World War II Behind Closed Doors (50 page)

It was against all this background that Churchill sat down with Stalin to discuss ‘percentages’ of influence. And as the detailed bargaining between Molotov and Eden that followed the introduction of Churchill's ‘naughty’ document showed, this was a serious attempt – though also a crude and first draft one – to solve the new foreign policy issues in eastern Europe that the post-war world would throw up. But after the Molotov discussions had demonstrated the alacrity with which the Soviets wanted to bargain, and also exposed the immense ambiguity of the term ‘percentages of influence’ – which nobody who was involved defined exactly – any attempt to take the proposal further in any formal way was dropped. Nonetheless, Churchill believed that the ‘naughty’ document did inform Stalin's subsequent actions. Later in the year, for example, the Soviets did not interfere in British action in Greece (a country that Churchill had written was ‘90%’ part of a British
sphere of influence). But there is evidence that Stalin may have already decided that the Soviet Union should not try to influence the fate of Greece before Churchill ever raised the question.
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During this first meeting of the trip – the same one in which Churchill raised his ‘naughty’ document – the discussion also turned to the future of Germany. Churchill said he was all for ‘hard terms’ and Stalin added he wanted German ‘heavy industry’ destroyed. Molotov then, perhaps disingenuously, asked Churchill his ‘opinion’ of the Morgenthau Plan. Churchill said that Roosevelt and Morgenthau were ‘not very happy about its reception’. And when Stalin spoke of his belief that ‘a long occupation of Germany would be necessary’ Churchill replied that ‘he did not think the Americans would stay very long’.

It was this realization that the Americans were not liable to participate long-term in European affairs that also partly lay behind Churchill's desire to resolve the Polish question on this visit to Moscow if he possibly could. Deals needed to be done – and they needed to be done swiftly For this reason Churchill had pressed Stalin to allow the Polish Prime Minister in exile, Stanislaw Mikołajczyk, to come to Moscow. And at five o'clock in the afternoon of 13 October he duly walked into the Spiridonovka Palace in the Kremlin to begin discussions with Stalin and the British Prime Minister.

It is not hard to imagine Mikołajczyk's emotions as he met Stalin once again, especially as any assurances he had received from the Soviet leader little more than two months before about the Warsaw Uprising had come to nothing. But no matter how badly he felt at the start of the meeting, worse was to follow. To begin with, Stalin reiterated the demands that he had expressed back in August.
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‘One could not shut one's eyes to the facts’, he said. And the facts, as far as Stalin was concerned, were clear. ‘The Polish Committee’ (the Lublin Poles) were overseeing ‘much work’ in Poland and – a familiar theme – had ‘a large army’. They therefore had to be involved in any discussions about the future of Poland. In addition, the London Poles must recognize the ‘Curzon Line’ and relinquish eastern Poland – without accepting Soviet demands here, ‘there could be no good relations’.

Mikołajczyk made the understandable point that ‘Polish soldiers abroad who were fighting against the Germans thought that they were fighting in the hope of returning to that territory’, [meaning the land that would be lost in eastern Poland if the Curzon Line was accepted]. Stalin retorted that ‘Ukrainians and White Russians’ were also fighting for this land but ‘Mr Mikołajczyk perhaps did not know of it. They had suffered much more than all the Poles put together’.

Churchill did his best to act as mediator, saying that ‘they all knew of Poland's sufferings’. He then made a long and emotional statement in which he argued that they all – including Marshal Stalin – wanted Poland to be a ‘free, sovereign and independent state, with the power to lead its own life’, as long – and here came the familiar qualifier – as Poland was ‘friendly’ to the Soviet Union. But on the crucial question of the eastern Frontier of Poland the British government supported the border the Soviets wanted, ‘because they felt it their duty. Not because Russia was strong but because Russia was right in the matter’. Mikołajczyk replied that ‘he did not know that they now had to divide Poland before dealing with other questions’.

Then came a devastating moment for the Polish Prime Minister. After Churchill had ‘appealed’ once more to Mikołajczyk to make a ‘beau gesture’ and give up eastern Poland, Molotov intervened. He had clearly had enough of Churchill's emotional speeches and wanted to return to hard realities. Molotov reminded everyone ‘what was said in Tehran upon the Polish question’. President Roosevelt had ‘agreed to the Curzon Line’ but ‘did not wish it published at the moment’ and so they ‘could [all] conclude that the points of view of the Soviet Union, Britain and America were the same’.

It was the diplomatic equivalent of a mugging. For although Mikołajczyk had known that Churchill had wanted the Poles to agree to the Curzon Line, he had not known that the matter had been discussed – and seemingly agreed – at the Tehran Conference without the Poles being present. Nor had he realized that Roosevelt had also been party to this agreement.

Churchill said: ‘I hope you will not hold against me these
unpleasant but frank words which I have spoken with the best of intentions’. Mikołajczyk replied: ‘I have already heard so many unpleasant things in the course of this war that one more will not let me lose my balance’.

The next day, at the dacha outside Moscow where the British were based, Churchill once again pressed the Poles to change their minds and consent to the movement of the frontier. It was here that the strain on Churchill began to show. He simply could not believe that the Poles would not do as they were told. ‘You must do this’, he said. ‘If you miss this moment everything will be lost’.
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‘Should I sign a death sentence against myself?’ asked Mikołajczyk.

‘I wash my hands off’, said Churchill. ‘As far as I am concerned we shall give the business up. Because of quarrels between Poles we are not going to wreck the peace of Europe. In your obstinacy you do not see what is at stake. It is not in friendship that we shall part. We shall tell the world how unreasonable you are. You will start another war in which 25 million lives will be lost. But you don't care’.

‘I know that our fate was sealed in Tehran’, said Mikołajczyk.

‘It was saved in Tehran’, said Churchill.

‘I am not a person completely devoid of patriotic feeling, to give away half of Poland’.

‘What do you mean by saying “you are not devoid of patriotic feeling”?’ said Churchill. ‘Twenty-five years ago we reconstituted Poland although in the last war more Poles fought against us than for us. Now again we are preserving you from disappearance, but you will not play ball. You are absolutely crazy’.

‘But this solution [the Curzon Line] does not change anything’.

‘Unless you accept the frontier you are out of business for ever. The Russians will sweep through your country and you people will be liquidated. You are on the verge of annihilation’.

Mikołajczyk still would not accept the loss of eastern Poland. Churchill told him that ‘we will be sick and tired of you if you go on arguing’. The meeting ended with the Poles withdrawing in
order to consider what they should do. But it was a foregone conclusion what decision they would eventually reach. How could it be otherwise? How could they ‘play ball’ as Churchill wanted? Mikołajczyk was being asked to sign an agreement that gave up eastern Poland to the Soviets at a time when Polish soldiers in the Allied army – many whom came from the very area of Poland that was to be relinquished – were fighting and dying for the Allied cause.

Churchill's outburst is significant partly because of his remark that unless the Poles signed the agreement ‘the Russians will sweep through your country and you people will be liquidated’. This comment sits oddly – to say the least – with his view expressed at Tehran that Stalin should be allowed various territorial gains because the ‘character’ of the Soviet government had ‘changed’.

The Poles returned to the British dacha and gave their verdict at three o'clock in the afternoon. Mikołajczyk, not surprisingly, said that he could not consent to the Curzon Line. Churchill, in an outburst full of invective, accused the Polish government in exile of being composed of ‘callous people who want to wreck Europe’.
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He said that if the Poles ‘want to conquer Russia we shall leave you to do it. I feel as if I were in a lunatic asylum. I don't know whether the British government will continue to recognise you’.

Finally, he ended the meeting with the bitter – and, he must have known, untrue – remark: ‘In this war what is your contribution to the Allied effort? What did you throw into the common pool? You may withdraw your divisions if you like. You are absolutely incapable of facing facts. Never in my life have I seen such people’.

Mikołajczyk was clearly shaken by his visit to Moscow – not just by the vehemence of Churchill's attack, but by the revelation that the Western Allies had agreed the future borders of his country behind his back at Tehran. Mikołajczyk was particularly distressed by the knowledge that Roosevelt had misled him. In June 1944, when he had visited Washington, Mikołajczyk had been told by the Americans that ‘only Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill had agreed to the Curzon Line’. Roosevelt had
been at his most skittish with Mikołajczyk during the meeting. ‘I have studied sixteen maps of Poland this morning’,
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he told him. ‘In only three hundred years, parts of White Russia have been Polish, and parts of Germany and Czechoslovakia…. On the other hand, parts of Poland have at times been annexed to those countries’. As a result, said Roosevelt, ‘it is difficult to untangle the map of Poland’. However, despite these ‘difficulties’, Roosevelt gave no hint that he had reached any kind of agreement about Polish borders – unofficial or official – with Stalin at Tehran.

Now, Mikołajczyk said in a letter delivered to the American ambassador in London, ‘I learned with shocked surprise from Mr Molotov's statement at the meeting on October 13 that at the Tehran conference the representatives of all the three Great Powers had definitely agreed that the so-called Curzon Line should be the frontier between Poland and the Soviet Union’.
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Once again, Roosevelt had been caught out. And his motive for concealing the truth from Mikołajczyk in June is obvious. The American President had expressed concern at Tehran that the several million American voters of Polish descent would be upset if the Soviets gained eastern Poland – and they could express their displeasure directly at the polls in the Presidential election in November 1944. But once Roosevelt was comfortably re-elected on 7 November, Mikołajczyk could no longer damage him. On the 22nd, Roosevelt replied blandly to Mikołajczyk's implied accusation of bad faith and said that ‘if mutual agreement’ was reached on the borders of Poland, then ‘this Government would offer no objection’. (In private, that same month, Roosevelt expressed his views more frankly on the question of future European borders to Averell Harriman: ‘…he [Roosevelt] considered the European questions were so impossible that he wanted to stay out of them as far as practicable, except for the problems involving Germany’.)
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As far as Mikołajczyk was concerned, he had heard and seen enough. He resigned on 24 November.

But despite his inability to force through an agreement on Poland, Churchill still ended his visit to Moscow in an optimistic mood. At a final dinner in the Kremlin, on 18 October, Churchill
and Stalin chatted almost as old friends. But revealingly, when the conversation turned to the subject of Rudolf Hess, the Nazi who had flown to Britain just before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin demonstrated that his innate suspicion of the British remained. He congratulated the ‘British Intelligence Service’ for managing to convince Hess to make the journey to Britain. Churchill, who had just remarked that Hess was insane, denied British involvement in the affair. But Stalin added that members of the Soviet intelligence service also often did not reveal what they had been up to until after the event.
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Despite, by Churchill's own admission, Stalin leading a country that was capable in the immediate future of ‘liquidating’ Poland, the British Prime Minister remained convinced that the Soviet leader was someone whom he could – to use a more recent expression – ‘do business with’. In November, just days after Mikołajczyk had resigned, Churchill told the Cabinet that: ‘No immediate threat of war lay ahead of us once the present war was over and we should be careful of assuming commitments consequent on the formation of a Western bloc that might impose a very heavy military burden upon us’.
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Although his views about the stability of the post-war world were still capable of changing, it seemed to Churchill – on balance – that the Soviet Union would prove to be a genuinely cooperative member of the international community and he returned from Moscow in an upbeat mood. ‘I have had very nice talks with the old Bear [Stalin]’, he wrote to his wife Clementine. ‘I like him the more I see him. Now they respect us and I am sure they wish to work with us’.
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Over the next few months, that hope would be shattered.

THE BATTLE FOR BUDAPEST

As the Big Three now prepared for what would become the most famous conference of the war, at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945, one of the most momentous of all the battles of the Second
World War began in Hungary. The battle for Budapest is much less well known in popular history than other iconic events of the war like Stalingrad or the battle for Berlin; yet it was of real significance in terms of both scale and timing, since it illustrated how Soviet forces were capable of behaving as they advanced into central Europe.