World War II Behind Closed Doors (53 page)

Much has been written about Roosevelt's physical state at the conference. Those who worked closely with him, like George Elsey, had noticed a profound deterioration of the President's health over the previous months, and Churchill had remarked on how sick Roosevelt looked at the time of the Quebec meeting in September. At Yalta, Lord Moran, Churchill's doctor, recorded: ‘Everyone seemed to agree that the President has gone to bits physically… I doubt, from what I have seen, whether he is fit for his job here’.
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Hugh Lunghi, who went to Yalta as part of the team from the British military mission in Moscow, remembers seeing the two leaders arrive by plane, and he too was surprised by the President's appearance: ‘Churchill got out of his aircraft and came over to Roosevelt's. And Roosevelt was being decanted, as it were – it's the only word I can use, because of course he was disabled. And Churchill looked at him very solicitously. They'd met in Malta, of course, so Churchill, I suppose, had no surprise, as I had – and anyone else had who hadn't seen Roosevelt previously – to see this gaunt, very thin figure with his black cape over his shoulder, and tied at his neck with a knot, and his trilby hat turned up at the front. His face was waxen to a sort of yellow, waxen and very drawn, very thin, and a lot of the time he was sort of sitting, sitting there with his mouth open sort of staring ahead. So that was quite a shock’.

Roosevelt was a dying man at Yalta – there is no question about it. But whether or not Roosevelt's undoubted weakness affected his judgement is less easy to establish, with contemporary testimony supporting both sides of the argument. What is certain,
though, is that Roosevelt's eventual accomplishments at Yalta were coherent and consistent with his previous policies as expressed at Tehran and elsewhere. His principal aims remained those of ensuring that the Soviet Union came into the war against Japan promptly once the war in Europe was over, and gaining Soviet agreement about the founding of the United Nations. The intricacies of the borders of eastern Europe mattered much less to him – illness or no illness.

Whilst Roosevelt's physical decline was clear to all at Yalta, just as obvious was Stalin's robust strength and power. As Hugh Lunghi saw it: ‘Stalin was full of beans…. He was smiling, he was genial to everyone, and I mean really everybody, even to junior ranks like myself. He joked at the banquets more than he had before’. Ever since the Red Army victories of 1943 Stalin had taken to wearing military uniform, and he cut an imposing figure at Yalta. ‘I must say I think Uncle Joe is the most impressive of the three men’, wrote the head of the British Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, in his diary. ‘He is very quiet and restrained…. He's obviously got a very good sense of humour and a rather quick temper!’
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More than that, the Allied leaders felt that Stalin at Yalta was someone they could relate to on a personal level. Churchill had remarked the year before that ‘if only I could dine with Stalin once a week, there would be no trouble at all. We get on like a house on fire’.
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Churchill and Roosevelt remained anxious to believe in Stalin the man. They clung to the hope that Stalin's statements of friendship, like his speech on 6 November 1944 in which he talked of the relationship with the Western Allies being based on ‘vitally important and long standing interests’,
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meant that he was planning on future cooperation with the West. And by the time of Yalta Churchill, for example, could point to the fact that the Soviets had recently allowed the British a free hand in Greece – just as the ‘percentages’ discussions of October 1944 had suggested they would. In any case, the future peace of the world still depended on sustaining a productive relationship with Stalin. And so, with these thoughts careering around their minds, the two Western leaders remained predisposed to believe what evidence
they could in order to bolster up the most convenient overall conviction: that Stalin was a man they could ‘handle’.

At the first meeting of all three leaders, in the tsarist glory of the Livadia palace, the former holiday home of the imperial family, Roosevelt remarked that ‘we understood each other much better now than we had in the past and that month by month that understanding was growing’.
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The American President looked forward to some ‘frank and free’ speaking at the conference.

It was Poland, of course, that was to be the test case of the relationship with Stalin, and no subject was discussed more at Yalta. Despite the protests of the Polish government in exile, both Roosevelt and Churchill agreed that Stalin could keep eastern Poland. What mattered to Roosevelt and Churchill was that Poland – within its new borders – could be ‘independent and free’. ‘Great Britain’, said Churchill, ‘had no material interest in Poland. Her interest is only one of honour because we drew the sword for Poland against Hitler's brutal attack. Never could I be content with any solution that would not leave Poland as a free and independent state’. Once again, one marvels at the ability of the Western leaders to mention only the convenient bits of recent history. They knew full well that only days after ‘Hitler's brutal attack’ on Poland from the West, the Soviet Union had made its own ‘brutal attack’ from the East. And it was the very gains the Soviet Union had made because of that attack that Churchill and Roosevelt had now agreed to accept.

Stalin remarked: ‘The Prime Minister has said that for Great Britain the question of Poland is a question of honour. For Russia it is not only a question of honour but also of security’, because the Germans had ‘passed through’ Poland twice in the last thirty years en route to the Soviet Union. But Stalin went on to say that ‘it is necessary that Poland be free, independent and powerful’. He then said that as far as he was concerned, the Lublin Poles, who were now in the Polish capital as ‘the Polish government’, had ‘as great a democratic base in Poland as de Gaulle has in France’. He also spoke once again, as he had to Churchill the previous October, of the need to ‘maintain order behind the lines’ and
declared that ‘there are agents of the London government connected with the so-called underground. They are called resistance forces. We have had nothing good from them but much evil’.

Stalin therefore kept to his position that elements of the Home Army (if not all of them) were ‘bandits’ and that the ex-Lublin Poles were the legitimate – if perhaps temporary – government of Poland. Unlike at Tehran, where he had stayed quiet in the face of Stalin's accusations about the Polish resistance, Churchill now made this gentle protest: ‘I must put on record that the British and Soviet governments have different sources of information in Poland and get different facts. Perhaps we are mistaken but I do not feel that the Lublin government represents even one third of the Polish people. This is my honest opinion and I may be wrong. Still, I have felt that the underground might have collisions with the Lublin government. I have feared bloodshed, arrests, deportation and I fear the effect on the whole Polish question. Anyone who attacks the Red Army should be punished but I cannot feel the Lublin government has any right to represent the Polish nation’.

As Churchill and Roosevelt saw it, the challenge was to do what they could to ensure that the government of the newly constituted country was as representative as possible. And so Roosevelt sent Stalin a letter after the discussion that day in which he recorded his concern that ‘people at home look with a critical eye on what they consider a disagreement between us at this vital stage of the war’.
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He also stated categorically that ‘we cannot register the Lublin Government as now composed’. Roosevelt proposed that representatives of both the Lublin Poles and the London Poles be immediately called to Yalta. Then the Big Three could assist them in jointly agreeing to a provisional government in Poland. ‘It goes without saying’, wrote Roosevelt at the end of the letter, ‘that any interim government which could be formed as a result of our conference with the Poles here would be pledged to the holding of free elections in Poland at the earliest possible date. I know this is completely consistent with your desire to see a new free and democratic Poland emerge from the welter of this war’.

This put Stalin in something of an awkward spot. It was, of course, not in his interests to have the composition of any interim government of Poland worked out jointly with the other Allied leaders. It would make him merely one voice in three in the discussions, instead of the principal driver of events if matters were left until after the meeting disbanded. And how Stalin found his way out of this potentially uncomfortable situation tells us much about both his character and his acute sense of how real power operates.

He first practised the classic politician's ploy – delay. The day after receiving Roosevelt's letter, 7 February, he claimed that he had only received the communication ‘an hour and a half ago’. He then said that he had been unable to reach the Lublin Poles because they were away in Kraków or somewhere else in Poland. However, Stalin said, Molotov had worked out some ideas based on Roosevelt's proposals – but ‘these proposals were not yet typed out’.

Then Stalin made his cleverest move. He suggested that instead of discussing Poland – how could they, since he had just said he had not had time to respond to Roosevelt's suggestions in detail – the Big Three should turn their attention to the voting procedure for the new United Nations. This was the subject dearest to Roosevelt's heart, but one that had proved highly problematic at past meetings. The Soviets had been insisting that each of their republics should have one vote in the General Assembly, which would give them sixteen votes to America's one. They had argued that since Britain with its extensive Commonwealth and Empire effectively controlled a large number of potential votes, the Soviets deserved the same treatment. Now, in a clear concession, Molotov said that ‘they would be satisfied with the admission of three or at least two of the Soviet Republics as original members’. This changed the atmosphere of the meeting in an instant. Roosevelt said he was ‘very happy’ to hear these proposals and ‘felt that this was a great step forward which would be welcomed by all the peoples of the World’. Churchill agreed wholeheartedly with the American President, saying that he too ‘would like to express his heartfelt thanks to Marshal Stalin and Mr Molotov for this great step forward’.

It was only then, after the happy discussion about the voting procedure in the new assembly of nations, that Molotov presented the Soviet response to Roosevelt's letter about Poland. He wrote that ‘it would be desirable to add to the Provisional Polish Government some democratic leaders from Polish émigré circles’, but added that they still hadn't been able to reach the Lublin Poles on the phone. As a result, ‘time would not permit the carrying out of the President's suggestion to summon the Poles to Crimea’.

This was the most significant moment of the conference so far. Churchill and Roosevelt – it ought to go without saying, but it seems necessary to say it in this context – were sophisticated and experienced politicians; indeed, they were two of the most sophisticated and experienced politicians of the twentieth century. And yet they let Molotov and Stalin get away with what was obviously a crude ruse. Did anyone in the room really believe that the Soviets, having been given a day to do so, were unable to reach their own tame government of Poland on the telephone? Especially since it was so clearly in the interests of the Soviet Union not to have a deal brokered with the London Poles here at Yalta in the presence of the Western leaders? Yet neither Churchill nor Roosevelt raised the issue of the alleged inability of the Soviets to get hold of their own puppet government. Churchill responded to Molotov's proposal only with a comment about the exact borders of the new Poland. Molotov had finally revealed the details of the boundaries of the new Poland, as the Soviets saw them, with the western border along the rivers Oder and Neisse south of the city of Stettin. This would take a huge portion of Germany into the new Poland, and Churchill remarked that ‘it would be a pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it got indigestion’.

The British were concerned lest so much territory was taken from the Germans that in the post-war world they would be permanently hostile to the new Poland, thus forcing the Poles closer to the Soviets. At the meeting, Churchill couched this concern as anxiety about the reaction of ‘a considerable body of British public opinion’ to the Soviet plan to ‘move large numbers of Germans’. Stalin remarked in response that most Germans had
‘already run away from the Red Army’ in these regions. And in any case, as Churchill acknowledged, there would be plenty of space – since the Germans had already had ‘six to seven million casualties in the war and would probably have a million more’, and this would ‘simplify’ the problem.

Thus the request that Roosevelt had made the day before – that the Lublin and London Poles be brought to Yalta so that a deal for the provisional government of Poland could be thrashed out under the auspices of the Big Three – was successfully dodged by Stalin without a whimper from the Western leaders.

The next day the three leaders began their meeting by swiftly agreeing to Stalin's request that the Soviet Union receive territory in the East from Japan as the final price for the Red Army's participation in the Pacific war. Stalin claimed that the Soviets had historic claims on all this territory – something the Japanese still dispute, with justification, to this day.

The leaders then returned once more to the question of Poland. Churchill referred to this moment as ‘the crucial point of this great conference’. In a lengthy speech he laid out the immensity of the problem the Western Allies faced. ‘We have an army of 150,000 Poles who are fighting bravely. That army would not be reconciled to Lublin. It would regard our action in transferring recognition as a betrayal’. Churchill acknowledged that, if elections were held ‘with full secret ballot and free candidacies’ this would remove British doubts. But until that happened, and with the current composition of the Lublin government, it was impossible for the British to transfer its allegiance from the London-based Polish government in exile.