The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (470 page)

Moscow nights were filled with banquets that stretched into early morning. The luminaries attended a performance at the Bolshoi Theater on October 16. It was Stalin’s first appearance at the theater since the start of the war, and for him to attend in the presence of a foreigner was even more remarkable. When Stalin and Churchill stood in their box to acknowledge the crowd, the audience erupted with a “sound like a cloudburst on a tin roof,” Eden wrote. Between acts, Churchill and Eden hastened to the restroom, where they discussed at length—or Churchill declaimed at length on—a new strategy to deal with the Poles. Eden reminded the prime minister that the show could not continue until they returned, and reminded him again, and again. When they finally returned to the box, their hosts made no mention of their absence, although at dinner the following night in Stalin’s Kremlin apartments, Stalin pointed toward a door and said, “That’s where you can wash your hands if you want to, the place where I understand you English like to conduct your political discussions.” Churchill found himself warming to Stalin, telling Clementine in a cable from Moscow, “I have had vy nice talks with the Old Bear. I like him the more I see him.
Now
they respect us here.”
⁶⁷

On October 27, five days after returning to London from Moscow, Churchill told the House: “I am very glad to inform the House that our relations with Soviet Russia were never more close, intimate and cordial than they are at the present time.” Yet, he warned, “The future of the world depends upon the united action in the next few years of our three countries [America, Great Britain, and Russia]. Other countries may be associated, but the future depends upon the union of the three most powerful Allies. If that fails, all fails; if that succeeds, a broad future for all nations may be assured.” He told the House that the three great powers “are all firmly agreed on the re-creation of a strong, free, independent, sovereign Poland loyal to the Allies and friendly to her great neighbour and liberator, Russia.” That Churchill anointed Russia Poland’s “liberator” is at best an ironic choice of words given Stalin’s eagerness to destroy Poland in 1939. Churchill then went on to scold the London Poles, who, had they taken the advice “we tendered them at the beginning of this year, the additional complication produced by the formation of the Polish National Committee of Liberation [
sic
] at Lublin would not have arisen; and anything like a prolonged delay in the settlement can only have the effect of increasing the division between Poles in Poland, and also of hampering the
common action which the Poles, the Russians and the rest of the Allies are taking against Germany.” He had not said so in so many words, but in effect he had just told the Poles that they were responsible for whatever came their way.
⁶⁸

Mikołajczyk never returned to Moscow in search of an agreement. Instead, unwilling to agree to any settlement before the peace conference (the same stance Churchill had taken early in the war), he resigned from the Polish government in late November, handing over the reins to the moderate voice of Polish socialism, Tomasz Arciszewski. Arciszewski then reconstituted the London Poles, Churchill told the House, “in a form that in some respects I certainly am not able to applaud.” Had Mikołajczyk reached a settlement with Stalin, Churchill added, “he would be at this moment at the head of a Polish Government, on Polish soil, recognized by all the United Nations, and awaiting the advance of the Russian Armies moving farther into Poland as the country was delivered from the Germans.” He pressed the point—and the rebuke—further: “If the Polish Government had agreed, in the early part of this year, upon the frontier there never would have been any Lublin Committee to which Soviet Russia had committed herself, so I now say that if Mr. Mikolajczyk could swiftly have returned to Moscow early in November… to conclude an agreement on the frontier line, Poland might now have taken her full place in the ranks of the nations contending against Germany, and would have had the full support and friendship of Marshal Stalin and the Soviet Government.” Churchill’s message was clear: the London Poles had done nothing, and now all of Poland would face the consequences.
⁶⁹

S
talin had told Churchill during their meetings that he personally favored recognition of de Gaulle and the FCNL but had not stated so publicly for fear of introducing division into the ranks of the Big Three. Churchill sent a telegram to Roosevelt on October 14 in which he proposed the recognition of de Gaulle’s provisional government. France was cleared of Germans, he told the president, and de Gaulle was firmly in charge of civil matters. It had been Eden who brought Churchill along slowly to this day. The foreign secretary later wrote: “No one was wiser than Mr. Churchill in giving weight to arguments which he had resisted at the time if, on later reflection, he judged them sound.” Hull had likewise advised Roosevelt that a failure to recognize de Gaulle would reflect badly on the United States if Russia and Britain did so. Roosevelt’s turnaround came so fast that when Churchill
arrived back in London on October 22, he learned that the Americans had announced their recognition of the FCNL the day before, even before official notification from Roosevelt arrived in London.
⁷⁰

This meant that Duff Cooper served now as ambassador to the government of France, not simply as representative to the FCNL. When Churchill visited de Gaulle in Paris on November 10, his host was no longer simply
le général,
but
l’état.
The next day, the twenty-sixth anniversary of the armistice, Churchill and de Gaulle laid a wreath to the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe and then, swept along by a crowd of hundreds of thousands of ecstatic Frenchmen, marched side by side down the Champs-Élysées. The crowd, Cadogan recorded in his diary, chanted “Chur-chill, Chur-chill” the entire time, the P.M. grinning and waving wildly all the while. When Churchill laid a bouquet at the foot of Clemenceau’s statue, the military band struck up, on de Gaulle’s orders,
“Le Père la Victoire”
(“Father Victory”). De Gaulle leaned into Churchill, and said, in English, “For you.” “And it was only justice,” de Gaulle wrote in his memoirs.
⁷¹

Over dinner at the Hôtel de Ville—the Paris city hall—de Gaulle asked Churchill what had struck him the most during the day’s events. Churchill responded, “Your unanimity.” Still, despite the amity attached to the occasion, de Gaulle made absolutely clear to Churchill that France sought—and deserved—a role in the occupation of Germany and that although he appreciated an Anglo-American-Soviet invitation to sit on the European Advisory Commission, which would plan Germany’s postwar fate, it was only a first step. De Gaulle demanded that France become a “full associate” in managing the peace. Churchill agreed, and told Roosevelt so in a telegram on November 16. Roosevelt’s reply was lukewarm at best—Eden called it “snarky to the French, and generally arrogant and aloof.” The president proposed putting off any talk of French involvement until the next meeting of the Big Three. He added a familiar refrain that could only disturb Churchill, and did: “You know, of course, that after Germany collapses I must bring American troops home as rapidly as transportation problems permit.”
⁷²

Roosevelt intended to bring the troops home in order to speed them by rail across the country so that they could make ready to embark from the American West Coast for the invasion of Japan, where all within the U.S. military expected American casualties to exceed one million. The president’s vision extended to the distant Pacific, to the enemy that drove America into this war. Churchill and Eden gazed across the Channel, as Englishmen had for centuries. They saw that Roosevelt’s decision would leave in Europe an undermanned and ill-equipped French army of barely eight divisions, an exhausted British army, and the Red Army.

B
y late fall, Churchill’s attention turned to Greece, where in early December civil war again ignited. Communist ELAS paramilitary forces had taken over half the police stations in Athens and attacked the British embassy; their political arm, the EAM, had walked out of Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou’s royal government. At issue, as Eden saw it, was the necessity of bringing the Greeks around to settling their differences “through the ballot box, and not by the bomb.” Eden pressed King George of the Hellenes to agree to a regency under the Greek Orthodox archbishop Damaskinos, in order to take the wind out of the EAM sails. Churchill, who knew that the Germans had allowed Damaskinos to perform his duties in the See of Athens, where the late dictator Ioannis Metaxas had not, believed the archbishop was “both a quisling and a Communist.” Cadogan quipped that the archbishop was Churchill’s “new de Gaulle.” Churchill refused to press the Greek king on the matter, telling the cabinet, “I won’t install a dictator [Damaskinos]—a dictator of the left.” Under no pressure from Churchill to do otherwise, King George persisted in refusing a regency, claiming the appointment of a regent would signal the Greek people that he had abandoned them. At least two dozen civilians were killed when demonstrations erupted in Athens in early December. There, Lieutenant General Ronald Scobie and five thousand British troops found themselves on the verge of going to war against the Greek Communists.
⁷³

On December 5, Churchill cabled Scobie with orders to open fire if need be to restore order. One sentence in the cable soon brought trouble: “Do not however hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.” “Occupied” would have been a far better word choice, but Churchill was on the warpath, sustained by his belief that the 30,000 British casualties suffered in the defense of Greece in 1941 justified a return to Greece; indeed, he believed that the Greek people had appreciated the British effort then, and desired it now. As well, Churchill had paid a goodly price in Moscow for influence over Greek affairs, and he intended to keep the bargain he had reached with Stalin. He advised Scobie to handle the situation without bloodshed if possible, “but also with bloodshed if necessary.” Churchill told Roosevelt that he knew little of Damaskinos, but that British officials in Athens believed the archbishop “might stop a gap or bridge a gully.” Had Churchill tended to his boxes—three “hopelessly overcrowded” boxes by then, Colville noted—he would have known that the archbishop was the best choice if the goal was to bring the warring
parties in Greece to the conference table. The difficulty with taking a hard—military—stance in Greece, as Eden saw it, lay in the possibility that world opinion would hold that British troops were trying not to restore order, but rather to restore the king at the point of a gun.
⁷⁴

American opinion on the matter soon arrived by way of the new U.S. secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, and the American columnist Drew Pearson. Stettinius had taken over on December 1 from a very tired Cordell Hull, who had served in his office for almost twelve years, the longest term of any American secretary of state. Stettinius, upon assuming his post, issued a statement that strongly implied that British actions in Italy and Greece were nothing more than imperial interference in the affairs of allied states. This was insult enough, but someone at either the State Department or the White House leaked to Pearson Churchill’s “shoot to kill” cable to Scobie. Pearson ran with it in the
Washington Post,
thus raising again the question of whether American boys were dying for opportunistic British imperialism. Churchill was “incensed,” Colville wrote, that his private communication should find its way into the American press. It appears that Pearson came into possession of the cable because a very tired Jock Colville, who composed the telegram to Scobie at 4:00
A.M.
on December 5, forgot to mark it “Guard,” which would have signified that the cable was not intended for American eyes. Instead, it was routed through American military and diplomatic channels, and finally to Pearson. Colville confessed his omission to the Old Man, who very “kindly” told the young secretary “that it was his [Churchill’s] fault for keeping me up so late.”
⁷⁵