The Road to Berlin (35 page)

The Prime Minister returned to the problem of time, six months of operational idleness between the fall of Rome and the onset of
Overlord
. Stalin closed this gap abruptly by suggesting the abandonment of the attempt to take Rome, closing down the Italian front and putting the men down in southern France two months before
Overlord
. The Prime Minister protested with full vigour, and the President interceded with remarks related to the timing of the operations—he opposed any delay with
Overlord
but proposed an examination of the suggestion to put men ashore in southern France two months before
Overlord
, subject to the cross-Channel attack being held on schedule. It was eventually decided that the whole question would be turned over to the staffs for their consideration on
Monday morning. Stalin did not exactly leap at this but he agreed to allow Marshal Voroshilov to take part in these military conversations. Churchill made one last effort on behalf of his design for Turkey, and once again Stalin demonstrated his almost total lack of interest. Stalin had shifted his ground swiftly and shrewdly, from hot complaint that not enough was being done to detach German divisions from the east, to proposing the closing down of an Allied front and virtual inactivity elsewhere. The Prime Minister pushed, in rather hectic fashion, for an Eastern presence: Stalin steadily pushed the Anglo-American armies to the west. Watching his performance, assisted as it was by American disinclination for any Eastern
imbroglio
, General Brooke confessed to watching ‘a military brain of the very highest calibre’ in action. At least Stalin had his sums right.

‘A bloody lot has gone wrong.’ The Prime Minister had cause for irritation if not gloom at the end of the first session and he gave his feelings pungent expression. Three and a half hours of discussion ended without any real decision save for Stalin shunting his allies westwards, away from his southern flank. And whatever his political motives, there was every reason for Stalin to struggle against the ‘dispersal’ he foresaw in any effort in the eastern Mediterranean, a point that fell on ready American ears made more receptive as Stalin talked pointedly about warring on Japan. Over and after dinner, at which President Roosevelt played host, Stalin went on to explore the minds of his allies on two questions central to him and crucial to the alliance, the treatment of Germany and the place of Poland. To the President and Prime Minister alike he was gloomy, frank and brutal over Germany, questioning the wisdom of ‘unconditional surrender’ without any statement of terms, predicting in alarmist fashion the eventual recovery of Germany from the present war only to embark on a fresh one, hinting also that the political dismemberment of Germany was insufficient without gouging out the substance of Germanism. The attitude of German workers in the service of Hitler obviously enraged him: those German prisoners of war whom he taunted with this under interrogation he had shot when they answered that they served out of sheer obedience. Over Poland both parties trod warily at first; Stalin fell in very readily (and understandably) with the plan to lift Poland bodily to the west, setting her western frontiers on the Oder, but for the moment he was silent over the eastern frontier. With the aid of three match-sticks the Prime Minister demonstrated how this hopscotch amidst the frontiers would work, and Poland was already half sold out, for all the brave words. Stalin smiled and was visibly pleased.

The Monday morning staff talks brought in Marshal Voroshilov, who pounded away at General Brooke about
Overlord
as the prime operation to be executed as from 1 May 1944. None of General Brooke’s arguments about actually releasing German strength by foreclosing Mediterranean operations made any dent in Voroshilov: the Channel was wide, that Voroshilov conceded, but so were the many rivers which the Red Army had crossed because it wanted to. Voroshilov taxed General Brooke directly on his own belief in
Overlord:
did he hold to it
as strongly as General Marshall?
Overlord
must take absolute precedence, Voroshilov insisted; anything else in any other theatre was secondary. General Brooke signified full agreement with this order of priorities, but argued as always that a lesser operation could assist and must assist the accomplishment of the major one. The argument spilled over into the second plenary session held on the afternoon of 29 November, a meeting preceded by the President and Stalin conferring alone on possible Soviet–American arrangements covering the Far Eastern theatre and on the President’s view of policing the post-war world, when Stalin deferred any commitment about operational matters in the Far East and narrowed down his concept of ‘policing’ to standing astride Germany and Japan.

The second plenary session opened with a bang. After the report on the morning’s staff talks, Stalin lashed out at once: ‘Who will command
Overlord?
’ The President informed Stalin that as yet this had not been decided, whereupon Stalin retorted that without a man to prepare
Overlord
nothing would come of it. Stalin was not stopped by the information that General Morgan presently supervised preparations: there had to be a commander. He more or less brushed aside the Prime Minister’s explanation of Anglo-American niceties in apportioning command, asking only for the selection of a man both to prepare and to command. The Prime Minister then set out once more to stamp the coalition strategy with his own imprint, lunging at the German flank, opening the Aegean, ‘stretching’ the enemy in the Balkan theatre, bringing Turkey into the war. Stalin shoved Turkey, the Aegean, Rumania, Rome and Yugoslavia aside with one stroke: in view of the urgency of rendering aid to the Red Army,
Overlord
must have precedence; the date must be fixed—no later than May 1944—there must be no postponement, and a supreme commander must be appointed. A descent on southern France would contribute directly to
Overlord:
anything in Italy or the Balkans was mere ‘diversion’. Any argument leading to the commitment of forces in the Balkans Stalin axed down at once; by his reckoning, the thirty German divisions in the Balkans that the Prime Minister wished to entrap simply did not exist. After a further bout of argument between Stalin and Churchill, the latter made his final plea for Turkey and urged that questions of the timing and scale of operations be turned over to the Technical Military Committee. Stalin refused to consider this: the date of
Overlord
, the nomination of a supreme commander and the role of a support operation in southern France could be decided here and now. ‘How long is this conference going to last?’—Stalin had to be away by 2 December at the latest. The President suggested a simple and direct instruction for the Chiefs of Staff, that
Overlord
was paramount for 1944, that any subsidiary operation must be considered in the light of any delaying effect on the cross-Channel attack. Stalin now attempted to nail down
Overlord
completely; he had tried the tactic of applying pressure for a commander, now he demanded a date so that the Red Army could co-ordinate its offensive from the east. His parting shot was aimed directly at the Prime Minister: did the British really believe in
Overlord
, or did they merely talk about it to ‘keep the Russians quiet?’—
shtoby
uspokoit Russkikh?
With complete malice aforethought, Stalin was bent on exposing the Prime Minister’s isolation from the President and the prevalent ‘Soviet–American’ view.

At the first dinner Stalin had related how he taunted those prisoners whom he finally consigned to their doom. At the second dinner, on the evening of the twenty-ninth, Stalin set about baiting the Prime Minister. He had earlier observed to the President that he thought Mr Churchill too lenient in the matter of Germany. Now he warmed to his subject, suggesting that 50,000 Germans, the core of the ‘German General Staff’, be shot out of hand when the war was finished. In a surge of disgust the Prime Minister left the dinner, only to be wooed back by an affable Stalin dismissing it all as a joke. On the following day, 30 November, Stalin had cause for greater satisfaction. In the morning the Prime Minister—walled off as he was from the President—paid a call on Stalin to clarify the British attitude. Stalin gave little away: he was pleased that the commander for
Overlord
might be appointed almost at once, but hinted darkly that without
Overload
occurring in May 1944 the Red Army might falter, the Russians succumb to ‘war-weariness’. If he knew
Overlord
would proceed on time, there would be no need ‘to take steps’ to circumvent feelings of ‘isolation’ in the Red Army and he could actually plan a simultaneous Soviet offensive for May–June. The definite date for
Overlord
, which Stalin did not extract from the Prime Minister in the morning, he obtained at the lunch attended by the three Allied leaders. Stalin got his prize at long last:
Overlord
timed for May 1944, enjoined as an Anglo-American decision. The political karate that Stalin practised at Teheran, numbing the President and jolting the Prime Minister, had paid off. Over lunch, with the discord submerged in high-sounding phrases and the rivalry smothered with talk of responsibilities, Stalin felt out the ground about territorial concessions. At no time did he enunciate any Soviet policy, and he had earlier explicitly refused to talk terms—’… When the time comes, we will speak’. Warm-water ports he was promised: in the Far East the President held out Dairen and a hint that expansive Soviet claims might be met, even though Stalin quite realistically pointed out that the Chinese would have a say in this.

The third plenary session that afternoon pulled the compact over
Overlord
into shape: the Anglo–American armies would attack in May, whereupon Stalin committed the Red Army to offensive operations in the east also timed for May. In the evening the Prime Minister played host at dinner where amiability appeared to rule once more. Stalin, having got the date for
Overlord
, now worried about the man and was assured by the Prime Minister that the commander would almost certainly be General Marshall. That reassured Stalin for the moment, and he turned next to the attitude of General Brooke who seemed no friend of the Russians. During the toasts and speeches Stalin put his opinion to the company, capping the President’s compliments with the charge that General Brooke failed properly to appreciate the Red Army, an attack the intended victim managed to turn neatly enough.

The final day of the Teheran conference passed in a rapid shuffle of arguments and schemes about frontiers, those of friend and foe alike. The Prime Minister’s plans for Turkey were steadily whittled away. After a break for lunch, Poland came up for discussion and this time Stalin had no time for toying with matchsticks. Slicing into the Prime Minister’s exposition, he argued that now ‘governments’ were under discussion and one government he refused to treat with was that of the ‘London Poles’. As for frontiers, Stalin stuck out for the 1939 demarcation which Molotov at once passed off as the ‘Curzon line’. Both the ‘Curzon line’ and the ‘Oder line’ were scrutinized in great detail; the main discussion moved for the moment on to Finland, and here Stalin allowed himself to be talked into relative magnanimity, though forbearance was in any event the best investment for Soviet policy. On Germany, after chiding the Prime Minister for his faint-heartedness over real dismemberment, Stalin went on to support the President’s plan for splitting Germany into five units since it came nearest to his own aim of partition: Germans were Germans and should be sundered one from another. Neither the President nor Stalin was inclined to give southern Germany the benefit of any doubt. Stalin tossed out the idea of a Danubian confederation in any form, insisting specifically on Germany and Hungary being kept at arm’s length. Reverting to Poland, the Prime Minister finally extracted Stalin’s agreement to his ‘Curzon–Oder’ line formula, to which Stalin tacked on Königsberg as the price of his accession to the idea. Stalin thus rewarded himself for having ‘agreed’ to a proposal that gave him what he wanted in the first place.

The Teheran conference dispersed, a common decision apparently agreed but in reality the basic divisiveness glowing like a hot coal through it all. Stalin had cause for self-congratulation, as his objective was fully attained: the contradictions within the capitalist camp had served him admirably. He had anchored
Overlord
irremovably in the late spring of 1944; he left open—and public—the option of ‘dealing’ with Soviet ‘war-weariness’; he had kept rival armies away from his southern flank; he had splintered Poland and kept the Baltic states in his clutch with almost no effort, not to mention the claim staked out provisionally in the Far East. For all this Stalin could and did argue that the Russians had paid with a torrent of blood. His need for a decision governing
Overlord
was imperative, else the
perelom
would sag and even engulf him, or worse, bleed Russia still further into immobility. Whatever his political motives, his strategy of insisting on the decisive frontal attack was sound and his mistrust of Mr Churchill’s ‘diversions’ was real enough. German intelligence, nevertheless, was ‘sixty per cent’ sure that the Prime Minister had been steered away from the Balkans at Teheran and was correspondingly pleased. President Roosevelt, who had taken some of Stalin’s hectoring, remained convinced that he had established a personal, useful and durable relationship with Stalin. The British Prime Minister withdrew from Teheran in good order but a prey to foreboding: at the end of the second session his gloom deepened (and his health deteriorated). After his duels with Stalin public amiability gave way to private storms. Once in Cairo, Churchill
fretted to be off to Italy, feverishly anxious to consult General Alexander and to ‘do something with these bloody Russians’.

Some measure of Stalin’s gratification showed in the enthusiastic, even exuberant, Soviet press reaction. The Red Army got its psychological boost and the promise that a second great pincer would soon reach into Germany. From Cairo the Prime Minister and the President sent Stalin confirmation of additional decisions to scale down the Bay of Bengal operation in order to release landing-craft for southern France, to step up production of amphibious craft for
Overlord
and also to divert them from the Pacific. Yet within little more than a month the same Soviet press that conveyed Stalin’s momentary satisfaction also helped to communicate his continuing aggravation, which evidently centred on Churchill’s reservations about
Overlord
and the welling ‘Polish problem’. On 17 January 1944
Pravda
published a story from its Cairo correspondent mentioning separate peace negotiations between Britain and Germany—‘two leading British personalities and Ribbentrop’ had met somewhere in the Iberian peninsula to talk terms. It was a story that Stalin himself disavowed not much later: the purpose, therefore, was less to report hot news than either to prod the British or to pre-empt possible stories of German–Soviet dickering. Shortly after the Teheran conference, the Japanese Legation in Stockholm handed yet another German ‘peace-feeler’ to the Russians, Berlin’s proposals including autonomy for the Ukraine and Soviet aid in raw materials and supplies to keep Germany in the fight against the Western powers. This somewhat preposterous programme got short shrift, though it did not prevent yet another Japanese initiative in late January 1944, when the Japanese tried at the same time to induce a certain realism in the Germans, not least by abandoning wild plans for the Ukraine. Meanwhile
Pravda
fired off more warning shots, aimed this time in the direction of the Baltic states, Finland, Poland, even the Balkans—here was a Soviet preserve, in the case of the Baltic states walled off from any ‘interference’ by nothing less than ‘the Soviet constitution itself’. As for the ‘Cairo report’ on German–British contacts (the Americans were conspicuously deleted from this cabal), Stalin parried the Prime Minister’s protest by advising him that ‘its significance should not be overrated’.