The public was exhilarated by the initial successes, so much so that when Churchill spoke in the Commons on June 8 he felt the need to advise MPs to give 'strong warnings against over-optimism' when they spoke in their constituencies, and to combat the idea 'that these things are going to be settled with a run'. Great dangers lay behind, but 'enormous exertions lie before us'. On June 9 Churchill learned of the extent of those exertions, when he was told that although the British and American forces had linked up their beach-heads, the Americans were already twenty-four hours behind schedule, and that heavy German opposition had been encountered 'along the whole British front'. Indeed the British line had remained virtually static for twenty-four hours, and Caen, the vital objective for that day, was as yet beyond their grasp. Worst of all, insufficient land had been liberated to set up air-strips, with the result that all air support had to come from bases in England. This was a blow, leading Churchill to wonder whether the Allies might not have to be content for some time to come with securing the Cherbourg and Brest Peninsulas, and no more; 'the smaller and larger lunette', he called them.
Despite a tenacious German defence, nearly 400,000 men were ashore by midday on June 10. 'One united heave,' Churchill telegraphed that day to Tito, 'and we may be freed from the agonies of war, and the menace of tyranny.' In Italy, Alexander was driving northwards the remains of twenty-three German divisions. In Russia, Stalin had launched the first phase of his promised summer offensive. On the morning of June 12, Churchill's train took him to Dover, where he crossed the Channel by destroyer, then transferred to the barge of the Admiral commanding the British naval forces at the beach-head, Admiral Vian of Cossack fame. On board the barge, he sang a song he had learned during his schooldays at Harrow. It was about the Spanish Armada and in it were the lines,
But snug in her hive, the Queen was alive,
And Buzz was the word in the Island.
The sailors listened, but to Churchill's disappointment, he told the boys of Harrow seven years later, 'not one of them knew the words'. From the barge, he clambered on to an American amphibious army truck which ran him up the beach at Courseulles. Montgomery met him at the beach and drove him by jeep to his headquarters château at Cruelly, five miles inland and about three miles from the front. The château had been heavily bombed the night before. 'I told him,' Churchill later wrote, 'he was taking too much of a risk if he made a habit of such proceedings. Anything can be done once or for a short time, but custom, repetition, prolongation, is always to be avoided when possible in war.' Returning to Courseulles, Churchill saw a German air raid on the harbour. Then he re-embarked in Vian's barge and sailed along the shore, watching landing-craft unloading lorries, tanks and guns. West of Hamel he saw an artificial harbour being prepared, with its caissons, wave-dampeners and floating piers. Close by was a monitor with 14-inch guns, firing inland. 'Winston said he had never been on one of His Majesty's ships engaging the enemy and insisted on going aboard,' Brooke, who was with him, noted in his diary. 'Luckily we could not climb up owing to seaweed on the bilges, as it would have been a very noisy entertainment had we succeeded. Then we returned to our destroyer and went right back to the east end of the beach where several ships were bombarding the Germans.'
As the destroyer was about to turn, Churchill said to Vian, 'Since we are so near, why shouldn't we have a plug at them ourselves before we go home?'
'Certainly,' Vian replied, and within a few moments all his guns were firing on the coast. 'We were of course well within the range of their artillery,' Churchill later wrote, 'and the moment we had fired Vian made the destroyer turn about and depart at the highest speed. We were soon out of danger and passed through the cruiser and battleship lines. This is the only time I have ever been on board a naval vessel when she fired "in anger"-if it can so be called. I admired the Admiral's sporting spirit.'
On the three-hour sea voyage back to Portsmouth, Churchill slept. When he returned to London he was told that 13,000 German soldiers had already been taken prisoner. That evening, however, while Churchill was dining with Clementine and Mary, Captain Pim came in to report that the first German flying bombs were on their way. During the night twenty-seven were despatched across the Channel. Four reached London, and two people were killed. Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff decided to divert aircraft needed for Normandy to bomb the launching-sites, of which sixty-seven had been identified by June 14, but bad weather over the Calais area impeded the counter-attacks. On the following night, fifty flying bombs exploded in the London area. When one of Churchill's Private Secretaries, Christopher Dodds, left the Annexe with John Peck to see if anything was visible, 'we met the PM who had already been out to see for himself'. It was an episode, Dodds later recalled, 'exemplifying the PM's energy and (hair-raising!) disregard for personal danger'. Churchill's comment, in a telegram to Stalin, was, 'We had a noisy night.'
On June 18, sixty-three service personnel and fifty-eight civilians were killed when a flying bomb fell on the Guards Chapel during a church service. That night, at a Staff Conference, and on the following night at a specially convened War Cabinet Committee, Churchill and his advisers discussed the measures needed to prevent public panic. 'He was at his best,' the First Sea Lord, Admiral Cunningham, noted in his diary, 'and said the matter had to be put robustly to the populace, that their tribulations were part of the battle in France, and that they should be very glad to share in the soldiers' dangers.' It was agreed that when the flying bombs came, as they did at every hour of the day and night, the air-raid sirens should be sounded as little as possible. 'The PM said one must have sleep,' Cunningham noted, 'and you either woke well-rested, or in a better land!'
More than half a million Allied soldiers were ashore in Normandy. But still the Germans held Caen. In London, 526 civilians had been killed by the end of the first week of the flying-bomb attacks. Almost permanent conferences were being held in Churchill's Map Room to determine the best means of countering the attacks; of seven hundred flying bombs sent over in the first week, two hundred had been shot down by anti-aircraft guns and fighters. To reduce the danger of one method of defence impeding the other, Churchill proposed that the fighters should have a 'free run' by day and the anti-aircraft guns by night. The new weapon was an ever-present danger; while dictating a telegram to Roosevelt on June 20, about post-war Anglo-American oil policy, Churchill broke off his line of argument to tell the President, 'At this moment a flying bomb is approaching this dwelling.' After continuing his dictation a few moments longer he added, 'Bomb has fallen some way off.'
***
An acrimonious dispute now arose between the British and Americans. It had its origins in the Italian war zone. Four French and three American divisions were about to be taken away from Alexander's army in Italy for the landing in the South of France, planned for August 15. On June 15 the Joint Planning Committee in London, on the basis of the German Army's own top-secret signals, had advised the British Chiefs of Staff that the South of France landing would be a less effective blow to the German forces than renewing the advance in Italy at full strength, and launching an amphibious landing at the head of the Adriatic, to be followed by an advance into northern Yugoslavia. At a Staff Conference on June 22 Churchill supported this recommendation, telling the Chiefs of Staff that, on the basis of the top-secret information available of Germany's own plans, an amphibious landing 'at the head of the Adriatic in the Trieste area' would be more effective than a South of France landing in drawing German divisions away from Normandy. It was clear from the Enigma decrypts that the Germans would not defend the South of France with any real zeal, but they would defend the passes leading from Italy to Austria with tenacity, sending down more and more forces to prevent an Allied breakthrough from the south.
Alexander was eager to continue his attack northward through Italy. General Maitland Wilson, commanding the British Forces in the Middle East, was keen to carry out an amphibious landing at the head of the Adriatic, and strike eastward, first to Zagreb, then towards Austria and the Danube. Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff pressed Roosevelt and the American Chiefs for an amphibious landing at the head of the Adriatic. On June 28 their view seemed to be reinforced by a top-secret German naval signal, sent early that day and decrypted at Bletchley the same morning: a directive from Hitler himself which made it clear that he intended to hold the Apennines at all cost. 'And now we have the most marvellous information,' Brooke noted in his diary, 'indicating clearly the importance Hitler attaches to northern Italy.' It would be a 'grave strategic error', Brooke, Portal and Cunningham telegraphed to the American Chiefs of Staff later that day, 'not to take advantage of destroying the German forces at present in Italy and thus drawing further reserves on to this front'.
That day Churchill telegraphed to Roosevelt to remind him of 'how you spoke to me at Teheran about Istria'. He also sent Roosevelt a copy of the decrypted German naval signal. But on the following day Roosevelt rejected the Adriatic plan, telling Churchill that for 'purely political considerations' in the United States he would never survive 'even a slight setback' in Normandy if it became known 'that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans'. Churchill hastened to point out that the new plan had nothing to do with the Balkans. At the Teheran Conference 'you emphasised to me the possibilities of a move eastward when Italy was conquered, and specifically mentioned Istria. No one involved in these discussions has ever thought of moving armies into the Balkans; but Istria and Trieste in Italy are strategic and political positions, which you saw yourself very clearly might exercise profound and widespread reactions, especially now after the Russian advances.'
Roosevelt proposed putting the dispute to Stalin. Churchill was against this, pointing out that on a 'long-term political view' Stalin might well prefer the British and Americans to do their fighting in France 'and that East, Middle and southern Europe should fall naturally into his control.'
Churchill decided to go to see Roosevelt to put the Adriatic plan to him in person. On June 30 he gave orders for both his flying boat and his Lancaster bomber to be made ready for a flight across the Atlantic. But Roosevelt had made up his mind; the South of France landing would go ahead, and Alexander's army in Italy must therefore be reduced in strength. 'What can I do Mr President,' Churchill telegraphed on July 1, 'when your Chiefs of Staff insist on casting aside our Italian offensive campaign, with all its dazzling possibilities, relieving Hitler of all his anxieties in the Po basin (vide Boniface), and when we are to see the integral life of this campaign drained off into the Rhone Valley in the belief that it will in several months carry effective help to Eisenhower so far away in the north?' Churchill added, 'I am sure that if we could have met, as I so frequently proposed, we should have reached a happy agreement.'
Roosevelt would not change his mind. Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff, and their two senior military commanders in the Mediterranean, were forced to abandon their preferred strategy. Alexander would not be allowed to exploit a known German weakness, and a classic opportunity. It was a low ebb in the Anglo-American wartime relationship.
***
By June 28 the number of Allied soldiers killed since the Normandy landings had reached 7,704, of whom 4,868 were American, 2,443 British and 393 Canadian. In London the flying bombs had exacted a heavy toll; in the first sixteen days' bombardment 1,935 civilians had been killed. On June 30 Churchill and his wife spent the day visiting anti-aircraft units active in the battle against the flying bomb. Elizabeth Layton noted, 'It really was rather fun, Master and Mistress sitting amid the corn, cameras snapping on every side, rather anxious Generals rushing about.'
'Is there anything on the cards?' asked Churchill, but no bombs came over. On the following day he learned that Soviet forces, advancing along the whole Eastern Front, had in a single battle near Bobruisk killed 16,000 German soldiers and taken 18,000 prisoners. 'This is the moment,' he telegraphed to Stalin, 'to tell you how immensely we are all here impressed with the magnificent advances of the Russian Armies which seem, as they grow in momentum, to be pulverising the German Armies which stand between you and Warsaw, and afterwards Berlin.' Churchill added that in Normandy more than three-quarters of a million troops were now ashore, and 50,000 Germans had been taken prisoner. 'The enemy is bleeding on every front at once, and I agree with you that this must go on to the end.'
***
On July 6 the flying-bomb death toll reached 2,752. It was a weapon, Churchill told the Commons that day, 'literally and essentially indiscriminate in its nature, purpose and effect'. That night, because of the danger of flying bombs, the Staff Conference was held in the underground Central War Rooms. 'There is no doubt the PM was in no state to discuss anything,' Andrew Cunningham wrote in his diary, and he added, 'Very tired and too much alcohol.' Eden, who was also present, called it a 'deplorable evening'. When Churchill began to criticise Montgomery, noting that even Eisenhower had called him 'over-cautious', Brooke lost his temper at Churchill's criticism.
When the meeting was over Churchill returned above ground to the Annexe, for his nightly dictation. 'PM in mellow mood and quite chatty for him,' noted Marian Holmes. 'Loads of work and got to bed finally at 3.40 am.' In search for some possible means of retaliation that might force the Germans to call off the flying-bomb attacks, Churchill dictated a minute that night to the Chiefs of Staff about the possible use of gas. 'I should be prepared to do anything,' he wrote, 'that might hit the Germans in a murderous place. I may certainly have to ask you to support me in using poison gas. We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany in such a way that most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention. We could stop all work at the flying-bomb starting points.'
Churchill had in mind mustard gas 'from which nearly everyone recovers'. He would use it only if 'it was life or death for us' or if it would 'shorten the war by a year'. To this end it might even be used on the Normandy beach-head. 'It is absurd to consider morality on this topic,' he wrote, 'when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war the bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing, as she does between long and short skirts for women.'
It would be several weeks or even months, Churchill added, 'before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas'. In the meantime he wanted the matter studied, he wrote, 'in cold blood by sensible people, and not by that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across, now here, now there'. The enquiries were made. It emerged that the Air Staff had already made plans for one-fifth of Britain's bomber effort to be employed on dropping gas, if such a form of warfare were decided on. But the military experts to whom Churchill remitted the question doubted whether gas, of the essentially non-lethal kind envisaged by Churchill, could have a decisive effect, and no gas raids were made. 'Clearly,' he commented, 'I cannot make headway against the parsons and the warriors at the same time.'
***
News had just reached London of the mass murder in specially designed gas chambers of more than two and a half million Jews at Auschwitz, which had hitherto been identified only as a slave-labour camp. In early July it became clear that more than half a million Hungarian Jews were in the process of being deported to their deaths there. When the Zionist leader Dr Chaim Weizmann appealed to Eden for the bombing of the railway lines to the camp, Eden showed his appeal to Churchill, who minuted that same day, July 7, 'Get anything out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me if necessary.' Weizmann also asked for the strongest possible public protest. 'I am entirely in accord with the biggest outcry possible,' was Churchill's immediate response.
The outcry was made at once, in the form of considerable press coverage of the killings, and radio broadcasts from London to the Hungarian railway workers, warning them that they would be considered war criminals if they continued to participate in the deportations. Within forty-eight hours the Hungarian Government forced the German authorities in Hungary to end the deportations. More than a hundred thousand Jews had been saved.
Before news of the halt to the Hungarian deportations was known, Churchill rejected a Gestapo offer to 'negotiate' the release of a million Hungarian Jews in return for trucks, food and money. The offer was a ruse by the Gestapo, intended to give the Jews of Hungary a false hope of rescue, at the very moment when more than 400,000 of them were being deported to their deaths; it was 'a naked piece of blackmail on threats of murder', Churchill told Eden on July 11. As for the murder of Jews by the Nazis, he added: 'There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved.'
***
On July 10 Allied forces entered Caen; that day Brooke found Churchill 'in good and affable mood'. But there was distressing news later that day from the Home Front: ten thousand houses had already been destroyed in one month of flying-bomb attacks, Churchill told Stalin, 'as compared with 63,000 during the whole of the 1940/41 blitz'. He was quite prepared, he told the flying-bomb committee of the War Cabinet that evening, to 'threaten the heaviest possible scale of gas attack on Germany if the indiscriminate attack on London was not stopped'. But he was not convinced that the 'present scale' of the attack on London 'justified such a serious step'.
On July 18 Churchill learned from his Intelligence experts that the Germans had developed an even more effective weapon than the flying bomb; a rocket which could carry a bomb weighing more than eleven tons, capable of a speed of 4,000 miles an hour, and able to reach London within four minutes of being launched from northern Europe. The flying bomb, or V-1, with its aeroplane engine and wings, was ten times slower, and much easier to intercept, than this new rocket-propelled bomb, known as the V-2.
As well as the rocket danger, there was an ever-present political worry: as Soviet forces crossed into central Poland, Churchill wanted a meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin, to try to preserve some form of democratic government for Poland. 'I would brave the reporters of Washington or the mosquitos of Alaska!' he told Roosevelt, in trying to persuade the President to agree to a meeting. He also suggested the Scottish port of Invergordon. 'The weather might well be agreeable in Scotland at that time,' he wrote. But Roosevelt, after initial keenness, declined, worried about the coming Presidential election. 'As you know,' he told Churchill, 'domestic problems are unfortunately difficult for three months to come.'
In Normandy, a joint Anglo-American offensive was poised to break out of the bridgehead. Relieved by the prospect of an accelerated advance through northern France, Churchill flew to Cherbourg on July 20, was shown an unfinished flying-bomb site that had been aligned on Bristol, and visited the landing-beaches. While Churchill explored the scenes of victory, Hitler, at his headquarters more than a thousand miles to the east, was injured by a bomb placed under the table on which he was studying a battle map. An Army plot to kill him had failed; terrible retribution was wreaked on all who had taken part in it, or had shown sympathy to those who wished to see him removed from power. Major Ewald von Kleist, who had visited Churchill at Chartwell in 1938, was arrested; the letter which Churchill had written to him, at Kleist's request, was found among his papers. Kleist was executed. Rommel, recovering from an Allied fighter attack on his car in Normandy, and distantly involved in the plot, was given the choice of execution or suicide. He chose suicide.
Continuing his visit to the Normandy beach-head, Churchill slept that night on board the light-cruiser Enterprise. On July 21 he called on Montgomery at his headquarters at Blay, visited a field hospital and a field bakery, and, at an artillery battery near Villers Bocage, 'had rounds fired', its regimental history noted, 'until he was satisfied that he understood the gun drill'. The history added, 'He gave great joy to the batmen and cooks and fatigue men of 276 Battery by stopping his car on the way back and having his photograph taken with them.' After Churchill had left, the regiment's commanding officer wrote to him: 'I know how much you enjoy getting near the battle, but I would like to tell you how tremendously pleased, heartened and honoured every soldier was by your visit. It means very much to them that you should wish to come and see them at work in their gun pits.'
Churchill slept that night again aboard the Enterprise. Then he returned to shore, lunched with Montgomery, made a tour of the landing-strips in the battle area, and was given a flight in a captured German aircraft. That evening he flew back to Britain, where he learned that Stalin had established a Polish Committee of National Liberation at Lublin, on what was intended to be Polish soil after the war. The Polish Government in London was excluded from this Committee. It was of the 'utmost importance', Churchill telegraphed at once to Roosevelt, 'that we do not desert the orthodox Polish Government'. The 'great hope' was 'fusion of some kind between Poles relying on Russia, and Poles relying on USA and GB'.
On July 31, with Red Army units only fifteen miles from Warsaw, the Poles rose in revolt against the German occupation forces. For many Poles the hope was to establish an independent Polish authority in the capital before the Russians arrived. On August 4, German forces, amounting to a division and a half, began to attack the insurgents, and the Hermann Goering Division was summoned from Italy, together with two SS divisions. That day, Russian air activity over Warsaw ceased. Churchill, who had just agreed to a Polish request to drop ammunition and supplies into the city, appealed to Stalin to help the Poles. Stalin refused to help, replying derisively about the ability of the Poles to resist. Yet Polish resistance was to continue for more than a month.
***
On August 4 Eisenhower lunched with Churchill and outlined a proposal for the cancellation of the South of France landing due to begin in eleven days' time, and for switching the forces assembled for it to Brittany. This change of plan would bring substantial Allied forces to the flank of the armies in Normandy. On August 5 Churchill flew to France, intending to put the American plan to Montgomery, whose own offensive would thereby be much enhanced. But as his plane reached the Cherbourg Peninsula it was recalled to Britain; fog on the landing-strip at which he was expected had caused the preceding plane to crash and all its occupants had been killed.
Churchill flew back to southern England, to Eisenhower's 'Advance Command Post' at Portsmouth, where it quickly emerged that Eisenhower had unexpectedly changed his mind, and now wanted the South of France landing to go ahead as planned, but that his Chief of Staff, General Bedell Smith, still favoured a Brittany landing. Churchill at once appealed to Hopkins to seek Roosevelt's approval for the Brittany plan. On the following morning, while awaiting a reply from Hopkins, he flew back to Normandy, to try once more to put the plan to Montgomery. But on reaching Montgomery's new headquarters in the Forêt de Cerisy, he found that the battle there was at its height, and sensing the tension, cut short his visit after an hour and returned to Britain.
Awaiting Churchill when he reached the Annexe was a telegram from Hopkins. Although he had not yet heard from Roosevelt, he was certain that the President's answer 'will be in the negative'. That afternoon, the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington put the case for the Brittany plan to the American Chiefs of Staff. 'We could not budge them,' they reported back to London. A day later, Roosevelt telegraphed to Churchill that he wanted no change of plan. The Brittany landing was dead; the South of France landing would go ahead as planned.
In Italy, as a result of the build-up for the South of France landing, Alexander's army had been reduced by seven divisions. Yet he still took the offensive, and on August 10 forced the Germans to withdraw from Florence. That night Churchill flew from London to Algiers, on his way to Italy. He wanted to be with Alexander, to see something of the battle, and to discuss the many problems now besetting the Mediterranean operations. 'I do hope you will get a little rest with the brush as well as with the binoculars,' Oliver Lyttelton wrote to him.
While in Algiers, Churchill had a long talk with Randolph, who was still in pain as a result of a plane crash while making a second journey to Partisan-held Yugoslavia, and suffering also from the blow of a disintegrating marriage. 'No reference was made by either of us to family matters,' Churchill wrote to Clementine. 'He is a lonely figure by no means recovered as far as walking is concerned. Our talk was about politics, French and English, about which there was plenty of friendly badinage & argument.' Randolph urged his father to reverse his recent refusal to meet de Gaulle. 'After all,' he wrote a few days later, 'he is a frustrated man representing a defeated country. You as the unchallenged leader of England and the main architect of victory can afford to be magnanimous without fear of being misunderstood.'
From Algiers, Churchill flew to Naples, where he was General Maitland Wilson's guest at the Villa Rivalta, overlooking the Bay. While there he received an appeal from the Poles still fighting in Warsaw, and still denied help by Stalin. 'They implore machine guns and ammunition,' Churchill telegraphed to Stalin from Naples on August 12. 'Can you not give them some further help, as the distance from Italy is so very great?' Stalin declined. That day twenty-eight British and Polish pilots made the fourth 1,400-mile round trip from southern Italy to Warsaw. Three planes were lost. The nearest fully operational Soviet airstrip to Warsaw was less than fifty miles away.
During August 12 Churchill received Tito at the Villa Rivalta, urging him to establish a democratic system in Yugoslavia 'based on the peasants'. In the afternoon he went by Admiral's barge to a small beach where he bathed in the waters of a hot spring. On the return journey he was recognised by two convoys of troops preparing for the South of France landing. As he passed the cheering troops he sent them a message wishing them well. 'They did not know,' he later wrote, 'that if I had had my way they would be sailing in a different direction.'
That night Churchill received an invitation from Roosevelt for a meeting in Quebec in September, without Stalin. Churchill accepted. On the following day he went by boat to Capri, to view the Tiberius rock over which the Roman Emperor had thrown his victims, and to see the Blue Grotto, by whose azure waters he was entranced. Then, guarded by a dozen American military policemen, he undressed on the rocks and swam. During lunch in a restaurant on the island he was 'in holiday mood', wrote one of the Englishmen present, 'and talked about chewing-gum defacing the features, demonstrated how to light a cigar without interrupting his conversation, and enquired about the arrangements for the Capri water supply'. Returning to Naples, he presided over a conference between Tito and his fellow Yugoslav leader Dr Ivan Subasic, the Ban of Croatia, persuading them to accept a 'fusion and cessation' of the civil war.
On August 14 Churchill again swam, this time at a point beyond Cumae in the open sea. After he had made a V-sign, on leaving, to an enthusiastic group of Italians at the pier, Churchill asked one of the Englishmen on board:
'D'you think they like that?'
'Yes, though I believe the sign also has an improper connotation in Mediterranean lands.'
'I know that, but I have superseded that one-V for Victory.'
After returning to Naples for lunch, Churchill flew to Corsica. There, in Ajaccio harbour, he boarded the Royal Scotsman, a former merchant ship carrying six assault landing-craft. That night, while he slept on board, eleven Allied divisions landed in southern France. At eight in the morning of August 15 he transferred to the destroyer Kimberley, which steamed towards the coast, where shortly after midday 'we found ourselves in an immense concourse of ships,' Churchill wrote to Clementine, 'all sprawled along twenty miles of coast with poor St Tropez in the centre. It had been expected that the bombardment would continue all day, but the air and the ships had practically silenced the enemy guns by 8 o'clock. This rendered the proceedings rather dull.'
Churchill looked at 'the panorama of the beautiful shore with smoke rising from many fires started by the shelling, and artificial smoke being loosed by the landing troops and the landing-craft drawn up upon the shore'. But it was from 'a long way off', and he was disappointed. Had he known beforehand what the conditions would be, he told Clementine, he would have requested a picket boat and gone 'with perfect safety very much nearer to the actual beaches'.
Opposition in the air was light, at sea there was none, and on land very little and very brief. In terms of what the Americans had expected of these landings, a massive switch of German forces from northern France, they were the greatest failure of the war in the West. Churchill told the King, 'Your Majesty knows my opinion of the strategy, but the perfect execution of the plan was deeply interesting.'
Returning to Naples by sea, on the morning of August 16 Churchill studied a series of German top-secret messages about the imminent German withdrawal from Greece. He at once obtained the approval of the Chiefs of Staff to send a British military force to Athens at the earliest possible moment to forestall the Greek Communists there. Then, after communicating this decision to Roosevelt, he went for another swim, this time off the island of Procida. 'We have had altogether four bathes,' he wrote to Clementine, 'which have done me all the good in the world. I feel greatly refreshed and am much less tired than when I left England.'
On August 17 Churchill drove through the devastated town of Cassino, and then flew over the monastery which, as the main German fortification, had been pulverised by Allied bombardment. Then he flew north to Alexander's headquarters at Siena. As the weather was too bad to visit the front with any chance of seeing anything, for three days he visited the troops in the rear areas. Near Livorno he fired the first shot of a howitzer that had been set on a German artillery position north of Pisa. On August 20, the weather having improved, Alexander took Churchill to a forward artillery observation point about two miles from the front line, on the Arno River. Then he flew back to Naples, where dinner was enlivened by a German aircraft making repeated low-level attacks on the port before it was brought down and destroyed by naval gunfire.
Churchill's thoughts were still on the folly of denuding Alexander's army for the South of France landing. With half of what had been taken away, he later wrote, the Allies 'could have broken into the Valley of the Po, with all the gleaming possibilities and prizes which lay open towards Vienna. That evening Alexander maintained his soldierly cheerfulness, but it was in a sombre mood that I went to bed. In these great matters, failing to gain one's way is no escape from the responsibility for an inferior solution.'
On August 21 Churchill flew from Naples to Rome for a day of discussion about the proposed British military expedition to Greece. 'Winston in very good heart,' Macmillan noted that night. On the following afternoon the discussion was about the political future of Italy. 'Winston was like a dog worrying at a bone,' Macmillan wrote. 'But his peculiar method does succeed in eliciting the truth.' Churchill argued in favour of 'a steady process of relaxation of control' in Italy, which should no longer be an occupied enemy state, but a 'friendly co-belligerent'.
'We finally broke up at 7 pm,' Macmillan wrote, 'all but Winston completely exhausted.' That night after dinner Churchill had a long talk with Brigadier Maurice Lush of the Allied Control Commission, who found the Prime Minister cheerful, 'for he was, next day, continuing his participation in the battle with Alex and his men.' Churchill told Lush that he 'hoped so much to take part in the first stages of an autumnal breakthrough' which would enable Alexander 'to swing to the right, overcome Austria, and so alter history'. Then, Lush later recalled, 'he gave me a cheerful "good night" at 2 am'.
On the following day Churchill telegraphed to the Chiefs of Staff that if Alexander could break through into the Po Valley, 'I certainly contemplate a move into the Adriatic.' And to Smuts he confided two days later that he still hoped Alexander's army would reach 'the great city', Vienna. 'Even if the war comes to a sudden end, there is no reason why our armour should not slip through and reach it as soon as we can.' He had told Alexander that in the event of the war ending suddenly he should 'be ready for a dash with armoured cars Vienna was the prize.
On August 23 Churchill flew from Rome to Alexander's headquarters at Siena, where he authorised the establishment of a Jewish Brigade Group to fight as an integral part of Alexander's army. 'This will give great satisfaction to the Jews when it is published,' he wrote, 'and surely they of all other races have a right to strike at the Germans as a recognisable body.' On the following day he visited the New Zealand Division. On August 25, as he worked at Alexander's headquarters, de Gaulle entered Paris.
That day Alexander launched a new assault on the German defences. Churchill went with him to a high point overlooking the battle zone. 'The whole front of the Eighth Army offensive was visible,' he later wrote. 'But apart from the smoke puffs of shells bursting seven or eight thousand yards away in scattered fashion, there was nothing to see.' Then, after a picnic, the two men went further forward, to an old castle overlooking a valley. 'Here one certainly could see all that was possible,' Churchill recalled. 'The Germans were firing with rifles and machine guns from thick scrub on the farther side of the valley, about five hundred yards away. Our front line was beneath us. The firing was desultory and intermittent. But this was the nearest I got to the enemy and the time I heard the most bullets in the Second World War.'
On August 27 Churchill flew back to Naples for two days' more talks about the impending British expedition to Greece. He also wrote a message to the Italian people, setting out what he called 'one or two quite simple, practical tests' by which one could answer the question 'What is freedom?' There were in fact seven questions, which were 'the title deeds on which a new Italy could be founded'. The questions were:
Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of opposition and criticism of the Government of the day?
Have the people the right to turn out a Government of which they disapprove, and are constitutional means provided by which they can make their will apparent?
Are their courts of justice free from violence by the Executive and from threats of mob violence, and free of all association with particular political parties?
Will these courts administer open and well-established laws which are associated in the human mind with the broad principles of decency and justice?
Will there be fair play for poor as well as for rich, for private persons as well as Government officials?
Will the rights of the individual, subject to his duties to the State, be maintained and asserted and exalted?
Is the ordinary peasant or workman, who is earning a living by daily toil and trying to bring up a family, free from the fear that some grim police organisation under the control of a single Party like the Gestapo, started by the Nazi and Fascist Parties, will tap him on the shoulder and pack him off without fair or open trial to bondage or ill-treatment?
These questions, The Times commented, contained words 'both of encouragement and warning'. They also contained the essence of Churchill's political philosophy.
That day Churchill left Naples by air for London, having to fly first to Rabat, where, as thunderstorms were reported further north, he spent the night. Then, on the morning of August 29, he flew from Rabat to London. During the flight he was taken ill, his temperature rising to 103. It was pneumonia again. Two nurses were called in, a lung specialist took blood tests and X-rays, and M & B was administered. 'It would be a tragedy if anything were to happen to him now,' Sir Andrew Cunningham, who saw him that night, wrote in his diary. 'With all his faults (& he is the most infuriating man) he has done a great job for the country, & besides there is no one else.'
As Churchill recovered, slowly, in bed at the Annexe, the Germans had lost control of much of northern France, and had been driven back across the Belgian border. 'How wonderful it is to see our people leaping out at last after all their hard struggles,' he telegraphed to Montgomery, recently promoted Field Marshal, on September 2. In Italy that day, Alexander's forces entered Pisa and pierced the Gothic Line defences, but were confronted by eight new German divisions sent hastily to stop any further thrust northward. As an answer to the one question that mattered in the Italian campaign, 'Who is containing whom?', Italy continued to be a drain on German resources.
***
The Warsaw insurgents were still fighting against impossible odds, and without Soviet help. On September 3 Churchill suggested to Roosevelt that they should both tell Stalin that, if he did not at least allow British and American aircraft to use Soviet air bases near Warsaw to ferry in help to the insurgents, Britain and America 'would take certain drastic action in respect of our own supplies to Russia'. But Roosevelt did not want to upset Stalin, from whom, unknown to Churchill, he was even then asking permission to use Soviet air bases in Siberia as staging-posts for American bombing raids against Japan.
Churchill was so angered by the Soviet refusal to help Warsaw that on September 4, despite a recurrence of fever, he left his sick bed in the above-ground Annexe and descended to the Central War Rooms. The whole War Cabinet shared his anger. But they were reluctant to do anything to break up still further the already fragile working of the alliance, limiting their protest to a collective telegram to Stalin, stating that the Soviet action in denying help to Warsaw 'seems to us at variance with the spirit of Allied co-operation to which you and we attach so much importance both for the present and for the future'.
The Warsaw uprising was being systematically and savagely crushed and thousands of Poles executed. It was to be more than four months before the Russians entered the capital.
***
On the morning of September 5 Churchill left London by train for Greenock, on the Clyde; that afternoon he boarded the Queen Mary. A nurse, Dorothy Pugh, and a penicillin expert, Brigadier Whitby, were both on board. During the voyage Churchill learned that those American servicemen on board, who were going on leave, were having to lose a week's leave because of the week's wait at Greenock for Churchill to come on board. He at once telegraphed to Roosevelt to ask if the week could be made up to them. 'It would be a pleasure to me if this could be announced before the end of the voyage and their anxiety relieved,' Churchill wrote. Roosevelt agreed.
Churchill was not feeling well; as a result of his visit to Italy he had been advised to continue a course of malaria pills for another two weeks, and these pills seemed to upset him. On September 8, after a Staff Conference on board, Brooke wrote of how Churchill 'looked old, unwell and depressed. Evidently found it hard to concentrate and kept holding his head between his hands.' At the conference Churchill warned the Chiefs of Staff of his concern that their proposal to divert forces from Italy to the Far East, a proposal based on the assumption that a German collapse was likely before the end of 1944, was based on a dangerous assumption, as 'German garrisons were showing stout resistance at most of the ports'. The Americans had failed to take St Nazaire and had been checked at Nancy. The Germans were also putting up a 'stout resistance' in the forts around Antwerp, 'a port we badly needed'.
That day, as the Queen Mary continued westward, British forces entered Brussels. But other news bore out Churchill's warning: German forces were holding Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk, and had retaken Metz. In the East, Stalin's advance knew no such setbacks; on September 9 Soviet forces entered Bulgaria, and on the following day Bulgaria surrendered. Roumania had already abandoned Germany and joined the Allies. The Russians now had the prospect of a rapid advance through the Balkans and into Hungary.
On September 10 the Queen Mary reached Halifax. From there a twenty-hour train journey took Churchill to Quebec, where Roosevelt's train was awaiting him on an adjoining track. During their first day in Quebec, September 12, they learned that American forces had crossed the German frontier west of Aachen. But a message from London that day reported, accurately, that 'enemy resistance increases as Allies approach German frontier'.
Roosevelt now agreed that there would be no further withdrawals from Alexander's army. The Americans were even willing to let Alexander have the landing-craft needed for an Istrian landing. Churchill was greatly relieved. 'He had always been attracted by a right-handed movement with the purpose of giving Germany a stab in the Adriatic armpit,' he told the conference. 'Our objective should be Vienna.'
On September 13 Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, spoke of a post-war Germany that would be allowed no industry at all. The Ruhr would be closed down. The shipyards would be dismantled. At first Churchill was ill at ease with this. 'I'm all for disarming Germany,' he told Morgenthau, 'but we ought not to prevent her living decently. There are bonds between the working classes of all countries, and the English people will not stand for the policy you are advocating. I agree with Burke. You cannot indict a whole nation. What is to be done should be done quickly. Kill the criminals, but don't carry on the business for years.'
In reporting Morgenthau's plan in a telegram to the War Cabinet two days later, however, Churchill wrote, 'I was at first taken aback at this, but I consider that the disarmament argument is decisive and the beneficial consequences to us follow naturally.' Part of the economic benefit to Britain of a 'pastoral' Germany would be that Britain would have to supply Germany with much of its industrial needs, thus stimulating British industry. On September 15 Churchill and Roosevelt signed an agreement 'looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character'. This agreement was rejected by the State Department in Washington before it could even be discussed by the War Cabinet in London.
On September 17, while Churchill was still in Quebec, three airborne divisions, British and American, including a Polish Parachute Brigade, 35,000 men in all, parachuted behind German lines in Holland, with the object of seizing a bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem. As the battle began, Churchill left Quebec by train for Hyde Park, where he was Roosevelt's guest for two days. Clementine was with him; in a letter to Mary she wrote of how the President 'with all his genius, does not-indeed cannot (partly because of his health and partly because of his make-up)-function round the clock, like your father. I should not think his mind was pinpointed on the war for more than four hours a day, which is not really enough when one is a supreme war lord.'
Churchill and Roosevelt discussed the atom bomb, which, they were told, would 'almost certainly' be ready by August 1945. That week it had taken 2,600 sorties, and the loss of more than a hundred planes, to drop 9,360 tons of high explosive bombs on Germany; one atom bomb, carried in a single plane, would be the equivalent of at least 20,000 tons of high explosive. The two men rejected a suggestion that 'the world should be informed' about the atom bomb with a view to an international agreement regarding its use. They also decided that when the bomb was finally available 'it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender'.
Churchill was not certain that the atom bomb would need to be used. During the last day of the discussions at Quebec he had thought it 'quite possible' that the current 'heavy, sustained and ever-increasing' bombing of Japanese cities by the Americans 'might cause Japan to throw up the sponge'. People stood up to heavy bombardment if they thought it would 'sooner or later' come to an end. 'There could be no such hope for Japan.' All they could look forward to was 'an ever-increasing weight of explosives on their centres of population'.
Leaving Hyde Park on September 19, Churchill took the night train to New York, where on the following morning he re-embarked on the Queen Mary. 'PM in excellent form,' noted Cunningham, '& most interesting about his time at the Admiralty in the last war.' Much of Churchill's work on the voyage was to prepare the speech he would make on his return. 'Work with a vengeance,' Marian Holmes wrote in her diary on September 24. 'PM dictated a further 2,000 words of speech. I got the best view of his behind that I have ever had. He stepped out of bed still dictating, and oblivious of his all-too-short bed jacket. Anyway, he was in a kind and conciliatory mood, and I felt the waves of his approval.'
On September 26 the Queen Mary reached Greenock, where John Peck was waiting with the most recent and urgent telegrams. The worst news was from Arnhem; the attempt to seize and hold a bridge over the Rhine had failed; 1,400 of the 35,000 troops involved had been killed. Travelling south overnight, Churchill's train stopped at Rugby to pick up another urgent pouch; it contained the grave news that the last resistance of the Polish patriots in Warsaw was being overcome, and savage reprisals were being carried out against tens of thousands of Poles in the city.
At ten in the morning the train reached London. An hour and a half later Churchill was in the Commons to answer Prime Minister's Questions. The fate of the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities was raised; the Government, he said, were 'resolved to do their utmost to prevent Nazi criminals finding refuge in neutral territory from the consequences of their crimes'. The war in the Far East was also on his mind that day; in a telegram to Stalin he explained that the eventual opening of a Russian front against Japan 'would force them to burn and bleed, especially in the air, in a manner which would vastly accelerate their defeat'.
Churchill now decided to go to see Stalin; that night he asked Portal to prepare a flight schedule to Moscow. He had a number of reasons for being on his travels again so soon. Fearing the financial and physical burden on Britain of a long war against Japan, he wanted to persuade Stalin to declare war on Japan as soon as Germany was defeated. He also wanted to discuss the political future of Yugoslavia and Greece, which he hoped to exclude from Communist control, and of Poland, where he was personally and morally committed to the establishment of a freely elected Government. 'I cannot conceive that it is not possible,' he had told the Commons that day, 'to make a good solution whereby Russia gets the security which she is entitled to have, and which I have resolved that we shall do our utmost to secure for her, on her Western frontier, and, at the same time, the Polish nation have restored to them that national sovereignty and independence for which, across centuries of oppression and struggle, they have never ceased to strive.'
Before leaving for Moscow, Churchill twice took Clementine to the theatre; on October 3 to Shaw's Arms and the Man and on the following night to Shakespeare's Richard III, both with Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Sybil Thorndike. On his return to the Annexe on October 4 he learned that British forces had successfully entered Greece, landing at Patras, on the Gulf of Corinth, from which the Germans had withdrawn. In Poland, however, to Churchill's intense distress, after so many hours trying to help them, the Warsaw insurgents had at last been crushed. 'When the final Allied victory is achieved,' he told the Commons on October 5, 'the epic of Warsaw will not be forgotten. It will remain a deathless memory for the Poles, and for the friends of freedom all over the world.'
Two days later, with the political future of Poland high among his concerns, Churchill left London by air for Naples, where he learned that Alexander's armies were now 'stuck in the Apennines with tired forces' and could not spare any men for an amphibious landing at the head of the Adriatic. After four hours in Naples he flew to Moscow where, shortly after midday on October 9, his plane landed at the wrong aerodrome, took off again, and then landed at the airport where Maisky, Vishinsky and a guard of honour awaited him. He was driven to Molotov's dacha, which had been put at his disposal.
That same evening Churchill was driven from the dacha into Moscow, a forty-five-minute drive. In his first talk with Stalin, he re-affirmed his earlier acceptance, at Teheran, of the Curzon Line as Russia's eastern frontier. Churchill promised to 'bring pressure to bear' on the Poles to do likewise. The discussion then turned to southern Europe and the Balkans. Britain had a 'particular interest' in Greece, Churchill told Stalin, but Roumania was 'very much a Russian affair'. He did not want to use the phrase 'dividing into spheres', Churchill said, 'because the Americans might be shocked', but as long as he and Stalin 'understood each other' he could explain it to the Americans.
Churchill then produced what he described to Stalin as 'a naughty document'. On this were listed the 'proportional interest' of Russia and Britain in five countries. For Roumania, Churchill suggested 90 per cent Russian interest and 10 per cent British. For Greece, he proposed 90 per cent British 'in accord with USA' and 10 per cent Russian. Yugoslavia and Hungary were both listed as 50-50, and Bulgaria as 75 per cent to Russia and 25 per cent to 'the others'.
Stalin studied the list and then, Churchill later recalled, 'took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back. After this there was a long silence. The pencilled paper lay in the centre of the table.' Eventually Churchill said:
'Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an off-hand manner? Let us burn the paper.'
'No, you keep it,' was Stalin's reply.
The discussion turned to Turkey, where Churchill told Stalin he was in favour of Russia having free access through the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean 'for her merchant ships and ships of war'. Russia, he said, had a 'right' and also a 'moral claim' to this, which he would support. Churchill then asked Stalin not to encourage Communist participation in the civil war in Greece or to 'stir up' Communism in Italy. Stalin agreed. Speaking of Togliatti, whom Churchill had met in Rome in August, Stalin commented that he was 'a wise man, not an extremist, and would not start an adventure in Italy'.
Churchill did not get back to the dacha until 3.10 in the morning. He had been travelling and working continuously for sixty hours, sleeping only while travelling. 'I gave him some papers,' noted Marian Holmes, who expected dictation, 'but he said he couldn't work.' Sleeping soundly, Churchill woke on the morning of October 10 and stayed in bed, dictating. Then, shortly after midday, he drove back to the Kremlin, where Stalin was host at a luncheon that lasted four hours. At the end of the meal Churchill announced, 'I'm going back to the embassy for my Young Lady'. He was then driven to the British Embassy, asked Elizabeth Layton to join him in his car, and told her as they drove back to the dacha, 'I think I'll dictate in the dark.' Along the twenty-three-mile route, armed guards stood to attention and saluted as they passed.
Churchill wanted to send Stalin a formal note of their discussion about the Balkans. 'These percentages which I have put down,' he explained, 'are no more than a method by which in our thoughts we can see how near we are together, and then decide upon the necessary steps to bring us into full agreement.' If published, the percentages might be considered 'crude, and even callous', but they might serve as a 'good guide for the conduct of our affairs', which, if managed well, might prevent 'several civil wars and much bloodshed' in the countries concerned. Churchill added, 'Our broad principle should be to let every country have the form of Government which its people desire.' No ideology should be imposed on any small State. 'Let them work out their own fortunes during the years that lie ahead.'
Harriman, who was in Moscow as Roosevelt's emissary to the talks, and to whom Churchill showed this letter, said he was certain both Roosevelt and Hull would 'repudiate' it. The letter was therefore never sent, despite its assertion of the principle of self-determination. On October 11 Churchill remembered that Albania had been omitted from the list of percentages. He therefore proposed 50-50, the same division as for Yugoslavia and Hungary. But for Hungary, Molotov had insisted upon a drastic change in Russia's favour, from 50-50 to 80-20. To this Eden had agreed.
In a telegram to the War Cabinet, Churchill explained that the percentages were 'only an interim guide for the immediate post-war future', and would be 'surveyed' by the Great Powers, including of course the United States, when they met at the armistice or the peace table to make 'a general settlement of Europe'. In the event, no Peace Conference took place. Except in Greece, the degree of control exercised by Russia was to be determined, not by the percentages in Churchill's 'naughty document', but by the arrival of the Soviet Army and its political commissars. The Russians, Churchill told the War Cabinet, were 'insistent in their ascendancy' in Roumania and Bulgaria, 'both Black Sea countries'.
That evening Churchill entertained Stalin to dinner at the British Embassy, across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. When Churchill remarked that his hostile attitude to the Italian people had changed because of the enthusiastic welcome they had given him on his recent visit, Stalin commented that the same crowd had supported Mussolini. The dinner went on until four in the morning, so late that Churchill slept at a house in the city which Stalin had set aside for him at 6 Ostrovskaya Street. 'I have had very nice talks with the Old Bear,' Churchill wrote to Clementine on October 13. 'I like him the more I see him. Now they respect us here & I am sure they wish to work with us.'
In the evening, at the Spiridonovka Palace in central Moscow, Churchill and Stalin had a long talk with the leading members of the Polish Government in London, whom Churchill had urged to fly to Moscow during his visit, and whom he begged to accept the loss of pre-war territory in return for participation in the Communist-dominated National Liberation Committee which Stalin had established at Lublin. The London Poles would not accept the Curzon Line. When Churchill proposed that they accept it subject to the final agreements of a Peace Conference, it was Stalin's turn to refuse; the Poles must accept the new line without conditions. At this point, the minutes of the meeting recorded, Churchill made 'a gesture of disappointment and hopelessness'.
Later that night, as the sky of Moscow was lit with rockets celebrating the entry of Soviet forces into the Latvian capital of Riga, Churchill and Stalin again met the Lublin Polish leaders at the Spiridonovka Palace. Dutifully, they echoed Stalin's sentiments. Two days later Churchill telegraphed to the King: 'The day before yesterday was "all Poles day". Our lot from London are, as your Majesty knows, a decent but feeble lot of fools, but the delegates from Lublin seem to be the greatest villains imaginable.' On October 14 Churchill had a two-hour talk with the London Poles at the British Embassy. When the Prime Minister of the 'London Poles', Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, said that Polish public opinion would not accept the loss of the eastern territories, Churchill replied: 'What is public opinion? The right to be crushed!' Of course nothing could prevent Poland from declaring war on Russia, but by doing so Poland would lose the support of the other powers.
Still Mikolajczyk would not accept the Curzon Line. During a ninety-minute talk that afternoon at the house on Ostrovskaya Street, Churchill could not persuade him to do so. As for Britain, Churchill told him, she was 'powerless in the face of Russia' with regard to the future Polish Government. But he then went to see Stalin in the Kremlin, to propose a compromise formula; the London Poles would accept the Curzon Line, in return for fifty-fifty participation in the future Government of Poland. After an hour of discussion, Stalin agreed. The onus was now on Churchill to persuade the London Poles to concede the frontier.
That night Stalin went with Churchill to the Bolshoi Theatre. They arrived after the start of the evening's programme, the first act of the ballet Giselle, had already begun. It was only when the lights went up for the interval that the audience saw Churchill, whereupon, he reported to the King, there was at once a 'prolonged ovation'. Then, when Stalin came into the box and stood at his side, there was 'an almost passionate demonstration'. The interval was followed by two hours' singing and dancing by the Red Army Choir. 'I noticed the PM thoroughly enjoying the songs,' noted Marian Holmes, 'and beating time to them with his hands. Stalin didn't change his personal expression at all.'
From the Bolshoi Theatre, Churchill returned briefly to the town house before going to the Kremlin for a discussion with Stalin on military matters. The Soviet Army did not intend to advance into western Yugoslavia, Stalin said, but would prefer to link up with Alexander in Austria, at which Churchill promised that Alexander would push forward to Vienna 'as soon as possible'.
***
On the morning of October 15, Churchill woke up in great discomfort, the victim of a violent attack of diarrhoea. That afternoon he again received the London Poles, and asked them to accept the formula to which Stalin had agreed the previous afternoon. But they refused to accept the loss of the city of Lvov, which lay just to the east of the Curzon Line. Churchill lost his temper with them, pacing up and down the room and declaiming; 'I will have nothing more to do with you. I don't care where you go. You only deserve to be in your Pripet Marshes. I shall indict you.' Oliver Harvey noted in his diary, 'A painful scene to witness, the PM so right and the Poles so foolish-like the Bourbons expecting everything to come back to them.' Before the meeting ended Churchill proposed a compromise. He would go to see Stalin and appeal to him 'in the interests of Anglo-Soviet relations' and for the effect of such gesture upon 'world opinion' towards Russia, to let the Poles keep Lvov; but he would only make this appeal on the condition that, if Stalin rejected it, the Poles would agree to accept the Curzon Line without amendment. The Poles refused.
That afternoon Churchill developed a fever. No more meetings could be held that day. As his temperature rose above 100, two doctors and two nurses were summoned from Cairo. But on the following morning the temperature was back to normal and the summons was countermanded. The fever, Churchill explained to Clementine, 'came from the tummy and not from the chest, and I am now quite well again'. On the afternoon of October 16 he returned to the Kremlin with a Curzon Line formula devised by Eden, and acceptable to the London Poles, that would describe the disputed line not as a 'frontier' but a 'demarcation line'. For two hours Churchill tried to persuade Stalin, but in vain. 'The Prime Minister used all possible arguments,' Eden telegraphed to the War Cabinet, 'but was unable to move him.'
For one more day Churchill shuttled between the London Poles and Stalin, to whom he forcefully put their case. But Stalin now made it clear that whatever formula might be devised about the frontier, as far as the future Polish Government was concerned, it was his Lublin nominees who would have the majority.
On October 17 Churchill and Stalin had a final, six-hour conference, from ten that evening until four in the morning. Still trying to find some basis for an agreement between Stalin and the London Poles, Churchill persuaded Stalin to accept the phrase 'basis for frontier' rather than 'frontier' in describing the Curzon Line. But on the political predominance of the Lublin Communist Poles, Stalin would still not give way. The London Poles could participate, but no longer as equals.
Discussing the future of Germany, Churchill told Stalin that the Ruhr and the Saar should be 'put permanently out of action', and Germany's metallurgical, chemical and electrical industries stopped 'for as long as he had a word to say, and he hoped for a generation at least'. Stalin did not demur. When Churchill then said that Germany should be 'deprived of all her aviation', Stalin agreed that 'neither civil nor military flying should be allowed' and that all training schools for pilots should be forbidden. Churchill also told Stalin that he would like to see Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary form a 'separate grouping', a Customs union with no trade or commercial barriers.
On one point, central to Churchill's purpose in going to Moscow, there was hardly any discussion and no dispute; Stalin agreed that, 'on the day the German armies are destroyed', Russia would declare war on Japan. 'We must remember the supreme value of this in shortening the whole struggle,' Churchill telegraphed to Roosevelt shortly before leaving Moscow.
At seven on the evening of October 18 Churchill had one last meeting with the London Poles, but failed to persuade them to accept the final formula to which Stalin had agreed, even though he reported Stalin's willingness to appoint the Prime Minister, Mikolajczyk, as head of a Polish Government of National Unity; but only if the Curzon Line were to be the border, and Lvov were to become a Soviet city. Many hours of negotiation had failed. Henceforth, the London Poles were effectively excluded from the fate of their country.
That night Stalin gave Churchill a farewell dinner in the Kremlin. It lasted six hours, until two in the morning. During dinner news arrived that Soviet forces had entered Czechoslovakia, and Moscow was again illuminated by multi-coloured rockets. That morning, Stalin went to Moscow airport to see Churchill off. As Churchill had not yet arrived, he waited in the rain. Then, in a short farewell ceremony, Churchill informed Stalin's interpreter, Vladimir Pavlov, that he had been awarded an honorary CBE. The new Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for such Pavlov had become, had 'been privy', Churchill explained, 'to the most deadly secrets of State'. His insignia would follow later. Stalin then went on board Churchill's plane, where he was shown the Prime Minister's travelling comforts, then left the aircraft to stand on the tarmac waving his handkerchief as the plane took off.
From Moscow, Churchill flew to the Crimea, a five-hour flight, dined at the airport near Simferopol, and then flew on through the night, for a further six hours, to Cairo. On the following morning he flew to Naples, a seven-hour flight involving a wide westerly detour via Benghazi to avoid flying over Crete, which was still held by the Germans. At Naples he spent the day at the Villa Rivalta; among his requests was that more of the soldiers in Italy be allowed to go to Britain on leave, now that, with the liberation of most of France, it was possible for them to travel by train from Marseilles to Paris and then on to Le Havre.
On the morning of October 22 Churchill flew from Naples to London, arriving in the afternoon after a six-and-a-half-hour flight; his total flying time from Moscow had been more than twenty-four hours. Met at the airport by Clementine, he was driven to Chequers, where Sarah and Diana were among those waiting to welcome him. 'He looks none the worse for his journeys,' John Martin wrote to Randolph, 'and seems to me to have returned from Moscow fitter and in better spirits than he has been for a long time.'
On October 27, in giving an account of his Moscow visit to the Commons, Churchill said, 'I have not hesitated to travel from court to court like a wandering minstrel, always with the same song to sing, or the same set of songs.' His aim was 'the unity of the Allied Powers'. Harold Nicolson, who heard him speak, wrote to his sons later that day: 'A few months ago he seemed ill and tired and he did not find his words as easily as usual. But today he was superb. Cherubic, pink, solid and vociferous.'
Five days later Churchill once more tried to persuade the Polish Government in London to accept the Curzon Line, go to Moscow to tell Stalin, and then participate in the deliberations of the Lublin Poles. When the Poles said that they would want 'assurances' that they could still deal with Polish territories east of the Curzon Line, Churchill told them, 'This is nonsense, a pure utopia!' Cadogan noted in his diary: 'PM knocked them about badly-and rightly. Finally gave them forty-eight hours in which to say "Yes" or "No". Think that's right.'
Twenty-four hours later the Poles said 'No'. Churchill's long search for a compromise had been in vain.
***
Churchill was now looking towards the coming of peace 'in March, April or May', he told the Commons on October 31. If the Labour Party wished to withdraw from the Coalition once Germany was defeated, although it would be a matter of regret to many people, it would not be one of 'reproach or bitterness'. A General Election would then be called and the country could return to Party politics. He had a 'clear view', Churchill said, that it would be wrong to continue the present Parliament 'beyond the period of the German war', and in a powerful defence of the system of Government he had supported and participated in for half a century, he told the House: 'The foundation of all democracy is that the people have the right to vote. To deprive them of that right is to make a mockery of all the high-sounding phrases which are so often used. At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. No amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly palliate the overwhelming importance of that point. The people have the right to choose representatives in accordance with their wishes and feelings.'
That evening Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary, 'I have never admired Winston's moral attitude more than I did this morning.'
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