Churchill's Third World War E-Book

Jonathan Walker

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 371

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

'A thrilling and ground-breaking account' - Eye-Spy magazine As the war in Europe entered its final months, the world teetered on the edge of a Third World War. While Soviet forces hammered their way into Berlin, Churchill ordered British military planners to prepare the top secret Operation Unthinkable - the plan for an Allied attack on the Soviet Union - on 1 July 1945. Using US, British and Polish forces, the invasion would reclaim Eastern Europe. The controversial plan called for the use of Nazi troops, and there was the spectre of the atomic bomb. Would yet another army make the fatal mistake of heading East? In Churchill's Third World War Jonathan Walker presents a haunting study of the war that so nearly was. He outlines the motivations behind Churchill's plan, the logistics of launching a vast assault against an enemy who had bested Hitler, potential sabotage by Polish communists, and he speculates whether the Allies would have succeeded had the operation gone forward. Well supported by a wide range of primary sources from the Churchill Archives Centre, Sikorski Institute, National Archives and Imperial War Museum, this is a fascinating insight into the upheaval as the Second World War drew to a close and former alliances were shattered. Operation Unthinkable became the blueprint for the Cold War.

Leseprobe

For Professor Peter Simkins

An inspirational historian and leading member of the

Cabinet War Rooms Restoration Team

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

List of Maps

Acknowledgements

Glossary

Introduction

1. ‘An Unspoken Fear’

2. Yalta

3. Three Fishermen

4. The Plan – ‘Quick Success’

5. The Plan – ‘Total War’

6. War Clouds

7. The Plan Delivered

8. Fortress Britain

9. US Hawks

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Plates

Copyright

MAPS

1. Germany 1945 – Occupation Zones

2. Venezia Giulia Region. 8 May 1945

3. Operation Unthinkable. 1 July 1945 – ‘Quick Success’

4. Operation Unthinkable – ‘Total War’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The story of Operation Unthinkable is particularly significant for Poland, since the venture might have provided the Poles with their last chance of freedom before total Soviet domination. My thanks, therefore, to Katarzyna Kienhuis, Head of International Relations at the Institute of National Remembrance (INR) in Warsaw. Dr Tomasz Labuszewski and Dr Jacek Sawicki of the INR offered helpful advice on the state of the Polish resistance in 1945 and I am most grateful for the benefit of their wide knowledge. My thanks to Mikolaj Ksiaek and Marta Hiscox for their help with translations. Similarly, my thanks to Piotr Sliwowski, Head of History at the Museum of the Warsaw Rising and also the staff of the Archiwum Akt Nowych in Warsaw. Professor Anita Pra·zmowska gave me valuable insights into the state of post-war Polish society. Dr Andrzej Suchcitz, Keeper of Archives at the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London was most helpful with sources and advice; likewise Dr Halik Kochanski, whose recent book, The Eagle Unbowed, is a most valuable source for historians and researchers. Dr Ross Bastiaan gave me the benefit of his deep knowledge of Australian and Empire history, while Sofie Milkowska, a former member of the Polish resistance, kindly kept me supplied with details of the underground in 1945.

My special thanks to the following friends and colleagues who have helped me with checking drafts, or providing sources and contacts: Keith Northover, Peter Hall, Paul and Sarah Arnott, Minnie Churchill, Jasper Humphreys and Simon Tidswell. Scandinavia played a part in the ‘Unthinkable’ story and I am grateful to Lieutenant-Colonel David Summerfield RM for conveying his expert knowledge of the region. Archive and library specialists have also been very helpful in locating material and I am grateful to Meriel Santer, Kate O’Brien and staff from both the Churchill Archive Centre and the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives.

I have made every effort to obtain the necessary permission to reproduce copyright material in this work, though in some cases it has been impossible to trace the current copyright holders. Any omissions are entirely unintentional and if any are brought to my notice, I will be most happy to include the appropriate acknowledgements in any future re-printing. I acknowledge permission to quote passages from the following: Pen & Sword Books for Bomber Pilot on the Eastern Front, by Vasiliy Reshetnikov, and Finale at Flensburg, by Charles Whiting; Constable & Robinson for Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940–1956, by Lord Moran; Macmillan Publishers for Truman, by Roy Jenkins; Orion Books for Harold Nicolson Diaries 1907–1964, edited by Nigel Nicolson; WW Norton for Witness to History by Charles Bohlen; extracts from Professor George Kennan’s interview are reproduced from www.nsarchive.org with the kind permission of the National Security Archives.

My thanks to the following archives and individuals for permission to reproduce images: Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, The Harry S Truman Library, The UK National Archives, The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, The US Library of Congress, The US National Archives and Records Administration.

Permission was kindly given by The Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives (LHCMA) to quote from the papers of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke and Major-General FHN Davidson; similarly, The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum gave their permission to quote from the Field Marshal Montgomery Papers; UK Crown copyright material is reproduced under the conditions of the Open Government Licence; the US National Security Archives have allowed permission under limited licence to quote from material in their collections.

As always, Shaun Barrington of Spellmount and The History Press has offered useful help and advice. And finally, my greatest thanks to my wife, Gill, who has given me so much support during the writing of Operation Unthinkable and who has cheerfully accompanied me on my research adventures into Eastern Europe.

Jonathan Walker, 2013

GLOSSARY

AK

Armia Krajowa

(Polish Home Army)

COS

Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (British)

DSZ

Delegatura Sil Zbrojnych

(Armed Forces Delegation for Poland). Successor to Nie. Set up May 1945 and disbanded August 1945. Aimed to bring together all partisan bands opposing Soviet domination inside Poland.

JPS

Joint Planning Staff

JWPC

US Joint War Plans Committee

LWP

Ludowe Wojsko Polskie

(Polish People’s Army). Soviet-sponsored Polish army. Established 1943.

Nie

Niepodleglo

(‘No’). Set up in spring 1944 and disbanded May 1945.

NKGB

Narodnyi Kommissariat Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti

(Soviet Security and Intelligence Service)

NKVD

Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del

(People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs)

NSZ

Narodowe Sily Zbrojne

(National Armed Forces). Nationalist resistance group established in September 1942. Partly merged with AK in 1944 but elements maintained a separate NSZ. This group survived the war to continue the fight against the communists until the 1950s.

PKWN

Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego

. (Polish Committee of National Liberation). Also known as the Lublin Committee. Soviet-sponsored administration, which later became the Provisional Government of Poland.

PPR

Polska Partia Robotnicza

. (Polish Workers Party). Polish Communist Party.

SBZ

Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany

SMERSH

Smert Shpionam

(Death to Spies)

SSR

Soviet Socialist Republics

TRJN

Tymczasowy Rzad Jednosci Narodowej

(Polish Provisional Government of National Unity).

UB

Urzad Bezpieczenstwa

(Polish Secret Police)

USAAF

United States Army Air Force

WiN

Wolnosc i Niezawislosc

(Freedom and Independence). Successor to Nie. Set up in the summer of 1945. Became the largest post-war underground organisation in Poland. Infiltrated by the communist Polish Secret Police, WiN was largely destroyed by late 1947.

INTRODUCTION

At 3 p.m. on VE Day, 8 May 1945, Prime Minister Winston Churchill broadcast to the British nation from the Cabinet room in 10 Downing Street. He still used the familiar hand gestures as if he were addressing a public meeting and his voice betrayed little of the massive strain he had endured since 1940. The speech echoed from loudspeakers to vast crowds in Parliament Square, Trafalgar Square and across Britain. It was picked up by wirelesses across Europe and beyond. Churchill announced that the war against Germany was finally over and reminded his listeners of the magnitude of the struggle that they had endured. ‘We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing’, he warned, ‘but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead’. While he reminded his audience that Japan was the devil still to be vanquished, he was well aware of another, more unpredictable peril that lay in wait to the east. He would later recall:

When in these tumultuous days of rejoicing I was asked to speak to the nation, I had borne the chief responsibility in our island for almost exactly five years. Yet it may well be there were few hearts more heavily burdened with anxiety than mine.1

The cause of Churchill’s private agony during the days of celebration was Josef Stalin, and his determination to totally control Poland and Eastern Europe. Not without good reason did Churchill name his account of the end of the war Triumph and Tragedy. By May 1945 he was deeply worried about not only Stalin’s tightening grip on continental Europe, but also his designs on Britain and her Empire. The omens during the last months of the war had not been good.

In the spring of 1945 the Red Army continued its advance towards Western Europe, reaching the Adriatic in the south and approaching to within 100 miles of the River Rhine in the west. Meanwhile Germany was shattered and the great powers of Britain and France were financially exhausted. The United States was already turning its attention to the Pacific region and looked set to evacuate Europe. With such bleak prospects Churchill saw one last chance to save Poland from total Soviet domination. Even Britain herself looked vulnerable, and there seemed only one solution – to push back the Soviet Empire by force. Without delay he ordered Operation ‘Unthinkable’ to be prepared, to examine the possibility of an Allied force attacking the Red Army and regaining the lost ground in Europe.2

Churchill felt isolated. The late President Roosevelt, with his ‘progressive’ advisors, Army chief of staff General George Marshall, Ambassador Joseph Davies, Harry Hopkins and even his own son Elliott Roosevelt, had all sought to accommodate Stalin. Indeed, the president considered himself the best man to deal with Stalin, telling Churchill, ‘I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department.’ Given the capacity of the Soviet leader for devious and brutal behaviour, it was a bold boast and one the US Joint Chiefs of Staff did not, at least privately, endorse. ‘No one in the West’, they admitted, ‘really knows which direction Soviet policy will take.’3

As far as Stalin was concerned, after the enormous sacrifices of his people, the Soviet Union deserved the spoils of war. During ‘The Great Patriotic War’, as the Soviets called the Second World War, in excess of 8.5 million Red Army soldiers had perished, as well as more than 17 million civilians. This total estimate of more than 25 million deaths dwarfed the losses suffered by any other participating power and the war also cost the Soviet Union about 30 per cent of its natural wealth.4 Although the country’s contribution to the Allies’ success was irrefutable, its motives and future agenda in Europe were not quite so clear. Churchill was profoundly concerned about Soviet intentions, and although his angst was not widely shared, even a cursory look at Soviet and Russian history should have alarmed his colleagues. Stalin was, after all, the standard bearer of Marxism, and an avowed enemy of small nations. He clung to the old Russian belief that she was a ‘mother country’ entrusted with the protection of the Slav nations in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, the ultimate victory of the Soviet Union in the Second World War imbued the people with a confidence that they could achieve anything through sacrifice – a confidence that was boosted by Stalin’s ruthless denials of Allied help through Lend-Lease or the Arctic Convoys. The vast outpouring of pro-Soviet articles by the British press during the war must surely have strengthened Stalin’s self-confidence even more. So, as his assurance grew, Stalin believed that there was no future in a post-war partnership with the West, and although he did not relish the prospect, he saw no alternative but conflict with his erstwhile allies.5

If Stalin’s ambitions were to be checked, and diplomacy failed to deliver, the West might have to resort to military means. Anglo-American military strength was at its peak in May 1945, but that would rapidly diminish due to general demobilisation and the re-deployment of forces to the Far East. Churchill felt he would have to act quickly and decisively to combat the Soviet threat. On 12 May 1945 he cabled Roosevelt’s successor, President Truman:

I am profoundly concerned about the European situation, as outlined in my No. 41. I learn that half the American Air Force in Europe has already begun to move to the Pacific theatre. The newspapers are full of the great movements of the American Armies out of Europe. Our Armies also are under previous arrangements likely to undergo a marked reduction. The Canadian Army will certainly leave. The French are weak and difficult to deal with. Anyone can see that in a very short space of time our armed power on the Continent will have vanished except for moderate forces to hold down Germany.

Meanwhile what is to happen about Russia? I have always worked for friendship with Russia but, like you, I feel deep anxiety because of their misinterpretation of the Yalta decisions, their attitude towards Poland, their overwhelming influence in the Balkans excepting Greece, the difficulties they make about Vienna, the combination of Russian power and the territories under their control or occupied, coupled with the Communist technique in so many other countries, and above all their power to maintain very large Armies in the field for a long time. What will be the position in a year or two, when the British and American Armies have melted and the French has not yet been formed on any major scale, when we may have a handful of divisions, mostly French, and when Russia may choose to keep two or three hundred on active service?

An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind. There seems little doubt that the whole of the regions east of the line Lübeck-Trieste-Corfu will soon be completely in their hands. To this must be added the further enormous area conquered by the American Armies between Eisenach and the Elbe, which will I suppose, in a few weeks, be occupied when the Americans retreat, by the Russian power. All kinds of arrangements will have to be made by General Eisenhower to prevent another immense flight of the German population westward, as this enormous Muscovite advance into the centre of Europe takes place. And then the curtain will descend again to a very large extent, if not entirely. Thus a broad band of many hundreds of miles of Russian-occupied territory will isolate us from Poland.

Meanwhile, the attention of our peoples will be occupied in inflicting severities upon Germany, which is ruined and prostrate, and it would be open to the Russians in a very short space of time to advance, if they chose, to the waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic.6

Churchill was always at his most articulate and inventive when faced with a grave situation. As his doctor, Lord Moran, observed, ‘In adversity Winston becomes gentle, patient and brave.’ Even if events did not favour him, ‘he will not spend the rest of his days brooding on the past. Whatever happens, nothing can hold up for long the stream of ideas that rush bubbling through his head.’7 One such idea was Operation Unthinkable.

The remarkable thing about this plan was that it was unique. Churchill, alone among Western leaders, was prepared to consider a pre-emptive strike against Soviet forces in the summer of 1945. President Roosevelt and his successor, President Truman, would not, at first, countenance the Soviet threat, and even when it became impossible to ignore, they would not endorse the first use of arms against the Soviet Union.

The alarming aspect of the attitudes of national leaders in the West during the fast-moving events of the spring and summer of 1945 was their capacity for dramatic mood swings. Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman took it in turns to be either bullish or conciliatory towards Stalin, while he remained resolutely unyielding in his demands.8 Consequently, what seemed an inevitable and logical course of action for the Western Allies one week could well be discarded the next. It is in the light of this frighteningly volatile atmosphere that Operation Unthinkable was born. In his VE Day speech Churchill exhorted ‘Advance Britannia’, but if she did indeed advance, would Poland really stand a chance of recovering her freedom in 1945? And just how close did the world come to a Third World War?

NOTE ON WORD USAGE

The term ‘the Soviet Union’ is always used in the text, rather than ‘Russia’, which is the usual word found in contemporary documents and may appear in quotations. Russia was only one of the fifteen socialist republics that made up the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), which existed between 1922 and 1991. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union the individual republics have become independent states, of which Russia remains the strongest.

1

‘AN UNSPOKEN FEAR’

WINSTON CHURCHILL, 23 FEBRUARY 1945.

Churchill took up the mantle of chief sceptic about Stalin only later in the war. Before that it had been up to the Poles to warn the West in vain of Stalin’s ambitions, which they had learned about from bitter experience. The annexation of eastern Poland by Stalin in 1939 was a blatant act of double-dealing as well as naked aggression. Subsequently, the need for an alliance against Hitler had compelled the Poles to accept the Soviets as allies, but this abrasive relationship was finally shattered in April 1943, when the Soviet Union broke off relations with the London-based Polish government-in-exile. This crisis erupted after the Poles had demanded a Red Cross inquiry into the Katyn massacres, when more than 21,000 members of Poland’s elite, including officers, professors and writers, were found to have been murdered on Stalin’s orders.1 Despite pressure from the Western Allies, Stalin had refused to re-establish relations with the London Poles in 1944, claiming that they had rejected his demands for the ceding of eastern Polish territory. He even alleged that Polish intransigence had forced him to establish a Lublin-based ‘National Committee of Liberation’ in July 1944, which comprised communist and left-wing Poles. This committee, also known as the PKWN (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego), would shortly emerge as Stalin’s sponsored Polish government, and it would dash Western hopes of a democratic government.

As 1944 drew to a close, Stalin’s strategy for the domination of Poland was all coming together. The Polish resistance, in the shape of the Home Army, had been effectively destroyed by the Warsaw Rising and although their spirit was undiminished, their command structure and operations were seriously depleted by the end of the year.2 By then, Soviet forces had overrun Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltic States and large parts of Hungary. They had advanced into East Prussia and occupied a large swathe of Poland up to the River Vistula. Stalin envisaged that he would soon have almost total possession of Eastern Europe, and with it the power to dictate his terms to the Allies. Meanwhile Churchill and particularly Roosevelt were becoming desperate to avoid a total fall-out with Stalin over Poland. Churchill pressured the Polish government-in-exile to accept the loss of their eastern territory, especially as it was softened by the offer, once the war was over, of a similar-sized chunk of German territory to the west.

But Britain, or more precisely her military commanders, did not entirely roll over before Stalin. Barely a month after the June D-Day landings, post-war planning was being discussed in the British War Office, and on 27 July, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, met with the Secretary of State for War, Sir James Grigg, to discuss the future dismemberment of Germany. Should it be carved up between the Great Powers or, as Brooke favoured, ‘gradually converted to an ally to meet the Russian threat of 20 years hence’? That night, he noted in his diary, ‘Germany is no longer the dominating power in Europe. Russia is … she has vast resources and cannot fail to become the main threat 15 years from now.’3 This was certainly at odds with the entrenched view within the British Foreign Office (FO) that any future Soviet threat could easily be contained by the West.4

This split between the soldiers and the diplomats was widening, and Brooke baulked at the attitude of the Foreign Office. His diary entry for 2 October 1944 showed his frustration at the diplomats’ attitude towards the Soviets:

A longish COS [Chiefs of Staff Committee] where we discussed the Foreign Office attitude to our paper on dismemberment of Germany. We had considered the possible future and more distant threat to our security in the shape of an aggressive Russia. Apparently the FO could not admit that Russia might one day become unfriendly.5

Indeed, senior Foreign Office figures such as Christopher Warner, who was head of the FO’s Northern Department ‘wobbled’ constantly over the idea that plans should be prepared for a conflict with the Soviet Union. He feared that France might succumb to a communist take-over after the war, and if such war plans existed, the military would be tempted to try them out in France. To this end he sanctioned that ‘special security treatment’ should be applied to any FO papers that mentioned the Soviets as a possible enemy. So, as 1944 drew to a close, the predominant view in Whitehall was that Stalin would seek to accommodate the West for another 10 years, if only to repair the war damage to the Soviet economy. They perceived that Stalin wished to see that those countries that bordered the Soviet Union followed the same foreign policy, but he would not necessarily insist on them having communist governments. Consequently, such a benign Soviet attitude was not expected to challenge Britain’s imperial interests.6 However, this FO view only looked at the situation through the eyes of a responsible Western democracy, which would realise that huge post-war restoration costs would mean a corresponding reduction in arms spending and a curtailing of foreign policy. No such constraints, of course, bound Stalin, whose spending on military hardware knew no limits.

The British Foreign Office was optimistic, if not naive, about finding a solution with Stalin as to the future of Poland. British analysts did not dismiss the problems of negotiating with the Soviets, but seemed pathetically grateful for any crumbs Stalin discarded:

We consider that Poland must have the closest and genuinely friendly relations with Russia but that she should herself be genuinely independent and in no sense a puppet of the Soviet Union. A settlement on the above lines would in our view constitute a complete fulfilment of our obligations to Poland. So far as public statements and private assurances go there is no difference between us and the Soviet Government on the above policy. Indeed, Marshal Stalin in his last Moscow conversation with M. Mikolajczyk went further than we should have expected in positively encouraging the Poles to maintain their present relationship with Great Britain and America in addition to entering upon a new relationship of alliance with Russia.7

There were even those within the FO who feared the day when the British public might realise that ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin was not all that he seemed. Should public pressure then start upsetting the status quo, it would ruin the carefully nurtured relationship between London and Moscow.8

In October 1944 the Polish prime minister, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, previously rebuffed by Stalin, joined Churchill in Moscow to attempt a last-ditch reconciliation over the issue of the Polish border. But it was all in vain. Mikolajczyk realised that the Soviet Union ultimately wanted to engulf Poland and stood his ground against Churchill. There was a furious row between the pair and Churchill erupted at the Polish leader’s intransigence. ‘We will tell the world,’ Churchill bellowed, ‘how unreasonable you are. You will start another war in which 25 million lives will be lost. But you don’t care.’ So Mikolajczyk was bullied into agreeing to the Curzon Line proposal (the old suggested Polish/Soviet border, mooted by the British in the 1920s), but he metaphorically drew the line at handing over Lwów and the Carpathian oil fields. Even this stance was too much for his rigid government-in-exile colleagues back in London and they refused to allow him to cede any territory. Left with no alternative, Mikolajczyk resigned as prime minister on 24 November 1944, and was replaced by the elderly socialist Tomasz Arciszewski, an implacable opponent of Stalin. Weeks later the Lublin Poles declared themselves the provisional government of the Republic of Poland. As 1945 dawned, the Soviet Union formally recognised the new Polish government, leaving Churchill and Roosevelt with few political options. Even on the military front, events were not going smoothly for the Western Allies, with their forces meeting stiff German resistance in the Ardennes. A further conference with Stalin was a necessity.

However, before the Marshal of the Soviet Union would agree to a conference, he made sure that the Red Army was as far forward as possible and that the three great capitals of Berlin, Budapest and Prague all lay within his grasp. On 17 January 1945 the Red Army also occupied what was left of Warsaw and weeks later they captured Kraków, farther south. So, having placed himself in a commanding position, Stalin now acceded to the Western Allies’ request for another meeting of the ‘Big Three’.

A suitable meeting-place for the Big Three was determined by Stalin’s refusal to move very far from home. President Roosevelt was happy to suggest Yalta, a resort on the ‘Crimean Riviera’. To begin with there was some confusion as to whether he meant Malta rather than Yalta, but once that was clarified the only problem for Stalin was the physical state of the place. The Germans had left the Crimea as a wasteland, with its countryside ravaged and its roads pitted with landmines. Nothing if not resourceful, the Red Army was ordered to completely overhaul Yalta and the surrounding area. Thirty thousand Soviet troops were brought in to guard the approaching roads and the resort, while 1,500 train coaches arrived from Moscow bearing vast quantities of linen, food, drink and furniture, as well as glass to repair the shattered windows of the villas.9

While Soviet troops were patching up Yalta for the conference, the US and British delegations broke their journeys, stopping off at Malta. But if Churchill and his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, were hoping for preconference discussions with Roosevelt, they would be disappointed. According to Eden, although the president arrived with a great flourish, he was soon tired by his illness and distracted by his daughter, so that there were no talks with the British. Eden recalled that although Roosevelt was sick, there was an abiding feeling that the president and his aides did not want to be ‘ganging up’ with their British allies, or be seen to be doing so, before meeting the Soviet delegation. This meant that there was no preparation before going into the ring with Stalin at Yalta. As far as the Polish issue was concerned, it was a fatal mistake.10

2

YALTA

Going into the Yalta Conference, the Western Allies were far from unified. Roosevelt, rather than standing shoulder to shoulder with Churchill, increasingly saw himself as ‘an honest broker’ between Britain and the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, Roosevelt’s son Elliott also saw him in this role. ‘The Russians had a Polish government in Moscow,’ he observed, ‘and the British backed the old Polish government operating outside of Poland. Father’s role was mediator and arbitrator – as it was so important for unity that it continue to be.’1 Yet unity was not Roosevelt’s sole objective. He shared the belief, with many of his advisors, that the American mission in the war should not just end with the defeat of Hitler, but should also help to free colonial people from their masters. American foreign policy was at this time avowedly anti-imperial and Roosevelt made his opinions about the British Empire very clear to Churchill. ‘I’ve tried to make it clear to Winston,’ he complained, ‘that while we’re their allies and in it to victory by their side, they must never get the idea that we’re in it just to help them hang on to the archaic, medieval Empire ideas.’2 It seemed that Roosevelt and his advisors were becoming as suspicious of Britain’s post-war ambitions as those of the Soviet Union.

Perhaps Churchill had misjudged the Americans more than the Soviets. As John Lukacs has observed, ‘the idea of an Anglo-American union evoked no response in American minds and hearts; it all seemed somehow limiting and backward compared to such things as world government or the United Nations.’3 For his part, Roosevelt believed Churchill to be cleverer and more calculating – a conviction reinforced by Roosevelt’s discovery, some months earlier, of Churchill’s deal concerning the partition of the Balkans.4 The ‘naughty document’, as Churchill himself christened it, had been conceived when he met Stalin in Moscow in October 1944. During their talks, Churchill suddenly proposed that the countries of the Balkans should be split by percentage into areas of Western and Soviet control. Churchill passed a piece of paper to Stalin on which he had scribbled that ‘Russia’ could dominate 90 per cent of Romania, while Britain and the US would have a 90 per cent stake in Greece. Yugoslavia and Hungary would be split 50/50 and Bulgaria 75/25, but there was no attempt to arbitrarily split influence in the real problem areas of Poland, Austria or Italy.

What seems a cynical document was, in fact, Churchill’s reaction to sudden news. He had heard, via ULTRA, that the Germans were about to evacuate Athens and there was an immediate risk that the vacuum would be filled by communist partisans. He was prepared to sacrifice an already Soviet-dominated Romania for a free hand in Greece, so that the British could advance into Athens within days, and stop a communist takeover. This idea of a ‘deal’ over post-war Europe also cemented Churchill’s belief that Stalin would always respond to a spot of bargaining. The prime minister reasoned that as a man devoid of all moral constraints, Stalin might well come to heel if presented with a straightforward percentage split of control over Europe. However, this assumption relied on the unlikely premise that Stalin would keep his word and that the West could rely on some element of anti-Soviet sentiment in the caretaker governments of Eastern Europe. Both these hopes were soon to be dashed and it was this sense of betrayal that increasingly haunted Churchill and persuaded him that force against the Soviet Union might be justified. Unsurprisingly, when Roosevelt heard about this impromptu deal, he was furious. He had not been consulted beforehand and it merely reinforced his belief that Churchill was pushing Britain’s imperial ambitions, or at the very least trying to exclude the US from the European negotiations.5

When the British and American delegates arrived at the Black Sea resort of Yalta, they found a surreal world that contained superficially grand palaces. But behind the gloss, the place was a wreck. The British were initially impressed by the ‘green cypresses, terra-cotta earth and magnificent country villas’, including their own base, which resembled a castle from ‘a Grimm’s fairy-tale’. The building had to accommodate Churchill, the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, two field marshals, three chiefs of staff and a host of their attendants. Domestic arrangements were bizarre, as Churchill’s secretary recalled:

The Vorontsov Villa boasted several banqueting halls, various reception rooms, a conservatory containing lemon trees and so on; but washing facilities seemed to be neglected. It appeared that Prince and Princess Vorontsov had concentrated more on eating than on bathing. One bath and three small washbasins served this enormous Palace, and in the morning one queued with impatient Generals and embarrassed Admirals, all carrying their shaving kit and wishing that their dressing-gowns had been long enough to cover their bare ankles.6

As many as twenty generals could be sharing a bathroom, and the sight of Field Marshal Sir Henry ‘Jumbo’ Maitland Wilson emerging from the bathtub was not for the faint-hearted. Nonetheless, there was much embarrassment and spluttering when local Crimean girls arrived with bath brushes to administer the Russian ritual of back-scrubbing.7 So, with spotlessly clean delegates, Yalta (also known as the Crimea Conference) convened on 4 February 1945. Stalin ensured that all the accommodation used by the Allies was fitted with bugging devices, and although the delegates swept their rooms for such devices, they missed many of them, including the exterior microphones fitted to pick up outdoor conversations. So throughout the conference, the daily conversations of Churchill, Roosevelt, their chiefs of staff, and numerous advisors and diplomats were analysed by Stalin and the general staff of the Red Army. Stalin, through the offices of his Soviet Security and Intelligence Service (NKGB), had also acquired a mass of British documents concerning the proposed strategy of the British delegation, so he was well aware of the divergent policies of the Western Allies, especially regarding Poland.8

For many attendees it was their first sight of the legendary Soviet dictator. George Kennan, a deputy head of the US Mission in Moscow, summed up what it was like to be in Stalin’s presence:

Stalin, when he looked at you, he didn’t look at you because he always looked to the side; he held his head on one side, and never looked you straight in the eyes, which to me – I mean I’d read about him obviously – rather betrayed his sort of suspicious, locked-in nature. He had a withered left arm, and he held this in his right hand, with his palms upright, cupped. This was a typical stand of his. But then he’d shake you by the hand very formally; very soft hand, he had … when I first met him, I got rather a shock because of his very marked Georgian accent. He spoke in short sentences.9

Both Roosevelt and Churchill were, by now, familiar with Stalin and his operating techniques, yet as Kennan observed, the US president still seemed puzzled by him:

I don’t think FDR was capable of conceiving of a man of such profound iniquity, coupled with enormous strategic cleverness as Stalin. He had never met such a creature and Stalin was an excellent actor and when he did meet with leading people at these various conferences, he was magnificent, quiet, affable, reasonable. He sent them all away thinking this really is a great leader. And yes, but behind that there lay something entirely different. And Charles Bohlen, my colleague who succeeded me as ambassador there, was present at the Yalta and the Potsdam Conferences and he told me that he saw, only on one or two occasions, when the assistants to Stalin had said or done something of which he didn’t approve, when he turned on them and then the yellow eyes lit up and you suddenly realised what sort of an animal you had by the tail there.10

The gaunt and fast-fading Roosevelt felt that he and Stalin stood together on certain issues, not least that they both saw Britain as a spent force, thoroughly exhausted by the war. At one of the first plenary sessions, Roosevelt made a statement that was designed to allay Stalin’s concerns about US influence in Europe, but it struck fear into Churchill’s heart. The president stated that he did not wish to keep a vast army in Europe after the war and therefore US troops would be pulled out of Germany within two years of the end of the war. This would leave Britain and France responsible for occupying all of western Germany, and it would also leave Britain perilously undefended, should Stalin advance beyond Berlin.11 There were other indications that the US was lukewarm about any military operations in Europe that might conflict with Stalin. For the US chiefs of staff had persistently turned down requests from Churchill to support Allied operations in the Balkans. Roosevelt believed that the British wanted to establish a presence in Eastern Europe in order to prevent communist takeovers there. This US attempt to curb British aspirations won favour in Moscow and reinforced Roosevelt’s conviction that he, and he alone, could hold all the wartime Allies together in the post-war world.12 Frank Roberts, a British Foreign Office minister, was apprehensive about the US president’s apparent lack of interest in Europe, and particularly the fate of Poland. ‘A cynic might also add,’ he ventured, ‘that he [Roosevelt] had already won his re-election, and did not need the Pittsburg Polish vote for the time being.’13

Yalta certainly had a packed agenda. Among the main items discussed by Britain, the US and the Soviet Union were the creation of the United Nations, the ‘Dismemberment of Germany’, reparations and the most contentious of all – Poland. With the first two issues Britain was at odds with the Soviet Union; Stalin’s ‘dream team’ for the UN comprised all fifteen separate Soviet states, which after pressure from the West were whittled down to the Ukraine, Belorussia and Russia itself. As for the dismemberment of Germany, Churchill demanded the inclusion of France as an occupying power. He had no love for General de Gaulle, and the French leader characteristically failed to appreciate Churchill’s gesture, but still, France added weight to the West’s increasingly fragile position. 14

There were daily arguments, mainly between Churchill and Stalin, over the composition of Poland’s future government; with the Soviet Army occupying Poland, Stalin believed he held all the cards. He was never going to negotiate with an émigré Polish government in London, and as for the Polish borders, Stalin was keen to cite history as his reason for redesigning them in the Soviet interest. He said he feared Poland being used again as a corridor for invading armies to attack his country. ‘In future,’ he growled, ‘we do not want to be shot in the back.’ Stalin did indeed receive most of his border demands, and although final confirmation was to be left to the ‘future Polish government’, it was clear that his client state of Poland would receive part of the old East Prussia on her northern boundary, together with a slab of eastern Germany, including the mineral-rich area of Silesia, and the town of Breslau and port of Stettin.15 This was supposed to be compensation for the loss of her eastern territory to the Soviet Union, but this effectively placed a productive slice of Germany within Stalin’s control. According to Anthony Eden this also meant the expulsion of over 8 million ethnic Germans from the newly acquired territory. Despite all the posturing, a final agreement was hammered out by the time the conference ended on 11 February. The wording was a compromise, but Stalin’s threat was clear from the first line:

A new situation has been created in Poland as a result of her complete liberation by the Red Army. This calls for the establishment of a Polish Provisional Government which can be more broadly based than was possible before the recent liberation of western Poland. The Provisional Government which is now functioning in Poland should therefore be reorganised on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad. This new Government should then be called the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity … This Polish Provisional Government of National Unity shall be pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot. In these elections all democratic and anti-Nazi parties shall have the right to take part and to put forward candidates.16

When Roosevelt’s chief of staff, Admiral Leahy, saw the document, he told the president that it could be interpreted any way the Soviets wished. The president shrugged. ‘I know it,’ he replied, ‘but it’s the best I can do for Poland at this time.’ Roosevelt knew he had a sizable Polish-American vote at home to placate and he did not have time on his side. His health was rapidly declining, though it is debatable whether he knew he had just weeks to live. Yet, despite the publicly announced ‘shared intent’ over Poland, the two sides were as far apart as ever on who should govern Poland. The more realistic Leahy knew there was trouble ahead. ‘Russia will be the dominant power in Europe,’ he warned, ‘with the prospects of another war.’17

As the Red Army continued its relentless westwards advance, Stalin was prepared to concede a few token democrats on his communist-based Lublin Committee. But he was only prepared to consider one final outcome – the installation of a communist and pro-Soviet government in Poland. Meanwhile the Western Allies wanted any new provisional government to include democratic Polish leaders from outside Stalin’s orbit, and preferably from the London Polish government-in-exile. They wanted future elections to be ‘free and fair’, but Stalin could easily circumvent this by refusing to allow the West to participate in observing such elections. Stalin physically held the territory, and the Yalta agreement on Poland was a face-saving agreement for the West, an attempt to paper over widening cracks between the Big Three. Platitudes flowed during the after-dinner speeches at Yalta and Churchill was as enthusiastic as the other leaders to flatter Stalin.18 But at least Churchill did not extend such largesse to Stalin’s chief of police, Lavrenti Beria. When the British ambassador to the Soviet Union, Archibald Clerk-Kerr, toasted Beria at the end of one of the Yalta dinners, Churchill was horrified. ‘Be careful,’ Churchill admonished, shaking his finger at the ambassador, ‘be very careful.’ To the prime minister, Beria obviously symbolised the worst excesses of the Soviet system and was indeed Stalin’s ‘bloody hangman’.19

But the West indulged Stalin excessively. It is true that at Yalta the US believed it was imperative to secure the agreement of the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan. The Americans were still vulnerable in north-west Europe, and that was evident by their recent reversal at the Battle of the Bulge. A long, hard fight towards Berlin still lay ahead and a usable atomic bomb was still some way off. Yet, that hardly excused the wholesale capitulation over Poland. After all, the Poles had stood beside Britain at a time when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had made pacts of friendship. At Yalta, even as Polish troops were dying alongside British and American soldiers, her eastern territory was sacrificed to the Soviet Union.

The Allies gave away 69,000 square miles of eastern Poland in return for Stalin’s agreement to declare war on Japan. It is true that Poland was compensated with a little more than 39,000 square miles of territory in the west and to the north, taken from the old German Reich; this was rich industrial territory with mineral deposits, good infrastructure and contained a number of important cities and ports.20 But Stalin was now emboldened and he also demanded that the Allies abandon the Polish government-in-exile and recognise his puppet ‘Lublin’ government. In February 1945 Soviet support seemed vital if Japan was to be defeated and Roosevelt made a further deal with Stalin, offering him even more concessions in Asia.21

Roosevelt’s belief that he was better off negotiating direct with Stalin may explain why Britain was only asked to agree to these concessions at a very late stage, for the president did not want any British obstructions.22 Stalin also demanded the return of any Soviet citizens who found themselves in the west at the end of the war, either because they were POWs or because they had escaped westwards from the communists. Britain caved in easily on this point, perhaps because they couldn’t face having to resettle the estimated 2 million Soviet citizens who might refuse to go back to their homeland. In the event their fate was either execution or a life in one of the Soviet slave labour camps or ‘gulags’.23

By obtaining Soviet help in the war against Japan, Roosevelt was obviously aiming to reduce US casualties. But Stalin extracted a further raft of concessions from the Western Allies in exchange for his agreement to enter the war against Japan ‘two or three months after the surrender of Germany’. He demanded, and obtained, control over areas of Mongolia and Manchuria (without China’s consent), as well as the restoration of Soviet territorial rights that were lost after its earlier disastrous war against Japan in 1905.24 The US delegates were delighted. ‘We’ve just saved two million Americans,’ Admiral King, Chief of US Naval Staff told colleagues.25 But there were other, more insidious reasons for the president’s reliance on the Soviets. In the Pacific theatre certain elements of the American administration believed that Churchill was as keen on recovering former occupied colonies of the British Empire as he was on defeating Japan. To this end, Admiral King, who exerted great influence on Roosevelt, was anxious that the British should not play a major part in the Pacific war. The US was also determined to prevent France claiming back Indo-China and the Dutch from re-possessing the Dutch East Indies. Consequently, a swift defeat of Japan with Soviet help could certainly stop the old empires from recovering their former colonies.26