The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (473 page)

Two million East Prussians now fled in a human stampede before the Red Army. “It was as if,” Sir John Keegan wrote, “the submerged knowledge of what the Wehrmacht had done in the east” seized Germans “with terror and flung them on the snowbound roads in an agony of urgency.” Eight centuries of Germanic settlement was undone in days. “Speed, frenzy and savagery characterized the [Soviet] advance,” professor John Erickson wrote. “Villages and small towns burned, while Soviet soldiers raped at will and wreaked an atavistic vengeance” on any home or village that displayed any insignia of Nazism. Soviet T-34 battle tanks chased down and crushed German refugees “in a bloody smear of humans and horses…. Raped German women were nailed by their hands to the farmcarts carrying their families.” When Tito’s number three man, Milovan Djilas, visiting Stalin in Moscow, voiced his disdain for such atrocities, Stalin answered, “Does Djilas, who is himself a writer, not know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can’t he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?” Stalin told Djilas, “You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal, and it is not ideal, nor can it be…. We have opened up our penitentiaries and stuck everybody in the army.”
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On January 27, Zhukov’s forward units crossed the Oder, the last natural obstacle between his armies and Berlin, less than one hundred miles distant. Having again outrun his supplies, he paused.

That day, Hitler moved to his new Berlin headquarters—a concrete-and-steel bunker deep beneath the Chancellery. While chairing the first meeting there, Hitler asked Göring and Jodl, “Do you think the English are enthusiastic about all the Russian developments?” Jodl replied, “They [the English] have always regarded the Russians with suspicion.” Göring added, “If this goes on we’ll get a telegram [from the English] in a few days.” No telegram was forthcoming, but the RAF was, and the American air forces, and the Red Army. Three days later, Albert Speer prepared a report for Hitler that summed up the consequences of losing Silesia. The coal supply would last two more weeks; aircraft were plentiful, but supplies of synthetic fuel were exhausted. The report began: “The war is lost.” Hitler read the first line and ordered the report placed in his personal safe. By February 3, Zhukov had established secure bridgeheads across the northern Oder.
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C
hurchill, Sarah, Eden, and the chiefs left by air for Malta on January 29, reaching the island the next morning. Churchill arrived chilled, tired, and
with a temperature that spiked to 102 degrees. Sarah thought, “Here we go again.” Lord Moran told his diary: “He [Churchill] has a bad habit of running a temperature on these journeys.” The Old Man, lacking the strength to leave the plane, spent six hours in restless sleep on the tarmac before being whisked off to a cabin on board HMS
Orion
.
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While Churchill recuperated, the British and American Chiefs of Staff sat down for talks on the proper strategy Eisenhower should pursue in order to kill the German armies at his front. Eisenhower had finally submitted his “appreciation” for future actions in which he proposed to attack along the length of the Rhine, and cross it at several points. This broad-front strategy displeased the British, who argued that Germany was, in essence, already defeated and that Eisenhower’s plan was too methodical and too cautious. Instead, the British argued, Eisenhower should hurl Montgomery’s army into the Ruhr basin with Berlin the ultimate objective while the American armies along the upper Rhine guarded that flank. Eisenhower had already expressed his total opposition to this “pencil line thrust on Berlin.” Marshall, at times “brutally frank… stood four-square behind Eisenhower,” Ismay later wrote, “and the British had no option but to give way.” Brooke and Churchill had understood since late summer that through “force of circumstances”—the Allied army “was predominantly American”—they would have to accede to the Americans’ wishes. Still, they came away believing that Marshall, although closing the door on any further discussion, did not close it on the prospect of getting as far east into Germany as possible in order to discourage the Russians from pushing west. The British welcomed this prospect, believing it left open the possibility of getting to Berlin, and of denying the Soviets the North Sea and Baltic coasts. But Marshall had not endorsed, let alone championed, a run to Berlin, and he had made it absolutely clear that he would continue to back Eisenhower in his strategy, wherever it took the Allies.
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Had Field Marshal Sir John Dill, the British liaison to the American Chiefs, been present, he might have guided Marshall to a more precise statement of intent and mediated Marshall’s growing dislike of the supercilious Brooke. But Dill had died in November in Washington. So great was Marshall’s respect for Dill that he arranged for the field marshal to be buried in America’s Valhalla, Arlington National Cemetery.

With brass bands playing national anthems and with the Stars and Stripes and Union Jacks snapping in the breeze, Roosevelt sailed into Valletta Harbor on February 2 on board the cruiser USS
Quincy.
Wearing a cloth cap, and with a cape hanging off his shoulders, he waved from the bridge as
Quincy
passed alongside
Orion.
All who saw the president were shocked by his gaunt, almost skeletal, appearance. He would ordinarily have emerged refreshed and invigorated after a ten-day sea voyage. Instead,
he looked frail and exhausted. After a brief informal meeting with Churchill, Eden, and the Combined Chiefs in the ship’s wardroom, Roosevelt kept to his stateroom until the aircraft were readied to ferry the delegation to Yalta late that night. Eden told his diary: “He [Roosevelt] gives me the impression of failing powers.”

The president spoke little during the meeting. Again, as before the Tehran Conference, Churchill and Roosevelt failed to forge a united front to present to Stalin. The matter of the framework of the United Nations Organization had been settled in the early autumn at Dumbarton Oaks, but the exact mechanism for Great Power voting had yet to be worked out, and Stalin had stated his belief that any Great Power that was party to a dispute should be able to exercise its veto prerogative; that is, any of the Big Four could effectively override the wishes of the General Assembly. Allied zones of occupation in Germany had been proposed at the second Quebec conference, but the question of whether the French would gain such a zone had not been settled, and nor had the question of German reparations. Stalin had made himself quite clear in that regard; he wanted everything not nailed down in Germany carted off to Russia. Most critically, Roosevelt and Churchill had not agreed on a policy to guarantee Polish borders and Polish liberties. Eden confided to Harry Hopkins that “we were going into a decisive conference and had so far neither agreed what we would discuss nor how to handle matters with a Bear who would certainly know his mind.”
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Pug Ismay framed the Yalta Conference in Clausewitzian terms: “War is a continuation of policy by other means.” Both sides, Ismay later wrote, the potential losers and winners, must give political consideration to the consequences of their military decisions, the loser to preserve what he can from the wreckage, the winner “in order to ensure that the purposes for which he took up arms, will be realized in the post-war.” The main German armies had now been compressed to the German frontiers, east and west. They would henceforth fight on German soil for German soil, if not for German honor. The Greater Reich had disappeared. Sixteen Wehrmacht divisions in Norway, and more than twice that many in Croatia and Italy, were effectively cut off from Berlin. German troops in Amsterdam were now trapped behind Allied lines. The end was coming, and it was coming fast. For Poland the end had come; the Red Army now occupied the entire country. While on board
Orion
Churchill wrote a long letter to Clementine, in which he offered: “The misery of the whole world appalls me and I fear increasingly that new struggles may arise out of those we are successfully ending.”
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At about midnight on February 2, twenty American Skymasters and five British Yorks began lifting off at ten-minute intervals from Luqa airfield
on Malta for the seven-hour flight to the Crimea. A sixth York, carrying staff members from the Foreign Office and War Cabinet, had lost its way and crashed in the Mediterranean on the trip to Malta. Most on board were drowned, including aides to Cadogan and Brooke. Seven survivors were picked up, but the plane took vital maps, charts, and papers to the bottom. Churchill had not done much preparation for the Yalta meeting to begin with; now he could not catch up. The loss of the papers, Harold Nicolson wrote, “will cast a gloom over the conference.”
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The Russians had been told originally that about thirty-five Americans and a like number of British would make up the entourage traveling to Yalta. That figure now stood at close to seven hundred. Yet only two members of it really mattered.
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The fate of Poland—of all central and Eastern Europe—rested with a dying man, a tired man, and Joseph Stalin, described by his comrade Milovan Djilas as “an ungainly dwarf of a man” whose “conscience was troubled by nothing, despite the millions who had been destroyed in his name and by his order.”
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T
he aerial flotilla arrived at the Laki airfield in the Crimea early on February 3. Yalta was about eighty miles distant, a seven-hour drive on rutted and washed-out coastal roads. Soviet troops, many of them stout women, guarded the entire route. Stalin arranged for Roosevelt and the Americans to take up residence in Yalta itself, at the Livadia Palace, the summer home of Czar Nicholas II, where once a thousand servants tended to the care and feeding of seven royal Romanovs. The plenary sessions would take place there. Churchill and the British were put up at the Vorontsov Palace, about twenty minutes from Yalta. Alec Cadogan found the place to be of “indescribable ugliness,” built in 1837 “in what Baedeker so aptly describes as a combination of the Moorish and Gothic styles. You couldn’t possibly imagine what it looks like.” The furnishings, Cadogan wrote, were “of an almost terrifying hideosity.” Sarah Churchill tried her hand at a description: “It looked like a Scottish baronial hall inside, and a cross between a Swiss chalet and a mosque outside.” It was perched on a bluff high above the sea. A great stone staircase on the seaward side was set off by three pairs of sculpted lions: one pair slept on their paws, another stared seaward, the third bared their fangs to roar. A pair of stone lions guarded the front gates. Another huge lion sculpture occupied a prominent place in the grounds. This beast had one eye open and one closed. Whether Churchill saw—or Stalin intended—the irony in the menagerie of stone lions remains unrecorded.
The British were warned by the Soviets to take care where they strolled; the area had not been fully cleared of land mines.
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Stalin arrived on February 4 and took up residence in the Yusupov Palace, more a country estate than a palace, situated between the Churchill and Roosevelt sanctuaries. The Germans had looted all three residences of furniture and fixtures but, remarkably, had not destroyed them on their way out of town. Stalin, in turn, stripped three Moscow hotels of furniture and fixtures, along with cooks, chambermaids, and waiters, which he sent by train to Yalta so that the gathered Allied elites might sleep and dine in relative comfort as they charted the course of the postwar world. Churchill raised a toast in that regard at a small dinner party hosted by Roosevelt the evening of February 4: “The whole world will have its eyes on this conference. If it is successful we will have peace for one hundred years.”
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Five years later, Churchill wrote in his memoirs, “Poland had indeed been the most urgent reason for the Yalta conference, and was to prove the first of the great causes which led to the breakdown of the Grand Alliance.” He had telescoped his memory by the time he wrote those words. Each of the Big Three brought his own most important priority—or two—to Yalta; Churchill’s was Poland. Roosevelt came seeking a final determination on the structure of his beloved United Nations Organization. He came, as well, seeking firm commitments from Stalin on the Pacific war. General MacArthur had taken Manila that week, and the war against Japan had entered a new and critical phase. Issues in need of discussion abounded: the Russians, by sending troops into northern Iran, seemed poised to make mischief there. The issue of German reparations had to be addressed, along with the “dismemberment” of Germany (a term Stalin insisted upon) and the organization of Allied zones of occupation in Germany and Austria. Should France have such a zone? Churchill thought it should; Stalin, having months earlier signed a friendship treaty with de Gaulle, thought France should have a role, but limited; Roosevelt, though he loathed de Gaulle, was not about to cast a veto or waste political capital over that issue. A great deal more than Polish borders and the structure of a Polish government was on the Yalta agenda—or, rather, would have been if the Big Three had arrived with an agenda in place. They had not. Instead, during eight days of afternoon meetings and evening feasts, the agenda presented itself as each of the leaders waited for just the right moment to lay claim to the matter that most concerned him.
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