The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (448 page)

T
he next day, November 30, was Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday. Lord Moran expected to find his patient in “poor fettle” that morning, after the previous evening’s sordid events, but Churchill had already dismissed the episode as if it were “only a bad dream.” After breakfast he met privately with Stalin, where he argued the case for further actions in the Mediterranean before Overlord. Stalin did not buy it. Instead, he warned that if by May Anglo-American forces had not landed in France, “bad feeling” and an erosion in Russian resolve would result, for Russians were “war weary.” Here again was Stalin playing his negotiated peace card.

During the third plenary session, as friendly as the previous night’s dinner had not been, Roosevelt and Churchill pledged their absolute allegiance
to Overlord. And they pledged their support of a warm-water port for the Soviet Union. The military decision on Overlord having been taken, Churchill could only promise to support and nurture the operation, although he reminded Stalin that landing craft, not British reluctance, would determine the issue. Having gotten what he came for, Stalin stressed secrecy and deception in planning the invasion; were the Germans to learn even the meanest of details, the Allied invasion forces and the Red Army would find themselves in extreme peril. The Germans had proven themselves quite adept at such subterfuge, Stalin admitted, at the expense of the Red Army. Churchill and Stalin agreed on the need for false radio messages, dummy tanks and planes and airfields, and covert cover plans. They stressed the need for covert radio traffic intended to confuse the Germans as to when the Anglo-American invasion and the Soviet summer offensive would be launched—simultaneously or sequentially—thus denying the Germans the option of shifting troops from one front to the other. And of course, disguising the “where” of both Allied offenses was paramount. “The truth is so precious,” Churchill told Stalin, “that she should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.”
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The formal session adjourned on that note, and the principals and military chiefs wandered off to their lodgings to dress for dinner, which was to take place in the British legation, at Churchill’s insistence. The children were invited, Elliott, Randolph, and Sarah, as were the leading diplomats. It was to be quite the affair, and why not, it was his birthday, after all, Churchill later wrote. As well, he was the oldest of the leaders. And in a barely disguised jab at his allies, he wrote, “We were by centuries the longest established of the three Governments; I might have added, but did not, that we had been the longest in the war.”
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As the dinner hour approached, Stalin made his appearance, escorted by fifty Russian policemen who took up positions at the doors and windows. Roosevelt’s Secret Service men shadowed the Russians. Inspector Thompson supplied Churchill’s security. Thompson, when among Russians, liked to carry two guns under his jacket. Roosevelt brought along a birthday gift, a lovely Kashan bowl Harriman had purchased from a museum curator earlier that day after Roosevelt, realizing he had not thought to procure a gift for Churchill, had dispatched his ambassador to find something appropriate.
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The banqueting room in the British legation was done up in county house elegance—white linens, bone china, numerous candelabra casting a golden light over the scene. Portraits of British royals hung on the walls, which were inlayed with glass mosaics. Thick red draperies covered the windows. Persian waiters in red-and-blue livery and wearing white gloves tended to the needs of the assembled. Brooke noted that the waiters’ gloves seemed
too large, which resulted in the fingertips flapping when they handled the plates. A cake with sixty-nine candles sat in the middle of the table.
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Churchill announced that the meal would be conducted in the Russian style, with toasts encouraged, but with champagne instead of vodka. One of the first salutes raised was to Sarah, by Roosevelt. Churchill then proclaimed that the whole political world was now a matter of tints, and England’s was getting pinker. Stalin replied, to much laughter, “A sign of good health.” Roosevelt returned to the tint theme later in the evening when he announced that the effect of the war would be to “blend all those multitudinous tints, shades, and colors into one rainbow where their individuality would be lost in the whole.” Brooke thought that a “fine idea.” He had had a fine day, prevailing upon the Americans that the window for Overlord should be expanded to June 1 to allow for changes in circumstances, which had a habit of changing. By doing so, Brooke bought more time in the Mediterranean. The CIGS that night was, for a change, in a festive mood, a good thing, because the festivities continued into the new day. Churchill raised a glass to “Stalin the Great” and another to Roosevelt, in tribute to the president’s “devotion to the cause of the weak and the helpless.” And when Stalin raised a toast to Brooke, which in effect accused him of not liking Russians, Brooke responded by referring to Churchill’s remarks earlier in the day regarding lies and deception. Then he raised his glass to Stalin, and asked, might “one’s outward appearance deceive one’s friends?” In fact, Brooke added, he felt only “friendship and comradeship” toward Stalin and the Red Army. Stalin liked that, and told Brooke that “some of the best friendships of this world were founded on misunderstandings.”
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Toast followed toast; Churchill drank to the proletarian masses, Stalin to the Conservative Party. Then the marshal turned to Roosevelt and lifted his glass to America, without whose production of tanks and planes “the war may have been lost.” This facile salute ignored the fact that for almost two deadly years, while America prepared for war and Stalin avoided war, Churchill and Britain alone had fought the war. Still, Churchill later wrote that he “went to bed tired but content, feeling sure that nothing but good had been done. It certainly was a happy birthday for me.”
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The next afternoon, when Churchill and Stalin sat down to discuss Polish borders, they did so without Roosevelt’s direct participation. The president explained at length to Stalin his domestic political difficulties, and announced that he could not take part in any such discussion for at least a year; nor could he be publicly associated with any arrangement arrived at. “This,” Eden later wrote, with great understatement, “was hardly calculated to restrain the Russians.” When Stalin sensed weakness, he struck.
Pressed by Churchill to outline his frontier demands, Stalin responded with anything but restraint. He “asked for the Curzon Line, with Lvov to go to the Soviet Union.” The Curzon Line, proposed as Poland’s eastern border by British foreign minister George Curzon in 1919, ran from the Baltic to the Czech border. But when Polish borders were finally established in the early 1920s, the frontier fell 150 miles east of the Curzon Line, in territory that had been part of czarist Russia. Stalin wanted that territory back. In many places the Curzon Line almost exactly overlay the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line of 1939, a happy coincidence for Stalin, who pointed out that the frontiers of 1939 were the most ethnographically correct. Eden and Churchill saw immediately where Stalin was going and asked if he was proposing the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line. “Call it what you will,” replied Stalin.
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He indeed was proposing that the British in effect ratify the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, but he couched his argument in terms of the British accepting a Polish frontier of their own invention. Churchill ordered a map produced, and pointed out differences between the two lines in the Baltic north and in the south, where Lvov fell on the Polish side. Stalin waved off the differences. He wanted the Polish border moved such that Lvov would end up on the Russian side. Churchill later wrote, “I was not prepared to make a great squawk about Lvov.” In the north, Stalin sought Königsberg, which Churchill had no objection to. Königsberg going to the Russians would solve the problem of a year-round Baltic port. Churchill then suggested the new western Polish border follow the Oder River, which Stalin did not object to. However, the Oder flows from two tributaries, the Western Neisse and the Eastern Neisse. No one in the room thought to clarify which branch of the Neisse would define the new Polish border. Churchill concluded by telling Stalin, “The Poles would be wise to take our advice.” But Eden began to doubt they would ever reach a settlement that the Poles would agree to. And he joined Churchill, Brooke, Ismay, and Cadogan in feelings of dismay and perplexity with the “American unwillingness to make ready with us for the conference in advance.” “Above all,” Eden later wrote, “I began to fear greatly for the Poles.”
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The final piece of political business conducted in Tehran was an agreement in principle by the Big Three to the Curzon Line and the need to reward Poland with German territory. Roosevelt had sat in on but had not contributed to the discussion, but he joined his partners in endorsing the solution. He did not tell Cordell Hull of this, and indeed told the London Poles months later that he had not agreed to any such arrangement. But whether through a translator’s indiscretion or Roosevelt’s unwillingness to articulate his position for fear of domestic political repercussions, Stalin believed Roosevelt had agreed. Consequences accrued a year later.
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S
talin had come to Tehran seeking assurances on only two matters: Overlord and his western borders. He left Tehran with both. Roosevelt had arrived believing Stalin to be, in his own term, “getatable.” The president left believing he had got at Stalin, although he told reporters that Stalin proved “tougher than he had expected.” Robert Sherwood called the end of the Tehran Conference the “supreme peak of Roosevelt’s career.” Perhaps, but Roosevelt had paved his chosen path to Stalin’s good graces over his friendship with Churchill. Alec Cadogan concluded that Churchill’s lack of guile was as vital to the alliance as was Roosevelt’s wit and homespun charm. Churchill was as he appeared; Franklin Roosevelt was not. Cadogan believed Churchill “has very few reticences; U.J. is shrewd enough to spot that, and must, I think, have satisfied himself that he was reading an open book, that there was no concealment or duplicity, and he could have faith.”
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Stalin indeed thought he was reading an open book, but the conclusions he took from it were not at all those Cadogan had in mind. Four months later, Stalin regaled Milovan Djilas, Tito’s third in command, with stories of the Tehran Conference. Djilas, in Moscow as head of a Yugoslavian diplomatic mission, arrived at the Kremlin at about the same time Randolph Churchill and his mission arrived at Tito’s headquarters. “Perhaps you think,” Stalin told Djilas, “that just because we are allies of the English we have forgotten who they are, and who Churchill is. They find nothing sweeter than to trick their allies…. And Churchill? Churchill is the kind who, if you don’t watch him, will slip a kopeck out of your pocket. Yes, a kopeck out of your pocket. By God…. And Roosevelt? Roosevelt is not like that. He dips in his hands only for bigger coins. But Churchill? Churchill—even for a kopeck.” At a later meeting, even the wooden Molotov displayed a stunted sense of humor when he recounted a toast Stalin had made to Churchill, a salute to the importance of secrecy in the coming invasion. But the toast, Molotov allowed, was actually a backhanded slap at Churchill’s 1915 gambit in the Dardanelles, where the “failure occurred because the British lacked sufficient information.” The irony escaped Churchill who, Molotov said, had been “in his cups.” Djilas concluded that “Churchill had left a deep impression on the Soviet leaders as a farsighted and dangerous ‘bourgeois statesman’—though they did not like him.” Nor did they have faith in him. Cadogan had it backwards.
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Of Tehran Churchill later wrote: “On my right sat the President of the United States, on my left the master of Russia. Together we controlled practically
all the naval and three-quarters of all the air forces in the world, and could direct armies of nearly twenty million men, engaged in the most terrible of wars that had yet occurred in human history.” Yet Churchill understood that the United States and the U.S.S.R. accounted for the vast majority of that awesome power. With an American soon to command the largest of the Western armies and Stalin in command of the Eastern, Churchill’s influence over the management of the war could only diminish. Churchill had arrived in Persia secure in his nineteenth-century belief in England’s imperial destiny; he left having learned a cold lesson. He now had no choice but to regard the status of his small island nation from a mid-twentieth-century vantage point, and it was one of declining geopolitical might. He had always been good at adapting to changing conditions, political or military, but this was different: the sun was setting on an entire era.
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