The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (33 page)

The decor is drab. The accent is on oak—heavy oaken chairs, oaken fireplace, and a great oak banister writhing up to a sinister minstrels’ gallery. I stand looking at the table where they sat, the three little flags in the middle all drooping and dusty. I feel the unease and the hypocrisy of the occasion.

It was here that he came on 17 July 1945, to the Cecilienhof, one of the few buildings in Potsdam not damaged by Allied bombs. Originally intended for some minor offshoot of the Hohenzollern dynasty, it looked then as now like a vague German attempt to build an English country house. It was the last and least successful of his
wartime conferences. He had tried and failed to hold the meeting in Britain—indeed, he never succeeded in persuading Roosevelt to visit Britain throughout the war. Now the summiteers were in the Russian zone of occupied Germany—in Potsdam, the home of German kings and kaisers.

This was the German Versailles, a place of palaces and pavilions, of lawns and lakes, a suburb of Berlin that today has UN world heritage status. In 1945 the greater part of the site was in ruins.

On the night of 14 April of that year the RAF had sent 500 Lancaster bombers, and dropped 1,780 tons of high explosive. Churchill was the author of this strategy; Churchill had insisted on area bombing—and with the specific and avowed intent of terrorising the civilian population. He pursued the aerial bombing—of doubtful military benefit—mainly because it was the only way he had of attacking Germany.

Short of launching a second front, it was the only means of expressing his pent-up aggression, of showing the Russians and the Americans that Britain, too, could inflict violence upon the enemy. It is true that he was himself seized by doubts. ‘
Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?’ he said suddenly one evening at Chartwell when he watched footage of burning German towns.

He was alarmed by the controversy over the Dresden fireball, in which 25,000 were killed and in many cases carbonised by British aerial bombing (and which he denounced in a suppressed memo as a ‘
mere act of terror and wanton destruction’), and he was furious when he found that the RAF had been so culturally insensitive as to attack the palaces of Potsdam. Now he came to see the results of a policy from which he could not easily dissociate himself.

More than 1,500 had died and 24,000 had been made homeless in Potsdam alone. As he picked his way through the rubble of Berlin
he was filled with a typical compassion. ‘
My hate died with their surrender,’ he said in his memoirs. ‘I was much moved by their thin haggard looks and threadbare clothes.’

Churchill’s war was never with the German people. It was the ‘Narzis’ that he wanted to smash; and now that he was at the apogee of his success, he found himself in the presence of another enemy, and one he had feared long before Nazism was even born: just as savage; just as ideologically driven; and in some ways more difficult to fight.

The Potsdam table is large and round, about ten foot in diameter, and reputedly made for the occasion by Russian carpenters. The massive oak is covered, as it was then, by a thick red felt cloth: perhaps in honour of the Russians whose red flag had been hoisted over Berlin, and who had organised the conference. It looks like the perfect place for poker; and there was one of the Big Three who seemed to have all the cards.

After four years of savage warfare, in which the Nazis and the Soviets had held each other by the throat like a pair of hydrophobic dogs, it is incredible to think that Stalin could still wield 6.4 million men in the European theatre alone. Russia had lost 20 million—and yet she ended the war as by far the most powerful military force in Europe.

In Stalin, the Soviet Union had a twinkling-eyed tyrant of total cynicism and ruthlessness. We have already seen how he baited Churchill in 1942, sneering at the alleged cowardliness of the British army. That was his style: sneer, flatter, fawn, bully, kill.

Stalin had risen to power by liquidating his enemies, and he maintained power by systematic murder of entire groups of people—the Tsarist officer corps, the kulaks, counter-revolutionaries, Poles, whoever stood in his way. He had the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on his hands before the Second World War had even begun.
It was in Tehran in November 1943 that Churchill got a flavour of his homicidal mania; and also of the eerie willingness of the Americans to indulge him.

The discussions of the Big Three had turned to Europe after the war. Stalin was already insisting that Poland should be bisected, and much of that country retained by Russia. Then, at the dinner in the evening,
he sketched out his plans for post-war Germany.

Stalin: ‘Fifty thousand Germans must be killed. Their General Staff must go.’

WSC: ‘I will not be party to any butchery in cold blood. What happens in hot blood is another matter.’

Stalin: ‘Fifty thousand MUST be shot.’

WSC (getting red in the face): ‘I would rather be taken out now and shot than so disgrace my country.’

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: ‘I have a compromise to propose. Not 50,000 but only 49,000 should be shot.’

At this hilarious sally, the President’s son Elliott Roosevelt rose to say that he cordially agreed with Stalin’s proposal, and that he was sure it would receive the full backing of Congress. Churchill then left the room in fury, and it was only with some difficulty that he could be persuaded to return.

What the Americans did not understand—or did not choose to understand—was that Stalin was only half joking; perhaps not even joking at all. To shoot 50,000 people in cold blood was nothing to Stalin; as he was said to have put it, not a tragedy but a statistic.

Things had been no better at Yalta in February 1945, where Stalin irresistibly and blandly continued to push his agenda: the Soviet domination of eastern Europe. Roosevelt was by now desperately ill, passing in and out of consciousness; and Churchill simply did not have the military muscle to oppose the Russian demands. Stalin was charm itself, comically showing off his limited command of English
(‘
You said it!’ and ‘The toilet is over there’ were among the few but surprisingly idiomatic phrases he deployed); but the message was increasingly clear. Russia was to retain all the gains of the odious Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, and to command all of eastern Europe and the Balkans—with the exception of Greece (‘
This brand I snatched from the burning,’ as Churchill boasted, ‘on Christmas day’).

The Baltic states were to go to Russia. Poland was to go to Russia—Poland, the country whose very sovereignty and integrity had been the cause of the war; Poland was once again betrayed, sacrificed and carved up to please a totalitarian regime. Again and again, Churchill found himself isolated, as Roosevelt sided with the Russian dictator.

When that great American President finally died on 12 April 1945, Churchill took what seems now to be the astonishing decision not to go to his funeral: astonishing when you consider how integral their relationship had been to Allied success; not so astonishing when you think of the gradual estrangement that had begun between them. America was still driving a very hard bargain over British war loans, and had been responsible for such minor vexations as cancelling meat exports to Britain. But the fundamental divergence was on the matter of Stalin, Russia and the post-war world.

On 4 May 1945 Churchill wrote to Eden that the Russian coup over Poland ‘
constitutes an event in the history of Europe to which there has been no parallel’. On 13 May he cabled the new President Truman to say that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended across the Russian front—which shows that the phrase, later to become so controversial, had been used by Churchill almost a year before his Fulton, Missouri, speech. By the end of that month Churchill was so alarmed by the prospect of a communist and Russian-dominated eastern Europe that he proposed an operation that has only recently been disinterred, mainly by the historian David Reynolds. On 24 May he asked British military planners to look into what he called Operation
Unthinkable—by which British and American forces would actually turn on the Russians, and push them back from eastern Europe. How would they do it? They would enlist the fighters who had proved most effective of all: the Wehrmacht.

Churchill suggested to Montgomery that captured German weapons should be stored in such a way as to be capable of being conveniently returned to the de-Nazified German troops; and used for an assault against the Soviets.
All that remained secret until 1998, and it is probably just as well that it did.

Even if it had been desirable, there was no way Churchill could have persuaded the Americans to take part in such a plan. To understand the comparative American indulgence of the Russians, you have to remember how the world looked to Washington in 1944 and early 1945. The war in the Pacific was by no means over. The Japanese were offering frenzied and suicidal resistance. The Japanese population was being schooled in guerrilla warfare—even to fight with spears. The Americans knew that eventually they would win—but they feared (in spite of possessing the bomb) that the loss of life would be horrific. They hoped that the Russians would come in decisively on their side.

And even if Churchill could have persuaded the Americans, there remains the prior question: what of his own army, and his own British electorate? What would they have said, if they had been told that it was now time to turn on the Russians? It is safe to say that if the British public had heard of Operation Unthinkable, they would have reacted with bewilderment and outrage. They knew little or nothing of Stalin’s purges. In the minds of many British people, the Russians were heroes who had shown a courage and spirit of self-sacrifice that put other armies (including their own) to shame.

In popular imagination Stalin was not yet a blood-soaked tyrant; he was Uncle Joe, with his folksy pipe and moustache. If the British
public had been told in 1945 that it was now time to turn their guns on Moscow, I am afraid they would have drawn the conclusion that Churchill had mounted his ancient hobby-horse of anti-communism—and that he was both wrong and deluded. The idea was never a runner, as British military planners made clear in their response to Churchill. Operation Unthinkable would require vast quantities of German troops and American resources; and I don’t suppose that conclusion came as any real surprise to the British Prime Minister.

As ever, he was allowing his mind to roam, to go through all the logical options—no matter how mad-sounding they might be. It says something for his undiminished martial instinct—after six grinding and debilitating years—that he should even contemplate the possibility of such an action. However impractical, Operation Unthinkable also reveals the depths of his anxiety about the communist threat; and here at least he was surely right.

As he looked at the map of Europe, he saw Germany in ruins, France on her knees, Britain exhausted. He saw that Russian tanks were capable of advancing to the Atlantic and to the North Sea—if they chose. They had shown their willingness to engulf the capitals of eastern Europe, and to impose a form of government that he believed to be wicked. What could be done to stop them? That was the big strategic question he posed—and a question that many Americans, for the time being, seemed to have no interest even in asking.

By the time Churchill came to leave the Potsdam conference, on 25 July, he had achieved little or nothing. He had filled the air of the dingy room with some brilliant phrases—which the interpreters had struggled to translate; but it was as if Britain was visibly continuing to shrink in the shade of the two emerging superpowers.

On the American side, Truman revealed that Washington now had the capacity to wield an atomic weapon—and refused to share
the technology with Britain: which you might think a slightly offhand way to treat an ally that had honoured scrupulously the terms of the Anglo-American technology-sharing agreements. Most of the early theoretical work on nuclear fission was British, and it was all handed on a plate—along with radar and everything else—to America. In the end, Truman was to take the decision to bomb Hiroshima alone; the consultation of Churchill was a mere formality.

For the Russians, Stalin continued to play his hand with economy and skill. When he spoke, it was to the point. He was never at a loss for a fact (unlike Churchill, who sometimes had to lean back to allow his seconds to whisper in his ear); and when he thought it necessary the Russian tyrant continued to dispense his lethal charm. He told Churchill how sorry he was that he had not been more publicly effusive in thanking Britain for helping Russia. He made a great thing of gathering up the menus and going round to get Churchill’s signature. ‘
I like that man,’ Churchill was heard to say—being a bit of an old sucker for flattery.

And all the while the Bear was engulfing eastern Europe, smiling complacently as he chomped away, securing at Potsdam not just war reparations but war ‘booty’, carting away whatever he could to feed the Russian economy. The puppet Soviet-controlled Polish government appeared before the leaders at Potsdam. Churchill asked whether they might have some non-communists in their ranks.
Nyet
, was the answer.

Then on 26 July Churchill was back in London, to receive the Order of the Boot, first class, from the British public. It was now that he really showed what he was made of; as if there had been some previous doubt about the matter.

He was seventy years old; he had emerged victorious at the end of the most violent conflict humanity had ever seen. He had his memoirs to write. He had not even been to Chartwell during the war: the
place had been under dustcloths. He had his fishponds to restock, his pigs to tend. He could have left public life amid the applause of a grateful nation and of a world in his immortal debt. That was not his way.

It is true that at first he found it hard to cope with the loss of his status. A black cloud descended, as his daughter Mary has recorded. His family did their best to lift his spirits, playing him favourite old tunes such as ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’. It wasn’t much use. He quarrelled with Clementine, who spoke of ‘
our misery’.