The Road to Berlin (87 page)

The problem of Poland, however, could not be settled with slips of paper. At his first meeting with Stalin, Churchill proposed that Mikolajczyk, Grabski and Romer be invited to take part in the present talks; after some considerable pressure from the British, the London Poles agreed to travel to Moscow and left on 10 October. Though Mikolajczyk’s memorandum of 7 October stipulated that the Polish delegation should know in advance ‘what terms for a settlement will be put forward by the Soviet Government’, Eden (according to the Polish record) insisted that ‘this is the last chance for the Polish Government to come to an agreement with the Soviets at an auspicious moment …’ while ‘both Churchill and Eden see no possibility of setting any preliminary conditions for entering into negotiations’ but insist that to miss this opportunity would be ‘unforgivable’. When the Polish delegation arrived in Moscow, Ambassador Harriman also emphasized that in his view this was ‘the last and sole chance to reach an agreement on the Polish question’.

Late in the afternoon on 13 October the first talks on the Polish question began in the Spiridonovka Palace. On entering, Stalin informed the Prime Minister that Soviet troops had taken Riga and several German divisions had been cut off in Hungary and he was in turn offered the Prime Minister’s congratulations.
Ten minutes later Molotov officially opened the proceedings and invited Mikolajczyk to open his case. In essence, Mikolajczyk argued that the nature of the Polish political system precluded any forced fusion of the London government and the Committee for National Liberation (the ‘Lublin Committee’): the Memorandum of 29 August ruled out participation by Fascist and ‘non-democratic groups’. Mikolajczyk proposed a Polish government based on the five political parties, ‘each of which would receive a fifth of the ministries’. The Polish memorandum must be the basis for further discussion.

Stalin proceeded to kick this aside. The memorandum had two important defects: first that it ignored the Lublin Committee—‘a government must be formed on the basis of a compromise between the two authorities which claim to be the government’—and, second, it failed to settle the problem of the eastern frontiers of Poland on the basis of the ‘Curzon line’. It had to be the Curzon line or nothing. Mikolajczyk refused to agree to ‘ceding 40 per cent of the territory of Poland and 5 million Poles’. Stalin intervened to point out that it was ‘Ukrainian territory and a non-Polish population’ which was in dispute. The Prime Minister cooled this wrangle for the moment, but Mikolajczyk refused to accept his proposal that ‘the frontier solution’ should be adopted at once, with the right of appeal at a subsequent peace conference; the Polish Prime Minister would not countenance ‘a new partition of Poland’ while Stalin rejected a ‘partition of the Ukraine and White Ruthenia’. This time Churchill appealed ‘for a great gesture in the interests of European peace’ from the Poles, intimating that for the Polish government ‘to estrange’ themselves from the British at this juncture would be unwise: specifically he proposed that the Curzon line be accepted as the
de facto
frontier with the right of ‘final discussion’ at the Peace Conference, and also that ‘a friendly agreement with the Committee of National Liberation …’ be concluded.

Stalin, who had been on his feet for some time, spoke with great deliberation in what was effectively the final statement: ‘I want to state categorically that the Soviet Government cannot accept Premier Churchill’s formula concerning the Curzon line.’ At this the Prime Minister threw up his hands in despair. Furthermore, Stalin continued, the Curzon line must be accepted as the future eastern frontier: as in the case of Rumania and Finland, so in the case of Poland, the Soviet Union aimed at ‘determining a definite frontier’. ‘I repeat once more: the Curzon line as the basis of the frontier.’ Faced with such intractability, Mikolajczyk could only note in his personal observations on the meeting that ‘the Polish government is expected to commit suicide of its own volition’, a role he was not persuaded to adopt and for which he and his government would be ‘inept’. Later in the evening the British ministers together with Stalin met the leaders of the ‘Lublin Committee’, who at once agreed to the Curzon line, whereupon Stalin’s interest rapidly faded and could not be aroused by Osobka-Morawski’s disquisition on the internal policies of the Committee. All Stalin wanted was a ‘definite frontier’ of his own determining.

Towards noon on the morning of 14 October the Prime Minister met Mikolajczyk in order to clear up ‘the Polish position’ before talking to Stalin that same afternoon. Churchill opened a furious attack—‘It is the crisis of the fortunes of Poland’; the damage would be ‘irreparable’ if agreement could not be reached; the Russians would back the rival government; there was ‘unlimited means’ at the disposal of the Russians to liquidate opposition; Mikolajczyk would have to go to Poland and form a united government; ideas such as those of General Anders, who hoped that after Germany was defeated ‘the Russians will be beaten’, were ‘crazy—you cannot defeat the Russians’. But Mikolajczyk was not to be moved, and in a burst of anger the Prime Minister rounded on him: ‘I wash my hands of it … because of quarrels between Poles we are going to wreck the peace of Europe.… You will start another war in which 25 million lives will be lost. But you don’t care.’ Mikolajczyk countered this outburst by retorting that the fate of Poland was sealed at Teheran, to which Churchill retorted that, on the contrary, Poland was saved. As this storm subsided a draft paper on the territorial question was prepared, recommending the Curzon line in the east and Poland’s compensation from lands ‘to the east of the line of the Oder’, their possession by Poland to be guaranteed by Great Britain and the Soviet Union.

At 2.30 pm the Polish delegation called on the Prime Minister, who was waiting to fix an appointment with Stalin, who, he was told, was ‘away from town’ (which simply meant he was having a nap, or so the Prime Minister divined from his own habits). This Anglo-Polish encounter was ‘very violent’. Churchill lashed out at the delegation: ‘you have no sense of responsibility … you do not care about the future of Europe … it is cowardice on your part.’ It was impossible for Churchill to present this draft text as his own proposal, from which the Poles would formally dissent: ‘I am not going to worry Stalin … I feel as if I were in a lunatic asylum. I don’t know whether the British government will continue to recognize you.’ Great Britain stood powerless in the face of Russia, but the Poles talked of beating the Russians. The Poles, Churchill continued, ‘hate the Russians—I know you hate them.’ At this the meeting ended in some confusion as the Prime Minister hurried off to meet Stalin, bearing a draft British proposal which dealt with the western and eastern frontiers of Poland. Stalin did accept the proposed draft, but on 15 October the Polish delegation returned to their previous insistence on ‘Line B’ for eastern Galicia, which meant Polish retention of Lvov; inevitably this was rejected by Stalin, and Mikolajczyk refused to countenance public confirmation of the Curzon line. The British draft proposal of 16 October adopted the old formula of a ‘line of demarcation’ and applied it to the Curzon line, specifying also the formation of a ‘Polish Government of National Unity under Prime Minister Mikolajczyk’: Stalin simply scored out the term ‘line of demarcation’ and substituted ‘basis for the frontier’ and slid in an amendment making the new Polish government the product of an ‘agreement’ between the London Poles and the Lublin Committee. Everything came back to square one.

Since the Teheran conference the Americans had tried to push the idea of preliminary studies and even preliminary moves for Soviet–American collaboration against the time when the Soviet Union entered the war against Japan. While Stalin held out tantalizing hints about talks with Soviet air and ground forces commanders in the Soviet Far East, nothing of any consequence had transpired. The American attempt to trade four-engined bombers (which Stalin requested in large numbers to give the Soviet air force a strategic arm) for air bases in Siberia also had come to nothing, all on the eve of the British ministers’ visit to Moscow. On being given an account of the proceedings of the Quebec conference late in September, Stalin had at once pointed out that projected operations in the Pacific made no mention of eventual Soviet participation and asked whether the President still thought it essential that the Soviet Union should enter the war against Japan—if not, then he was prepared to abide by that decision. Both the British and American ambassadors had assured him that Soviet help was important, whereupon Stalin had intimated that he would arrange for General Deane to meet Soviet commanders to discuss problems relating to Far Eastern operations. Further American prodding had still not produced any tangible result when the Prime Minister and his party appeared in Moscow.

On the evening of 14 October, ‘All Poles day’ as Churchill described it, the two leaders and their staffs sat down to a review of the military situation, with Field-Marshal Alanbrooke presenting the Allied operations in Europe and General Deane covering the Japanese situation, outlining the American view of the Soviet role—their principal task being the defeat of the Japanese army in Manchuria. For planning purposes the American chiefs of staff needed information on the timing of Soviet-Japanese hostilities once Germany was defeated, the length of time needed for the offensive build-up of Soviet forces in the Far East and the capacity available on the Trans-Siberian railway to organize and support an American strategic air force. All Stalin wanted to know in response to this was how many divisions the Japanese possessed. The meeting then broke up, on the assumption that Red Army operations would be reviewed the following evening. The Prime Minister, however, was somewhat sceptical. At the end of September Stalin had evidently called for a full analysis of the requirements for concentrating and supporting Soviet troops in the Far East: since 1942 the post of deputy chief of the General Staff (Far East) had been in existence and in the Operations Administration Maj.-Gen. Shevchenko ran the ‘Far Eastern section’ until June 1943 when he changed places with the chief of staff of the Far Eastern Front, Maj.-Gen. P.A. Lomov, who moved back to the General Staff while Shevchenko went out to the Far Eastern command. The requisite data on Far Eastern operations had been assembled at the beginning of October and used by Stalin on the evening of 15 October, when General Antonov and Lt.-Gen. Shevchenko attended him. In a detailed reply to the American questions posed the night before, Stalin submitted that the Red Army would need sixty divisions in the Far East (thus doubling present strength), requiring three months to concentrate all the Soviet
forces once the war in the west was over: in view of the limitations on the capacity of the Trans-Siberian, even running it at full stretch (thirty-six trains a day) would not supply sixty divisions, for which reason two or three months’ stocks must be built up in advance. Though vague about the date, Stalin repeated to Harriman that once Germany was defeated Russia would take the offensive against Japan, subject to the Americans helping to stock reserve supplies and to ‘the clarification’ of certain political aspects of Soviet participation, a reference to Soviet claims. The Americans could also have air bases in the Soviet Maritime Provinces and the use of Petropavlovsk as a naval base. Field-Marshal Alanbrooke put Antonov through his paces during the briefing, and more than once Stalin fished his deputy Chief of the General Staff out of the difficulties posed by Alanbrooke’s leading questions. Stalin argued the supply problem rigorously, he ‘displayed an astounding knowledge of technical railway details’, he showed detailed knowledge of past campaigns in the theatre from which he drew ‘very sound deductions’. The Field-Marshal came away ‘more than ever impressed by his military ability’.

When a brief position paper, compiled at the prompting of Eden with the reluctant agreement of Harriman, reached Stalin, his indignation at this ‘disregard of secrecy’ boiled over; committing the discussions to paper could mean a leakage and that might in turn trigger off a Japanese attack resulting in the loss of Vladivostok: secretaries might well talk, whereas Stalin preferred his own style—‘I am a cautious old man.’ Yet the Prime Minister discerned that Stalin was not unduly anxious about the effect of his preparations on the Japanese; on the contrary, he seemed to relish the prospect of a ‘premature attack’ by the Japanese, if only to make the Russians fight the harder. A Japanese pre-emptive attack could have spelt disaster for the Soviet plans, but, for all his fury about the ‘breach of secrecy’, on 17 October at a third and final meeting Stalin enlarged in detail on Soviet strategic plans for the Far Eastern attack: Soviet forces would pin the Kwantung Army from the north and the east in Manchuria, while powerful mobile forces struck down from the area of lake Baikal through Mongolia in the direction of Kalgan and northern China, thus isolating the Kwantung Army from Japanese troops in China. Air bases in the Maritime provinces would be available to the Americans, who could start secret surveys in the area and at Petropavlovsk, the naval base also available to them; joint planning could begin at once. In return, the United States would supply the Soviet Union with the supplies necessary to sustain a two-month reserve for a million and a half men with 3,000 tanks and 5,000 aircraft—the equivalent of 860,410 tons of dry cargo and over 200,000 tons of liquid cargo, to be delivered by 30 June 1945. The bargain was astutely driven home.

The Moscow conference ended in a gush of good feeling. Even the talk between Stalin and Mikolajczyk engineered by the Prime Minister passed off smoothly on 18 October, though Stalin made it unpalatably plain that the Curzon line—‘this line, by the way, was not invented by us but by the then Allied powers … by the Americans, French, English, that is to say, by our enemies at that time’—
must stand as the frontier: there could be no quibble about ‘a line of demarcation’. The composition of the new government provided further cause for misgiving and dissension when the chairman of the Lublin committee, Bierut, demanded seventy-five per cent of the Cabinet posts in return for Mikolajczyk becoming premier. On this point Stalin remained studiously vague, but he made a point of reminding the British Prime Minister that only he and Molotov could be counted on to resist applying the big stick to Mikolajczyk. Even that did not damp Churchill’s optimism that a settlement might be promoted within the coming two weeks. Such was his report to the President on 22 October, though the euphoria quickly evaporated. For all practical purposes the British and the London Poles returned from Moscow empty-handed: the tactic of winning Stalin’s friendship to save the Poles had not worked. The signs of friendship were assiduously and ostentatiously cultivated, even on the part of Stalin, who made the almost unprecedented gesture of seeing the Prime Minister off at the airport, a rare compliment once bestowed on Matsuoka in April 1941. Stalin was also open-handed with his gifts of caviar, but no other concession was to be prized out of him.