World War II Behind Closed Doors (29 page)

It was demonstrably an impassioned report, but it is important to reiterate that, despite the clear moral sense that ran through it, O'Malley recognized that there was no viable alternative to the policy the government was already pursuing. In such circumstances it is easy to imagine how those who were charged with making the political decisions about the Allied response to Katyn, together with
a number of O'Malley's colleagues at the Foreign Office, were liable to find his note somewhat indulgent – to see it as a vain attempt to seek the moral high ground while simultaneously accepting that the course ahead would be one of almost cynical pragmatism.

And although those sentiments were never explicitly expressed, the confidential comments of some Foreign Office mandarins certainly show that O'Malley's note was – to say the least – unwelcome. For example, after calling it ‘a brilliant, unorthodox and disquieting despatch’, Sir William Denis Allen at the Foreign Office went on to warn that: ‘In effect Mr O'Malley urges that we should follow the example which the Poles themselves are unhappily so prone to offer us and in our diplomacy allow our heads to be governed by our hearts’.
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Meantime, Sir Frank Roberts noted that O'Malley's report pointed to difficulties that might occur when the victors came to dispense justice on the vanquished: ‘It is obviously a very awkward matter when we are fighting for a moral cause and when we intend to deal adequately with war criminals that our Allies should be open to accusations of this kind’.

But the response to O'Malley's report that offers us perhaps the greatest insight into the ‘sophisticated’ thinking of some members of the Allied elite came from the powerful Permanent Secretary and head of the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan: ‘I confess that, in cowardly fashion, I had rather turned my head away from the scene at Katyn – for fear of what I should find there…. I think no one has pointed out that, on a purely moral plane, these are not new. How many thousands of its citizens has the Soviet Union butchered?… Quite clearly, for the moment, there is nothing to be done. Of course it would be only honest to circulate it [O'Malley's report]. But as we all know (all admit) that the knowledge of this evidence cannot affect our course of action, or policy, is there any advantage in exposing more individuals than necessary to the spiritual conflict that a reading of the document excites?’

Cadogan's comments on the O'Malley report are a masterpiece of diplomatic realpolitik. But his inclination to suppress the document did not prevail, and the report was circulated first to the
Prime Minister and then widely within the British government. Churchill even asked for copies to be sent to the King and Mrs Churchill, calling it a ‘lamentable tale’.
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But there remained the question of whether the O'Malley report should be shown to President Roosevelt. The Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, wrote to Churchill on 16 July that ‘The story has not been sent to the President but the Embassy at Washington have a copy of the despatch and can send it round to the President if you wish. On reflection I should be against this: the document is pretty explosive and in some respects prejudiced… if it were to find its way into unauthorized hands the reactions on our relations with Russia would be serious’. Eden also added in his own handwriting the note: ‘The document might well be shown to the President when you next meet him’. Churchill clearly felt it important that Roosevelt saw the O'Malley report, and he sent it to him on 13 August.
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In the note he enclosed with the report, the Prime Minister called it ‘a grim, well written story, but perhaps a little too well written’. He added: ‘I should like to have it back when you have finished with it as we are not circulating it officially anyway’.

It is interesting to observe that both Eden and Churchill felt uneasy about the O'Malley report. As we have seen, Eden called it ‘in some respects prejudiced’ and Churchill ‘perhaps a little too well written’. But what exactly did they mean? It is likely, surely, that they judged it somewhat politically naive. And although admittedly it contained no inaccuracies or substantial errors of fact, the problem remained that it was simply inconvenient. O'Malley had shown that, on a balance of probabilities, the Soviets were guilty of an immense war crime. And that was news that few people at the time wanted to hear.

It is probable that President Roosevelt soon joined the growing band of people who wished O'Malley had never committed his views to paper. That judgement can be inferred from the chain of notes that followed the delivery of the report to him. Some months after Churchill sent him the report, his secretary wrote to the White House asking if it could be returned. Further polite requests followed. But the report never came back. Roosevelt
treated it, as he did so much material that he believed was ‘unhelpful’, with complete disdain. No comment from him on the O'Malley report has ever been found – an eloquent statement in its own right.

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH STALIN WORSENS

It is not hard, of course, to understand why the President of the United States might have wanted simply to wish away the issue of Katyn, because at the same time as the Western Allies were wrestling with this potentially explosive problem they were also walking towards a political crisis with Stalin over the wartime policy that continued to be closest to the Soviet dictator's heart – the second front, or rather the lack of it. In August 1942 Churchill had announced to Stalin that the Western Allies were planning ‘a very great operation in 1943’. This very specific promise had been designed to soften the blow that there was to be no second front in 1942. And now, five months into 1943, Stalin was demanding to know, once again, exactly when the second front would be opened.

Roosevelt was intensely aware of the deteriorating relationship with Stalin; and he decided that whilst he had nothing of substance to offer – he certainly could not guarantee the imminent launch of a second front – he could attempt to ‘handle’ the situation by using his strongest personal attribute: his charm. But it was obviously difficult to charm Stalin at a distance of several thousand miles, so Roosevelt focused his attention on attempting to persuade the Soviet leader to attend an intimate meeting at which the two of them could become personally acquainted. And to deliver this invitation the American President carefully selected a special envoy.

Joseph Davies was a wealthy lawyer from Wisconsin, and a personal friend of the President's. He had served as American ambassador to the Soviet Union in the late 1930s and witnessed personally some of the infamous show trials during the Stalinist purges. Significantly, he had formed the erroneous view that most
of those who were on trial had genuinely been guilty of plotting against the Soviet state – a view that others in the American embassy in Moscow found bizarre given the true nature of the regime.
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Davies wrote a book about his experiences as ambassador,
Mission to Moscow
, which was made into a Hollywood film in 1943. In both book and film, Stalin is portrayed as the father-figure of the Soviet Union – a giant of a man responsible for massive projects of industrialization. And the purges are glossed over as implicitly necessary for the security of the state. The film was condemned as crass pro-Soviet propaganda during the 1950s, but during the war it was a hugely influential piece of work.

Davies arrived at the Kremlin to hand-deliver Roosevelt's invitation on 20 May 1943. And so secret was the message that Davies carried that the current American ambassador, William Standley, was not allowed to accompany him into the meeting with Stalin. Standley was furious when Davies told him that he was excluded: ‘I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach’, he wrote. ‘In plain language he [Davies] meant that a letter, which not only Mr Stalin and Mr Molotov, but also the interpreter, Mr Pavlov, would read, by the President's orders, could not be read or even discussed in the presence of the American ambassador, the regularly accredited representative in the Soviet Union. A pretty state of affairs!’
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The next day Standley revealed his feelings to his wife: ‘I don't know anything about what was in the letter or what went on in the Kremlin. I lay awake half the night wondering what I should do; that's why I'm disgusted, more so than usual’.
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As soon as he was closeted in Stalin's office, Davies explained to the Soviet leader that, although he personally did not believe in Communism, he felt that ‘it was vital to the war and to a post-war peace, that our governments, despite ideological differences, could and should work together’.
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He then went on to reveal that he believed that since ‘Britain, after this war, would be financially “through” for a long time’, the reality of world politics was that the ‘post-war peace depended on the unity of our two countries in this situation’. Davies expressed sympathy over the delay of the second front, and remarked that it had been ‘most unfortunate’ that Stalin
had not been able to meet President Roosevelt personally. He said that whilst he had ‘only admiration and respect’ for Churchill and Eden, ‘they were both adherents of an Imperial Policy, ingrained in their history’. And it was because the President thought it so vital that a meeting be arranged between the two leaders that he, Davies, had come on this new mission and carried a personal and special message from Roosevelt. He then handed over the letter he had carried from Washington and Pavlov, Stalin's translator, read it out in Russian. ‘During Pavlov's translation’, recorded Davies, ‘Stalin didn't flicker an eyelash. Grim and forbidding, he looked down at a sheet of paper on which he was “doodling”’.

The letter related ‘solely to one subject’
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– the proposed meeting between Roosevelt and Stalin that summer. The President outlined some possible locations for this intimate encounter, remarking that ‘Iceland I do not like because for both me and you it involves rather difficult flights and in addition would make it, quite frankly, difficult not to invite Prime Minister Churchill at the same time’. So Roosevelt suggested that the best place to meet would be ‘either on your side or my side of Bering Straits’. Stalin, naturally enough one might think, immediately pounced on the one glaring revelation in the letter – the deliberate exclusion, and by implication deception, of Churchill. Why was the British Prime Minister not to be invited to the proposed meeting? Davies replied that, whilst Roosevelt and Churchill ‘were strong and loyal allies, who respected each other and admired each other’, they ‘did not always see eye to eye’. Davies reiterated that the President was a firm believer in the second front and that he thought it the ‘quickest and most direct way to defeat Hitler’.

The conversation then moved on to a discussion of the kind of post-war world that Stalin envisaged. And here the Soviet dictator used a form of words that would remain remarkably consistent through the next few years of the conflict. He said that the Soviet Union ‘wanted all European peoples to have the kind of government they themselves chose, free from the coercion of any outside power; that they [the Soviet Union] had no aggressive intent, and would perpetrate no aggression, external or internal, except as it
might be a military requirement to protect themselves. But they insisted that the governments of countries on their border should be really friendly, not professionally friendly and secretly hostile, prepared to stab the Soviets in the back, as they have in the past’. It was this formula – ‘really friendly, not professionally friendly’ – that was later to cause so much trouble.

Towards the end of the Davies meeting, Stalin announced that he would be ‘very glad’ to meet with Roosevelt. But although Davies managed to force from him a provisional date of 15 July, Stalin was careful to say that he could only confirm the exact details later, since his movements were circumscribed by ‘the military developments of the summer’. This was a theme he developed in his formal reply to Roosevelt's offer, in which he expressly linked his inability to confirm a date for the meeting with the threat to the Soviet Union of an imminent massive summer offensive from the Germans. The implicit link was also clear – that the Soviet Union continued to carry the brunt of the war on its own, and the Western Allies, by continually delaying the second front, were daily increasing the cost of the war to the Soviet people in both material and human terms.

At the same time as Davies was in Moscow for his meeting with Stalin, Churchill was in Washington for a series of meetings with Roosevelt at the Trident Conference. Significantly, during that conference Roosevelt did not tell Churchill about Davies' mission, but focused instead on the broad question of Allied military policy. And central, of course, to the discussion was the question of the second front. Here there were clear differences between the Western Allies. The Americans believed an invasion of northern France was the quickest way to end the war, but Churchill remained wary of a cross-Channel operation and pressed strongly for the Allied forces to continue to attack the ‘soft belly’ of the Axis instead. In practical terms this meant mounting an invasion of Italy during 1943. To Churchill, the dangers of a cross-Channel operation were not so much the commonly perceived problem of establishing a foothold in northern France after landing on the beaches, but rather the danger of a subsequent influx of German
military resources from the East via their ‘excellent road and rail communications’. Later that year, in October 1943, Churchill revealed his fears that, if the Allies landed in France, the Germans would be able to ‘inflict on us a military disaster greater than that of Dunkirk. Such a disaster would result in the resuscitation of Hitler and the Nazi regime’.
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Churchill had even previously wondered whether an invasion of Germany might be necessary in order to win the war. He remembered how Germany had collapsed from within at the end of the First World War, broken by blockade while German soldiers still remained in France; and perhaps a similar result could be achieved in the current conflict by destroying Germany from the air. ‘In the days when we were fighting alone’, Churchill wrote on 21 July 1942, ‘we answered the question: “How are you going to win the war?” by saying: “We will shatter Germany by bombing”’.
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And a few days later, on 29 July 1942, Churchill had remarked to his colleague Clement Attlee: ‘Continuous reflection leaves me with the conclusion that, upon the whole, our best chance of winning the war is with the big bombers. It certainly will be several years before British and American land forces will be capable of beating the Germans on even terms in the open field’.
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