World War II Behind Closed Doors (56 page)

Roosevelt clearly thought Churchill was over-reacting. And it is not hard to see why. As the President subsequently pointed out, the agreement at Yalta could be read in such a way that Stalin could deflect many of the complaints. So why was Churchill so upset? He would claim it was because Stalin had broken his Yalta pledges. But it is likely there was more to it than that. Churchill knew he had an election coming up, and the British electorate would not take kindly to accusations that Poland, the country over which Britain had gone to war, had been betrayed. More over, Churchill's expansive rhetoric about Poland and Stalin (not least the comment that would come back to haunt him, about Chamberlain ‘being wrong’ to trust Hitler whilst he was sure he was ‘right’ to trust Stalin) meant that this was not an ordinary issue of foreign policy, but a principle that had come for him almost to define the latter part of his wartime premiership. Roosevelt, only just starting his new term in office and not burdened by these emotions, had no such worries.

But even at this most decisive time, Churchill's rhetoric was not all that it seemed to be. Although in public he could talk about the moral imperative behind the war, in private he revealed that he was a good deal less pure in his motives. On 13 February, on the way back from Yalta, he had argued with Field Marshal Alexander, who was ‘pleading’ with Churchill that the British should give more help with post-war reconstruction in Italy. Alexander said that this ‘was more or less what we were fighting this war for – to secure liberty and a decent existence for the peoples of Europe’.

‘Not a bit of it’, Churchill replied, ‘we are fighting to secure the proper respect for the British people!’
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On 15 March Roosevelt sent a cold reply to Churchill's communication of the 13th: ‘I cannot but be concerned at the views you expressed…we have been merely discussing the most effective tactics and I cannot agree that we are confronted with a breakdown of the Yalta agreement until we have made the effort to overcome the obstacles incurred in the negotiations at Moscow’.
²¹

Churchill realized he had gone too far. And, as he usually did in moments of stress in the relationship with Roosevelt, he tried to charm his way out of the situation: ‘I hope that the rather numerous telegrams’, he said on 17 March, ‘I have to send you on so many of our difficult and intertwined affairs are not becoming a bore to you. Our friendship is the rock on which I build for the future of the world so long as I am one of the builders’.
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Roosevelt did not reply, leading to the plaintive question from Churchill on 30 March: ‘By the way, did you ever receive a telegram from me of a purely private character… ?
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Roosevelt then merely acknowledged that he had received this ‘very pleasing’
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message.

But although during this period Roosevelt was less emotionally involved than Churchill over the question of Poland, he did get angry when Stalin accused the Americans of deception by holding a meeting with German officers in Berne in Switzerland about a possible surrender in Italy. Stalin saw this encounter as a reason for both the strengthening of German resistance against the Red Army in the East and the swift progress of the Western Allies through Germany. Roosevelt was furious that Stalin had effectively accused him of lying, writing on 4 April that ‘I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations…’.
²⁵

In his reply, Stalin immediately moderated his attack. But even though he was prepared to back down on this issue, what he would not do was move an inch on his position on Poland. On 7 April he wrote to Roosevelt, who had finally sent a telegram of protest to the Soviet leader on 31 March, agreeing with the American President that: ‘Matters on the Polish question have
really reached a dead end’.
²⁶
But Stalin was clear that the reason for this was that the Western Allies had ‘departed from the principles of the Crimea Conference’.

The consequences of the ambiguous language, not just of the Polish agreement made at Yalta but of the whole debate about Poland between the Western Allies and Stalin for the last three years and more, were now plain for all to see. Stalin stated not just that the Lublin Poles should still make up the bulk of the new government (since the agreement at Yalta had called only for the existing provisional government to be broadened) but also that any other Poles who were invited to take part should be ‘really striving to establish friendly relations between Poland and the Soviet Union’. The Soviets were, of course, the ones who would decide just who was ‘really striving’ to be their friend. It was the kind of indefinable test favoured by Stalin's regime – a positive version of the negative charge, which was virtually impossible to refute, that one was ‘an enemy of the people’.

‘The Soviet Government insists on this’, wrote Stalin, ‘because of the blood of the Soviet troops abundantly shed for the liberation of Poland and the fact that in the course of the last 30 years the territory of Poland has been used by the enemy twice for attack upon Russia – all this obliges the Soviet Government to strive that the relations between the Soviet Union and Poland be friendly’.

Roosevelt, more than Churchill, recognized that, given the loose language of the Yalta agreement, there was little the Western Allies could do apart from protest – and there were limits even to that, given that Soviet cooperation was needed in other areas. One of the last telegrams Roosevelt sent to Churchill before his death read: ‘I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible because these problems in one form or another seem to arrive every day and most of them straighten out…’.
²⁷

Roosevelt left the White House on 30 March 1945 to go on what would prove to be his final journey, to the health resort of Warm Springs in Georgia. Here his office was filled with documents about the forthcoming conference in San Francisco that would initiate the United Nations. Right to the end of his life,
Roosevelt never lost his focus on his vision of the UN. Alongside this grand ideal, the detailed question of Soviet infractions in Poland must have seemed to him relatively unimportant.

Perhaps appropriately, for a man who self-confessedly never ‘let his right hand know what his left was doing’, there was an element of deception around his death that April. Not just in the obvious sense – that he had deliberately concealed the extent of first his disability and then, more recently, his illness from the American people – but also in the demonstration of his most intimate feelings. Many years before, shortly after marrying his wife Eleanor, he had fallen in love with Lucy Mercer, then his wife's personal secretary. He had wanted to leave Eleanor for her, but had finally chosen to stay married and so preserve his political career. Now he wanted Lucy by his side. On 9 April he drove out to accompany her, and the painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff who was to paint his portrait, back to Warm Springs. On 12 April he finally fell victim to a cerebral haemorrhage. Unbeknownst to his wife Eleanor, it was Lucy who was with him the day he died.

Churchill, understandably, paid Roosevelt a tribute in the House of Commons, but, curiously, he did not choose to attend the President's funeral – something he later said he regretted. His excuse – pressure of work – was merely a convenient get-out. He was the most compulsive traveller of all the wartime leaders and could have made the journey if he had wished. Perhaps this was a final statement of disappointment – a small and ungenerous payback for the fact that Roosevelt had not supported him in the last weeks over the protests to be made to Stalin.

BATTLE FOR BERLIN

Meantime, the battle for Berlin raged. And both the planning and conduct of this final battle in the war in Europe demonstrate further signs of the disintegrating alliance with Stalin.

The planning for the operation had been conducted at the end of March and the beginning of April against the background of
Stalin's suspicion that the Western Allies were planning some kind of separate peace with Germany via the Berne talks – a suggestion that, as we have just seen, outraged President Roosevelt during his last days.

Stalin met Marshal Zhukov, the most prominent of the Soviet commanders, in the Kremlin late in the evening on 29 March, and handed him an intelligence document which suggested that the Western Allies were in discussion with Nazi agents. The Soviet leader remarked that ‘Roosevelt wouldn't break the Yalta agreement [which placed Berlin well within the agreed Soviet zone of occupation of Germany] but Churchill was capable’.
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Stalin had just received a telegram from General Eisenhower which, much to Churchill's subsequent annoyance, confirmed that the Western Allies were not pushing immediately forward to Berlin. In the double-think world that Stalin now inhabited, this was evidence of Allied deceit: if they had said they were not moving to take Berlin, then of course they were. It was all heavily reminiscent of the near-paranoid state Stalin had fallen into back in the spring of 1941 before the Nazi invasion. And so, in this spirit of saying the opposite of what one really intended, Stalin sent a telegram to Eisenhower on 1 April that stated that he agreed that the capture of Berlin should not be a priority since the city had ‘lost its former strategic importance’.
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Then, in a move calculated both to speed the advance and deny Zhukov the glory of overall command, Stalin announced to his generals that he was splitting the task of capturing Berlin between two Soviet armies. It was a race between Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front and Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front to see who could take the capital. ‘Stalin encouraged an intrigue – scheming’, says Makmud Gareev,
³⁰
then a major in the headquarters of Soviet 45th Infantry Corps and subsequently deputy chief of all Soviet forces. ‘When they were drawing the demarcation line between the two fronts in Berlin, Stalin crossed this demarcation line out and said: “Whoever comes to Berlin first, well, let him take Berlin”. This created friction…. You can only guess Stalin was doing it so that no one gets stuck up and thinks he was the particular general who took
Berlin…. At the same time he had already begun to think what would happen after the war if Zhukov's authority grew too big’.

On 16 April Zhukov's troops launched a massive attack on the Seelow Heights outside Berlin, and within four days had broken through this last major defensive position in front of the capital. By Hitler's birthday, the 20th, the Red Army was shelling the German leader's subterranean refuge – the Führerbunker.

For Vladen Anchishkin,
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a captain in a mortar unit in Zhukov's Belorussian Front, this was the culmination of years of fighting: At last it was the end of the war, it was a triumph, and it was like a race, like a long-distance race, the end of the race. I felt really extreme – well, these words did not exist then – but I felt under psychological and emotional pressure. Naturally I didn't want to get killed. This is natural. I didn't want to be wounded. I wanted to live to the victory, but it was somewhere in the background, and in the foreground were the things I had to do, and this state of stress that was in me'.

And he was certain that the years of brutal warfare had changed him and his comrades: ‘In the end, in the war itself, people go mad. They become like beasts. You shouldn't consider a soldier an intellectual. Even when an intellectual becomes a soldier, and he sees the blood and the intestines and the brains, then the instinct of self-preservation begins to work…. And he loses all the humanitarian features inside himself. A soldier turns into a beast’.

The battle for Berlin was one of the bloodiest and most desperate of the war. Although criticized since for his desire to leave the fight to the Soviets, Eisenhower was correct in the assumption that there would be heavy losses in the struggle. Around 80,000 Soviet soldiers died in the operation, 25,000 within the capital itself.

‘So many of our people died – a great many, a mass’, says Vladen Anchishkin. ‘It was a real non-stop assault, day and night. The Germans also decided to hold out to the end. The houses were high and with very thick foundations and basements and very well fortified…. And our regiment found itself in terrible confusion and chaos, and in such a chaos it's very easy to touch
somebody else with your bayonet. Ground turns upside-down, shells and bombs explode’.

Within the chaos of the battle, the rivalry between Zhukov and Konev was intense. Anatoly Mereshko,
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an officer with Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front, was ordered to find out just which Soviet forces had captured a particular suburb of Berlin first: ‘I got into my car with machine gunners. Rode up there and talked to the people in the tanks. One said: “I am from the Belorussian Front,” another: “I am from the Ukrainian Front”. “Who came here first?” I asked. “I don't know,” they replied. I asked civilians: “Whose tanks got here first?” They just said: “Russian tanks”. It was difficult enough for a military man to tell the difference between the tanks. So when I came back I reported that Zhukov's tanks got their first and Konev's tanks came later. So the celebration fireworks in Moscow were in his name’.

In the heat of the battle it was also clear that the race between Zhukov and Konev had not helped the soldiers to know just which forces were friendly and which were not: ‘They [Zhukov and Konev] were rivals’, says Vladen Anchishkin. ‘There was rivalry between two fronts. There was nothing criminal about it…. But this rivalry in Berlin did not always have a positive effect because sometimes soldiers didn't know who was where…. This was on the borders between the fronts, and a lot of people died only because of the rivalry between two fronts’.