Finest Years (44 page)

Yet in August 1942 Stalin was thoroughly briefed about Western Allied strategy, thanks to the highly placed Soviet agents in London. He had been told of the fierce Anglo-American arguments about the Second Front. On 4 August Beria reported:

Our NKVD resident
in London sent the following information received from a source close to the English General Staff: A meeting about the second front took place on 21 July 1942. It was attended by Churchill, Lord Mountbatten, General Marshall and others. General Marshall sharply criticized the attitude of the English…He insisted that the second front should be opened in 1942 and warned that if the English failed to do this the USA would have to reconsider sending
reinforcements to Great Britain and focus their attention on the Pacific. Churchill gave the following response to General Marshall: ‘There is not a single top general who would recommend starting major operations on the continent.' A further meeting on the second front took place on 22 or 23 July 1942. This was attended on the English side by Churchill, Mountbatten and the chiefs of staff; on the American side by Marshall, Eisenhower and others. The participants discussed a plan for the invasion of the continent which has been developed by English and American military experts…English chiefs of staff unanimously voted against and were supported by Churchill who declared that he could not vote against his own chiefs of staff. NKVD resident in London also reported the following, based on information from agents which had been also confirmed earlier by a source close to American embassy: on 25 July the British war cabinet agreed that there should be no second front this year.

A further 12 August NKVD intelligence brief to Stalin included a note on the prime minister's political position: ‘
Churchill departed for the USSR
in an atmosphere of growing domestic political crisis. The intensification of fighting on the Soviet-German front has had a marked effect on British public opinion…Source believes Churchill will offer a number of concessions to the Soviet Union BERIA.' Russian access to such insights should not be taken to mean that Stalin was always correctly informed. For instance, several times during the war NKVD agents reported to Moscow supposed parleys between the Western Allies and the Nazi leadership. On 12 May 1942 Beria passed to Stalin ‘a report from the London resident on German attempts to start separate negotiations with the English': ‘
We know from a reliable source
that an official from the German embassy in Sweden has flown to England from Stockholm on board a civilian aircraft.' Like other such claims, this one was fallacious, but it fuelled Soviet paranoia. NKVD information was entirely accurate, however, about Britain's position on the Second Front. Moscow was told that the prime minister's objections did not derive, as Stalin had supposed, from political hostility to the USSR, but instead from pragmatic military considerations.

Stalin had always displayed intense curiosity about Churchill, for a quarter of a century the arch-foe of Bolshevism. In June 1941 the Russian leader was surprised by the warmth with which Britain's prime minister embraced him as a co-belligerent. In the intervening fourteen months, however, little had happened to gain Stalin's confidence. Extravagant Western promises of aid had resulted in relatively meagre deliveries.
The Times
editorialist waxed lyrical on 6 January 1942 about the flow of British supplies to support the alliance with the Soviets:‘The first result of this collaboration has been the splendid performance of British and American tanks and aeroplanes on Russian battlefields.' This was a wild exaggeration of reality, based upon sunshine briefings of the media and Parliament by the British government. Not only were targets for shipments of aircraft and tanks to Russia unfulfilled, but much of the material dispatched was being sunk in transit.

Convoy PQ16 was the target of 145 Luftwaffe sorties, and lost eleven of its thirty-five ships. In July, when twenty-six out of thirty-seven ships carrying American and British supplies were lost with PQ17, 3,850 trucks, 430 tanks and 250 fighters vanished to the bottom. Following this disaster the Royal Navy insisted on cancelling all further convoys for the duration of the Arctic summer and its interminable daylight. Churchill, pressed by Roosevelt, reinstated the September convoys, and began moving supplies through Persia, where the British and Russians now shared military control. But the only important reality, in Moscow's eyes, was that aid consignments lagged far behind both Allied promises and Russian needs. Even more serious, the British had vetoed American plans for an early Second Front.

It was implausible that Stalin would display a sentimental enthusiasm for his British allies, any more than for any other human beings in his universe. He would never acknowledge that his nation's predicament was the consequence of his own awesomely cynical indulgence of Hitler back in 1939. But Russia's sense of outraged victimhood was none the less real for being spurious. The Soviets sought to bludgeon or shame the British and Americans into maintaining supply shipments, and landing an army in Europe at the earliest
possible date. Russia was counting her dead in millions while the British cavorted in North Africa, paying a tiny fraction of the eastern blood sacrifice. In August 1942, Rostov-on-Don had fallen, Germany's armies were deep in the Caucasus and almost at the gates of Stalingrad. Posterity knows that Hitler had made a fatal mistake, splitting his principal summer thrusts in pursuit of the strategically meaningless capture of Stalin's name-city. The tide of the eastern war would turn decisively by the year's end. But Russians at the time could not see beyond cataclysm. They knew only that their predicament was desperate. They could no more regard Churchill's people as comrades-in-arms than might a man thrashing in a sea of sharks look in fellowship upon spectators cheering him on from a boat.

The prime minister wasted no time, at his first meeting with Stalin, before reporting the decision against a landing in Europe in 1942. He said that any such venture must be on a small scale, and thus assuredly doomed. It could do no service to Russia's cause. The British and American governments were, however, preparing ‘a very great operation' in 1943. He told Stalin of
Torch
, the North African invasion plan, observing that he hoped the secret would not find its way into the British press—a jibe at ambassador Maisky's notorious indiscretions to journalists in London. He spoke much about the RAF's bombing of Germany, describing the beginnings of a long campaign systematically to destroy Hitler's cities with a ruthlessness he assumed the Soviet leader would applaud. ‘We sought no mercy,' said the prime minister, ‘and we would show no mercy.'

The substance of this first encounter, which lasted three hours and forty minutes, was made even less palatable by poor interpreting. All foreign visitors to the Kremlin were at first disconcerted that Stalin never looked into their eyes. Instead, this infinitely devious warlord, clad in a lilac tunic and cotton trousers tucked into long boots, gazed blankly at the wall or the floor as he listened and as he spoke. There were no immediate Soviet tantrums, though Stalin made plain his displeasure at the Second Front decision. ‘A man who is not prepared to take risks,' he mocked, ‘cannot win a war.' Given his prior knowledge of Churchill's ‘revelation', at this meeting he was
making sport of the prime minister. But he did so with his usual supreme diplomatic skill, maintaining his visitors' suspense about what their host really knew or thought. When they parted and Churchill returned to his villa, he signalled Attlee in London: ‘He knows the worst, and we parted in an atmosphere of goodwill.' Harriman cabled Roosevelt: ‘The prime minister was at his best and could not have handled the discussion with greater brilliance.' Next day, the 13th, Churchill conferred with Molotov about detailed aspects of Allied plans, and aid to Russia.

That afternoon Brooke, Wavell and Tedder arrived, in a Liberator delayed by technical trouble. They were in time to attend the prime minister's second meeting with Stalin, and were shocked by their glacial reception. The Soviet leader began by handing Churchill a formal protest about the delay to the Second Front: ‘It is easy to understand that the refusal of the Government of Great Britain to create a second front in 1942 inflicts a mortal blow to the whole of Soviet public opinion…complicates the situation of the Red Army at the front and compromises the plans of the Soviet command.' What Churchill called ‘a most unpleasant discussion' ensued. He was resolute in making plain that the Allied decision was irrevocable, and thus that ‘reproaches were vain'. Stalin taunted him with the destruction of PQ17: ‘This is the first time in history the British Navy has ever turned tail and fled from the battle. You British are afraid of fighting. You should not think the Germans are supermen. You will have to fight sooner or later. You cannot win a war without fighting.'

Harriman slipped a note to Churchill: ‘Don't take this too seriously—this is the way he behaved last year.' The prime minister then addressed Stalin with unfeigned passion about Britain's past defiance and future resolution, his stream of rhetoric flowing far ahead of the interpreters. Stalin laughed: ‘Your words are not important, what is vital is the spirit.' Churchill accused Stalin of displaying a lack of comradeship. Britain, he reminded the Georgian, had been obliged to fight alone for a year. In the early hours of 14 August the two delegations parted as frigidly as they had met. ‘
I am downhearted and dispirited
,'
Churchill told his British colleagues. ‘I have come a long way and made a great effort. Stalin lay back puffing at his pipe, with his eyes half closed, emitting streams of insults. He said the Russians were losing 10,000 men a day. He said that if the British Army had been fighting the Germans as much as the Red Army had, it would not be so frightened of them.'

After a few hours' sleep, the British communed among themselves. Churchill was smarting from the drubbing he had received. All his latent animosity to the Soviets bubbled forth, revived by abuse from a leader who eighteen months earlier had been content to collude in Hitler's rape of Europe. He was also dismayed by an incoming signal from London, detailing heavy losses to the epic
Pedestal
convoy to Malta. Cabling Attlee to report the Russians' intransigence, he said that he made ‘great allowances for the stresses through which they are passing'.

That night the British attended a banquet, accompanied by the usual orgy of toasts. Hosts and guests feasted in a fashion grotesque in a society on the brink of mass starvation. But what was one more grotesquerie, amid the perpetual black pageant of the Kremlin? Stalin shuffled among the tables, as was his habit, clinking glasses and making jokes, leaving Churchill often lonely and perforce silent in his own place. When the Soviet warlord sat down once more, the prime minister said: ‘
You know, I was not
friendly to you after the last war. Have you forgiven me?' His host responded: ‘All that is in the past. It is not for me to forgive. It is for God to forgive.' This literal translation obscures the proverbial meaning of the Russian phrase, probably missed by Churchill: ‘I will never forgive.' The British delegation found it bizarre that Stalin, of all people, so often invoked the Deity, a habit he acquired as a young seminarian. He said of
Torch
: ‘
May God prosper
this undertaking.' The most notable success of the evening was a speech by Wavell in Russian.

Even the Soviets were impressed by the quantities of alcohol consumed by both their own leader and Churchill. One guest, unfamiliar with the prime minister's usual diction, wrote afterwards: ‘His speech was slurred as though his mouth was full of porridge.' The Russians
decided that Churchill must be perpetrating some shocking indiscretion when they saw Brooke tugging insistently at his sleeve in a fashion no man would have dared do to Stalin. After the prime minister left the dining room, Stalin noticed that Alexander Golovanov, who commanded the Soviet air force's long-range bombers, was staring at him in some alarm. ‘
Don't be afraid
,' said the Soviet leader, with unaccustomed docility. ‘I am not going to drink Russia away.' He lapsed into silence for a few moments, then said: ‘When great affairs of state are at stake, alcohol tastes like water and one's head is always clear.' Golovanov noted with respect that Stalin walked from the room steadily and unhurriedly.

Churchill left the banquet in sullen mood, deploring alike the food, his hosts' manners and the uncongenial setting. Next morning, a meeting between Brooke, Wavell and Stalin's senior officers proved abortive when the Russians flatly refused to disclose any details of their operations in the Caucasus, saying that they were authorised to discuss only the Second Front. The sole Soviet weapons system that inspired British enthusiasm was the Katyusha multiple rocketlauncher, of which the visitors requested technical details. These were never forthcoming.

On Saturday, Churchill and his colleagues entered the big Kremlin conference room overlooking the Moskva river with considerable apprehension. The prime minister told Stalin that he had considered it his duty to inform him personally of the Second Front decision. Exchanges between the two sides were more fluent, because Churchill had now enlisted the services of Major Birse, a bilingual member of Britain's Military Aid Mission. Stalin suddenly seemed more emollient. ‘Obviously there are differences between us,' he said, ‘but…the fact that the meeting has taken place, that personal contact has been established…is very valuable.' After more than an hour of talks, as they rose from the table Stalin suddenly, and apparently spontaneously, invited Churchill for drinks in his private apartment. There they adjourned for a further six hours of informal conversation, during which the prime minister believed that a better rapport was established. Stalin suggested a British landing in north Norway,
a proposal which Churchill could endorse with unfeigned enthusiasm. The Russian said that it would be helpful for Britain to dispatch trucks rather than tanks to the Red Army, though this request reflected ignorance of British military-vehicle weaknesses. A sucking pig was brought in, which Stalin addressed avidly, and his guests sampled politely. A draft communiqué was agreed. At 2.30 a.m. Churchill parted from his host, with protestations of goodwill on both sides.