The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (384 page)

It was a vital distinction. Stalin believed that were Hitler to be assassinated or overthrown, possibly by the Prussian officers whom Hitler despised, the West might reach an agreement with the new Hitler-less Germany and then turn—with Germany—against Russia. It was a paranoid belief, but one strongly held nonetheless. Churchill indeed considered Hitler an interim enemy; he held Germany to be part of the European family, destined to again take its place at the table after Hitler was dealt with. Stalin, however, saw Germany as Russia’s perpetual enemy, now more than ever deserving of annihilation. Once Hitler was vanquished, as Stalin saw it, the West would once again consider Moscow and communism to be its supreme enemies, a status cemented with the revolution of 1917. For the duration of the war, Stalin’s relationship with his allies was informed by his certainty that Churchill and Roosevelt were not and never would be true friends of Russia.

For their part, Churchill and Roosevelt never entirely trusted Stalin. For the next three years they weighed every decision against the possibility that Russia might quit the war, as the Bolsheviks had done in 1917. They withheld the Ultra secret from Stalin (although they passed along Ultra decrypts as information gained from reliable “agents”), and of course they did not bring Stalin into the atomic bomb project. Yet, where Churchill’s trust in Stalin was qualified, his
loyalty
to Stalin was not, and never diminished throughout the war. In Churchill’s moral paradigm, loyalty was an absolute, where trust admitted to degrees. Even as Stalin made the extent of his territorial ambitions known in 1943 and 1944, Churchill remained loyal, cabling Roosevelt in April 1944, “I have a feeling that the [Soviet] bark is worse than its bite.” Even as victory became certain and Stalin’s demands for territory—at the expense of liberty within those territories—hardened, Churchill remained the steadfast partner. After Yalta, in early 1945, Churchill told the Commons that Stalin’s “word was [his] bond…. I know of no Government which stands to its obligations… more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government.”
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Given their distrust of Stalin, why did two such brilliant politicians as Churchill and Roosevelt remain so loyal to an ideological enemy who for almost twenty years had terrorized his own people while declaring capitalism to be his mortal foe? Because, Churchill wrote in his memoirs, they had no decent alternative. “Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill was blind to the continuance of terror and tyranny in the Soviet Union,” Harriman later wrote. But they needed Stalin and the millions upon millions of Russian men he could feed into the teeth of Hitler’s war machine. Stalin, supported by the West, could buy the time America needed to arm. For England, each day the Russians fought diminished the prospects of a German invasion of the Home Island. As well, Roosevelt and Churchill truly believed that a man’s word was his bond; they were gentlemen, after all. As the war progressed, they became quite confident that they could handle Uncle Joe (they often called him “UJ” in their private communications) much as they handled each other—with tenacity (Churchill) and charm (Roosevelt). Yet they never appreciated the fullness of the man. “Let no one think Stalin is a thug… or roughneck,” the journalist and author John Gunther wrote three years earlier. Stalin was a reader of Plato, a student of the American Civil War, a man of brains as well as prescient political instinct. He once dismissed a group of Bolshevik writers by telling them to “read Shakespeare, Goethe and other classics, as I do.” He had a sense of humor, which Hitler did not. He was perhaps the most politically adroit of all the principals, Allied and Axis. Yet Churchill and Roosevelt believed he was malleable, reachable, and teachable.
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Harriman later recalled that Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s certainty that “they knew how to get along with Stalin” infected the judgment of “lesser lights,” including, Harriman admitted, himself. He confessed in his memoirs that he “was not entirely immune to that infectious idea” of getting along with Stalin given the “tough talks” he had held with the marshal in “tough sessions.” Beaverbrook tried to prove his loyalty to Stalin by shipping to the Soviets the Lend-Lease matériel Stalin demanded, matériel that Britain desperately needed. Churchill feared Beaverbrook’s generosity would result in Britain being “bled white.” All of the players, American and British, thought they could handle UJ. In fact, Uncle Joe had never been a man to be handled. Rather, he had proven himself the consummate manhandler.
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Eden that month took a pragmatic approach to Stalin’s demands, telling the War Cabinet that the Soviets would inevitably, one way or another, get the Baltic states, the implication being now was as good a time as any. For Churchill, this would not do. The time for drawing boundaries, he told Eden, was not yet at hand, and such questions “can only be resolved at the Peace Conference when we have won the war.” He then went easy on Eden, whose journey to Moscow was the most important of his career to date.
The Old Man expressed his overall satisfaction with the mission and advised his emissary to “not be rough with Stalin.” A discussion of boundaries, however, was out of the question. Such was Churchill’s political, and moral, position in regard to Eastern Europe, a position that events and Stalin in time undermined.
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C
onfined by the weather to his cabin aboard the
Duke of York,
Churchill dictated three long memos in which he outlined to the War Cabinet and the COS his plans for Europe and Asia in 1942, and his worldwide plans for 1943, which included the “advantage in declaring now our intention of sending armies of liberation into Europe in 1943.” Those words were intended not only for the British chiefs but for Roosevelt and his advisers. Nowhere in the three memos did Churchill refer to the possibility of sending large Allied armies into Europe in 1942; he knew it could not be done. Yet the Americans were already thinking of doing just that—opening a second European front by autumn. Stalin had demanded one since July. Churchill, within months, would find himself under fire from the Americans, Stalin, and British leftists, accused by all of opposing a second front, when in fact, on the advice of his military chiefs, he opposed only a premature second front, a distinction he tried without success to impress upon his allies that year, and upon his critics for the rest of his life.
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While Churchill was at sea, Adolf Hitler sated the curiosity of all who had wondered for several days just who would replace Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch as commander in chief of the German army and head of
Oberkommando des Heeres
(OKH), the army’s high command. Given that Germany was a land-based power, OKH had been, traditionally, the primary military voice within the
Wehrmacht,
until 1938, when Hitler configured his personal military mouthpiece,
Oberkommando des Wehrmacht
(OKW), which directed all branches of the German military. From then on, the professional staff officers of OKH, loathed by Hitler for their Prussian and aristocratic lineage, exercised less influence. In reality, OKW, sprinkled throughout with Hitler’s lackeys, planned and directed operations in all theaters except Russia, where OKH had been left to manage the eastern army
(Ostheer)
under the eye of and at the pleasure of OKW, a relationship that played nicely into Hitler’s strategy of pitting his military services against one another. Von Brauchitsch, his heart failing and lacking the stomach to argue with Hitler—who had been outraged by Brauchitsch’s strategy of taking Moscow before the Caucasus oil fields—resigned.

It was clear to Hitler that only one German possessed the requisite
military genius to replace Brauchitsch, who, he later told Goebbels, was “a coward and a nincompoop.” And so on December 19, the Führer appointed himself commander in chief of Germany’s army. He was of course already supreme commander of all German armed forces, but C in C was a hands-on job of tactical—not only strategic—decisions. A purge of the ranks had begun; Rundstedt, Guderian, and Erich Hoepner, considered panzer geniuses just a year earlier, were pushed out, and Bock was retired. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel stayed on as chief of staff of the supreme command of the German armed forces, an imposing title that belied his status as a rubber stamp for Hitler. Franz Halder stayed on as chief of staff at OKH with hopes of serving as a counterweight to Hitler’s increasingly baneful influence over the army. Halder was just the sort of professional soldier Hitler distrusted. The disfavor was returned; more loyal to his army and to Germany than to Hitler, Halder loathed the Führer, yet duty demanded he serve him to his best ability. Colorless and professorial, Halder protected the army’s traditions and was one of the very few in the highest ranks who felt it his duty (and was man enough) to apprise Hitler of the Führer’s strategic weaknesses. Still, Halder later told a historian that he carried his pistol to staff meetings in the Reich Chancellery with the intent of ridding Germany of the poisonous Austrian, but “as a human being and a Christian” could not bring himself to do so. Yet had he done so, the porcine Göring would have taken Hitler’s place, and were Göring to be toppled, Hitler’s number three man (and Rudolf Hess’s successor), the thuggish yet clever and ambitious Martin Bormann, would assume the leadership, that is, if the more thuggish and more ambitious Heinrich Himmler did not dispute the issue. No lone assassin could dismantle the Nazi apparatus.
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Hitler’s decision was equivalent to Roosevelt taking over day-to-day operations from Marshall, or Churchill supplanting Brooke. But whereas a peevish Hitler squelched dissent, Churchill (himself often peevish) fostered an often-fractious give-and-take between himself and his generals, with the result that decisions taken were made stronger by having been annealed in the furnace of debate. Hitler’s takeover of the army apparatus not only banked the fires of debate, but further fractured his chain of command and set up fiefdoms within the German armed forces, each reporting to Hitler but not to the others, such that Hitler and Hitler alone was privy to
all
information. He thus deprived himself of the unified and coherent counsel of the experts who could best counsel him. But Hitler, suspicious of the lot of them, felt he served his own cause more efficiently by forcing his generals to toil in partial darkness. It later proved a disastrous decision, but at the time it appeared inspired, for as Mollie Panter-Downes wrote that week, “The idea of Hitler as a crazy, Chaplinesque commander who would quickly blunder toward disaster isn’t so popular as it was before some of those supposedly crazy
notions of his proved pretty sound after all.” If anyone was blundering to disaster that week, it was Churchill and Roosevelt, in the Far East.
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L
ate in the afternoon of December 22, after almost ten terrible days at sea, the
Duke of York
sounded Hampton Roads, at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. The plan had been to cruise right up the Potomac, but Churchill had had enough. He took a military plane to Washington, accompanied by a few of his aides. As the aircraft made its final approach along the Potomac, the group gazed out the windows and “transfixed with delight” took in a sight none had seen in more than two years: “the amazing spectacle of a city all lighted up.” When Churchill touched down at the Anacostia naval air station, he saw Franklin Roosevelt sitting in the backseat of a large black sedan that had pulled onto the tarmac. The president had come across the river to welcome his guest in person. It was the sort of generous, seemingly offhand gesture that Roosevelt was master of. Nobody, especially Churchill, was immune to such charm. From Roosevelt’s perspective, the arrival by air of a foreign leader was an event not to be missed; no American president had ever flown on an airplane while in office, let alone learned to fly one, as had Churchill more than two decades earlier. Roosevelt watched from his limousine as the prime minister of Great Britain emerged from the aluminum skin of a flying machine into the Washington night as if to proclaim, change is in the air.
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