World War II Behind Closed Doors (32 page)

The Red Army lost nearly three hundred thousand dead at Kursk, the Wehrmacht about one hundred thousand. It was an immense encounter that left both sides momentarily stunned. But the Red Army could claim victory. They had, for the first time, held the German summer advance, a fact that led Alfred Rubbel to this conclusion: ‘It wasn't until then that we truly understood how strong the Russians were…. One didn't want to believe it before [but] now the pessimistic view was that the war was lost. It was over’.

Mikhail Borisov was decorated as a Hero of the Soviet Union for his exploits during the battle of Kursk. He claims that it was simply ‘love for the Motherland’ that motivated him to ‘fight to the last breath – that is how we were brought up. And this feeling remained with us for the rest of our lives. I keep saying to myself: “If Russia finds itself in hard times again, even now I can do something to defend it”…. I come from a Cossack family and my ancestors were all Cossacks. And love for the Motherland and love for weapons came with a mother's milk’.

Now, as the Germans began a slow fighting retreat that would last almost two years, until the Red Army reached the gates of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, the Allied leaders had to discuss not just the strategy for the remainder of the war, but also the shape of the post-war world and the new boundaries of Europe. So as one war entered its last phase, a new one began – this time a fractious and divisive political struggle. What had united the three Allied leaders was the desire to defeat Hitler. But what would hold them together once the threat from Hitler started to disappear?

4
THE CHANGING WIND

FIRST MOMENTS AT TEHRAN

It is the Yalta Conference in January 1945 that has come to symbolize the controversial division of Europe at the end of the war. ‘The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’, said President George W. Bush, speaking in Latvia in May 2005 on the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war in Europe. ‘Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable’.
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Whether President Bush's words represent an accurate judgement on Yalta or not is something that the reader must decide, having read the evidence in Chapter 5. But what is certain is that the focus of the world on Yalta as the moment of key decision-making at the end of the war is mistaken. The first meeting between Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, held in the Iranian capital, Tehran, in November 1943, was of much greater significance. This initial encounter not only established the dynamic of the personal relationships between the so-called ‘Big Three’, but determined the answer to many of the key questions facing the post-war world that would merely be tinkered with or rubber-stamped at Yalta just over a year later.

Roosevelt had wanted a face-to-face meeting with Stalin for years; the Davies visit to Moscow was only the most recent attempt to arrange the encounter. He had suggested several times in 1942 that the two of them should meet, and had even asked Stalin to attend the Casablanca Conference at the start of 1943 – this was the conference at which Roosevelt had first announced that the Allies should only accept ‘unconditional’ surrender from the Germans.

For Stalin, the ability to reject or accept an invitation to a summit with Roosevelt was one of the easiest levers of power he had in the relationship. Stalin was quick to couple the question of whether or not he would agree to meet Roosevelt and Churchill with the perennial issue of the second front. Although in August 1943 Stalin had written to Churchill and Roosevelt agreeing that a meeting of the three of them was ‘desirable at the first opportunity’,
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he made it clear that if the imminent summit was not convened on his terms then he would insist it was postponed until after the long-awaited second front had been launched.

This did not suit Roosevelt at all. He wanted to establish a personal relationship with Stalin, something that could only be achieved if the two of them were in the same room. It was uniquely within this intimate zone that Roosevelt believed he could work his magic of ‘handling’ people. And there were also vital questions of substance that the President wanted to discuss – questions that he felt could best be resolved to his advantage only after his personal chemistry had charmed the Soviet dictator. Two of these issues were, as far as Roosevelt was concerned, more important than all the others. First, he wanted to know whether or not the Soviet Union would commit to breaking its treaty of non-aggression with Japan and come into the war in Asia on the side of the Western Allies, and second, he wanted to judge the extent to which Stalin was prepared to participate in American plans for a post-war world of collaboration and peace (a policy that would eventually result in the formation of the United Nations).

Roosevelt suggested meeting Stalin in Cairo, but this location – along with a string of others that the Americans subsequently put forward, including Beirut and Basra – was rejected by the Soviets. Stalin, not for the first time, used the excuse that he could not stray far from his country while his people were still facing the might of the German army. Eventually Stalin suggested Tehran, but the Americans thought this impractical. While Congress was in session the President was constitutionally obliged to sign or veto legislation within ten days of it being presented to him – something he could not do from the Iranian capital.
Roosevelt therefore wrote to Stalin on 21 October, stating simply: ‘I cannot go to Tehran’.
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Stalin insisted: if the meeting was not held in that city, there would be no meeting at all. The Soviet leader was attracted to Tehran not only because of its proximity to the Soviet Union but also because he felt safe quartered within the guarded compound of the Soviet embassy. On 8 November Roosevelt caved in and agreed to meet Stalin in Tehran later in the month – thus his first concession to the Soviet leader was made even before the meeting began. A contingency plan was developed to enable Roosevelt to deal with his constitutional responsibilities; if he needed to sign any legislation he would leave the conference, fly to Tunis – which was more than two thousand miles west of Tehran – and then return.

This was not, of course, just to be a meeting between Stalin and Roosevelt: Churchill was invited as well. After the debacle of the secret approach to Stalin in May, the Americans knew that the British Prime Minister could not be excluded from this encounter. Roosevelt and Stalin would thus meet for the first time with Churchill present – but with the British Prime Minister as something of a gooseberry. Roosevelt knew that just because Churchill was to be physically present at the meeting, it did not mean that he could not still be marginalized. After all, just six months before, Joseph Davies, acting as Roosevelt's agent, had explicitly told Stalin that after the war ‘Britain will be financially through for a long time’ and that the two most powerful nations in the post-war world would be the Soviet Union and the United States. And these were truths Roosevelt still believed. Subsequently, one wit referred not to the ‘Big Three’ but to the ‘Big Two and a Half’; and it was the ‘Big Two and a Half who met together from the beginning.

Even before the Tehran Conference began, Roosevelt was careful not to create the impression that Britain and America were somehow ganging up on Stalin. When the British and Americans met in Cairo before travelling on to Tehran, Churchill was disappointed by his lack of contact with the President. Instead of holding meetings with the British Prime Minister, Roosevelt preferred
to while away the time talking to the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek about the war in Asia – meetings that Churchill believed were ‘lengthy, complicated and minor’.
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All this was exasperating for Churchill. He had important strategic matters he wanted to discuss with Roosevelt – chiefly the war in Italy, which was not going as well as expected. Although the Italians had surrendered on 3 September 1943, the German commander in the country, Field Marshal Kesselring, had moved swiftly to disarm the Italian army and rush reinforcements to the south. The Germans now held the Allies near Salerno, and were clearly prepared to fight a slow war of retreat. The most effective way to deal with the Germans, given Italy's long seaboard, was by a series of amphibious landings further up the coast in order to bypass their defences. But such an operation needed landing craft, and these were in short supply. The American Admiral King had insisted on large numbers for the war in the Pacific – a war that could only be conducted amphibiously – and the demands of the forthcoming Operation Overlord (as the long-awaited second front was now called) meant that there were precious few landing craft in Europe that were not already committed for D-Day.

At the first Quebec Conference in August 1943 (there was to be a second, held in the autumn of 1944) the Western Allies had agreed to launch Overlord in the spring of 1944. But now, because of the slow progress of the Italian campaign, Churchill wanted to revisit the whole schedule. On 20 October he wrote to Roosevelt, asking for a detailed discussion of the options at their meeting in Cairo. But this was a matter Roosevelt and the American military leadership did not want to open up once again. Churchill, it will be recalled, had on several previous occasions announced that despite agreeing with the second front in principle in practice there was always one more operation that needed to take precedence; and the Americans had at last run out of patience with him.

Churchill had thought that he would have three clear days alone with Roosevelt in Cairo to discuss all of this before the Chinese arrived, but the Americans juggled the schedule at the last minute to eliminate this possibility. Indeed, Roosevelt had been so
anxious to avoid the impression of an Anglo-American cabal forming in Cairo that he had even wanted the Soviets to be represented at the meeting – with their delegation arriving on the same day as the British and Chinese – but Stalin had decided not to allow Molotov to participate. He explained to the Western Allies that it was inappropriate, given the Soviet Non-Aggression Pact with Japan, to have a Soviet voice at a meeting attended by Chiang, whose troops were fighting the Japanese in China.
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At a meeting on 24 November in Cairo, Churchill finally seized the opportunity to plead with Roosevelt and the American military leadership for more resources for the Mediterranean. But – predictably – the Americans would not countenance a delay in Overlord. Towards the end of the meeting Roosevelt reminded Churchill of the relative troop numbers now committed to the overall conflict: very soon more Americans would be involved in the war than troops under British command.

On the 26th, Roosevelt and Churchill left for Tehran. In the plane Churchill gloomily confided to his doctor, Charles Wilson (later Lord Moran), that the campaign in Italy had been put ‘in jeopardy’
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by the American desire to invade France on the schedule drawn up at Quebec. Moran also gives an insight into the American mind-set just before the Tehran Conference by quoting a revealing conversation he had with Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's close adviser: ‘Harry tells me the President is convinced that even if he cannot convert Stalin into a good democrat he will be able to come to a working agreement with him. After all, he had spent his life managing men. And Stalin at bottom could not be so very different from other people. Anyway, he has come to Tehran determined, if I can trust Hopkins, to come to terms with Stalin, and he is not going to allow anything to interfere with that purpose’.
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Roosevelt was immediately presented with an unexpected opportunity to spend more time at the conference with Stalin. On 24 November the Americans had enquired of the Soviets about safety in the city – there was a fear that ‘Axis agents’ might be operating in Iran. And since the American legation was the other side of the city from the Soviet compound, where the meetings
were to be held, the Soviets suggested that Roosevelt should place his safety in their hands and stay in a building within their security zone.

There was some truth in the Soviet claim about the dangers of Tehran. Iran had privately supported Germany earlier in the war, although officially remaining neutral, and the British and Soviets had responded with an invasion, Operation Countenance, in August 1941 in order to protect their own interests in the country. As a result, Iran was now backing the Allies, and the important supply route to the Soviet Union – known as the Persian corridor – had been safeguarded. But the legacy of the early years of the conflict, and the sympathy with Germany, remained in some quarters.

Roosevelt swiftly accepted the suggestion that he stay in the Soviet compound, no doubt also thinking that this would be seen as a physical statement of his desire to build a relationship with Stalin. Churchill, meantime, stayed in the British embassy next door. Roosevelt's decision to reside under Soviet control meant that his premises were bugged – something that Sergio Beria, son of the NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria, later confirmed.