Dinner With Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table (16 page)

As the presidential staffs prepared to wrap up the meeting on 11 February, the President and his party were given boxed presents by the Soviets. The boxes contained “vodka,
several
kinds of wine, champagne, caviar, butter, oranges and tangerines”.
52

But gifts can present problems. After the meeting in Moscow between Churchill and Stalin in 1944, the Soviets also gave the British large boxes of food and champagne which the latter assumed were gifts for them. On returning to London, the Soviet embassy asked the British delegation for the “gifts” which had been intended for the embassy staff in connection with the Red Army Day celebrations – only to be told they had all been consumed. It is not clear whether or not Churchill ever found out about the miscommunication between the two departing staffs.

Unhappy with the President’s performance at the
conference
, Churchill told his doctor, Charles Wilson, who had
recently
been ennobled and was now Lord Moran, that during the meetings “the President is behaving very badly. He won’t take any interest in what we are trying to do”.
54
This
confirms
Cadogan’s observation that “The President in
particular
is very woolly and wobbly”.
55

The Prime Minister was glad the Yalta Conference was over. Hugh Lunghi later reflected that he had been
particularly
“dispirited … and particularly objected to the overuse of the word ‘joint’ as in, say, joint agreement. It reminded him, he said, of the ‘Sunday family roast of mutton’.”
56

For two days after the end of the meeting, Churchill rested aboard the SS
Franconia
at Sebastopol from the long hours and hard work before flying to Athens. The feasts at Yalta had not dampened post-conference appetites. On board ship, Cadogan wrote in his diary that he had “joined Winston at a terrific lunch – dressed crab, roast beef, apple pie, washed down with excellent Liebfraumilch, and gorgonzola and port!”
57

For all his persuasive skills, Churchill was unable to achieve one of his principal wartime goals: a free and independent
Poland. Britain’s position as a world power was diminishing as American troops flooded into Europe from the west and Soviet troops, outnumbering the Germans by two to one, rolled out across the continent from the east.

Roosevelt did not survive to see these developments: he died on 12 April 1945, just two months after the Yalta Conference ended. It fell to his Vice President, Harry S Truman, to fill his place at Potsdam, the next and final
meeting
of the Big Three.

C
HAPTER
8

Meeting at Potsdam July 1945

W
hen Churchill arrived in Potsdam, fifteen miles south-west of ruined Berlin, on 15 July 1945, three days in advance of the final Big Three meeting (code-named Terminal), he had several reasons to be happy. The European war was won, the Pacific war a month from
victory
. Churchill’s two months of telegraph and telephone
exchanges
with the new American President gave him
confidence
that he would work well with Harry Truman at the formal meetings that would start a few days later. To the Prime Minister, the circumstances of the Potsdam negotiations, if not of Britain’s geopolitical position, seemed ideal:
victorious war leaders gathering for meetings at the highest level, with elaborate dinners of the sort that provided a stage on which he could shine and employ his potent personal, table-top diplomacy.

But the horizon was not cloudless. Churchill was aware that his ability to control events had diminished. American troops outnumbered British soldiers in the field, and Soviet troops had rolled out east at a phenomenal rate. He could not quickly duplicate with Truman the easy camaraderie he had developed with Roosevelt. He also knew that Stalin
intended
to dominate Eastern Europe and beyond, if possible, and had his troops in position to enable him to do just that.

The recent British general election, its results still being tabulated to include late-arriving soldiers’ ballots, created uncertainty as to how long he might remain Prime Minister. Some of his advisers, among them his son Randolph, told him he had nothing to fear. Randolph assured his father that when the results were announced on 25 July, he would have a majority of somewhere between seventy and one hundred seats, most likely eighty; and Max Beaverbrook, two days before the election, put the Prime Minister’s likely majority at around one hundred. Churchill knew better: he predicted “a hotly contested election”.
2
and cabled Truman in advance of the Potsdam summit: “As you know, electioneering is full of surprises.”
3
To his colleagues at the Potsdam meeting, he announced: “Some of us will be back.”
4

The Potsdam Conference, the last and longest of the
wartime
Big Three summits and the only one at which Churchill was joined by Truman, was held from 18 July to 2 August 1945. The meeting was convened largely at Churchill’s behest,
5
but the site was selected by Stalin, who claimed to be taking his lead from Roosevelt’s toast at Yalta, in which
the President proposed that the next meeting be held in Berlin, to celebrate the downfall of Hitler. Churchill toured Berlin and, always magnanimous to fallen enemies, was deeply moved by the devastation. Berlin was “a chaos of ruins”, he later wrote, its inhabitants “haggard”.
6
Although Berlin had been heavily damaged by Allied bombings and too ruined to accommodate the Big Three conference, Potsdam, just south of the German capital, was relatively unscarred by the war.

Stalin, like Churchill, knew how to set a stage, in his case not by displaying any charm or gift for oratory, but by showing off Soviet power, a method he preferred to Churchillian persuasiveness. Potsdam was controlled by Stalin’s armies, which allowed him to secure the roads
between
the villas housing the delegations and the conference centre with an ostentatious show of military strength. Stalin had even arranged for the courtyard of the meeting hall to be “carpeted with a 24-foot red star of geraniums, pink roses, and hydrangeas”,
7
lest any of the conferees forget who
controlled
the territory on which they were meeting.

Potsdam had several features to recommend it as a site for a Big Three conference. To its south-east was Babelsberg, a former German movie studio and colony which had
suffered
little war damage and contained a great many elegant villas, with lawns sloping down to the several lakes and
canals
; enough villas to house all the diplomatic and military attendees and their staffs more comfortably than had been possible at Yalta. The delegations were much larger than at previous summits: the American delegation was four times the size of the group that President Roosevelt had brought to Yalta.
8

The Prime Minister was assigned Villa Urbig, a pink stucco
house at what was then 23 Ringstrasse in a quiet residential area of Babelsberg, while his party was assigned fifty houses to allocate among more than 250 people. In her memoirs, Joan Bright, a brilliant manager of the arrangements for the British delegations at several conferences, noticed that every single house contained a “beautiful Steinway or Bechstein grand piano”.
9
Chief Petty Officer Stewart Pinfield, who had been in charge of catering for the Prime Minister in Newfoundland and at Teheran in 1943, and by some
accounts
partly responsible for the melting Persian ice pudding, was summoned once again to supervise the Prime Minister’s kitchen, a sensitive post given Churchill’s view of the
importance
of dinners in the coming negotiations.

Welcome to my villa: Churchill greets Truman and Stalin

Arrangements for caring for and feeding some thousand people were immensely complex. The Russians could ship supplies overland, but, because each delegation was
responsible 
for provisions in its own set of villas, everything for the Americans and British attendees had to be flown in. Joan Bright’s list of absolute necessities to meet the needs of the British delegation was extensive: food and drink, cooking utensils, cutlery, ashtrays, table linen, glass, china, caterers, cooks and waiters. Even drinking water was to be air-lifted in.
11
Joan Bright also requested “sixty dustpans, brushes and broom pails, scrubbing brushes. Two hundred house
flannels
. Sixty mops. Twenty four sauce pan brushes … Two gross dusters, thirty three-tier bunks with palliases [
straw-filled
mattresses] and pillows. One hundredweight soda and one hundred tin bath and sink cleaner”.
12
And new shirts for the Prime Minister’s guards.
13
In his notes, Lord Moran recorded with some distaste that the French windows in Churchill’s villa were “very dirty”.

President Truman was assigned a stucco house at 2 Kaiserstrasse. Although painted yellow, it became known as the Little White House, and is now home to a liberal German political foundation. The Americans also flew in all the
supplies
needed by the eleven Navy cooks and stewards in the Truman entourage. “Cases of liquor and wine were flown in. A planeload of bottled water from France arrived daily.”
14

Sixty-one years later, when Lady Soames revisited her father’s villa to celebrate the placing of a commemorative plaque, she “recalled the difficulties of fulfilling even basic
household tasks” in the city of Potsdam, as she arranged a dinner party for Truman and Stalin, at which her father was to play host. “I had to do the flowers for this large party and it was certainly a challenge to even find them.”
15

Control of the Potsdam area made it easier for the Soviets to provide for the feeding and housing of their own military and diplomatic staffs. They set up cattle, poultry and
vegetable
farms and “two special bakeries, manned by trusted staff and able to produce 850 kg of bread a day”,
16
and brought from Moscow by train anything else they needed and could not requisition locally. This access to food supplies
simplified
the task of catering for the typically lavish Soviet
post-session
buffets held in the Music Room of the Cecilienhof Palace.

The 176-room Cecilienhof Palace was Stalin’s final reason for choosing Potsdam: a mock-English-Tudor mansion built for Crown Prince Wilhelm, the last Hohenzollern, and named after his wife, Crown Princess Cecilie. The palace – which today serves as a museum, restaurant and hotel, and for
political
meetings of the European and German Federal
governments
– was ideal for the plenary sessions. Set in 180 acres, it contains a large, double-height central meeting room on the ground floor. Lohengrin would have been at home here.

Stalin had this vast central meeting room, as well as all the villas, remodelled and refurnished, and the electricity system repaired, once again requisitioning everything he needed to furnish the villas and meeting room from the
impoverished
, war-torn Germans for whom he felt no Churchill-style sympathy.

The separate suites on different sides of the central room served two purposes. First, the national leaders could
enter
simultaneously from different doors, all the same size,
solving a potential protocol problem. At the plenary
sessions
, the three national leaders – the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill; the Soviet “man of steel”, Generalissimo (no longer the mere “Marshal” he was at Yalta) “Uncle Joe” Stalin; and the newcomer to big power summits, American President Harry S Truman, entered separately and
simultaneously
, accompanied by what Lord Moran described as their “captains, who had survived the miscalculations of six years of world war”.
17

The Big Three and supporting staffs, at the Cecilienhof

Second, the separate suites allowed each delegation to
confer
in private, to compare notes and prepare for the next
session
. Not unsurprisingly, the rooms claimed by Stalin’s party
for what today would be called break-out sessions were the largest and brightest: with two doors, and a polygonal bay window with cushioned window seats, overlooking the lake. The Generalissimo’s desk straddled the room at an angle, giving him a clear view of everyone entering or leaving it.

The only daylight in the conference chamber comes from an immense many-mullioned window at one end; and for the late-afternoon meetings from a giant brass chandelier hung very high in the ceiling. The meeting room itself would have done little to dissipate the gloom generated by the war leaders’ inability to agree on the post-war organisation of the world. In this pseudo-Wagnerian setting, around the special ten-foot round conference table made in Moscow,
18
one era of bloody history ended and another contentious one began. The armchairs assigned to the leaders were larger than the rest, with golden putti heads on the backs. Seated on one side of each leader was his principal foreign adviser: the American Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. On the other side sat each leader’s interpreter. These aides and advisers were assigned armless chairs, which enabled them to lean over more easily for whispered conferences with their chiefs. The seating hierarchy was matched by a vehicular one. Churchill and his staff were chauffeured about in an armoured Humber Pullman. Clement Attlee, now Leader of the Opposition, who had served as Deputy Prime Minister in the coalition government, and Anthony Eden were assigned smaller armoured Humbers; lesser mortals, the military and diplomatic staffers who were assigned conference seats
behind
the front row, rode in Daimlers.