After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (45 page)

In the west, the German army appeared submissive and cooperative. On Crete on 9 May, a handful of British soldiers and administrators received the surrender of four Wehrmacht divisions. A small British force was preparing to fly to Norway – in Operation Doomsday – to oversee the implementation of the ceasefire and the disarming of hundreds of thousands of German troops. And with a prevailing mood of happiness and relief, for some the Russians, in contrast, appeared obdurate and unyielding. They did not understand the Soviet insistence that peace could not begin until the Germans capitulated to them, at a place and time of their choosing. They thought that the signing at Rheims should have been enough. And yet, it is possible to see a different view.

In May 1945 Winston Churchill’s wife Clementine was in the Soviet Union representing the British Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund. She had founded this organisation in October 1941 and within a year it had raised nearly £2 million to buy clothes and medical supplies. Donations had poured in from every corner of the British Empire – and from every level of British society, from the king and queen, who each donated £1,000 in the first days of the fund, to ordinary factory workers, who contributed to the penny-a-week subscription. Hundreds of community groups undertook fund-raising activities. By January 1945 more than £4 million worth of goods had been shipped to the Soviet Union, some 11,600 tons of medical aid and clothing, 2,000 tons of powdered medicines, countless sterilisers, syringes, X-ray installations and blood transfusion sets. Two hospitals had by then been equipped in war-devastated Rostov-on-Don as a permanent memorial to the fund.

Clementine Churchill wrote that the fund ‘provided an outlet for the feelings of sympathy and admiration, respect and gratitude which swept over our people as the noble struggle of the Russians to defend their country grew through bitterness and agony to strength and power’. A similar sense of indebtedness was carried through the letters of donors to the fund, praising the Russians and the Red Army as ‘heroic’, ‘valiant’, ‘brave’, ‘patriotic’ and ‘deserving’.

Yet Mrs Churchill also experienced the harsh, critical face of Soviet bureaucracy. Her organisation was chided for its failure to meet quotas. The production rates at a British syringe factory were ‘too low’, and when she managed to acquire some twenty kilograms of a rare drug, she was told in no uncertain terms that this was only a fraction of what was needed.

And yet, as the war drew to a close, it was the Russian generosity of spirit which prevailed. Mrs Churchill was invited to pay a six-week-long visit to the Soviet Union to see how the money was being spent. This was to be an official thank-you from the Soviet leadership, but also a way for ordinary Russian people to show their gratitude for the British aid.

At the beginning of her trip, in late March 1945, she had an audience with Stalin in the Kremlin. The Soviet leader received her with considerable courtesy – but a telling moment occurred when Clementine Churchill presented Stalin with a gift from her husband, a gold fountain pen. This was an aristocratic gift – and she relayed the message that the British prime minister hoped the Soviet leader ‘would write him many friendly messages with it’. Stalin accepted the present with a genial smile but observed, in true Bolshevik fashion: ‘I only write with a pencil.’

Mrs Churchill travelled all over Russia. She exclaimed of Leningrad, despite its war damage: ‘I think it is the most beautiful city I have ever seen.’ And on 11 April she wrote movingly to her husband of the aftermath of the 900-day German siege of the city: ‘Yesterday we visited a scientific institute. Attached to it is a hospital where we saw many children still being nursed back to health from the effects of prolonged starvation during the Blockade.’

The siege of Leningrad had been lifted on 27 January 1944. By then, more than a million of its civilians had perished from hunger and cold. German policy had been to deliberately starve the city’s inhabitants to death.

Clementine Churchill was even more deeply moved at Stalingrad, which she reached four days later. She wrote: ‘What an appalling scene of destruction met our eyes. My first thought was how like the centre of Coventry or the devastation around St Paul’s, except that the havoc and obliteration seem to have spread out endlessly.’

Coventry had a special bond with Stalingrad. Its inhabitants, and particularly its women, had encouraged the Soviet city during the battle and this had forged a special bond of friendship. The two cities had twinned in 1944 – the first places in the world to do so. Mrs Churchill continued:

One building that caught my eye was a wreck that had been ingeniously patched and shored up. I learnt that it was the building in whose cellar the Russians had captured Von Paulus, the German commander [the Univermag Department Store]. It was characteristic of them, I thought, to make every effort to preserve this ruin because of its symbolic value. It represented the final overthrow of the enemy after one of the most savage struggles in all human history. Stalingrad was the turning-point of the war – and that will be remembered by the Russians for centuries to come.

Winston Churchill – also inspired by the heroism of Stalingrad – had asked Clementine to pass on his personal appreciation and Dmitry Pigalev, the chairman of the local soviet there, thanked him for it, adding that they would rebuild their city. Mrs Churchill saw this work in progress, telling her husband: ‘Two great factories have been reconstructed and are making steel and tractors … They are rebuilding their city with the same spirit of determination with which they fought the Germans.’

The British prime minister was uplifted by Clementine’s descriptions of Russian perseverance against the odds. He told her in return of the emerging horror of the concentration camps, and reflecting on this, that he felt the real hope for the future of the world lay in a friendship between the British and Soviet peoples. And such a friendship was offered to Mrs Churchill time and time again on her travels.

‘Last night we attended the local theatre,’ she wrote after one visit. ‘The audience was rapturous in its welcome and threw bunches of violets from the gallery … The whole town turns out to greet us everywhere we go and I am continually amazed and moved by so much enthusiasm …
I want you to know that this tremendously warm feeling seems universal
’ (emphasis added).

The visit was developing into a resounding success and it was to Clementine Churchill’s considerable credit that when her husband cabled her twice, on 5 May, when Anglo-Soviet relations had dropped to a new low, and asked her to return home early, she refused.

‘You seem to have had a triumphant tour,’ he wrote to her, ‘and I only wish matters could be settled between you and the Russian common people. However there are many other aspects of this problem than those you have seen on the spot.’ Churchill added: ‘The Ambassador has my authority to show you the telegrams about the position,’ and spoke of ‘poisonous politics and deadly international rivalries’.

Winston Churchill had asked his wife to return on 7 May, before VE-Day. Clementine replied, courteously but firmly, that now she was back in Moscow a detailed programme of events had been drawn up for the remainder of her stay and it might appear rude to leave in a hurry. She would not be able to leave before 11 May. Clementine realised that an unexpected and premature departure from the Russian capital would only make matters worse.

To his credit, Churchill accepted his wife’s desire to stay for the duration of her visit. With two Victory Days in existence, on 8 and 9 May – one for the West, the other for the East – the presence of Mrs Churchill in Russia for both became a huge diplomatic asset. Churchill came round to embracing its possibilities, suggesting that Clementine broadcast a message on his behalf to the Russian people on 9 May, ‘congratulating Marshal Stalin, the Red Army and the Russian people on their splendid victories’.

Mrs Churchill herself was aware how different the Rheims signing of 7 May appeared from a Russian view: ‘On Victory Day I remember being struck by astonishment that the surrender was signed in Rheims and only as an afterthought in Berlin,’ she said. ‘This was rather incomprehensible to the Russians – and I must confess, to me.’

Foreign correspondent Alexander Werth was concerned that the Victory Day announcements had not coincided: ‘The one day difference between VE Day in the west and VE Day in the east made an unpleasant impression,’ he remarked. It would have been ideal if the dates had been the same. But in the circumstances, it was a considerable achievement to have them only one day apart.

In Moscow 8 May was an ordinary working day. In the evening, Mrs Churchill spoke to a group of journalists in the British embassy there. ‘Unless,’ she told them, ‘the friendship that has been established between the Soviet Union and the English-speaking people during the war continues, increases and deepens, there will be very little happiness in the immediate future for the world and in the lives of our children and great-grandchildren. I hope that, in a small way, my visit will help.’

Also doing his best to promote this cause was another British visitor to Moscow, Dr Hewlett Johnson of Canterbury Cathedral, known to his countrymen – from his extreme left-wing opinions – as the ‘Red Dean’. Hewlett Johnson was undertaking a separate tour from Mrs Churchill, but for a similar reason, having founded his own Anglo-Soviet Medical Aid Fund. He had a naive enthusiasm for the Bolshevik cause, seeing Stalin as ‘a man of kindly geniality … leading his people down new paths to democracy’. Hugh Lunghi said with wry amusement: ‘Three years living in Russia had given me a very different view of the Soviet leader.’ It was the fact that Mrs Churchill was in Moscow on 9 May which was politically and symbolically important. Frank Roberts, an attaché at the British embassy, cabled the Foreign Office: ‘The presence of Clementine Churchill in Moscow for both VE Days is making a valuable contribution towards future relations between the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union.’

The Russian people learnt that the war was finally over through an announcement made on the radio early on the morning of 9 May by their most famous broadcaster, Yuri Levitan, who was regularly employed to read out the Orders of the Day and other state declarations. Stalin had even made a rare joke about him. When asked when the war would be over, he replied: ‘Don’t worry – Levitan will tell us.’

When journalist Lazarus Brontman enquired when
Pravda
would run the story of the unconditional surrender at Karlshorst, he was told simply: ‘After Levitan’s announcement’. At 1.10 a.m. on 9 May, Levitan’s voice duly intoned: ‘Attention, this is Moscow. Germany has capitulated.’ Russia now learnt of the signing concluded in Berlin’s outskirts and Moscow Radio announced that ‘in honour of the victorious conclusion of the great patriotic war’ this day, 9 May, would be a ‘festival’, with flags hoisted on all public buildings, and a general holiday. Then, in a mark of respect not followed by the other Allied powers when making similar announcements, the national anthems of Britain, America and France were played after the ‘Internationale’.

Pravda
’s leading article duly appeared: ‘The capitulation of Germany carried through the Moscow night like the wind. The people had waited four years for this moment … A nationwide celebration began. On the streets were more and more people. There is a crowd at the Kremlin walls. People are embracing, kissing. Today there are no strangers.’ Valentin Berezhkov, who had interpreted at some of the wartime conferences, wrote: ‘It is hard to describe the joy of thousands of people in Red Square and around the country. The pride that victory was finally won over a treacherous and foul enemy, the grief for the fallen, hopes for a lasting peace and continued co-operation with our wartime allies – all this created a very special feeling of relief and hope.’

That morning, Svetlana Stalin phoned her father in the Kremlin. She was the youngest child and only daughter of the Soviet leader. Her father had doted on her when she was a child, calling Svetlana his ‘little sparrow’. In the war years, they had drifted apart. Stalin had reluctantly given permission for Svetlana, aged seventeen, to marry a fellow Moscow University student, Grigory Morozov, but chose never to meet her husband. Now the couple were expecting their first child. Overcome with emotion, Svetlana struggled to speak, but finally blurted out: ‘Father, congratulations on the victory.’

There was a pause. ‘Yes, the victory,’ said Stalin distantly. And then his voice warmed. ‘Thank you. I congratulate you too. How are you?’

‘I felt wonderful,’ Svetlana said, ‘like everyone in Moscow on this special day. My husband and I invited our friends round. The room was full. We drank champagne, danced and sang. The streets outside were overflowing with people.’

When Nikita Khrushchev phoned the Kremlin to add his victory congratulations he found the Soviet leader in a less expansive mood. ‘I’m busy,’ Stalin said abruptly. ‘Please do not interrupt me when I am working.’

That morning saw a spontaneous expression of joy that surprised experienced foreign journalists. ‘The weather was chilly,’ Hugh Lunghi recalled, ‘but the gathering crowd was radiant as the fitful sunshine picked out the many colours of its kerchiefs.’ The correspondent of
The Times
clambered to the top of a building to gain a rooftop view of the festivities. He wrote:

Hundreds of thousands of people have been streaming into the centre of Moscow since early morning. The crowds fill the broad street, two or three times the width of Whitehall that runs below the western walls of the Kremlin, past the university and on to the Moskva River. They line the river bank below the terrace. They are packing Red Square. Crowds sweep each side of St Basil’s Cathedral towards the bridge over the Moskva, away towards the theatre square, where a bandstand has been erected for street dancing. It is a homely, democratic crowd, in which generals and soldiers, commissars and workers, mingle.

‘Everyone was polite,’ recalled Lazarus Brontman. ‘There was no swearing or scuffling – just a crowd of happy people, everyone laughing.’