World War II Behind Closed Doors (36 page)

At Tehran, straight after their tête-à-tête, Roosevelt and Stalin moved on to the first plenary session of the conference, which opened at 4.30. Here the stark difference in political styles between the Western Allies and Stalin became immediately evident. Roosevelt remarked that ‘the Soviets, the British and the United States were sitting round the table for the first time as members of the same family’; Churchill added portentously that ‘the meeting probably represented the greatest concentration of worldly power that had ever been seen in the history of mankind. In their hands almost certainly lay victory: in their hands beyond any shadow of a doubt lay the happiness and fortunes of mankind’. He added that he ‘prayed that they might be worthy of this wonderful God-granted opportunity of rendering service to their fellow-men’.
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Stalin, who in his entire life would never make a speech like the one he had just heard from Churchill, contented himself with thanking the President and Prime Minister for their remarks and said merely that he hoped that the three of them would ‘make good use of this opportunity’.

At this first full meeting, Stalin made an immediate concession. Instead of berating the Western Allies for the lack of a second front or insisting on the 1941 borders with Poland – the two subjects that, as we have already seen, were highest on his personal agenda – he announced that he ‘would first address himself to the question of the Pacific’. He said that ‘unfortunately it was impossible for the Soviets to join in the struggle against Japan at the present time, since practically all their forces were required to be deployed against Germany’. However, Stalin went on, ‘the moment for their joining
their friends in this theatre would be the moment of Germany's collapse: then they would march together’. It was a clever tactic. Stalin immediately placed the Americans in his debt. But what, in practical terms, had he conceded? Only an agreement in principle to attack Japan once the war in Europe had been won. And what was crucial, in Stalin's mind, to help the war in Europe to be over swiftly? Why, the second front of course.

It was clear from Stalin's subsequent words that his single-minded focus on the importance of the second front had not diminished. The British and Americans had gained the impression, from a meeting of Foreign Ministers in Moscow in October, that the Soviets might possibly call at Tehran for both Overlord and an increase in Allied resources for the Mediterranean theatre. But Stalin now made his wishes clear. Overlord was pre-eminent – a view that coincided exactly with American plans.

Churchill was not about to give up, and he launched a spirited attack, outlining once more the benefits of more resources for the Mediterranean. But to no effect. Stalin saw no benefit in dispersing the Allied effort. He wanted one strike against the beaches of northern France with – just possibly – a landing in support of Overlord in the South of France. The session broke up with Churchill dismayed – he confided to Lord Moran immediately afterwards that ‘A bloody lot has gone wrong’.
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But, tough as he was, Churchill pressed on, holding one more crucial meeting with Stalin later that day – this time on the question of Poland.

From the first moment of the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland there had been an acceptance in the British Foreign Office that it would be difficult ever to get this portion of Poland back, but Churchill had been outraged when Stalin told Eden in December 1941 that he wanted to claim this territory as his own. However, by now the Prime Minister had come to the conclusion that, politically, there was no alternative but to give the Soviets what they wanted. At Tehran, late at night, he and Stalin discussed the fate of Poland in what must surely rank as one of the most important – yet seemingly casual – conversations of the war. It was Churchill who raised the question of Poland, and Stalin was careful to say
nothing until he heard what the Prime Minister proposed – this despite Churchill's attempt to get the Soviet leader to disclose first ‘what he thought about it’. Stalin revealed nothing, saying that ‘he did not feel the need to ask himself how to act’ and waited for Churchill to show his hand.
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Churchill said that after the war ‘the Soviet Union would be overwhelmingly strong and Russia would have a great responsibility for hundreds of years in any decision she took with regard to Poland. Personally, he thought Poland might move westwards like soldiers taking two steps close. If Poland trod on some German toes, that could not be helped, but there must be a strong Poland. This instrument was needed in the orchestra of Europe’.

The significance of Churchill's words should not be underestimated. For he had just proposed – via the almost comic simile of ‘soldiers taking two steps close’ – one of the largest and most fundamental population shifts of the twentieth century. As a consequence, millions of people would either be uprooted if they sought to keep their previous nationality, or subsumed into another country. At a stroke, Germany would lose more territory than had been lost as a consequence of the Versailles Treaty. Meantime the Poles, Britain's ally, might lose in the East around 40 per cent of the country that had existed before the war – the very land, moreover, from which came the majority of Polish soldiers who were currently fighting in the British army in Italy.

Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, said in the same meeting that he was ‘encouraged’ by the idea that ‘the Poles should go as far west as the [river] Oder’. But Stalin was careful not to commit himself, merely asking Eden ‘whether we [the British] thought he was going to swallow Poland up’.

Eden replied that ‘he did not know how much the Russians were going to eat. How much would they leave undigested?’

‘The Russians did not want anything belonging to other people’, said Stalin. ‘Although they might have a bite at Germany’. The notes of the meeting conclude: ‘The Prime Minister demonstrated with the help of three matches [to mark the new border] his idea of Poland moving westwards, which pleased Marshal Stalin’.

Rather than looking at the subsequent conference at Yalta for the moment when the Allies demonstrated their power to determine the fate of post-war Europe, it is better to focus on this late-night meeting on 28 November 1943 in Tehran. By the use of similes, metaphors and, ultimately, props in the form of matches Churchill and Eden reshaped the boundaries of Poland and Germany – significantly without the presence of representatives from the two countries involved in this demographic and geographical upheaval. Indeed, Churchill said to Stalin that his idea was to see, ‘if the three Heads of Government, working in agreement, could form some sort of policy which might be pressed upon the Poles’.

Churchill was perfectly aware that the suggestions he made to Stalin were diametrically opposed to the views he had expressed two years before. A clue as to the reasons why he changed his mind can be found in a letter he wrote to Eden after the conference in January 1944. Principally, Churchill felt that the Soviet demands were in fact
a fait accompli
. ‘We are now about to attempt the settlement of the eastern frontier of Poland’,
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he wrote, ‘and we cannot be unconscious of the fact that the Baltic States, and the questions of Bukovina and Bessarabia, have largely settled themselves through the victories of the Russian Armies’. But there was more to the Prime Minister's change of heart than a mere acceptance of the inevitable. He revealed that ‘undoubtedly my own feelings have changed’ over the last two years. ‘The tremendous victories of the Russian armies, the deep-seated changes which have taken place in the character of the Russian State and Government, the new confidence which has grown in our hearts towards Stalin – these have all had their effect’.

Churchill was clearly influenced by the fact that 1943 had been a year of transformation in the fortunes of the Soviet Union. At the start of it the Red Army had been battling with the Germans in Stalingrad; now the Germans were in retreat. And this change in fortune on the battlefield had been accompanied – at least in the view of some leading figures in the British Foreign Office – by a number of signs that the Soviet regime was altering for the better.
For example, the Comintern – the body dedicated to the imposition of Communism on other countries – had been abolished in May 1943. (Its aims were simply too incompatible with the reality of the strategic alliance with the Western Allies.) And there were also indications of a new religious tolerance in the Soviet Union when in September 1943 Stalin permitted the Russian Orthodox Church to appoint a new patriarch.

Roosevelt too hoped for the best. ‘The revolutionary currents of 1917 may be spent in this war’, said the American President in April 1943 when talking of future Soviet intentions, ‘with progress [in the future] following evolutionary constitutional lines’.
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In addition, in purely practical terms, Churchill must have thought that the Poles would never be able to live at peace with their powerful neighbour if they kept the eastern portion of their country – territory that Stalin had so persistently demanded. Earlier discussions with the Soviet leader had made clear his obsession with ensuring post-war security on his borders, and perhaps, Churchill believed, if the Soviets were given eastern Poland, then they would feel more secure and thus more disposed to cooperate with the new independent Poland. As for the Poles, as Churchill was later to reiterate, they were, as far as he was concerned, gaining industrial land in the West – such as the port of Danzig – which was far more useful than the primarily agricultural land they were being asked to give up in the East.

And then there was another mood in the air, one fanned by the pro-Soviet tone of much of the reporting in the West in the wake of the Red Army's victories and sacrifices. It was a sense that the Soviet Union might have something to teach the world; that after the war a form of ‘socialism’ might be possible that took the ‘good things’ from the Soviet experience (a sense of ‘togetherness’, the goals of free education, healthcare for all, and full employment) and eliminated the ‘bad things’ (the lack of freedom and the corruption of the rule of law). Indeed, Churchill himself observed to Stalin at Tehran that the British were becoming ‘a trifle pinker’. And Stalin had retorted: ‘That is a sign of good health’.
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The question was, did all this really amount to ‘deep-seated changes…in the character of the Russian State and Government’? Probably only if one ignored the contrary evidence. For example, Churchill knew that earlier in 1943 Sir Owen O'Malley had reported that on a balance of probabilities Stalin's regime had been responsible for the murders at Katyn – a crime that the Soviets were now actively covering up.

More important still, where was the practical evidence that Stalin would allow ‘democracy’, as the West understood the concept, in any of the states that he was soon likely to control? Recent history had demonstrated that the Soviets were much more practised at organizing fake ‘elections’ as they had during their occupation of eastern Poland four years before. But Churchill felt he had little alternative but to accept the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland. Neither he nor Roosevelt was prepared to ‘turn them out’ with military force – indeed, it would have been impossible to do so while the war was still raging, and in the immediate aftermath of the conflict public opinion in Britain and the USA would hardly have supported the idea of a Third World War over the question of the boundaries of Poland and the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states.

However, if Churchill had stated, in effect: ‘We accept that the Soviet claims for Poland and other disputed territory such as the Baltic States are wrong – they are unjust – but there is no practical method of putting this right’, that would have been the reality. But he felt he could not say that – this was, remember, a ‘moral’ war – and it was thought essential for the Allies to present a united front to the world in order to prevent their enemies gaining heart from public discord between them. So Churchill persuaded himself that Stalin and the Soviets had changed. He (and Roosevelt) leapt on any sign that Stalin was a person who kept his word and who wanted to deal cooperatively and honestly with the West to make a better post-war world.

‘We have been constrained’, wrote O'Malley in his Katyn report, ‘by the urgent need for cordial relations with the Soviet government to appear to appraise the evidence with more hesitation
and lenience than we should do in forming a common sense judgement on events occurring in normal times or in the ordinary course of our private lives; we have been obliged to appear to distort the normal and healthy operation of our intellectual and moral judgements’. And despite all the recent scholarly work
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that suggests possible reasons why the British might have believed that Stalin was trustworthy, or that the Soviet regime was softening in some way, it is O'Malley's words that still best explain the thought process of Churchill and many of his Foreign Office advisers.

It is also significant that Churchill discussed Poland with Stalin in the absence of Roosevelt, who had gone to bed. This was a moment when the British Prime Minister could still demonstrate that he was a power in the world, able to negotiate epic deals. It was a rare moment at the conference. Because, as events the next day would demonstrate, Churchill was to be increasingly pushed aside.

ROOSEVELT MOVES ON STALIN

The second day of the conference opened with a meeting of military experts. It was a curious affair. Both the British, with General Brooke and Air Chief Marshal Portal, and the Americans, with a delegation led by General Marshall, had brought their finest military minds to Tehran. But Stalin had only taken the elderly and somewhat inept Marshal Voroshilov A cavalry officer during the Russian Revolution, Voroshilov had proved his incompetence twice in recent years: first by commanding the Red Army during the disastrous Winter War against Finland, and second by failing through his tactical mistakes to prevent the Germans advancing on the Leningrad front. ‘Here was Voroshilov’, remembers Hugh Lunghi, who was present at the meeting as an interpreter, ‘faced by this phalanx of Western Allies, and I suppose he did his best – but his best wasn't very good at all because he really was very thick-headed and couldn't really understand much about strategy’.