’. If US forces went home and France had not yet formed a proper army, ‘how will it be possible to hold down western Germany beyond the present Russian occupied line?’ he asked. ‘All would therefore rapidly disintegrate as it did last time.’ Roosevelt responded that there should be no problem in providing a French army with equipment taken from the Germans, while Harriman recalled that Marshall and Eisenhower trusted the Russians because they had kept their word militarily. Such was Roosevelt’s desire not to ruffle the Kremlin that, when the OSS secret service got hold of a book of Soviet intelligence codes, he ordered it to be returned, without notes having been made of its contents—the OSS boss, William Donovan, copied it all the same.
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China remained a major problem. Despite US efforts, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong were intent on renewing their civil war. The Generalissimo remarked pointedly to Patrick Hurley, who had become the US ambassador, that he did not want a repetition in his country of what had happened in Poland and Yugoslavia. His perennial concern about the reliability of American support was deepened by the discovery of an OSS plan to train and equip the Communists.8
He would have been even more concerned had he learned that Stalin had raised with the Americans his desire to regain Tsarist-era railway rights in Manchuria, as well as island territories north of Japan. Harriman noted that Red Army troops would probably be sent in to guard the lines, extending Soviet influence to the region. This would also open a channel for aid for the Chinese Communists, whose strength lay mainly in the north. With China’s economy in ruins, society ripped apart by eight years of war, endemic corruption, no convincing leadership from Chiang, and regional barons resisting his control, Roosevelt’s Fourth Policeman looked ever less able to fit the role he had laid out for it.
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When it came to international organisations, the allied picture was mixed. The Bretton Woods conference had laid down the post-war international monetary system on American-led lines. Other talks covered cooperation in areas such as food supplies, health and labour. An American bid to force through a civil aviation agreement that would have opened up world routes to its companies ran into stiff British opposition; the argument became so heated that Roosevelt and Churchill had to step in to formulate a compromise that led to the US making bilateral arrangements. Such incidents deepened suspicions in Congress and the administration that London would be an unwilling partner in the new world.9
After the inconclusive end of the Dumbarton Oaks talks during the summer, Leo Pasvolsky, the Russian-speaking State Department official, held protracted discussions with the Soviet ambassador, but Gromyko gave no ground. At the end of December, Stalin rejected an American suggestion for the Big Three to show moral leadership by agreeing to abstain from voting on a dispute in which they were involved. ‘The unanimity of permanent members is necessary in all decisions of the Council in regard to a determination of a threat to peace,’ he insisted.
The State Department warned that agreement on complete unanimity would be seen as surrender to the Kremlin, and ‘gravely alienate many sincere supporters of the Dumbarton Oaks’. Stettinius stressed the ‘urgent need’ for an accord as delay would bring ‘slackening of interest and possible growth of opposition’. The spectre of Wilson and the League of Nations hovered.
With such tensions and uncertainties in the air, a Big Three summit was clearly needed. The Western leaders suggested the Mediterranean, or Jerusalem. Stalin insisted on the Crimea. The President said he wanted to sleep on a warship, but that navigating the Dardanelles would be troublesome, requiring escort vessels needed elsewhere. Hopkins, who was in London, sent Roosevelt a message relaying Churchill’s remark on the Crimea: ‘If we had spent ten years on research, we could not have
Found a worse place in the world.’ But, the aide added, the Prime Minister felt ‘he can survive it by bringing an adequate supply of whisky. He claims it is good for typhus and deadly on lice which thrive in those parts.’
Stalin told Harriman his doctors advised him against making a long trip, and mentioned that he had suffered from ear trouble incurred on the flight from Teheran. Once more, he got his way with an agreement to meet in Yalta in February.
It would be only the second meeting of the Big Three, but also the last. The conference would go down as the moment at which the world was divided among the victors. The reality was that the contours of the Cold War were largely set even before the three leaders met. The task for Roosevelt and Churchill was to make the best of the situation on the ground, even before the hot war had been won.
World History
