Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (83 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

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Winston Churchill was in Moscow visiting Stalin from October 9 to 18. Roosevelt asked that Harriman be included, and advised Churchill and Stalin that he considered this meeting preliminary to the scheduled meeting between the three leaders in the Crimea in February, and said he would not be bound by any agreements from these meetings in Moscow. Stalin, who assumed that Churchill would be bringing whatever he and Roosevelt had concerted at Quebec, replied that Roosevelt’s position “does not seem to correspond with reality.”
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As his armies were already in Central Europe, he presumably meant the reality of what the Red Army was about to impose on “liberated” territory, and of the geographic misfortune of those countries that found themselves between Germany and Russia. (Churchill did not reply at all to Roosevelt, a rarity in their voluminous correspondence.)
Churchill and Eden met with Stalin on the night of their arrival, and Churchill opened with “Let us settle our affairs in the Balkans. Don’t let us get at cross-purposes in small ways.” He suggested that the Soviet Union have 90 percent of the influence in Romania and 75 percent in Bulgaria, that it be 50–50 in Yugoslavia and Hungary, and that Britain have 90 percent of the Great Power influence in Greece. While this was being translated for Stalin, Churchill wrote it out on a piece of paper and handed it to his host. Stalin “took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down.” Churchill said: “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner?” He suggested burning what he later called the “naughty” piece of paper, but Stalin told him to keep it. In his memoirs, Churchill claimed that these were only temporary arrangements, but that is completely implausible. Churchill well knew the nature of his host, and if it had been temporary, the demarcation would not have been “fateful to millions,” nor even “naughty.”
In fact he hadn’t struck a bad bargain, as Stalin was going to take what Churchill conceded anyway. But Molotov bullied Eden into raising the Soviet position in Hungary to 75 percent, and even then, Stalin raised his status in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary to 100 percent and stoked up a civil war under the noses of the British and the Americans in Greece. Churchill didn’t tell Roosevelt exactly what had happened but told him there was a need to resolve Balkan issues to avoid civil war there (though civil war resulted in Yugoslavia as well as in Greece).
In the light of subsequent revisionist history, including most ingenious revisions by Churchill himself in his voluminous memoirs, it is worth noting that if Churchill hadn’t dragged Britain’s heels on Overlord and distracted the Americans with all the bunk about the “soft underbelly” and “Ljubljana Gap,” and hadn’t thrown in with Russia at the European Advisory Commission’s demarcation of occupation zones in Germany, the Western Powers would have ended up with almost all of Germany, at least the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.
The atmosphere at the conference was very cordial; Stalin arranged for a great ovation for Churchill when they attended the Bolshoi Ballet and Opera, and saw him off at the airport, an unprecedented courtesy. “He made several expressions of personal regard which I feel sure were sincere.” Doubtless they were, and Mr. Churchill deserved no less, but Stalin’s cordiality is hardly surprising: Churchill had legitimized the rape Stalin was about to commit, though refusal to do so would not have prevented it.
11. THE 1944 ELECTION AND THE BATTLE OF THE ARDENNES
 
Roosevelt campaigned as he had in the 1940 election, in the last three weeks, and spoke to very enthusiastic and large crowds in the great cities of the East, Northeast, and Midwest, including a dramatic appearance, under a spotlight in an otherwise darkened Soldier Field in Chicago, before 120,000 people (where Mrs. Sullivan, the mother of five sons who had perished in a cruiser, was introduced to great applause). His tour of New York City and vigorous stump appearances silenced the only issue the Republicans had: Roosevelt’s health. Dewey was a comparative upstart and Roosevelt ran as the conqueror of the Republican Depression, of Republican isolationism, and of the Germans and the Japanese. There were only 2.691 million military votes out of more than 12 million eligible, but Roosevelt won, for the fourth time, 25.6 million votes (54 percent) to 22 million for Dewey (46 percent), and 432 electoral votes from 36 states to 99 from 12 states for Dewey. It was a very respectable performance by Dewey against so invincible an opponent, but if the armed forces had been able vote in representative numbers, Roosevelt would undoubtedly have won by at least as great a margin as he had over Willkie in 1940. (Willkie and McNary had both died, so if Willkie had won in 1940, the president on election day would have been the Republican secretary of state, possibly Herbert Hoover.)
On December 16, Hitler launched a major offensive in the west, out of the Ardennes Forest in poor winter weather that neutralized the Allies’ air advantage. The German attack involved about 500,000 men, nearly half of the 55 German divisions that had retreated to the Rhine before Eisenhower’s 96 divisions. The German plan was to overrun Allied supplies, especially tank fuel to resupply themselves, and proceed all the way to Antwerp, which had recently been cleared by the Canadians, in an attack that resembled the drive to Dunkirk in 1940. As in 1940, they were attacking out of the Ardennes against a relatively under-defended section of the Allied line, and one held by newly arrived American troops. Allied intelligence, especially from Patton’s Third Army, had warned that a German attack was possible, and Eisenhower had pulled Allied stores and supplies back from the front.
The Germans achieved almost complete tactical surprise, and advanced about 50 miles in the first week, when the weather kept the Allied air forces out of the fight. Patton wheeled his Third Army north and the 101st Airborne Division fiercely defended the surrounded Belgian fortress city of Bastogne. American resistance stiffened steadily, and Patton crashed into the German southern flank on Christmas Day and relieved Bastogne the next day. Eisenhower committed all his reserves to Bradley’s Central Army Group, and gave command of the American Ninth Army, partly separated from Patton by the German advance, to Montgomery, who, after his usual methodical preparation, attacked the northern side of the German salient on January 2. The Allied line regained its original position on January 21. Germany had taken about 120,000 casualties to about 90,000 for the Allies, 77,000 of them Americans, including 21,000 prisoners. Germany lost about a third of its air force, 1,500 planes, after the weather lifted following Christmas. It had been the usual highly professional operation by the Germans, but the correlation of forces was now too lopsided and the quality of the Western armies too well-developed for any prospect of successfully resisting in the west. The senior Allied commanders, Eisenhower, Bradley, Montgomery, Patton, and McAuliffe (in Bastogne), all performed admirably.
As 1944 ended, it was clear that Hitler would not be able to continue in the war for more than about six months. In both Europe and the Pacific, World War II had reached its final phase. The Allies were unstoppable; victory was at hand on every front. The Western Allies were on the Rhine and almost to the Alps and they had almost entirely occupied France and Italy. The Americans were approaching Japan from the east and southeast. The Russians were still not in Warsaw. Stalin would not be denied some spoils, but an immense strategic victory for Western democracy seemed imminent.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
 
From World War to Cold War, 1945–1951
 
1. YALTA
 
The Russians launched a general offensive on January 12, occupied Warsaw on January 17, and reached the Oder River, south of the border of Poland and Germany but only about 200 miles from Berlin, on January 23, 1945. Alexander and Clark had pushed the Germans into the extreme north of Italy. MacArthur’s forces entered Manila on February 5. This was where the Allied armies were when Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met at Yalta, in the Crimea, starting on February 4. Roosevelt was accompanied, apart from the service chiefs, by his new secretary of state, the former chairman of United States Steel Corporation, Edward Stettinius, who had been Hull’s under secretary when Hull retired in November 1944 (the longest-serving secretary of state in U.S. history); by James Byrnes, the head of the Offices of Economic Stabilization and War Mobilization; and by Roosevelt’s daughter, Anna. After introductory remarks from the leaders, and summaries of the Eastern and Western Fronts in Europe, Italy, the Pacific, and Burma, the conference dealt with great application with a succession of complicated points. It was agreed that France would receive an occupation zone of Germany carved out of the British zone and would join the European Advisory Commission and the Allied Control Commission in Germany; that Nazi war criminals would be punished, Germany disarmed, and the German general staff dissolved; and that reparations were to be determined by the Allies and paid by Germany. The United Nations Organization would be set up by the five founding powers (China and France as well as those present) at San Francisco, starting on April 25. (Roosevelt would have it set up and running before the war ended, and have equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats on the American founding delegation, to avoid the shambles that befell Wilson.)
The Yalta Declarations on Liberated Europe and on Poland promised democratic government with free elections, with, in Poland, “universal suffrage and secret ballot.” In Yugoslavia, the Communists under Josip Broz Tito and the regent for the Karageorgevich monarchy would be encouraged to cooperate, as Churchill had proposed (with no practical likelihood of success).
It was agreed that the foreign ministers of the Big Three would meet every three or four months for an indefinite period, and that unity between them was “a sacred obligation.” There was a slew of protocols and secret clauses, including relaxation of the Montreux Convention, assuring easier movement of Soviet vessels sailing to and from Soviet ports through the Bosporus, and the return of all prisoners and displaced civilians. As about one million Soviet citizens were serving with the German armed forces, Stalin wanted these people back to imprison or execute them. In practice, the Americans accepted their assurances that they were German, or whatever nationality they claimed, but the British, in the spirit of Colonel Nicholson in the film
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, dutifully shipped back a large number of Soviet defectors to Stalin’s gruesome mercies.
The Soviet Union undertook to enter the war against Japan within two or three months of the end of the European war, and the USSR would receive back all that Russia had ceded to Japan at the end of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905 in the Treaty of Portsmouth, brokered by Roosevelt’s cousin Theodore (southern Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, which had in fact been ceded in 1875, but not the Russian suzerainty of the Manchurian railways and the harbor of Port Arthur). Roosevelt was adamant that all Stalin could have was a lease, because China was another of the five designated permanent members of the United Nations, and he would not be a party to inflicting on China a return to colonialism. The entry of Russia into the war against Japan (which would require abrogation by Stalin of the Russo-Japanese non-aggression pact of 1941, not a great conscientious problem for any of them), was a high priority to the U.S. Joint Chiefs. It was clear from their battles with Japan on the islands approaching Japan itself that no Japanese, even most civilians, would be taken alive, and it was feared that if atomic weapons, which were scheduled to be tested in about five months, did not work, Allied casualties in an attack on Japan itself could be as great as one million. The Soviet Union was to receive three votes at the United Nations, for Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus. The British Dominions were all entitled to votes, and it was agreed in secret side letters to Roosevelt by Stalin and Churchill (“My Dear Franklin”) that the United States, if there were any domestic political embarrassment, could also have three votes. (In what would become a controversial matter, the alleged former Soviet spy Alger Hiss, who was in the American delegation at Yalta, made only one recommendation, to oppose granting the USSR three votes in the UN.)
The conference ended very cordially on February 11, and everyone, even the usually acidulous diarists Brooke and Cadogan, was quite satisfied with it. Roosevelt made it clear to intimates that he knew how easily its agreements could be violated, but he had what he needed most: the international organization with which he was going to defeat the isolationists and exercise through a façade of multilateralism America’s preponderant influence in the world; the solemn Declarations on Poland and on Liberated Europe, which if violated by Stalin, would justify strenuous U.S., U.K., French, and (if adequately bribed by the Americans) Chinese counter-measures; and the assurance that, if necessary, Russia would take a sizeable share of the casualties incurred in subduing Japan.

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