World War II Behind Closed Doors (38 page)

After their meeting the British and American military leaders went to report this new date to the President and Prime Minister. Roosevelt made one alteration to their conclusion – a small but significant one. He said that instead of announcing that Overlord would take place on ‘1 June’, they should tell Stalin that it would take place ‘during the month of May’. After all, wasn't 31 May nearly 1 June and yet still in ‘the month of May’? It is a minor moment amidst the epic decisions these statesmen were making at Tehran, but one that nevertheless shows the subtle way in which Roosevelt's mind worked. By coming up with this form of words the President must have felt that he had squared the circle between Stalin wanting Overlord on 1 May and the generals wanting it to be launched at the earliest on 1 June.

Hugh Lunghi, who observed Roosevelt at the conference, thought that he detected signs of the scheming mind behind the bonhomie: ‘He seemed at first to be very sort of hail fellow, well met. He was smiling and cheerful and slapping people on their back – but from a distance, metaphorically – and smiled and nodded to me, but as time went on I got an impression that he was rather cold and insincere. I don't know why – this was the feeling that I got. His laughter and his jokes, such as they were, seemed rather forced – as though he was pushing it’.

The final plenary session of the conference was held that afternoon, and little of substance was added to the decisions that had already been taken. Overlord would take place ‘in the month of
May’ and a commander for the operation would be named within the next few days.

That evening a dinner was held at the British legation to celebrate Churchill's sixty-ninth birthday. There were many courses and a complex layout of cutlery – something that seemed, momentarily, to fox the Soviet leader. ‘All seemed to be going well’, says Lunghi, ‘[when] I saw Churchill's chief interpreter, Arthur Birse, pointing something out to Stalin with the cutlery And I learnt afterwards from Arthur Birse that Stalin had been puzzled to have all this vast amount of cutlery on either side of his plate, and he actually asked Arthur Birse: “What do I do with them?” And Arthur Birse said to him: “Just proceed as you want. It doesn't matter at all which one you pick up – whatever you're comfortable with,” to put him at his ease’.

It was moments like this that made Stalin appear almost a comforting figure to the sophisticated Westerners. He could be admired as the leader of a nation fighting back against the Nazis, but still gently patronized. As one British correspondent put it: Stalin ‘looks like the kindly Italian gardener you have in once a week’.
²⁷
And so his occasional breaches of good taste – like his aggressive taunting of Churchill the previous night – could be put down to bad manners and lack of ‘class’.

The evening proceeded in a relaxed and happy way, marred only by a remark that Stalin made as he proposed a toast to General Sir Alan Brooke. Stalin's suspicions that it was the British who had, as he saw it, consistently been obstructive over the launch of the second front had been confirmed by the way the conference at Tehran had proceeded. So he made a sly dig, remarking that he hoped Brooke would ‘no longer look upon the Russians with such suspicion’
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and adding that if he really got to know them he would find them good people to deal with. Brooke, the most forthright of men, was not about to keep silent in the face of such a comment. He stood up and told Stalin that he had been deceived by appearances. Just as earlier in the day the Soviet leader had talked of the importance of ‘dummy tanks, aircraft and airfields’ in the deception of the Germans, so Stalin had mistaken
Brooke's genuine desire for a closer working relationship with the Soviets with the belief that he viewed them with ‘suspicion’. The speech seemed to mollify Stalin. But it did nothing to alter the substantive criticism, because Stalin was right. It had been the British – and in particular Churchill – who were least enthusiastic about the second front.

A small moment of comedy was provided towards the end of the evening when the dessert was brought in by a Iranian waiter, dressed in formal uniform with white gloves. According to Hugh Lunghi, the waiter ‘looked rather nervous’ and ‘was holding aloft a creation which I eventually realized was ice-cream – which I could hardly believe because it had some night lights burning under it. He moved towards Stalin, wanting to serve Stalin first’. But since the Soviet leader was speaking the waiter paused behind him with the salver on his right shoulder. Gradually it started tipping as the ice-cream began to melt. ‘I saw this wonderful creation slipping off the salver’, says Lunghi, ‘and about to descend on Stalin, but in fact the waiter moved suddenly to the side where Pavlov, Stalin's interpreter, was sitting, and this ice-cream fell all down the shoulder of Pavlov's new uniform – which was the new Soviet diplomatic uniform – so it ruined that. But Pavlov went on interpreting quite happily. And I heard Sir Charles Portal [the head of the RAF] whisper in a loud whisper: “Missed the target,” but it was a wonderful occasion. The party broke up quite happily after that’.

The following day, 1 December, the American and British military delegations left, leaving the politicians to discuss further – amongst other things – the potentially contentious issue of the boundaries of Germany and Poland. Originally these discussions had been scheduled to last several days, but the prospect of bad weather that might affect their flight plans made the leaders decide that they would attempt to resolve any difficulties during this one day and leave the next.

Roosevelt later revealed that by this fourth day of the conference he was ‘pretty discouraged’. He felt he had still not made the ‘personal connection with Stalin’ that he craved. Stalin, he felt, was ‘correct, stiff, solemn, not smiling, nothing human to get hold of’.
So on the morning of 1 December, the American President hit on a new tactic: he would ingratiate himself with Stalin by insulting Churchill. ‘On my way to the conference room that morning I caught up with Winston and I had just a moment to say to him: “Winston, I hope you won't be sore at me for what I am going to do”. Winston just shifted his cigar and grunted. I must say he behaved very decently afterwards. I began almost as soon as we got into the conference room. I talked privately with Stalin. I didn't say anything that I hadn't said before, but it appeared quite chummy and confidential, enough so that the other Russians joined us to listen. Still no smile. Then I said, lifting my hand up to cover a whisper (which of course had to be interpreted): “Winston is cranky this morning, he got up on the wrong side of bed”. A vague smile passed over Stalin's eyes, and I decided I was on the right track’.
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Roosevelt carried on teasing Churchill – ‘about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars, about his habits’ – and the Prime Minister was visibly discomfited. Eventually Stalin started laughing. This, Roosevelt believed, meant that he and the Soviet leader could talk for the first time ‘like men and brothers’. So much so that he subsequently told his son, Elliott Roosevelt, that he both liked Stalin and found him ‘altogether quite impressive’.
³⁰

Now that Roosevelt felt he had established the all-important personal connection with Stalin, he was not anxious to prolong the official talks. Stalin had already agreed to enter the war against Japan once Germany was defeated, and also to cooperate – albeit so far only in general terms – with Roosevelt's vision for the United Nations. Alongside these massive gains for the American President, the prospect of poring over maps and discussing exact boundaries seemed not only laborious but potentially divisive.

The first official meeting on 1 December discussed – somewhat inconclusively – the question of how to try to force Turkey into the war, and then the extent of reparations to be demanded from Finland once the war was over. Stalin, true to form, said that as regards the Finns he would be satisfied with the ‘1940 border’ – that is to say, the agreement the Soviets forced on the Finns after the Winter War – with perhaps some minor adjustments.

There was then a brief break in the talks, during which Roosevelt had a private conversation with Stalin and Molotov
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Aware that the contentious issue of Poland was about to be raised, the American President confided to Stalin that since he ‘might’ stand for re-election the following year, he had a problem – the several million Americans of Polish ancestry. As ‘a practical man’, he had to be conscious of their feelings – they could decide to vote against him if they disliked any deal he did over the future of their land of origin. But Roosevelt said he could tell Stalin secretly now that he agreed with moving the whole of Poland west and allowing the Soviets to keep the territory gained as a result of their invasion in September 1939. It was a significant exchange. Stalin now knew he had, at last, gained the land he had been demanding from the first moment of the forced alliance with the West. In 1942 the Americans had reacted with outrage at any suggestion that the Soviets could retain this territory; but now here was Roosevelt giving it away without a murmur. The President must have felt he had to balance the question of the future boundaries of Poland against the other key issues over which he had already reached agreement with Stalin. In addition, as Churchill had admitted, what could the Western Allies do in practice to get this territory back for the Poles?

This secret conversation with Stalin was yet another example of Roosevelt's hard-headedness. It was Stalin who had taken the
nom de guerre
‘Steel’, but it was also an epithet that could on occasion apply to Roosevelt – at his core, and despite the patina of jokes and charm, he had an ice-cold, almost ruthless sense of political realities.

Two of Roosevelt's most important colleagues – Averell Harriman and Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen – heard him give Stalin this secret assurance over Poland. Both recorded afterwards that they believed he had made a mistake. Harriman felt that Roosevelt had at this moment just given the Soviets the right to impose whatever system they wished on Poland, and Bohlen confessed he was ‘dismayed’ for much the same reason.

Harriman was subsequently called to task for the American decision to let Stalin keep eastern Poland when he appeared before
the US Congress committee on the Katyn forest massacre just a few years after the war. When asked how it was possible to reconcile the decision to let Stalin have this territory with the principles of the Atlantic Charter, he replied: ‘The Russians had contended – and I am not justifying the contention, but I am merely stating the fact – they had contended for a considerable period of time that the eastern borders of Poland had been unfairly made and that ethnologically there was a larger percentage of white Russians and Ukrainians in that area and that the agreement at the end of World War I was unfair to the Soviet interests. I assume that was the reason why this discussion took place and was not to be considered to be perhaps a violation of the Atlantic Charter’.
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Given that the position of the American administration in 1942 had been that the Soviet claim on eastern Poland was in clear breach of the Atlantic Charter, Harriman's argument was specious. (As Churchill wrote to Eden in January 1942: ‘We have never recognized the 1941 frontiers of Russia, except
de facto’.)

Sumner Welles, who had served as American Under-Secretary of State until just before the conference, was someone else who thought the President had made a mistake about Poland at Tehran. When giving evidence at the Katyn massacre hearings he was asked: ‘Don't you think that if we had adopted a more firm policy toward Soviet Russia and particularly toward its demands with regard to Poland and other similar situations that we could have avoided much of the trouble of the world today?’ Welles replied unequivocally: ‘As it has turned out, the answer to your question, I think, is clearly “Yes”’.
³³

But just what would this ‘more firm policy’ towards the Soviet Union have consisted of in practical terms in 1943? An outright confrontation with Stalin over the issue of the borders of eastern Poland might well have been immensely damaging to the war effort. By now it was unlikely in the extreme that Stalin could possibly make a separate peace with Hitler, but the potential of the Soviet Union to cause problems over a range of issues – not least refusing to come into the war against Japan once Germany was defeated – was huge. But there was, perhaps, a middle way on
offer that Roosevelt spurned. He could have refused to make any commitments on borders until the end of the war, when a peace conference could be convened with the participation of all the parties involved, crucially the Poles themselves. This had been the position of both the Americans and British earlier in the war, but they altered their policy, as they saw it, because circumstances had changed. At such a post-war conference the Poles might well still have objected to the border changes, but at least the matter would have been dealt with honestly and in the open.

What would Stalin have done if the Western Allies had kept to their original line and postponed any commitment on borders until the war was over? There were other things that Stalin wanted from the United States and Britain at this stage in the war apart from firm agreement on borders – most particularly, of course, the second front. Would he have thrown away all cooperation with Churchill and Roosevelt merely because they would not – without the consent of the Poles – agree to move the borders of the whole country? That is surely unlikely.

But, it might be argued, what would have been the point in causing this angst when Stalin would shortly have possession of all this territory and could do what he liked anyway? There was never any serious chance of the West fighting the Red Army to get this land back.

However, there is a clear difference between recognizing that one country has occupied another country by
force majeure
, and legitimizing that occupation. Maybe it is naive to expect politicians to stick to the principles they have freely signed up to – like those enshrined in the Atlantic Charter – but the corrosive cynicism that results when they don't is often worse.