Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945–1955
Barbara Leaming
Winston Churchill rages against time and his own mortality, in conflict with friend and foe alike, in this tumultuous political drama of his last ten years of public life. Here is Churchill at his most outrageous, maddening and devious – but also at his most human, courageous, and defiant.At the end of July 1945, Churchill was a defeated man - hurled from power by the British people after a war in which he had saved his country.‘Churchill Defiant’ is the story of how, when it seemed impossible, Churchill fought his way back over the next six years to the centre of great events. In 1951, at last Prime Minister once more, he was ready to begin his dash to win 'the last prize I seek': the lasting peace that had eluded the world after Hitler's defeat.But Churchill's battles were just beginning. He would have to wage war with both his closest colleagues and his most indispensable allies, the Americans, to get to where none of them wanted him to go: the negotiating table with the Soviets.Barbara Leaming has written a gripping, fast-paced narrative of bare knuckle politics, of life and death decisions, of old grudges, and fresh blame. It is a compelling, vivid, and often deeply poignant portrait of the great man at a time when almost no one wanted him to remain on the public stage and when he was willing to do absolutely anything to stay there.
BARBARA LEAMING
Churchill Defiant
Fighting On
1941–1955
I You Will, but I Shall Not Berlin, July 1945 (#ulink_7742bb06-0be6-50e8-8371-1ad078896974)
A flashlight revealed the stairs to the concrete underground air-raid shelter. Pools of stagnant water made the steps slippery. For an old man, uneasy on his feet, the descent was treacherous. Late in the afternoon on 16 July 1945, Britain’s seventy-year-old wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, picked his way with a gold-headed walking stick to the dark, dank bunker where Adolf Hitler had put a bullet into his right temple two and a half months before.
Word had spread quickly that Churchill was in Berlin. By the time his convoy reached the Reich Chancellery, the small British party had swelled to a jostling mob as war correspondents and numerous Russian officers and officials pressed forward to join Churchill’s entourage. Anxious to witness the final scene of one of history’s greatest dramas, they followed the Prime Minister, who wore a lightweight military uniform and visored cap, into the sacked remains of the Chancellery and, later, out to the garden where the entrance to the bunker was located.
In one of his most famous wartime broadcasts, Churchill had said, ‘We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us. Nothing.’ Now, the reporters hoped for a curtain speech from this master of the spoken word as he inspected the tangible evidence of his triumph. He had been fighting his way here in one way or another for more than a decade, and a statement from him would provide a thrilling end to the story.
Churchill had been a lonely voice in the wilderness during most of the 1930s, when his warnings about Hitler had gone unheeded. In 1940, Britain was already at war when he was called to serve as Prime Minister. Against seemingly impossible odds, at a time when France had fallen and Hitler’s armies had overrun the Continent, Churchill led Britain as it fought alone. While Nazi bombs rained on London and Hitler boasted that he had crushed the panic-stricken British in their holes, Churchill’s flights of oratory rallied his countrymen and offered hope that their plight might yet be reversed. After the Russians and then the Americans joined the fight on Britain’s side, Churchill battled the ‘bloodthirsty guttersnipe’ – as he referred to Hitler – for an additional four years.
By the end of the war in Europe, Churchill had accomplished what many people had once believed he could never do. At home in Britain, even long-time detractors agreed that he had saved the country. His personal story was all the more remarkable because he had spent so much of his adult life in political disrepute. The road to the premiership had been long, ‘and every foot of it contested’. Frustration, exclusion, and isolation had often been his lot before he became Prime Minister when he was sixty-five, an age that qualified him to draw an old-age pension.
The man who visited Hitler’s bunker had recast himself in just five years as one of history’s titans. Had Churchill died before 1940, he might have been remembered as a prodigiously gifted failure. On this day, he was at the apex of his glory. Yet thus far, he had appeared oddly detached and distracted. His bulbous, bloodshot, light blue eyes surveyed the devastation at the Chancellery, and he quietly asked a few questions of the Russian soldier who served as his guide, but he made no public comment. Finally, Churchill left reporters outside the bunker entrance as he followed the Russian soldier into the blackness.
He slowly made his way down the first flight of stone steps towards the chamber where Hitler’s body had been discovered, slumped over a sofa beside the lifeless form of his bride, Eva Braun, her lips puckered and blue from poison. Churchill hesitated when the Russian told him that two additional water-soaked flights remained. As if it were no longer worth the effort, he abandoned the tour without having seen for himself the site of his mortal enemy’s suicide. Churchill sent the others in his party, which included his youngest daughter, Mary, to view it without him. Then he turned and slowly began to make his way back up.
He climbed with difficulty. Five years of war had left Churchill in ravaged physical condition. In 1941, he had suffered a heart attack, the first of several episodes of heart trouble. He had repeatedly been stricken with pneumonia; on one occasion, in 1943, he had lain at the brink of death, at General Eisenhower’s headquarters in Carthage. There had been moments during the war when Churchill was so exhausted that he could barely speak, walk, stand, or concentrate. In 1944, Clementine Churchill had told a friend resignedly, ‘I never think of after the war. You see, I think Winston will die when it’s over.’ She knew better than anyone that her husband had put all he had into this war, and she was convinced it would take everything. She had watched as, whatever the state of Churchill’s health, the phones kept ringing and the red boxes laden with official papers were rushed in. When illness sapped his energies and made it difficult to work, he pressed harder. Defying predictions that he would soon have to hand over to a younger, stronger man, he had fought on with the whole strength of his gargantuan will. Lady Violet Bonham Carter, a friend of four decades, feared what the ‘last pull up the hill’ must have cost him. As victory drew near, Churchill was so physically weak that soldiers had to carry him upstairs in a chair after Cabinet meetings.
Churchill emerged from Hitler’s bunker under his own power, but when at last he reached the top of the stairs and passed through the door of a concrete blockhouse into the daylight, his hulking frame appeared so shaky and depleted that a Russian soldier guarding the entrance reached out a hand to steady him. The Chancellery garden was a chaos of shattered glass, pieces of timber, tangled metal, and abandoned fire hoses. Craters from Russian shells pocked the ground. In one of those craters, Hitler and his wife had supposedly been buried after Nazi officers burned their corpses. The rusted cans for the gasoline still lay nearby. Russians pointed out the spot where the bodies had been incinerated. Churchill paused briefly before turning away in disgust.
He moved towards a battered chair that had been propped against a bullet-riddled wall. One of the Red Army men claimed that it had belonged to the Führer. The hinges of its back were broken and the rear legs had buckled. Churchill tested it first with one hand before sitting. Gingerly perched on the front edge of the seat, he mopped his forehead with a handkerchief in the withering heat as he chewed on a cigar. When at length his daughter and the others came out of the bunker, Churchill was visibly eager to leave.
In front of the Chancellery, he was met by a cheering crowd of sightseeing British sailors and Royal Marines. The street was a sea of devastation, every roof bombed out. The glassless windows of gutted buildings stared blindly. Despite the applause that greeted him, Churchill’s mind was in turmoil; his heart ached with anxiety. This uncomfortable, even painful feeling of disconnection from the general rejoicing was not a new experience. For months, he had lived with the thought that in spite of what others might believe, the struggle was far from over. As the war came to an end, he saw that Soviet Russia, still ostensibly Britain’s ally, was fast becoming as dangerous potentially as Hitler’s Germany had been and that a third world war was already in the making. Worse, he knew that the Americans did not understand, indeed did not wish to be told, what was happening. As in a nightmare, the man who had warned in vain of the Nazi threat was again trying desperately to call attention to an emerging enemy.
In no mood to speak of victory, he acknowledged the cheers by mechanically raising his right arm and forming the familiar V-sign. Then he climbed into a waiting car for the return trip to Potsdam, outside Berlin, where he was due to face his Soviet and American counterparts. The talks, for which Churchill had been militating since May, were to have begun that afternoon, but the arrival of the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, had been inexplicably delayed. Potsdam was being billed as a victory conference, but Churchill privately regarded it as a chance to stage a ‘showdown’ with Stalin about Soviet territorial ambitions.
The Big Three – Churchill, Stalin, and President Franklin Roosevelt – had last met at Yalta, in the Crimea, in February. But by the time he had assured the House of Commons that Stalin meant to keep his promise given at Yalta of free elections in the countries the Soviets had liberated from Germany, Churchill had already begun to be troubled by doubts. He worried that by trusting Stalin he might have made the same mistake that his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, had committed with Hitler.
In March, Berlin became the focal point of Churchill’s concerns when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, informed him that rather than try to take the Reich capital with American and British forces, he intended to let the Russians get there first. Churchill moved at once to persuade Eisenhower that he was about to make a calamitous error with far-reaching consequences. In separate messages to Eisenhower and Roosevelt, Churchill argued that, as the Soviet armies were about to enter Vienna and overrun Austria, should they also be permitted to take Berlin it would strengthen their conviction, already alarmingly in evidence, that they were chiefly responsible for Hitler’s defeat and that the spoils were rightly theirs.
Churchill had no doubt that Stalin, whom Eisenhower had also informed of his intentions, well understood the symbolic and political significance of the Reich capital falling into Soviet hands. So when Stalin fulsomely complimented Eisenhower and assured him that the Soviet Union would send only second-rate forces to Berlin – which, he underscored, had ‘lost its former strategic importance’ – Churchill’s worst suspicions were confirmed. Churchill implored Eisenhower to pay particular attention to what was obviously a lie on Stalin’s part. But Eisenhower flatly refused. Eisenhower had Roosevelt’s backing when he declined even to attempt to race the Russians to Berlin. The Americans were not a little annoyed at Churchill’s insinuations about their Soviet ally’s postwar designs. Roosevelt had long insisted that Stalin was a man of good will and good faith who wanted nothing but security for his country, and that if the US gave him whatever he asked for, he could be counted on to work for a world of democracy and peace after the war and to refrain from annexing any territory. Meanwhile, on the very day – 1 April 1945 – that Stalin had written to congratulate Eisenhower on his sound thinking, he ordered two of his top military chiefs to capture Berlin post-haste.
Driving through the ruins of the former Reich capital, Churchill sat in silence. His car passed endless rows of saluting Russian soldiers, directional signs printed in Cyrillic characters, and red-bordered posters bearing the sayings of Stalin translated into German above his signature etched in vivid red. It was as if Stalin had branded Berlin, fashioned it into his personal war trophy. The Russians all seemed ‘high as kites’, convinced, as Churchill had predicted they would be, that they were principally responsible for having won the war. The shattered capital, where street after street had been reduced to rubble and where the stench of putrefying corpses and broken sewer lines fouled the air, was an image of the collapse of the Nazi empire. Churchill grimly perceived something more. To his eye, the ubiquitous, overpowering Red Army presence augured the rise of Soviet power in postwar Europe.
Hardly had Berlin surrendered to the Russians, on 2 May 1945, when Churchill had hatched a plan. Experience had taught him that Stalin was not a man to be swayed by arguments based on abstract principles. ‘Force and facts’ were his only realities. Brutal and unscrupulous, Stalin would do whatever he perceived to be in his own interest. The Americans had penetrated 120 miles deeper into Germany than originally planned. Churchill believed that gave him the leverage he needed to settle things peacefully with Stalin. The trick was to postpone pulling American troops back to the previously agreed-upon lines until Churchill was satisfied about both the temporary character of the Soviet occupation of Germany, and conditions in the countries liberated by the Red Army. Germany as a whole had yet to surrender when Churchill urgently contacted President Harry Truman, who had succeeded to office upon Roosevelt’s death in April. He urged the former vice president that they invite Stalin to a heads of government meeting to take place as soon as possible and that in the interim they maintain their troops in existing positions in order to show the Soviets ‘how much we have to offer or withhold’. From this point, everything depended on Truman. Roosevelt and Eisenhower had failed to listen to Churchill about Berlin. Could he hope for a better response from Truman, whom he had not yet met?
Churchill’s telegram was sent on 6 May. The following day, German generals signed the act of unconditional surrender of all German land, sea, and air forces in Europe. On 8 May, Victory in Europe Day, Churchill announced in a radio broadcast that the German war was at an end; only Japan remained unsubdued. London exploded in a paroxysm of celebration. From first to last, the Prime Minister was at the centre of the festivities. When he cried out to a vast crowd assembled beneath his balcony, ‘This is your victory,’ the people roared back, ‘No, it’s yours!’ A tender man easily moved to tears whether of joy or sorrow, Churchill made no secret of his pleasure in lapping up the affection and admiration, yet he remained oppressed by forebodings as he awaited Truman’s answer. He ended the long, emotionally charged day by sharing his concerns with a friend, the newspaper proprietor Lord Camrose, who had come to dine at 10 Downing Street.
While the noisy celebrations continued in the streets, Churchill spoke sombrely and confidentially of what would happen if Truman turned him down and the troops were withdrawn. Stalin would control seven European capitals in addition to Berlin: Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia, and Vienna. As far as Churchill was concerned, that could not be permitted.
When Truman replied the next day that he preferred to wait for Stalin to propose a meeting, Churchill refused to take no for an answer. He wanted a leaders’ meeting as soon as possible and suggested that he and Truman confer first in London in order to present a united front. The new president, who seemed to have in -herited his predecessor’s unrealistic view of Stalin, demurred on the grounds that he wished to avoid any impression of ‘ganging up’. Churchill warned bluntly that the Soviets had drawn down an ‘iron curtain’ upon their front and that the rest of humanity had no idea of what was going on behind it. He argued that surely it was vital to come to an understanding with the Soviet Union or at least see how things stood before American troops retired to the agreed zones of occupation.
Truman sent an emissary to London to convey what he did not wish to put in writing: Truman wanted to see Stalin first – without Churchill. The British Prime Minister could join them later. When Churchill waxed indignant, the emissary, Joseph Davies, went so far as to blame him for having provoked Stalin with his abiding hostility towards the Soviet Union. Truman’s representative maintained that in fact it was Churchill’s attitude that ‘placed not only the future, but possibly the immediate peace in real danger’.
Furious at being told that he, not Stalin, was threatening the peace, Churchill reminded Truman that a shared love of freedom ought naturally to align their two nations against the Soviet Communists, who followed a different philosophy. With Churchill threatening to break publicly with Washington if Truman dared to see Stalin alone, the President appeared to back down. He agreed to three-power talks, but at the last minute he declined Churchill’s pleas to postpone the retreat of the American army at least until after the conference.
When Churchill returned to his rose-pink, lakeside villa in Potsdam following the visit to Hitler’s bunker, he learned that Stalin had arrived in Germany. The leaders were to meet the following day at 5 p.m. in the former palace of the German crown prince. Due to Truman’s decision to withdraw his troops, however, Churchill was to face Stalin without the bargaining counter he had been hoping for. As he prepared to go into the talks, he was further wrong-footed by the fact that he had no idea of how much time he had to get what he wanted from Stalin. Prior to coming to Potsdam, Churchill – who had promised the British people a general election as soon as Hitler was defeated – had fought the first general election campaign in a decade. Polling day had been 5 July, but three weeks had been allotted to permit the service vote to come in before the total vote was counted. On 25 July, while the Potsdam Conference was still in progress, Churchill was due to fly back to Britain (briefly, he hoped) to learn his political fate.
The rapturous reception he had received in the course of his thousand-mile electoral tour strongly suggested to him that he would still be prime minister when the second round of talks began. Everywhere Churchill had travelled that spring, multitudes had come out to see and thank him for what he had done in the war. Standing nine and ten deep, enthusiasts had waved flags, sung patriotic songs, and cried out, ‘Good old Winnie!’ Repeatedly they had closed in on the hero’s open car and the progress of the motorcade had been slowed to a walking pace. Churchill had commented at the time that no one who had witnessed his reception could have any doubt about the outcome of the poll.
But what if there was an upset? What if poor Conservative showings in recent by-elections foretold a general swing to the left in British politics, as certain commentators were suggesting? Churchill had encountered some heckling, particularly in the last days of the campaign. Had these been isolated incidents, or did they reflect broad sentiment for change as Britons considered what they wanted their lives to be like after the war? Churchill had brought his Labour oppon -ent, Clement Attlee, to Potsdam to make it clear that all of Britain was being represented at the conference table, as well as to ensure that there would be no break in Attlee’s knowledge of affairs. But by his very presence, Attlee was also a reminder that when Churchill went home for the election results, they might prevent him from completing what he had begun with Stalin.
Attlee, who had been deputy prime minister in Churchill’s wartime coalition government, attended a small luncheon at the Prime Minister’s villa on the afternoon of 17 July. Also present was US Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Churchill lingered at the table bantering with his guests until half an hour before he was scheduled to see Stalin and Truman. With Attlee, he joked about the British general election as if there had not been a harsh word between them during the often exceptionally bitter campaign; and with Stimson, he exchanged light-hearted personal reminiscences about their younger days. In the leisurely course of the meal, Stimson gave no sign that he had anything urgent to convey to his host or that he desired to speak to him privately. Only when Churchill was showing Stimson out did the latter inform him that the world’s first atomic bomb had been successfully tested the day before in New Mexico. Though Britain had been a partner in the secret project to develop the new weapon, deadlier than any yet in existence, Churchill had not known in advance the date of the test. If the bomb worked, it promised to end the Pacific war quickly and to spare a great many Allied soldiers’ lives. In his present predicament, Churchill also sensed that it might be capable of something more. Nothing could be certain for there were no details as yet, but here potentially was the card he needed to persuade Stalin to come to terms in Europe.
Until Churchill had additional information, he was intent that this first bit of news from New Mexico be withheld from Stalin. Truman had already thrown away one bargaining counter, and Churchill wanted to be sure that it did not happen again. Stimson’s insistence that the Soviets really ought to be notified of the test left Churchill to go off to his meeting both excited about the new development and worried that the Americans might be about to squander another opportunity. Churchill, who had met with Truman the previous day, knew that the President had been lunching with Stalin that afternoon. Churchill had no idea whether Truman, who had had the information since the previous evening, might already have told Stalin about the bomb or even agreed to share its secrets with his Soviet ally, as Roosevelt had once been inclined to do. The last-minute timing of Stimson’s disclosure made it impossible for Churchill to talk to the President beforehand.
At the first plenary session at the Cecilienhof Palace – in whose courtyard the Russians had planted masses of geraniums in the form of a 24-foot-wide red star – Churchill played for time. For weeks, he had been pressing Truman to agree to the earliest possible meeting; now, he meant to go as slowly as possible. Previously, he had been insistent that the most contentious issues be addressed without delay; now, he told his fellow leaders, ‘We will feel our way up to them.’ Truman was in a difficult, almost impossible position at Potsdam. In the days before the conference, he had been nervous about facing giants like Churchill and Stalin, and with good reason. Though a dying man, Roosevelt had done nothing to prepare his successor for the presidency. Roosevelt never spoke to Truman confidentially of the war, of foreign affairs, or of what he had in mind for the postwar world. When Truman suddenly landed in the Oval Office after only three months as vice president, he had to struggle to catch up. Devoid of foreign policy experience, he pored over memoranda, briefs, and correspondence on international affairs. He conferred with presidential advisers, who, to his perplexity, offered conflicting advice. On the voyage to Europe, he absorbed as much information as he could from various coaches. At his first meeting with Stalin and Churchill together, he read aloud from prepared statements and thereafter was careful to stick to positions that had been well worked out in advance.
Churchill’s newly unhurried pace irked Truman, who protested, ‘I don’t just want to discuss. I want to decide.’
Churchill came back impishly, ‘You want something in the bag each day.’
Looking ahead to subsequent plenary sessions, Truman went on, ‘I should like to meet at four o’clock instead of five.’
‘I will obey your orders,’ Churchill replied.
Clearly amused, Stalin interjected, ‘If you are in such an obedient mood today, Mr Prime Minister, I should like to know whether you will share with us the German fleet.’ When the meeting concluded, Stalin invited the others to the banquet room, the length of which was filled by a table loaded with caviar, cold meat, turkeys, partridges, and salads, as well as vodkas and wines ‘of all hues’. Truman stayed less than ten minutes. Churchill, though he had previously complained of indigestion, happily ate and drank with Stalin. Pointing out that they had much to talk about privately, Stalin asked Churchill to have dinner with him the following evening. It promised to be a late night. In contrast to Truman, who preferred to go to bed early, Churchill and Stalin were both night owls. On the present occasion, Stalin remarked to Churchill that he had grown so accustomed to working late during the war that even though the necessity had passed, he could never get to sleep before 4 a.m.
By the time Churchill dined with Stalin on Wednesday, 18 July, he had had a chance to talk to Truman, who assured him that he had not informed the Soviet leader about the bomb. Churchill had concluded overnight that, once they were certain of the test results, it would actually be a very good idea were Stalin to be made aware that the Western allies had a singular new weapon. What continued to worry him, however, was the possibility that Truman would agree to share technical information with Moscow. Truman said he would not, but Churchill remained uneasy. Western possession of the bomb would be of little use in the negotiations if Stalin could count on being able to build one as well.
When Churchill arrived at half past eight, Stalin’s two-storey stone villa was surrounded by machine-gun-toting thugs. A phalanx of seven NKVD – secret police – regiments and nine hundred bodyguards had accompanied the dictator to Potsdam. Stalin had lived a life of violence, fighting off rivals and would-be usurpers with murder and bloodshed, and he was perpetually fearful of being treated in kind. In the present setting, the savage vengeance the Red Army had wreaked on the Germans provided an additional motive for an assassination attempt. Still, once through the numerous layers of security, Churchill was welcomed with friendly informality. Stalin had no other guests. Only the leaders’ interpreters, Birse and Pavlov, were scheduled to join them at dinner.
Though the surviving members of the original Big Three had become antagonists, they were bonded by a sense of themselves as men apart, the last of a superior breed that had included Roosevelt. As Churchill later said, together they had had the world at their feet and commanded many millions of men on land and sea. Churchill’s personal history with Stalin had begun with their written exchanges in 1941 after Germany’s surprise attack on Russia. When they first met, in Moscow in 1942, Stalin’s insults had nearly caused Churchill to break off their talks and fly home at once. The British Ambassador, Archibald Clark Kerr, had worked hard to assuage Churchill’s fury. Kerr urged him to reflect on the relative unimportance of his own wounded feelings weighed against the many young lives that would be sacrificed if he did not swallow his pride and return to the talks. Churchill resolved that in the interest of advancing their shared objective of defeating Hitler he would do what it took to build a relationship with Stalin, even somehow find a way to ‘like’ him. In subsequent meetings – at Tehran, again in Moscow, and at Yalta – Churchill and Stalin had developed a deep fascination with and respect for each other.
Though Churchill had no idea that Stalin’s late arrival at Potsdam had been due to a minor heart attack, he thought his host tonight looked ill and ‘physically rather oppressed’. Stalin’s once black hair was a grizzled mop, as were his shaggy moustache and eyebrows. His narrow, evasive eyes were yellow, his teeth stained and broken. Short and stocky, he had a withered left arm that he held woodenly in his right hand, palms up. War had aged the sixty-seven-year-old Generalissimo prematurely. He had worked too hard, slept too little, and not had a holiday in years. Despite his physical condition, he had made no more effort to moderate his appetites than Churchill had. In the course of the dinner, which extended to the next morning, there was a prodigious amount of smoking, eating, and drinking by both men.
When Churchill and Stalin last saw Roosevelt, at Yalta, the President had been a cadaverous figure with waxen cheeks and trembling hands. At times he had been lucid, but at other moments he sat with his mouth open, staring ahead, unable to follow the discussion. Roosevelt had clung to office in the belief that he was indispensable. Five months later, the conversation between Stalin and Churchill naturally turned to the death of great men and the problems of succession. A discussion of how Roosevelt’s successor was doing under the circumstances prompted Churchill to ask if Stalin had given any thought to what would happen at the Kremlin after he died.
Churchill had designated his own political heir. In 1942 he had written to King George that in the event of his death he wanted Anthony Eden to carry on as prime minister because he possessed the ‘resolution, experience and capacity’ the times demanded. Tall, slim, graceful, debonair, the forty-eight-year-old Foreign Secretary accompanied Churchill to Potsdam. Eden had a furrowed but handsome face with penetrating pale blue eyes and a carefully trimmed grey moustache, and he spoke in a mellifluous baritone. Stalin too had brought an heir apparent to the Potsdam Conference: Eden’s opposite number, the fifty-five-year-old Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Recently, Stalin had anointed Molotov with the words, ‘Let Vyacheslav go to work now. He is younger.’ Small and chunky, Molotov spoke with a slight stammer and had an impassive, ‘lard-white’ face. When he was upset, though his countenance remained stony, a telltale lump in his forehead swelled and throbbed alarmingly.
Stalin insisted to Churchill that he had arranged everything. He claimed to have groomed good men and thereby to have guaranteed the continuity of Soviet policy for thirty years. He made it all sound so sensible, but then Stalin was adept at portraying himself to foreigners as utterly reasonable and rational. In fact, in the words of the American diplomat George Kennan, he was ‘a man of absolutely diseased suspiciousness’. Stalin had a history of exterminating not only his opponents but also those whose character suggested that they might oppose him later. He sniffed plots and cabals everywhere, and never more so than after the war. In 1945, the leader widely venerated as his nation’s saviour was at the pinnacle of his power. At the same time, his own physical decay left him feeling vulnerable to the machinations of the ambitious younger men who formed his circle. As the fawning Molotov and other contenders for the postwar Soviet leadership well knew, Stalin was capable of ordering their arrest or execution at any time, ‘no questions asked’. (As a precaution, Molotov slept with a loaded revolver under his pillow and never permitted his sheets or blankets to be tucked in lest he have to leap out of bed and defend himself in the middle of the night.) Stalin spoke matter-of-factly of retiring on a pension in two or three years, but he was no more inclined to leave office willingly any time soon than Churchill was.
This evening, when Churchill voiced anxiety about the British election, Stalin expressed confidence that the Conservative leader had nothing to worry about. The concept of free elections meant nothing to Stalin. Churchill was in power; surely he had arranged to stay there. The only real mystery as far as the dictator was concerned was why Churchill would go to the trouble of flying home for the result. Characteristically, Stalin suspected a ploy on Churchill’s part.
Stalin was right to sense that Churchill was up to something, though at this point the latter’s calculations had nothing to do with the British election. Churchill asked whether there would be free elections in the territories under Soviet control, and he raised concerns that the Red Army was preparing to surge westward across Europe. When Stalin sought to reassure him on every count, Churchill took care not to provoke an angry confrontation by too directly challenging anything the Generalissimo said. Churchill was biding his time until he knew what kind of hand he had to play with Stalin.
Exactly a week remained before Churchill was due to fly to London. Every day that passed without news from New Mexico with precise details of the bomb test was an agony to him. There were plenary sessions on Thursday and Friday, but still no additional information came in. At half past four on Saturday, Churchill was about to leave for the Cecilienhof when Stimson arrived with the full report. This was the document the Prime Minister had been waiting for since Tuesday; everything depended on its contents. But no sooner had he begun to read than an aide reminded him that if he did not go now, he would be late for his 5 p.m. meeting. Following the day’s talks, Stalin was due to host a party for all of the conference’s participants, and Churchill naturally was expected to attend.
As the report was of the highest secrecy, Stimson had shown the single copy personally to each individual on his list, beginning with Truman. There was no question of his leaving the document for Churchill to study later, so it was agreed that he would return to the Prime Minister’s villa in the morning. Churchill reluctantly handed the report back to Stimson. Impatient to resume reading, he found the evening that followed interminable.
It was not until 11 a.m. on Sunday that Stimson reappeared and Churchill at last had a chance to study the report in full. The details of the atomic bomb gripped him: the lightning effect equal to that of seven suns at midday; the vast ball of flame which mushroomed to a height of more than ten thousand feet; the cloud which shot upward with immense power, reaching the substratosphere in about five minutes; the complete devastation that had been wrought within a one-mile radius. Immediately, Churchill saw that this was the card he had been hoping for. The bomb completely altered the balance of power with the Soviets. Stalin’s vast armies were negligible compared to it. Truman no longer had to worry about Stalin’s willingness to fight the Japanese, and Churchill hoped that that would translate into real support for some tough bargaining to get a viable settlement in Europe. He rushed over to see Truman, both to discuss a speedy end to the war in the Pacific and to confirm that the Americans were not intending to share the bomb’s secrets.
Churchill spoke excitedly of the bomb to his physician, Lord Moran, the following morning. He swore the doctor to secrecy and assured him that it had come just in time to save the world. Again, at lunch, he laid out the new situation to Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, Eden, and other key members of the British delegation. Referring to the sudden shift in the diplomatic equilibrium, Churchill thrust out his chin and scowled. He spoke of threatening to blot out Russian cities if the Communists refused to behave decently in Europe. But for all his talk of bullying Stalin with the bomb, Churchill’s aim was not to start another war. As he had told Eden early on, he believed that the right bargaining counter might make it possible to secure a ‘peaceful agreement’. He calculated that Stalin did not want war any more than he did, only the fruits of war, which the Soviets felt they had earned by their signal contribution to the defeat of Hitler. If Stalin could not be persuaded to settle, it might be best, as Churchill had previously told Truman, at least to know where they stood with him – and to know it sooner rather than later.
Churchill’s optimism about what he would be able to achieve with both his fellow leaders provoked intensely sceptical reactions from British colleagues. There was sentiment in the British camp that Truman (who controlled the bomb, after all) would never provide the backing Churchill needed, that Stalin would simply shrug off any real or implied threat, and that the details in the report from New Mexico might yet prove to have been exaggerated. Still, Churchill had found reason to hope, and to him that was all that mattered. On Monday night he called Lord Beaverbrook, who had had a hand in shaping the Conservatives’ electoral strategy, for the most up-to-date predictions. Churchill had come to Potsdam empty-handed; now that he had what he believed was the basis of a real negotiation, nothing must be allowed to interfere. Beaverbrook told his friend that the Conservatives were expected to win, though perhaps by a smaller majority than first predicted.
Having proposed at the outset that the leaders take their time moving towards the most difficult questions, Churchill was ready to step up the pace and intensity of the talks. But the moment was still not right for what he saw as the climactic confrontation about Soviet intentions in postwar Europe. That, he believed, must wait until the British election results were known and the people had affirmed their confidence in him. Fresh from having submitted himself to their judgement, he would be in an optimal position to demand free elections in the territories liberated by the Russians.
He managed to put off the sharpest exchanges of the conference until Tuesday, 24 July, the eve of his departure. Speaking of reports from Romania and Bulgaria, he charged that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended in those countries. Until this point in the talks Stalin had been inclined to speak in a low, controlled tone of voice, but Churchill had succeeded in arousing his ire, and he shot back, ‘Fairy tales!’ A fierce dispute about the veracity of Churchill’s claims followed. There was a good deal of pique and perspiration on the Soviet side of the large round table, which was covered with a dark red felt cloth and arrayed with offerings of pungent Russian cigar -ettes. Both Molotov and Eden grew indignant on behalf of their respective masters. Eventually Stalin declared that his and Churchill’s views were so far apart that the discussion ought to be broken off –for now.
After everyone rose, Churchill watched anxiously as Truman walked over to Stalin. Churchill and Truman had previously agreed that at the close of that day’s session the President would tell Stalin about the bomb and the plan to use it on the Japanese. (In fact, Stalin’s spies had already notified him of the successful test blast, but neither Churchill nor Truman knew that.) There was high tension as Churchill looked on from a distance of about five yards. He longed to see Stalin’s reaction, but he was also watching Truman. What would the President do if pressed for technical information? Would he agree to a meeting of American and Soviet experts? Truman had said in advance that he would not, but Churchill was aware that there had been no firm promise and that Truman did not yet perceive the Soviet threat as he did. Both participants in the silent scene were acting: in an effort to seem as casual as possible, Truman had left his own interpreter behind and depended on Stalin’s man to translate his remarks, while Stalin made a point of appearing by turns genial and nonchalant.
Later, as the leaders waited for their cars, Churchill found himself beside Truman. He inquired how the conversation had gone. Truman reported that Stalin had not so much as asked a question. Stalin had said only that he was glad to hear the news and that he hoped they would make good use of the new weapon against Japan.
In any event, the information had been conveyed, and every element was finally in place for the dramatic confrontation Churchill expected would occur after a forty-eight-hour intermission. He was in buoyant spirits when he dined with Lord Mountbatten, the Supreme Commander in South-East Asia. Churchill again had much to say about the bomb and his plans for the future, though Mountbatten wondered whether the Prime Minister might not be assuming too much about the election outcome. That Churchill may have had deep doubts of his own is suggested by a disturbing dream he had that night. Six nights after he and Stalin had talked of death and succession, he dreamed that he too had died. He could see his corpse laid out beneath a sheet in an empty room. The face and body were draped, but the feet that stuck out were recognizably his own. On Wednesday morning, as he prepared to attend a final brief meeting with Stalin and Truman, he feared the dream meant that he was finished.
To all outward appearances his confidence had been restored by the time of the ninth plenary session. At a quarter past twelve, when Truman adjourned the meeting until 5 p.m. on Friday, Churchill added crisply that he hoped to be back. His mood on the flight home with his daughter was one of certainty that he would soon return to complete what he had begun. In London, Churchill went to Buckingham Palace to report to the King on the talks thus far and on the changes in the international situation that the bomb had wrought. Before Churchill retired for the evening at the Annexe facing St James’s Park, he was pleased by the political gossip that even Labour headquarters was predicting a Conservative majority. Fittingly, he intended to monitor the figures from the Map Room, where once he had tracked the unfolding of the Allied victory over Hitler. Family members and close friends had been invited to sit with him as numbers streamed in throughout the day on 26 July.
Churchill went to bed on Wednesday night convinced that those numbers would favour the Conservatives. Sometime before daybreak, he awakened suddenly with a stabbing pain that told him the election was lost and the power to shape the future would be denied him. In anguish, he rolled over and slept until nine. About an hour later, Churchill was in his bath when he learned from an aide that his premonition of disaster was being amply confirmed by the early poll figures.
After he had dressed in a blue one-piece zip-up siren suit, he went to his Map Room. Over the next few hours, Churchill, surrounded by charts of constituencies and of the most recent state of the election, reacted to the news of each Labour gain by silently, stoically nodding his head. He complained only of the heat and the want of air. The Conservatives were out. Churchill had been returned in his constituency, Woodford. But overall there had been a Labour landslide, and Britain was to have a new prime minister.
Mrs Churchill, tall, silvery-haired, with proud posture and a profile said to resemble a ship’s prow, suggested to her husband that the outcome of the election might prove to be ‘a blessing in disguise’.
He replied, ‘At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.’ It was inconceivable that he had been cut off altogether from Potsdam. Initially, he insisted he would wait to take his dismissal from the House of Commons, as he was entitled to do. Then in his pride he declared that nothing would induce him to go back to Potsdam, though he was not yet ready to resign immediately either.
He spoke vaguely of stepping aside on Monday, though that would mean asking Stalin and Truman to wait in Germany until he made up his mind. Finally, Churchill accepted that under the circumstances he really had no choice but to resign at once – and let the talks go on without him. All of his great plans, everything he had so carefully set up, must remain unrealized.
Some twenty-four hours after he had raced to Buckingham Palace to speak to the King of his hopes, Churchill returned to tender his resignation. The King offered him the Order of the Garter but Churchill declined the high honour in the belief it would be wrong to accept it after what he saw as a public rebuff of his leadership. He drafted a statement to be read aloud to the nation on the BBC at 9 p.m. He stated that as a consequence of ‘the decision of the British people’, he had laid down the charge which had been placed upon him in darker times.
Thursday was devoted to immediate concerns. The next morning, he awakened to the realization of what the people’s decision meant for him personally. In years past, Churchill had been known to declare that in war one can only be killed once, but in politics many times. Politicians, he once wrote, expect to fall and hope to rise again. In the face of staggering rejection, numerous setbacks and many apparent dead ends, obstinacy had kept Churchill pounding on when fainter spirits might have given up. ‘No’ was an answer he had repeatedly refused to accept. ‘Unsquashable resilience’ had long been among his defining characteristics. He had justly been said to have more lives than a cat and to have survived as many arrows as legend planted in the flesh of Saint Sebastian.
This time, everything seemed different to him, and it was his age that made it so. By most estimates the magnitude of the Labour victory, a majority of 146 seats in the House of Commons, suggested that the Conservatives could not hope to return to power for at least a decade. Some people went so far as to say that Labour was in for a generation. For Churchill, as for his party, there was no avoiding the likelihood that by the time he had another chance at the premiership – if he ever did – he would be at least eighty.
Throughout the day, as he said goodbye to some of the people who had worked most closely with him during the war, he seemed absorbed by the idea that a comeback was impossible. The previous night he had briefly thought the new Labour Government might be turned out soon enough, but the final numbers left no such hope. After a farewell meeting with his Cabinet, he lingered privately to talk to Eden. Churchill expressed confidence that the Conservative heir apparent would surely sit in the Cabinet Room again.
‘You will,’ Churchill said with more than a dash of bitterness, ‘but I shall not.’
Churchill once observed that a man’s only real necessities in life are food and a philosophic temperament. All day Saturday at Chequers, which he had yet to vacate, he appeared remarkably cheerful and controlled, but after dinner and a film screening, his mood darkened noticeably. Attlee had returned to Potsdam a day later than scheduled and the talks resumed that very night at ten. The new Big Three worked at the conference table in the Cecilienhof until after midnight.
Cut off from all that forever, it seemed, Churchill sat into the night listening to Gilbert and Sullivan and other recordings on his gramophone.
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