Finest Years (73 page)

The foremost business of Yalta, above all in Churchill's eyes, was the future of Poland. Stalin wanted recognition of its new frontiers

—the so-called ‘Curzon line' in the east, the Oder-Niesse in the west. Churchill made plain that he was now less concerned with territory than with the democratic character of the new Polish government. He sought to exchange Western recognition of the frontiers Moscow wanted for some shreds of domestic freedom for the Poles. He could not, he said, accept that Moscow's ‘Lublin Poles' represented the will of the nation. Stalin riposted that the new Warsaw regime was as representative of the Polish people as was De Gaulle's new government of France. Roosevelt sought to adjourn the session, but Churchill
insisted that the Polish issue must be resolved. The president observed impatiently that ‘Poland had been a source of trouble for over 500 years'. The prime minister said: ‘
We must do what we can
to put an end to the trouble.' Here was another exchange sorely damaging to British purposes. Roosevelt's apparent indifference was once more flaunted before Russian eyes.

Overnight, however, some reinforcement was secured for the Polish cause. Roosevelt signed a letter to Stalin saying that the US—like Britain—could not recognise the Polish government as then composed. At the conference's third plenary session on 7 February, the president described the Polish issue as of ‘very great importance'. There was more talk of occupation zones in Germany. Agreement was reached about respective states' voting rights at the proposed new United Nations. On 8 February, Churchill reasserted the urgency of settling Poland. Molotov said that the new communist government had been ‘enthusiastically acclaimed by the majority of the Polish people'. Churchill pressed for immediate free elections, which prompted Stalin again to raise comparisons with France, where no poll was scheduled. Then, however, the Russian leader conceded that an election might be held in Poland within a month. There was still no visible anger in the conference chamber. There followed, indeed, more exchanges of compliments between the principals. But that night Churchill said bleakly: ‘The only bond of the victors is their common hate' towards Hitler.

Anglo-American leverage with Stalin derived solely from Lend-Lease supplies. Even had Roosevelt threatened to suspend shipments unless the Western powers gained satisfaction about Poland, the Russians would not have bowed. Stalin had shown himself implacable in imposing his territorial demands since 1941, when Western aid was much more important than in 1945. From start to finish he grasped the fact that the Anglo-Americans needed Russia's vast human sacrifice even more than Russia needed Western supplies. Even had the president himself been willing to exercise such pressure—as, of course, he was not—neither the American nor the British people would have supported sanctions. Popular enthusiasm for a common front against the Axis still ran high. Attempts to impose
Western wishes upon the heroic Russians would have commanded sympathy only with a small minority of people who grasped the reality of looming East European servitude.

At the fifth plenary session on 9 February, Churchill said that diplomatic observers must monitor the Polish election. The Russians responded smoothly that this was perfectly acceptable to them, but the Warsaw government must be consulted: the presence of such observers might wound the Poles by implying that they were not trusted. Likewise, when Churchill said that a British ambassador should be sent to Warsaw, the Russians deferred the matter to Polish arbitration. With his usual serpentine skill, Stalin reminded the prime minister of his debt to Moscow by asserting that he had ‘complete confidence' in British policy in Greece.

Next day, the 10th, Roosevelt caused consternation to the British by announcing that he would leave Yalta on the following morning. When the president had cabled the prime minister back in January, asserting his intention to spend only five days at Yalta, Churchill expostulated to his staff that even the Almighty had allowed himself seven to make the world. Now, in British eyes, the summit had yet to achieve decisive conclusions. But the president was thus far right, that even had he lingered it was unlikely anything further would have been accomplished. The chasm was unbridgeable between Russian intentions and Western aspirations in Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, an agreement had been reached about Poland which, if Stalin kept his word, might sustain some figleaf of democracy. Churchill professed satisfaction. He could do little else. He spent 12 February as a tourist, visiting British battlefields of the Crimean War and gazing on the ruins of Sebastopol. Next day, he rested aboard the British liner
Franconia
, anchored off the coast at his pleasure, then flew to Athens.

The contrast could not have been greater between his previous visit, amid gunfire, and the hysterical applause with which he was received on the afternoon of 14 February. Vast crowds thronged the streets of the Greek capital, offering a vindication that was sweet to him. He elected to make a further brief stop in Cairo. ‘A wandering minstrel
I,' he sang to himself, a ditty from his beloved Gilbert and Sullivan, ‘a thing of threads and patches.' He landed back in Britain on 20 February. Beaverbrook was among those who offered extravagant congratulations on his alleged ‘success' at Yalta, which ‘
followed so swiftly
on the heels of the Greek triumph, that you now appear to your countrymen to be the greatest statesman as well as the greatest warrior'.

Even by Beaverbrook's standards, this was a travesty. In the House of Commons there was profound anxiety about the outcome of Yalta, and its implications for the Poles. The concluding communiqué by the ‘Big Three' had asserted that Poland's provisional government should be ‘reorganized on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad'. The new government ‘shall be pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible…In these elections all democratic and anti-Nazi parties shall have the right to take part.' The cession of eastern Poland to Russia was acknowledged, in return for indeterminate territorial compensation in the west, which should ‘thereafter be determined at the peace conference'.

Churchill told the war cabinet that he was ‘quite sure' Stalin ‘meant well to the world and to Poland'. Likewise, facing fierce criticism in the House on 27 February, he cited the fact that ‘most solemn declarations have been made by Marshal Stalin and the Soviet State' about Polish elections. ‘I repudiate and repulse any suggestion that we are making a questionable compromise or yielding to force or fear…The Poles will have their future in their own hands, with the single limitation that they must honestly follow…a policy friendly to Russia. That is surely reasonable.' Fortified by the fulfilment of Stalin's promise of non-interference in Greece, he clung to the hope that the Soviet warlord would keep his word about Poland: ‘I know of no government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government. I decline absolutely to embark here on a discussion about Russian good faith.'

Over a drink in the smoking room afterwards with Harold Nicolson and Lord de la Warr, he said that he did not see what else he could have done at Yalta, save accept Stalin's assurances. On the
night of the 28th he told Jock Colville that he would refuse to be cheated over Poland, ‘
even if we go to the verge
of war with Russia'.
He voiced aloud his fear
that he might be deceived by Stalin, as Neville Chamberlain had been deceived by Hitler—then dismissed it. He was exultant when an amendment on Poland moved by Tory right-wingers in the Commons was defeated by 396 votes to twentyfive. But eleven ministers abstained, and one resigned. Eden, lacking confidence in Russian good faith, remained deeply depressed. General Anders, for the Poles, told Brooke that ‘
he had never been more distressed
since the war started…He could see no hope anywhere.'

Back in Moscow, Stalin expressed satisfaction about the outcome of Yalta. Unsurprisingly, he spoke more warmly of Roosevelt than of Britain's prime minister. ‘
Churchill wants a bourgeois Poland
to be the USSR's neighbour,' he told Zhukov, ‘a Poland that would be hostile to us. We cannot allow this. We want to ensure a friendly Poland once and for all, and that is what the Polish people want, too.'
Pravda
's political columnist told Russian readers with satisfaction: ‘
We see unprecedented unanimity
in the United States and England in welcoming the resolutions of the Crimea Conference.' The paper asserted that American and British commentators treated the protests of Polish émigrés with the contempt which these deserved.

No course short of war with Russia could have saved Polish democracy in 1945, and by February only a compound of vanity and despair could have caused Churchill to pretend otherwise. The Soviet Union believed that, having paid overwhelmingly the heaviest price to achieve the defeat of Hitler, it had thus purchased the right to determine the polity of Eastern Europe in accordance with its own security interests. To this day, Roosevelt's admirers declare that he displayed greater realism than Britain's prime minister by recognising this. The Western Allies lacked power to contrive any different outcome. Churchill, who had fought as nobly as any man in the world to deliver Europe, was now obliged to witness not the liberation of the East, but the mere replacement there of one murderous tyranny by another.

In the last months of Churchill's war premiership, his satisfaction about the Nazis' imminent downfall was almost entirely overshadowed by dismay at the triumph of Soviet tyranny in Eastern Europe. He wrote to a Tory MP on 6 March: ‘We are now labouring to make sure that the Yalta Agreement about Poland and free elections is carried out in the spirit as well as in the letter.' In reality, of course, Yalta was flouted in both. Almost daily, news reached Downing Street of savage Soviet oppression in Poland, including the imprisonment of sixteen prominent Poles who attended a meeting under safeconduct from the Red Army, and the deportation to labour camps of thousands of non-communists. Beria's NKVD conducted a war of repression against Polish democrats which persisted until the end of the German war, and after. Churchill drafted a fierce cable to Stalin, for which he invited American approval: ‘All parties were exercised,' he wrote, ‘about the reports that deportations, liquidations and other oppressive measures were being put into practice on a wide scale by the Warsaw administration against those likely to disagree with them.'

The dying Roosevelt vetoed this message, and thereafter repeatedly rejected Churchill's imprecations for the US to adopt a harsher policy towards Moscow. The president proposed a ‘political truce' in Poland, which the British believed would merely strengthen the Soviet puppet regime. ‘
I cannot agree
that we are confronted with a breakdown of the Yalta Agreement,' Roosevelt wrote on 15 March. ‘…We must be careful not to give the impression that we are proposing a halt to the land reforms [collectivisation] imposed by the new Polish
government.' A stream of messages followed from Churchill to Roosevelt, emphasising the prime minister's perception of the urgency and gravity of the Polish situation. Most went unanswered. The British persisted with their efforts, but received scant comfort from Washington, and none from Moscow.

Events on the battlefield had a momentum of their own, which Churchill could not influence. At this very late hour he made a brief attempt to assert British influence, by exchanging Tedder with Alexander. He wrote to his field marshal on 1 March, as if this was a done deal: ‘I have written privately to Eisenhower to tell him that you will be replacing Tedder as Deputy Supreme Commander about the middle of this month and that I propose Tedder shall replace you in the Mediterranean.' The purported justification was that Alexander's presence in north-west Europe would ease tensions between Eisenhower and Montgomery. In reality, Churchill wanted his favourite to assume control of the entire Allied ground battle for the last phase of the German campaign. The proposal was mistaken from every possible standpoint, not least Alexander's unfitness for the role. The Americans swiftly quashed it. Churchill received no more satisfaction from Washington when he remonstrated about Eisenhower's signal to Stalin, assuring him that the Western armies would stay away from Berlin. The Americans were not listening. If their manner towards Churchill was increasingly brusque, on the points of military substance it is impossible to doubt that they were right.

Churchill made one further intervention on strategic bombing policy, which has cast a baleful shadow over the historiography of the Second World War. On 28 March he minuted Portal, Chief of Air Staff, and the chiefs of staff committee:

It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land…The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied
bombing…I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.

Portal, standard-bearer of the Royal Air Force, was affronted by these remarks, as well he might have been. He persuaded Churchill to withdraw them, substituting a fresh document which omitted such phrases as ‘acts of terror'. The new minute began in more pedestrian terms: ‘It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so-called “area bombing” of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests…' This sanitised version was signed on 1 April. Churchill was anyway in no doubt that he had ordered a halt to area attacks on cities. He was thus dismayed, soon afterwards, to learn that 500 Lancasters of Bomber Command had devastated Potsdam. Some 5,000 civilians were alleged to have perished because the population had neglected air-raid precautions, supposing that the city's architectural treasures granted it immunity from bombardment. Churchill wrote crossly to Sinclair, the Secretary for Air, and Portal: ‘What's the point of going and blowing down Potsdam?' Portal replied that the Luftwaffe's operational headquarters had been transferred there, and that the attack was ‘
calculated to hasten
the disintegration of enemy resistance'.

The truthful answer to Churchill's question was that a huge force of British heavy bombers existed, and there was deep reluctance to stand them down as long as German resistance continued. The Red Army had begun to fight the last great battle of the European war for Berlin, a few miles from Potsdam. Churchill's attitude, displayed in his draft note to Portal of 28 March, was characteristic in its impulsiveness, even irrationality. Earlier in the war he had been a committed supporter of area bombing, though once delivered from the desperate predicament of 1940-41, he never shared the exaggerated faith of the airmen that this could win the war. When the great land campaigns began in Italy and France, he lost interest in Bomber Command. Its contribution might be useful, but was plainly not
decisive. It may sound flippant to suggest that Britain's prime minister was oblivious of the operations of hundreds of heavy aircraft, dealing nightly death and destruction to some of the greatest cities in Europe. Yet amid the huge issues crowding in upon him each day, the air offensive receded into the background—as also, it must be said, did the issue of the Nazi death camps and possible RAF operations to impede their activities. In Churchill's mind, the fate of the Jews was entwined with that of millions of other European captives of Hitler. The best means of securing their delivery was to win the war as swiftly as possible.

So vast was the scale of the war by 1944-45, so diverse its manifestations, that no human being, even Winston Churchill, could address every aspect with the commitment which some modern critics believe should have been expected of him. How could it have been otherwise? He interested himself in a wider range of affairs than any national leader in history. But many things, including air policy in the last year of the war, were neglected. Commanders were left to do as they thought best. The only important bombing controversy to which Churchill seriously addressed himself from 1942 onwards was that concerning the 1944 assault on the French road and rail network before D-Day, which he was persuaded reluctantly to endorse.

Throughout the war, the direction of strategic bombing was impeded by the fact that its achievements were shrouded in mystery. The progress of armies was readily measured by advances or retreats, that of rival fleets by sinkings. But the airmen's extravagant claims could be assessed only through problematic interpretation of aerial photography, with limited assistance from Ultra signal decrypts. In December 1941, Mr Butt's Cabinet Office report caused the prime minister to accept that the RAF's campaign against Germany, prodigious in its demands on national resources, was not achieving commensurate results. Thus the decision was made to change policy, to conduct ‘area bombing' of cities, in place of discredited precision attacks on military and industrial targets. ‘
In the full tilt of war
,' observed Churchill in old age, ‘it was the only means of hitting back. I was of course ultimately responsible…
But later I was not so sure of the effectiveness of the bludgeon.' Until June 1944, however, when great Allied armies became committed to the battlefield, the prime minister found it convenient to promote the view that strategic bombing was making an important contribution to the defeat of the enemy. If it was not, then many people—among whom Stalin was the most important—would have asked whether Britain was playing anything like a large enough part in fighting the war.

In attempting to distance himself from the bombing of Dresden, as Churchill did on 28 March 1945, he ignored his own request to Sinclair at the Air Ministry, just before Yalta, to launch major air attacks in eastern Germany, to assist and impress the Russians, who expressed an eagerness for such support. Dresden had featured for years on Bomber Command target lists. It had been left unscathed only because it was a low priority, and a long haul from British airfields. Throughout the war, none of Britain's senior airmen showed much aesthetic sensitivity.
Portal had advocated
heavy bombing of Rome when the city still belonged to Mussolini. Harris had assured the chief of air staff that he had ‘no false sentiments' about dispatching his bombers against one of the greatest cultural centres in the world. Only American opposition deflected attacks on the centre of Rome. Churchill's personal intervention was responsible for causing Dresden, together with Chemnitz and Leipzig, to be pushed up the February target schedule, and largely destroyed on the night of 13-14. It is unsurprising that no one at Bomber Command headquarters voiced concern about the fate of baroque churches before unleashing the Lancasters.

The prime minister, however, had not thought much before making his own, almost casual request to Sinclair. Throughout the war a host of matters briefly engaged his attention, then receded. It is implausible, but just possible, that by 28 March he had genuinely forgotten that he had urged the RAF to attack east German cities. The key to understanding the destruction of Dresden, so often misinterpreted as a unique atrocity, is that amid daily global carnage, the attack order had much less significance to those responsible than it seems to posterity to have deserved.

In the aftermath of Dresden, however, the raid was the subject of widespread comment—and some criticism. Following a SHAEF
^*
press conference about bombing policy on 16 February, an AP correspondent named Howard Cowan filed a dispatch stating: ‘The Allied air commanders have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German population centres as a ruthless expedient to hastening Hitler's doom.' This story received prominent play in American newspapers, though it was censored in British ones. US Secretary for War Henry Stimson demanded an inquiry into Dresden, which prompted Gen. ‘Hap' Arnold of the USAAF to respond: ‘We must not get soft. War must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman and ruthless.' In Britain, though there was no widespread outcry, questions were asked in the Commons by the government's inveterate critic, Labour MP Richard Stokes. For the first time in many months Churchill addressed himself seriously to the issue of area bombing. He perceived that it was indeed wanton to continue the destruction of great cities when the Germans were so close to collapse. With his usual instinct for mercy towards the vanquished, he wished to halt the process. This was both right and humane. The prime minister injured himself, however, by attempting in his draft minute to Portal to make this judgement retrospective, to condemn the Dresden decision to which he had been an implicit, if not absolutely explicit, party.

He also gave a formidable hostage to history by declaring that Bomber Command's campaign was terroristic. No one in the upper reaches of Britain's war machine had ever privately doubted that this was so, but ministers and airmen took elaborate pains to avoid acknowledging it. This was not Churchill's first mention of terror, in the context of bombing. He had used a similar word much earlier, in a memorandum to the war cabinet in November 1942, about policy towards Italy. ‘All the industrial centres should be attacked in an intense fashion,' he wrote, ‘every effort being made to terrorise and paralyse the population.' In war as in peace, there is unlikely to
be much cause for pride in a policy about which it is deemed necessary to deceive one's own people. The reputations of Churchill, Portal and Bomber Command were damaged by the exchanges of March-April 1945. The prime minister, who of all men should know, had put his signature to a document, albeit subsequently withdrawn, declaring Britain's strategic air offensive to have been terroristic. He had then been privy to an administrative sleight of hand, designed to suppress this admission of the truth.

Churchill's writings, dating back to World War I, make plain that he thought air bombardment of civilians barbaric. In the early part of World War II, when Germany had already ravaged half the cities of Europe and Britain had no other plausible means of attacking Hitler's Reich, he suppressed his instincts, and endorsed the bomber offensive. That decision seems both inevitable and justifiable. It is a gross abuse of language to identify area bombing as a ‘war crime', as do some modern critics. The policy was designed to hasten the defeat of Germany by destroying its industrial base, not wantonly to slaughter innocents. Yet it remains a blot on the Allied conduct of the war that city attacks were allowed to continue into 1945, when huge forces of aircraft employed sophisticated technology against negligible defences, and German industrial output could no longer influence outcomes. Both the operational necessity to attack cities—because the RAF could do nothing else—and the strategic purpose of such operations were gone. Yet the assault was maintained because, until Churchill's belated intervention, nobody thought to tell the air forces to stop, or rather to restrict themselves to residual military targets.

Here was a classic example of technological determinism. The weapons existed, and thus they continued to be used. The pity of Churchill's 28 March memorandum, not least from the viewpoint of some 200,000 German civilians who perished in 1945, was that it had not been written several months earlier. Yet it is hard not to sympathise with the exhausted old prime minister, bearing the troubles of the world upon his shoulders, for being slow to act. The record of his conduct towards Hitler's people shows an overarching
instinct towards mercy, remarkable in the leader of a nation which had suffered so much at German hands since 1939. Churchill's 1945 papers contain many charitable reflections and directions about the treatment of Germans. These should be set in the balance against the undoubted excesses of the bomber offensive, and his own responsibility for them.