The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (91 page)

The stories told of the immorality in such places as Yalta are to a great extent untrue … tales of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting thought of a swift, fleeting love affair.… The town with its cypresses had quite a deathlike air, but the sea still broke noisily on the shore; a single barge was rocking on the waves, and a lantern was blinking sleepily on it.

That sea—to the ancients, Pontus Euxinus, Sea Friendly to Strangers—had broken noisily on a shore occupied by Cimmerians and Scythians, Greeks and Genoese, Tartars and Russian princes. Two thousand annual hours of sunshine—comparable to Nice—suggested salutary conditions on the Crimean coast, and the first of three dozen sanatoriums for tuberculars and other invalids had been financed by progressive intellectuals, including Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. In 1920, by Lenin’s decree, Yalta became a workers’ spa, a proletarian paradise of fig, mulberry, and beech groves overlooking an inky sea of imponderable depth.

Then came the Germans. Three years of warfare, including the epic siege at nearby Sevastopol, utterly despoiled the Crimea, and Stalin’s invitation to the Anglo-Americans had triggered weeks of frenzied efforts to make Yalta presentable. Thousands of Red Army soldiers filled bomb craters, refurbished gutted houses, and shoveled manure from nineteenth-century palaces that the Germans had used to stable their horses. Fifteen hundred rail coaches ran from Moscow, a four-day journey, bringing carpets, window glass, and even brass doorknobs, which the absconding enemy had sawed off and carried away. Chefs, waiters, chambermaids, maîtres d’s, linens, beds, curtains, dishes, and silverware were gathered from the Hotels Metropol, National, Splendide, and Moscow for duty at Yalta. Each night a Russian convoy swept across the Crimea, rooting through farmhouses, boarding rooms, and schools for shaving mirrors, washbowls, coat hangers, clocks, and paintings. Swarms of plasterers, plumbers, painters, electricians, and glazers worked around the clock. Five hundred Romanian prisoners-of-war planted shrubs and semitropical flowers in riotous profusion.

British and American support ships were diverted to Sevastopol when it was found that Yalta’s coastal waters remained clogged with German mines. (“They didn’t leave a map,” a Russian officer explained with a shrug.) From the ships’ holds, office furniture, two hundred tons of radio equipment, and all that tipple aboard
Franconia
was trucked for fifty miles—and nine hundred hairpin turns—across the mountains. A “sanitary survey,” conducted in Yalta on January 28 by U.S. Navy physicians, found a “marked infestation with bed bugs”; hundreds of mattresses and pillows were sprayed with a 10 percent solution of DDT dissolved in kerosene. Linens were dusted with DDT powder and, for good measure, Russian kitchen staffs received instruction in “hygienic practices.”

Four Soviet regiments arrived to safeguard Yalta, in addition to 160 fighter planes, several antiaircraft batteries, and Stalin’s security cordon of 620 men, reinforced by a personal bodyguard of a dozen Georgians carrying tommy guns. Seventy-four thousand security checks were made within a twenty-kilometer diameter of the town, and 835 suspected “anti-Soviet elements” arrested. Three concentric circles of sentries ringed the Soviet, British, and American compounds, and the woods grew stiff with shadowy agents. Eavesdroppers with listening bugs and directional microphones also arrived from Moscow, intent on overhearing as many private conversations as possible.

Despite the efforts of all those Soviet maids and maîtres d’s,
ARGONAUT
would be more rough-hewn than earlier conclaves in venues like Casablanca, Quebec, and Washington. “Regret necessity for nineteen full colonels sleeping one room,” a terse message to the British delegation warned. Lieutenant General Hastings Ismay, the prime minister’s military assistant, later wrote, “It would have been difficult to find a more unget-at-able, inconvenient, or unsuitable meeting place.”

Yet apprehension ran far deeper than concerns over crowded quarters and bed bugs. “This may well be a fateful conference,” Churchill had told Roosevelt. “The end of this war may well prove to be more disappointing than was the last.”
ARGONAUT
would help shape the postwar world. Now all that remained was for the Argonauts themselves to arrive.

Sacred Cow
touched down at 12:10
P.M.
on Saturday at Saki airfield on the Crimean west coast, followed twenty minutes later by the prime minister’s upholstered Skymaster. Wearing his cape and a gray fedora with the brim turned up, Roosevelt descended in the caged elevator to the icy runway, where a Secret Service agent lifted him into a Russian jeep. He was greeted by Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, known privately to the Americans as “Stone Ass.” With Churchill standing at his elbow smoking a cigar, the president took the salute of a high-stepping, white-gloved honor guard from whose rifles live ammunition had been confiscated. All twenty-five planes from Mission No. 17 stood in perfect alignment as the captain of the guard marched past holding a sword “straight in front of him like a great icicle,” wrote Charles Moran. A band crashed through three national anthems and then the “Internationale.”

We will destroy this world of violence,

Down to the foundations, and then

We will build our new world.

He who was nothing will become everything.

“The president looked old and thin and drawn,” Moran added. “He sat looking straight ahead with his mouth open, as if he were not taking things in.” Three large tents stood near the crude control tower. Tables inside were heaped with platters of salmon, sturgeon, whitefish, caviar, and black bread. Beside steaming glasses of tea stood pitchers of vodka, as well as bottles of cognac and champagne. Marshall, muffled in a fur-lined khaki overcoat, glanced disapprovingly at this repast and muttered, “Let’s get going.”

Soon a weaving convoy of sedans and buses followed the unpaved road to Yalta, eighty miles and five hours away. No photograph or Movietone footage could have more vividly conveyed to the Western Allies the intensity of the war being waged by their eastern comrades: mile upon mile of gutted buildings, barns, crofts, trains, tanks, trucks. Peasant women in shawls and knee boots waved from barren fields and from orchards reduced to flinders. Except for a few sheep, no livestock could be seen, or farm machinery, or men for that matter, apart from the sentries in greatcoats and astrakhan hats, one every hundred yards, saluting each passing vehicle with an abrupt extension of their rifles at a thirty-degree angle. Churchill passed the time by reciting Lord Byron’s epic poem
Don Juan.
Beyond bleak Simferopol, the terrain lifted from snowy moor to mountain. The Route Romanoff followed a high, winding trace around the limestone flank of Roman-Kosh, the highest peak in the Crimea, before descending to the serpentine coastal road above the sea, each mile warmer than the mile before, until shortly before six
P.M.
they came to Yalta. Female traffic wardens waved them through with a waggle of red and yellow flags.

Churchill and the British contingent peeled away for their assigned billets in the Villa Vorontsov, described by Ismay as “a fantastic mixture of bogus Scottish castle and Moorish palace”; its furnishings, another guest said, radiated “an almost terrifying hideosity.” Built for a Russian governor in the early nineteenth century, with a handsome view of the Black Sea, the estate had served as a headquarters for Field Marshal Erich von Manstein during the Germans’ Crimean offensive. Great logs now burned in the hearths, and Russian housekeepers in black livery scurried about in an effort to accommodate the visitors. When Sarah Churchill mentioned that caviar was improved by lemon juice, a tub holding a lemon tree heavy with fruit appeared in the foyer. When Air Marshal Portal noted that a large glass tank lacked fish, goldfish swam on the instant.

Alas, Moran complained, “nothing is left out but cleanliness.” Bedbugs soon brought American fumigators with their DDT sprayers—too late for Churchill’s badly gnawed feet, although a bigger, bug-free bed was shipped by special train from Moscow. Generals and admirals now shared cells built for serfs—“We sleep in droves like prep school boys in dormitories,” one officer wrote his wife—and just two bathrooms with cold taps served the entire villa. Sarah wrote her mother of seeing “3 field marshals queuing for a bucket” to relieve themselves. Yalta, the prime minister would harrumph, was surely “the Riviera of Hades.” Perhaps only Brooke was happy: “I picked up a great northern diver, scoters, cormorants, many gulls and other diving ducks,” he told his diary. “Also dolphins feeding on shoals of fish.”

Ten miles away the Americans settled into the fifty-room Villa Livadia, a two-story, flat-roofed palace of limestone and marble set on a sea bluff. Suitcases and musette bags were piled in the grand foyer, as the travelers arrived to be greeted by servants who bowed at the waist and addressed Roosevelt as “Your Excellency.” (“The president did not seem displeased,” one general noted.) Here too the guests found an odd mixture of elegance and inconvenience. Waiters in swallowtail coats carried silver trays with little cakes and scalding tea in tall glasses, and caviar hillocks seemed to rise from every oak table. In a makeshift salon, a Russian barber and manicurist stood ready to groom the Americans, and the lush grounds around Livadia offered fifteen kilometers of walking paths lined with cedars, yews, and black cypresses shaped like exclamation points. Yet only four bathtubs and nine lavatories served more than one hundred Americans living on two floors in the villa; cards thumbtacked to the doors listed bathroom assignments by age, rank, and sex. (The president’s daughter, Anna, was one of two women in the traveling party.) For the impatient, auxiliary latrines were dug in a nearby deer park. A notice to all delegates asked, “Please do not pilfer rooms and dining services for souvenirs.”

An air of tragedy hung over Livadia, which had been built in 1911 as a summer palace for the last czar, Nicholas II, and his czarina, Alexandra, at a cost of two million rubles, paid in gold. Orthodox priests had spattered holy water and swung smoldering censers to bless each room. Little imagination was required to see the royal couple with their four daughters and ailing son arriving by imperial train from St. Petersburg, snacking on reindeer tongue and smoked herring as they cavorted through the villa or aboard the three-masted, twin-funneled royal yacht anchored below the bluff. It was said that lion-head embellishments on the marble benches outside the front entrance caricatured the czar; that he slept in a different room every night to foil assassins; that a private outside staircase had been used by the mystical Rasputin to visit the czarina. After abdicating in 1917, Nicholas futilely petitioned to retire at Livadia; instead, he and his family were murdered, and the villa became first a tuberculosis asylum and then a German division headquarters in 1941. Hitler had promised the estate to Rundstedt after the war for services rendered, and thus it escaped the torch.

Now Roosevelt slept in the czar’s first-floor suite, whose décor was described as “early Pullman car,” with brass lamps shaded in fringed orange silk and bottle-green harem cushions scattered across the floor. Marshall was assigned another royal bedroom upstairs, and Admiral King, to the great mirth of his comrades, occupied the czarina’s boudoir.

*   *   *

At four o’clock on Sunday afternoon, the heavy wooden doors flew open and a Secret Service squad marched into the Livadia foyer, followed by a Soviet security phalanx at port arms. From a black Packard in the semicircular driveway emerged a short ursine figure in a round military cap and a greatcoat adorned with epaulets and six brass buttons. His trousers were tucked into boots of soft Caucasus leather with elevated heels, and on the khaki tunic of his marshal’s uniform he wore the red ribbon and five-pointed star of a Hero of the Soviet Union. The impenetrable dark eyes and gray pushbroom mustache were softened by a slight smile that revealed irregular teeth, more black than bone in tint, and even the fading light showed that beneath a heavy coating of talcum powder his cheeks were dimpled with the smallpox scars he had incurred at age six. All conversation stopped—Russian servants were careful not to rattle the teacups—and junior officers pressed forward, necks craned, as if to catch a fleeting glimpse of Grendel.

Joseph Stalin intrigued even Franklin Roosevelt, who now greeted the marshal with a broad grin and an extended hand from behind the desk of his makeshift study in the palace. They shared native shrewdness, political acumen, and a conviction that their respective nations were about to become superpowers—a recent coinage that they would help define. In other respects the wealthy patrician had little in common with this son of a drunk cobbler and a mother born into serfdom. Roosevelt a few weeks later would tell his cabinet, preposterously, that during Stalin’s youthful study for the priesthood “something entered into his nature of the way in which a Christian gentleman should behave”; in fact, he had left the seminary to specialize in bank robbery, extortion, and—as the first editor of the Bolshevik newspaper
Pravda
—manipulation of the masses. Calm, laconic, and often courteous, with, in Brooke’s estimation, “a military brain of the highest caliber,” he was also vindictive, enigmatic, and a murderer to rival Hitler. Still, Roosevelt repeatedly told his lieutenants, “I can handle Stalin.” As for the marshal’s perspective: he had observed a few months earlier that “Churchill is the kind of man who will pick your pocket of a
kopeck
.… Roosevelt is not like that. He dips his hand only for bigger coins.”

Beneath a painting of a farmer plowing his field and a chandelier with bulbs of varying size and brilliance, they made small talk. The president was pleased they could have a private conversation before Churchill joined them. Stalin spoke a few snatches of English, perhaps learned from Hollywood movies, notably, “You said it!,” “So what?,” and “What the hell goes on around here?” With Bohlen translating and taking notes, Roosevelt assured the marshal that he was “living in comfort” at Livadia, where all plenary sessions would convene for the president’s convenience. He observed that Allied military fortunes had “considerably improved” since their last meeting, in Teheran fourteen months earlier. With armies from east and west now edging closer, he hoped that General Eisenhower would be able to communicate directly with Soviet field commanders rather than routing all messages through the Combined Chiefs. The shocking pillage of Crimea made him “more bloodthirsty than a year ago,” the president added, and he urged Stalin to consider offering a dinner toast “to the execution of fifty thousand officers of the German army.”