World War II Behind Closed Doors (30 page)

Although this does not suggest that Churchill was implacably opposed to a second front, it does suggest that he saw an Allied invasion of France as something that should be considered only once Germany was considerably weakened – ‘several years’ hence. And although it would be harsh to allege that Churchill deliberately lied to Stalin during his meeting in August 1942, when he led the Soviet leader to believe that there would be a second front in 1943, he certainly – by saying in 1942 that it would happen in 1943 – gave himself room subsequently to conclude ‘reluctantly’ in 1943 that circumstances were not now as propitious as he had hoped. Which is what happened at the Trident Conference. Churchill and Roosevelt now considered a second front impossible during 1943 for several ‘practical’ reasons. The German resistance in North Africa had been stiffer than anticipated, and the Western Allies had failed to take Tunis before the winter storms
had made the roads impassable. More resources than had at first been anticipated had been needed in the Pacific theatre of the war. And, finally, the early months of 1943 had seen terrible losses in the Atlantic: in March alone the Western Allies had lost twenty-seven merchant ships.

A combination of these factors, allied to Churchill's own unbending fear of the consequences of a cross-Channel attack, meant that the Western Allies now had the unenviable task of communicating their decision to Stalin. George Elsey was one of the first to learn of this tricky mission when Churchill, Roosevelt and a ‘whole gaggle’ of other people burst into the map room in the White House early in the morning of 25 May 1943: ‘They'd had a very convivial dinner upstairs – very convivial I might say from their appearance – but they had to settle down and answer this latest demand [from Stalin about the second front]. It wasn't a request from Stalin, it was almost a demand: “What are you going to do next?” And the debate went on… they couldn't answer Stalin. Sir John Dill, who was Chief of the British Mission in Washington, drafted an evasive reply, passed it across the desk. General Marshall and Admiral Leahy did some tinkering with the words and then it was Leahy who handed it to me to type and he read it aloud to the group and they all agreed that this would not satisfy Stalin because it was an evasive answer’.

The cable to Stalin was eventually finalized with the help of General Marshall and was transmitted on 2 June. It was a somewhat pusillanimous document in which the issue of the second front was not addressed with any clarity. Only towards the end of the cable was any reference made to this most vital issue: ‘…the concentration of forces and landing equipment in the British Isles should proceed at a rate to permit a full-scale invasion of the continent to be launched, at the peak of the great air offensive in the spring of 1944’.

Stalin's reply to Roosevelt, on 11 June, was ice-cold. He pointed out that ‘these decisions are in contradiction with those made by you and Mr Churchill’
⁵⁸
and that ‘the opening of the second front in Western Europe, which was postponed already
from 1942 to 1943, is being postponed again, this time until spring 1944’. Stalin further stated that this decision would create ‘exceptional difficulties’ and a ‘painful and negative’ impression on the people of the Soviet Union. He also noted that the decision had been taken without discussion with the Soviet leadership. This news that the second front was to be delayed yet again would lead, not surprisingly, to the dropping of any idea of a meeting between just Stalin and Roosevelt. And it was only now, after Stalin's devastating telegram, that Roosevelt thought Churchill should be told the details of the Davies trip to Moscow.

The smooth and emollient American aristocrat Averell Harriman was chosen by Roosevelt for the delicate task of breaking the news to the British Prime Minister. During a meeting with Churchill in Downing Street in the early hours of 24 June, Harriman emphasized that there was great value in allowing the President and Stalin to establish an ‘intimate understanding’ and that this was ‘impossible’ if the three of them got together. He then gave a straightforwardly political explanation for the meeting – that an encounter between the two of them, excluding Churchill, would play better with the American public, since any meeting on ‘British soil’ involving the three of them would make it appear as if Churchill had been the ‘broker’ and arranged it all. Harriman reported that he believed Churchill, although not agreeing with this course of action, would ‘accept it in good part’.
⁵⁹

Harriman was wrong: Churchill didn't take the news ‘in good part’ at all. The next day he sent a devastating note to Roosevelt. ‘You must excuse me expressing myself with all the frankness that our friendship and the gravity of the issue warrant’, he wrote. ‘I do not underrate the use that enemy propaganda would make of a meeting between the heads of Soviet Russia and the United States at this juncture with the British Commonwealth and Empire excluded. It would be serious and vexatious, and many would be bewildered and alarmed thereby’.
⁶⁰

Roosevelt's reply, on the 28th, was an almost half-hearted attempt to justify the meeting
à deux
, but the momentum behind the idea was clearly dying, not least because of Stalin's
fury at the news that the second front was to be delayed yet again. The reply is nonetheless a remarkable document for its opening sentence, which read: ‘I did not suggest to UJ [Uncle Joe, FDR's pet name for Stalin] that we meet alone but he told Davies that he assumed (a) that we would meet alone and (b) that he agreed that we should not bring staffs to what would be a preliminary meeting’.
⁶¹

It is not often that a man with the illustrious reputation of Franklin D. Roosevelt is caught out in a straightforward, bare-faced lie – but this is one such moment. In fact, that single sentence contained two lies. The suggestion for the meeting excluding Churchill had been Roosevelt's, not Stalin's, and Roosevelt had never told the Soviet leader that the proposed encounter would merely be some kind of ‘preliminary meeting’. Roosevelt then left it to Churchill to defend to Stalin the decision not to mount a second front in 1943. The correspondence grew so fractious that Churchill felt forced into changing his position on any talks, and asked Roosevelt to meet one-to-one with Stalin in order to repair the relationship – a suggestion that came to nothing.

This episode demonstrates in stark terms how Roosevelt worked his politics. By using emissaries, such as Davies, Hopkins and Harriman, he provided a barrier of deniability between himself and any idea he floated. Moreover, these emissaries, as can be seen in the prickly relationship between Ambassador Standley and Davies, often operated outside conventional diplomatic channels, with the salaried diplomats kept in a state of ignorance. Even more noteworthy, of course, is Roosevelt's easy recourse to duplicity over the idea of the Stalin meeting.

The President's behaviour was based partly on his habit of concealment – of never letting his right hand know what his left hand was doing. But there was a second reason why he was prepared to lie to Churchill about his dealings with Stalin: the anxiety, especially during the first six months of 1943, that the Soviets might be considering another deal with the Nazis that would extricate them from the war. At first sight such an idea seems ludicrous – the Red Army had just won the battle of
Stalingrad, an event that, with hindsight, signalled the start of a relentless march to Berlin. But that was not how it seemed to many at the time. Stalin had good reason to suspect that the Western Allies might never mount a second front – had they not already, as he saw it, reneged twice on their promise? And the cost to the Soviet Union of pushing the Germans back would clearly be immense, in both manpower and other resources. Why not see if the Germans would agree to terms in 1943?

Both the British and Americans were clearly aware of this danger. In January 1943, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr believed that ‘Stalin may make a separate peace if we do not help him’.
⁶²
And there is evidence, not just in the memoirs of Peter Kleist, the shady former associate of Ribbentrop, but also in British and American intelligence reports
⁶³
that contact between German and Soviet representatives occurred in neutral Stockholm that year. News of these peace feelers was even reported in the press, with the Swedish paper
Nya Dagligt Allehanda
announcing on 16 June that German and Soviet diplomats had met just outside the capital.

Although both the Germans and the Soviets denied that there had ever been any such negotiations, Molotov admitted to Harriman in November 1943 that the Nazis had tried to make contact but had been rebuffed.
⁶⁴
The evidence about the precise meaning of these alleged contacts in Sweden remains inconclusive – was Stalin really trying to make peace with Hitler, or was it just a provocation? But the significant point in the context of this history is that both the British and American leaders were aware of the potential danger that Stalin might extricate the Soviet Union from the war. The possibility might have been small – how could Stalin ever trust Hitler again, after the destruction of the Non-Aggression Pact? And Hitler always seemed opposed to such a compromise. Nonetheless, for the Western Allies there was a genuine perceived risk, and fear of what Stalin might do was a persistent worry lurking in the minds of Roosevelt and Churchill.

THE REALITY OF SOVIET LIFE

Tensions existed not only at the highest level in the relationship between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union: strain was also apparent much lower down the hierarchy of power. As Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill danced warily around each other during 1943, Hugh Lunghi,
⁶⁵
a twenty-three-year-old British officer, was posted to Moscow as part of the British military mission. Before he arrived he had viewed the Soviet Union through ‘rose-tinted glasses. We had great admiration for what the Red Army had, by then in 1943, achieved’. He was also influenced by ‘the way the media was reporting not only Russian military achievements, but, of course, was writing up the success – as they put it at that time – of this wonderful socialist experiment, the first socialist country in the world. So I thought we would see, when we got there, laughing, happy people’.

It was not surprising that Hugh Lunghi had these preconceived ideas since, especially during the first half of 1943, the Western media was full of praise for Stalin and the Soviet Union. In Britain, Lord Beaverbrook's
Daily Express
in particular was hugely supportive of the Soviet war effort, whilst in the United States the January 1943 edition of
Time
magazine put Stalin on the cover as ‘Man of the Year’ for 1942. ‘The year 1942 was a year of blood and strength’, reported
Time
. ‘The man whose name means steel in Russian, whose few words of English include the American expression “tough guy,” was the man of 1942…. He collectivized the farms and he built Russia into one of the four great industrial powers on earth. How well he succeeded was evident in Russia's world-surprising strength in World War II. Stalin's methods were tough, but they paid off’. And in a still more positive article in
Life
magazine in March, the Soviet Union was painted as a quasi-America, with its citizens portrayed as ‘one hell of a people…[who] to a remarkable degree…look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans’. Beria's NKVD was even described as ‘a national police similar to the FBI’.
⁶⁶

But instead of finding people in Moscow who ‘look like
Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans’, Hugh Lunghi witnessed poverty, hunger and fear amongst the ordinary citizens of this supposed workers' paradise. And as for the ‘official’ relationship with the Soviet authorities, it was, as far as he was concerned, ‘an absolute freeze’. The strictly controlled Soviet media were ‘hostile to us, and certainly played down any achievement that we might have gained on the field of battle with the Germans in the African campaign, or with bombing and so on’.

Throughout the war the British were suspicious that their military mission in Moscow was bugged by the Soviets – so much so that if they had anything of particular importance to discuss they would go into the bathroom and turn on the taps in an attempt to drown out their words. It was a precaution that they later discovered was fully justified, because immediately after the war Lunghi, now promoted to assistant military attaché, discovered surveillance equipment hidden underneath the parquet floor. He subsequently contacted ‘friends’ in the American military mission, who came round with a ‘box of tricks’ in an attempt to debug the whole building. Lunghi was intrigued to discover that they found bugs in all the rooms: ‘Now when I say all of them, every [single] room was bugged, even our cipher room. And it was either bugged under the ventilators or in the skirting boards’. The presence of news papers around the electronic surveillance equipment which dated back to the 1930s confirmed that the Soviets had been listening to the British for years.

The disillusionment that Hugh Lunghi experienced – between the propaganda image of the Soviet Union disseminated in the West and the harsh reality – was something felt by many Allied servicemen. Jim Risk, for example, then an American merchant marine officer in his early twenties, was astonished by life in the port of Molotovsk (now Severodvinsk) east of Murmansk. During his stay in the city he was shocked by evidence of the oppressive nature of the Soviet state. He managed to talk to some of the dock labourers, and discovered that they were political prisoners. ‘We're anti-Stalin’, they told him. ‘And they [the Soviet authorities] are not going to kill us – they're just going to work us to death’.

Every morning a column of several thousand political prisoners would march through the town from the prison camp on the outskirts to the docks, and the Allied sailors would stand and watch. One morning Risk saw a fellow American seaman throw a cigarette butt into the gutter. Suddenly one of the political prisoners broke from the column, and as he reached down to pick up the smouldering butt, he was shot by a guard. ‘And he was left to lie there – that was the thing that got me more than anything else. Dead!’ says Risk. ‘Just lying there on the side of the street!’