In his desire to further the cause of Jewish statehood, Churchill advised Weizmann to go at once to Cairo, to discuss the future of Palestine with the new Minister of State in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, one of his closest friends, with whom he had talked in Cairo two weeks earlier, and whose well-known dislike of Zionism, Churchill explained to Weizmann, was now 'a thing of the past'. Moyne had 'changed and developed' in the last two years, Churchill told the Zionist leader. Weizmann at once prepared to leave for Cairo; but was too late. Within twenty-four hours, Moyne was dead, gunned down with his driver by two Jewish terrorists.
Churchill was deeply shocked; but he opposed reprisals. Pressed by the Colonial Secretary to suspend at once all Jewish immigration to Palestine, he refused to do so. He also refused to appoint, as Moyne's successor, either of two suitable nominees, because he knew they were hostile to Zionism. But in the debate on Moyne's murder he told the Commons: 'If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins' pistols and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past. If there is to be any hope of a peaceful and successful future for Zionism, these wicked activities must cease, and those responsible for them must be destroyed root and branch.'
There was, Churchill told the Commons, an avenue of hope: 'I have received a letter from Dr Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organisation-a very old friend of mine-who has arrived in Palestine, in which he assures me that Palestine Jewry will go to the utmost limit of its power to cut out this evil from its midst.' Weizmann had appealed to the Jewish population 'to render all necessary assistance to the authorities in the prevention of terrorist acts, and in the eradication of the terrorist organisation'.
Moyne's murderers, members of the extremist Stern Gang, were executed in Cairo, the scene of their crime. The Jewish Agency and the British authorities in Palestine joined forces in tracking down other members of the Stern Gang and their caches of arms. Churchill's support for Jewish statehood in Palestine remained firm and uncompromising.
***
In the weeks immediately following his return from Moscow, Churchill acted to uphold his 'percentages' agreement with Stalin. Learning in the first week of November that the head of the British Military Mission in Roumania had protested about the extent of Russian control there, he wrote to Eden, 'We have only a ten per cent interest in Roumania, and are little more than spectators.' Unless care were taken, 'we shall get retaliation in Greece, which we still hope to save'. Every liberated or 'subverted' country, Churchill explained to Eden a week later, was 'seething with Communism'. All were linked together 'and only our influence with Russia prevents their actively stimulating this movement, deadly as I conceive it to the freedom of mankind'.
On November 10 Churchill was on his travels again, flying to Paris, which he had last seen shortly before its fall in 1940. On November 11, the Armistice Day of the Great War, he drove as General de Gaulle's guest to the Arc de Triomphe, where they laid wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier before taking the salute at an hour-long march-past. 'He had a wonderful reception,' Brooke wrote in his diary, 'and the Paris crowd went quite mad over him.' Four days later Churchill telegraphed to Roosevelt that he had re-established 'friendly private relations' with de Gaulle, and that he had 'a considerable feeling of stability' in France 'in spite of Communist threats'. The French politicians he had met had impressed him. 'I hope you will not consider that I am putting on French clothes while I say this.'
To help de Gaulle internally, Churchill instructed Ismay to send two thousand rifles and one hundred Sten guns 'as fast as possible' to the French Ministry of the Interior, 'for the purpose of arming the police'.
From Paris, Churchill went overnight by train, with de Gaulle, to Besançon. From there they drove sixty miles through heavy snow to a French artillery observation-post near the front line. It was snowing too heavily to see anything; indeed the French attack planned for that afternoon had to be put off because of the snow. On the way back to French headquarters for lunch, Churchill's car twice had a puncture, and once stuck in a rut at the side of the road. 'He arrived completely frozen and almost rolled up on himself like a hedgehog,' Brooke later recalled. 'He was placed in a chair with a hot water bottle at his feet and one in the back of his chair; at the same time good brandy was poured down his throat to warm him internally. The results were wonderful, he thawed out rapidly and when the time came produced one of those indescribably funny French speeches which brought the house down.'
That night Churchill returned to Paris on de Gaulle's train. 'Winston was in excellent form,' Brooke wrote in his diary, 'and even de Gaulle unbent a little.' Reaching Paris, Churchill's coaches were detached and sent eastward again, this time to Rheims. There Eisenhower was waiting to take him to his headquarters, where he was told the General's plans to reach the Rhine. Returning to London, he learned that Russia's 'aloofness' in Greece was having a dampening effect on the Greek Communists. 'This "aloofness" of Russia,' he commented to Eden, 'shows the way in which they are keeping to the general lay-out we fixed at Moscow.' Four days later he wrote again, 'This is good, and shows how Stalin is playing the game.'
To at least one member of Churchill's Secretariat, the week following Churchill's return from France was not a good one. 'He has frittered away his time in the last week,' Colville wrote in his diary on November 30, 'and has seemed unable or unwilling or too tired to give his attention to complex matters. He has been reading the first paragraph or so and referring papers to people without seeing what is really required of him. Result: chaos.' When Churchill spoke in the Commons on November 29, however, his speech was well received. He spoke, noted Nicolson, 'of the need of youth-"Youth, youth, youth and renovation, energy, boundless energy"-and as he said these words, he bent his knees and pounded the air like a pugilist-"and of controversy, health-giving controversy. I am not afraid of it in this country," he said, and then took off his glasses and grinned round at the Conservative benches. "We are a decent lot," he said, beaming upon them. Then he swung round and leant forward over the box right in the faces of the Labour people: "All of us," he added, "the whole nation."'
Nicolson commented: 'It read so mildly in the newspapers next morning. Yet in fact it was the perfect illustration of the Parliamentary art.'
On November 30 Churchill celebrated his seventieth birthday at the Annexe with Clementine, his three daughters-Diana, Sarah and Mary-his brother Jack and his son-in-law Duncan Sandys. Three close friends were also present, Eden, Beaverbrook and Bracken. After Beaverbrook proposed the toast, wrote Mary, 'Papa's reply made me weep. He said we were "the dearest there are"-he said he had been "comforted and supported by our love", and then, very slowly-almost solemnly-he clinked glasses with each one of us.' On the following day he drove from Chequers to Harrow for the school songs. Afterwards there was a sherry party at which, wrote Colville, 'the PM talked long and charmingly to the School Monitors, much as he did to the Midshipmen on the King George V last January, enthralling but never patronising'.
That week Churchill's main worry was the apparent breach, in Yugoslavia, of the fifty-fifty October agreement with Stalin. 'Tito has turned very nasty,' he told Smuts, 'and is of course thinking now only of grabbing Trieste, Istria, Fiume etc for a virtually Communised Yugoslavia. I am having great difficulty in getting the right-hand move, to which you know I am attracted, under way in time to influence events. Everything is very ponderous.'
The 'right-hand move' was the advance from the head of the Adriatic through the Ljubljana Gap to Zagreb, and then northwards into Austria, the move General Maitland Wilson had first proposed five months earlier.
On December 3 Churchill protested to Tito about his refusal to allow British warships to dock at Split and Sibenik, two of the Dalmatian ports under Partisan control. He also protested when Tito asked for the withdrawal of a British military unit helping the Partisans near Dubrovnik. But even as he was fighting this losing battle to obtain the fifty-fifty division of influence in Yugoslavia, Churchill saw danger looming for Britain's predominant position in Greece, where the Government in Athens was finding it impossible to demobilise the Communist guerrilla forces. 'It is important to let it be known,' he told Eden, 'that if there is a civil war in Greece we shall be on the side of the Government we have set up in Athens, and that above all we shall not hesitate to shoot.'
So vehement was Churchill against the growing dominance of the Communist forces in parts of Athens that on the morning of December 4 he provoked a word of caution from Clementine:
My darling Winston,
Please do not before ascertaining full facts repeat to anyone you meet today what you said to me this morning i.e. that the Communists in Athens had shown their usual cowardice in putting the women & children in front to be shot at-because altho' Communists are dangerous, indeed perhaps sinister people, they seem in this war on the Continent to have shown personal courage.
I write this only because I may not see you till tomorrow & I am anxious (perhaps over-anxious).
Your loving & devoted
Clemmie
'Tout savoir, c'est tout comprendre; tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.'
Throughout December 4 Churchill received details of growing Communist violence in the streets of Athens, including the murder of many policemen, and the seizing of police stations. That night he telegraphed to the senior British officer in Greece, General Scobie, 'Do not hesitate to fire at any armed male in Athens who assails the British authority or Greek authority with which we are working.' In carrying out these orders the extra authority of the Greek Government would be helpful, but, Churchill added, 'Do not hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.' As for the Greek Communist forces approaching Athens from the surrounding countryside, 'You should surely be able with your armour to give some of them a lesson which will make the others unlikely to try.' Churchill's telegram ended, 'It would be a great thing for you to succeed in this without bloodshed if possible, but also with bloodshed if necessary.'
Scobie had taken 1,800 Communist prisoners. On the following day there were protests in the Commons at Britain's action, and a debate which Churchill demanded should be treated as a Vote of Confidence. 'One must have some respect for democracy and not use the word too lightly,' he said. 'The last thing that resembles democracy is mob law, with bands of gangsters, armed with deadly weapons, forcing their way into great cities, seizing the police stations and key points of government, endeavouring to introduce a totalitarian regime with an iron hand, and clamouring, as they can nowadays if they get power, to shoot everyone who is politically inconvenient.'
'Democracy is no harlot,' Churchill continued, 'to be picked up in the street by a man with a tommy-gun.' If the vote went against him for his action in Greece, 'I will gladly accept my dismissal at the hands of the House; but if I am not so dismissed-make no mistake about it-we shall persist in this policy of clearing Athens and the Athens region of all who are rebels against the authority of the constitutional Government of Greece.' When the Vote of Confidence was taken, 279 MPs voted for the Government and 30 against. That night Churchill asked Macmillan to join him at the Annexe. 'He rambled on in a sad and depressed way,' Macmillan wrote in his diary that night. 'The debate had obviously tired him very much, and I think he realised the dangers inherent in the Greek policy on which we are now embarked. He has won the debate, but not the battle of Athens.'
On December 9 Churchill gave orders for military reinforcements to be sent to Greece from Italy 'without the slightest delay'. That day Scobie telegraphed that he had used machine-guns and tanks against Communist strongpoints inside Athens, killing fourteen 'rebels' and capturing 250. Scobie found 'most worrying' the 'activities' of the Russian Military Mission in Athens, headed by Colonel Grigori Popov. Churchill did not take alarm; Stalin after all had remained silent about Greece. 'Remember the percentages we wrote out on paper?' Churchill asked Eden on December 11. 'I think we have had pretty good treatment from Stalin in Greece, much better in fact than we have had from the Americans.'
On December 9 the Chief of the American Naval Staff had cancelled the order whereby seven American landing-craft were conveying British troops and supplies to Greece. There was also anger in the United States when Churchill's orders to Scobie to act as though he were in a 'conquered city' were published in the Washington Post. They had been accidentally leaked during their secret transmission through Italy.
On December 12 Alexander reached Athens from Italy. The situation was 'more serious' than he had previously thought, he telegraphed to Churchill. That day the War Cabinet agreed to support Alexander with whatever measures or reinforcements he thought necessary. At his side, the Greek Government forces, commanded by General Plastiras, were struggling to maintain control. Encouraging news reached Churchill that day from Alexander, who telegraphed, 'I met Colonel Popov of the Russian Military Mission today and walked him down the street in friendly and animated conversation', for the 'benefit', Alexander added, of the Greeks, 'who I hope will be duly impressed'. Stalin was keeping his October bargain.
Macmillan, who was now in Athens, and the British Ambassador there, Reginald Leeper, both recommended the appointment of Archbishop Damaskinos as Regent, and the creation of a Government under him which the Communists could accept. Churchill was at first uneasy about this, being afraid that the Archbishop would establish 'a dictatorship of the Left'. If the 'powers of evil' were to prevail in Greece, he warned on December 22, 'we must look forward to a quasi-Bolshevised Russian-led Balkan Peninsula and this may spread to Hungary and Italy'. In Athens, Macmillan, Leeper and Scobie were trying to persuade the Greek Communists to join a 'broad-based' Cabinet led by the Archbishop.
On the evening of December 22, at the Annexe, Churchill spoke to John Martin and Jock Colville of flying to Athens 'to settle the matter'. But nothing was decided by the early hours of the morning; so long did the discussion go on that it was too late for Churchill to drive down to Chequers that night as planned, and he slept at the Annexe. On the following day, December 23, he worked in bed all day, until five in the afternoon. The news from the battlefield was of a successful German counter-attack into the Ardennes, with American troops driven back and surrounded. Then he was driven to Chequers, where his family had already gathered for Christmas. As soon as he arrived, however, he told Clementine he would not be staying for the Christmas celebrations; he would be flying to Athens instead. She was devastated, went to her room, and wept.
That night Churchill asked Colville to make the flying arrangements for the journey to Athens. His only fear, he told Colville, was lest 'the weather bugger us up'. On the morning of December 24 Eden offered to go in his place; after a long talk on the telephone, Eden agreed to go with him. They would leave that very night, Christmas Eve. 'Two of your friends,' Churchill telegraphed to Alexander, 'of whom I am one, hope to be in Athens tomorrow.'
Half an hour before midnight, while the Christmas Eve festivities were at their height throughout Britain, Churchill left Chequers for Northolt. At 1.05 he was airborne; his aircraft, an American C54 Skymaster transport just converted for his use, had completed its trials only the previous day. 'She is the most luxurious craft imaginable,' Marian Holmes and Elizabeth Layton wrote in their joint diary of the unexpected journey. 'There are bunks for eight besides the PM, and a dining saloon' and swivel chairs and satin curtains throughout the aircraft. A snowstorm over France forced the Skymaster to climb to 13,500 feet; Churchill was woken up so that he could put on an oxygen mask.
On the morning of December 25 the Skymaster landed at Naples to refuel. 'Love and many thoughts for you all at luncheon today,' Churchill telegraphed to Clementine. 'I am sorry indeed not to see the tree.' At 10.45 he was airborne again; during the flight he dictated a telegram to Roosevelt: 'Anthony and I are going out to see what we can do to square this Greek entanglement. We cannot abandon those who have taken up arms in our cause, and must if necessary fight it out with them.'
At two in the afternoon on Christmas Day, Churchill's Skymaster landed at Kalamaki airport near Athens. He did not leave the plane; instead, as British soldiers guarded it, he held a conference on board with Alexander, Scobie, Macmillan and Leeper. As the wind howled round the plane, and those inside it got colder and colder, it was decided to invite the Greek Communists to join in a discussion with all the Greek parties, with a view to ending the fighting and setting up an all-Party Government led by the Archbishop. Churchill then prepared a communiqué announcing this invitation. As he dictated it, noted Elizabeth Layton, his cabin in the aircraft 'was bumping up and down in the wind. He looked flushed and uncomfortable, and was wrapped in several coats.' At one moment in the dictation Churchill stopped and said to her, 'That was a cannon-did you hear it?'
At four o'clock that afternoon Churchill left the Skymaster and was driven to the naval base at Phaleron Bay, passing a spot which had been shelled by the Communists that very morning. Reaching the base just after sunset, he was taken by barge to the cruiser Ajax, flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet. A few hours later the Archbishop arrived on board; as the Admiral and Colville led him to Churchill's cabin they came face to face with a fancy-dress party which was wending its way along the decks as part of the Christmas Day festivities. The revellers took the Archbishop, in his black robes and tall hat, for the leader of a rival party of revellers, but fortunately the Admiral intervened, 'in time', Colville noted, 'to prevent disaster'.
Churchill was impressed by Damaskinos, whose bitterness over the Communist atrocities had led him to issue an encyclical against them that very day. Would he be willing to preside over a conference of all the Greek political parties, including the Communists, Churchill asked. Damaskinos agreed to do so, and returned to the city.
On the morning of December 26 Churchill went on deck, from where, Colville noted, he could see 'the smoke of battle in the street-fighting west of the Piraeus, and there is a constant noise of shell-fire and machine-guns'. Four British fighters could be seen in the sky, strafing a Communist strongpoint on the side of one of the hills surrounding Athens. Later, while Churchill was dictating to Marian Holmes in his cabin, shells exploded near the battleship. 'There-you bloody well missed us!' he cried. 'Come on-try again!'
As Churchill prepared to leave Ajax for the shore, the ship was again straddled by Communist shell fire. Later, a salvo fell close to the Admiral's barge as it approached the shore with Churchill on board. An armoured car and military escort were at the quayside, to take him to the British Embassy, where he made what Colville described as a 'stirring speech' to the secretaries, typists and cypher clerks, thanking them for their excellent work in arduous conditions.
'I addressed all the plucky women on the Embassy staff who have been in continued danger and discomfort for so many weeks, but are in the gayest of moods,' Churchill telegraphed to Clementine. Then, shortly after five o'clock, he left by armoured car for the conference room at the Greek Foreign Ministry. Among those awaiting him there was Colonel Popov, Stalin's representative.
The Communist delegates had not yet arrived. Nor could Churchill know if they had any intention of arriving. Shells could be heard still falling in the distance, as could the sound of rocket fire from the British fighters. In a room lit only by a few hurricane lamps, the Archbishop made his opening statement. He would be willing to form a Government, he said, and if necessary to do so without the Communists. Churchill then began to speak; he was half-way through his statement when everyone suddenly heard what Colville called 'noises off, and three shabby desperadoes, who had been searched and almost stripped before being allowed to enter, came into the dimly lit conference room.' It was the Communist delegates. The proceedings then began all over again.
After the Archbishop had repeated his speech, Churchill told the delegates, 'Mr Eden and I have come all this way, although great battles are raging in Belgium and on the German frontier, to make this effort to rescue Greece from a miserable fate and raise her to a point of great fame and repute.' He and Eden would be available for consultation at any time. He wished them well. Whether Greece remained a monarchy or became a republic 'is a matter for Greeks and Greeks alone to decide'. As he was speaking the sound of gunfire could be heard outside. At one point, Colville noted, 'the roar of descending rockets' fired by the British fighters at a nearby Communist position 'almost drowned his words'.
It was, Churchill told Clementine, 'intensely dramatic, all those haggard Greek faces round the table and the Archbishop with his enormous hat, making him, I should think, seven feet high'. As to the Communist delegates, they 'certainly look a much better lot than the Lublin illegitimates'. When the Greeks began to speak, the discussion became heated, whereupon Churchill rose to his feet and declared: 'I should like to go now. We have begun the work. See that you finish it.' On his way out, he shook the hands of the three Communist delegates. Colonel Popov, who was present throughout, had made no comment or intervention.
The Greek delegates, Churchill told his wife, 'are the very top ones. We have now left them together as it was a Greek show. It may break up at any moment. We shall wait for a day or two if necessary to see. At least we have done our best.' Churchill returned to Ajax, which had moved a mile further off shore to avoid the spasmodic Communist mortar fire. That afternoon, while he was briefly on the bridge with the ship's Captain, further shells fell in the sea around them. Should he return fire, the Captain asked, to which Churchill replied, 'I have come to Greece on a mission of peace, Captain. I bear the olive branch between my teeth. But far be it for me to intervene with military necessity. RETURN FIRE!'
That night Churchill again slept aboard Ajax. As a precaution against underwater attack, depth charges were exploded throughout the night. At noon on the following day, December 27, he returned to the British Embassy. As he was about to leave the building with Scobie, to visit British military positions in the city, a burst of machine-gun fire from more than a mile away struck the wall of a house thirty feet above him. 'Several bursts were fired,' Colville noted, 'and a woman in the street was killed.'
Continuing with his visit to the troops, Churchill then returned to the Embassy for lunch, after which he saw the United States Ambassador and, Colville noted, 'gave him a piece of his mind about the very inadequate support the USA have given us in this whole affair'. He then gave a Press Conference, his words continually interrupted by the roar of mortar shells. 'If no satisfactory and trustworthy democratic foundation' could be agreed upon by the Greeks themselves, he said, 'you may have to have, for the time being, an international trust of some kind or other. We cannot afford to see whole peoples drifting into anarchy.'
Churchill then saw the Archbishop once more, to be told that the Communists were demanding very severe terms for joining the Government. Two of the Communist delegates asked to see him, but the Archbishop was strongly against any such meeting. Churchill hesitated. 'Winston very inclined to see them,' Macmillan noted in his diary, 'but I persuaded him (and Anthony agreed) that if we were going to put our money on the Archbishop, we must let him play the hand as he thought best.' Macmillan added: 'Winston partly wanted to see them as a good journalist, but partly because he has an innocence which is very charming but sometimes dangerous. He believed he could win them over. But I felt he would much more probably be deceived and betrayed.'
Churchill accepted Macmillan's and Eden's advice. Then he wrote to the two Communists to explain to them that as the conference was 'wholly Greek in character', he could not see them. He hoped, however, 'that the discussions that have taken place and contacts which have been made will result in a speedy end to the melancholy conflict proceeding between men of one country'. He made no accusation or recriminations. 'The hatreds between these Greeks are terrible,' he wrote to Clementine.
In the evening Churchill returned to Ajax. That night Macmillan found him 'still worrying about his refusal to grant a private interview' with the Communist delegates. But it was too late. His Greek mission was at an end. It would be up to the Archbishop to find a Prime Minister who could form the broadest possible Government, with or without the Communists. Britain would continue to defend that Government's position, at least in Athens itself. That night Churchill telegraphed to the Chiefs of Staff, asking them to agree to a brigade of troops then in Palestine being sent to Athens; they did. He also asked that fifteen of the women on the staff of the British Embassy in Athens should be given the British Empire Medal in the imminent New Year's Honours List. One of the women whose name he sent forward was awarded the MBE for 'tireless devotion to duty under fire'.
Aboard Ajax on the morning of December 28, Churchill thought of staying in Athens another day and calling another meeting of the conference. Macmillan wrote in his diary, 'He did not like the idea of going home without a peace, or at least a truce, arranged.' But by midday he had agreed to leave Athens without further meetings. Before setting off for the airport he sent Roosevelt a full account of what had been done, telling the President: 'I do not consider Archbishop is at all Left Wing in Communist sense. On the contrary he seems to be an extremely determined man bent on establishing a small strong executive in Greece to prevent the continuance of civil war.' It was a 'painful sight', Churchill added, 'to see this city with street-fighting raging, now here, now there, and the poor people all pinched and only kept alive by rations we are carrying to them, often at loss of life, at the various depots.' Britain had lost 'over one thousand men'. She was now reinforcing, and the military conflict would go on. 'The vast majority of the people long for a settlement that will free them from the Communist terror.'
***
As he prepared to leave Ajax, Churchill received a telegram from Montgomery to say that the German offensive in the Ardennes, aimed at the recapture of Antwerp, had failed. After addressing the ship's company, he left by barge for Phaleron, and then drove in a procession of jeeps and armoured cars to Kalamaki airport. After a short speech to the Royal Air Force personnel there, he boarded his Skymaster. There was one final hitch. As the plane was taxi-ing for take-off, Churchill called out, 'Stop the aircraft!' He had been reading a draft copy of the final communiqué of his visit, which said that he, Eden, Macmillan and Alexander had left the capital. This, Churchill felt, might give the impression that Britain was abandoning Greece to her fate. The aircraft was stopped and an amended communiqué given to one of the British diplomats still standing on the tarmac.
The Skymaster was finally airborne at 2.30; Churchill hoped to be back in England that evening, but after touch down at Naples there were reports of fog over southern England. He would stay that night at Naples. 'Hope to be with you at dinner tomorrow,' he telegraphed to Clementine. 'I was feeling lonely.'
On the morning of December 29 Churchill flew from Naples to London, flying over liberated France from Toulon to Cherbourg. At 3.30 in the afternoon the plane landed at Bovingdon airbase, where Clementine was waiting to greet him. Two and a half hours later, at Downing Street, he and Eden gave the War Cabinet an account of their journey. Then, at 10.30 that evening, they had a two-hour session with King George II of Greece, who was unwilling to appoint Damaskinos as Regent. At 1.30 a.m. they saw George again. 'I had to tell the King that if he did not agree, the matter would be settled without him, and that we would recognise the new government instead of him,' Churchill told Roosevelt. Finally, at 4 a.m., the Greek King accepted a Damaskinos Regency. Churchill then went to bed, twenty-two hours after he had been awakened at Naples.
In Athens, the Communists continued to put forward terms which Damaskinos was not prepared to accept. In the end, he asked General Plastiras to form a Government, from which the Communists were excluded. In Washington and in London there was strong criticism of Britain's intervention in Greece. 'The bitter misunderstandings which have arisen in the United States and in degenerate circles at home,' Churchill told Clementine, 'are only a foretaste of the furies which will be loosed about every stage of the peace settlement. I am sure in Greece I found one of the best opportunities for wise action that this war has tossed to me from its dark waves.'
***
Stalin was now threatening to recognise the Lublin Poles as the Government of Poland, and to exclude altogether the London Poles. On learning this, Churchill pressed for the quickest possible meeting of himself, Roosevelt and Stalin, who, however, said his doctors would not let him leave the Soviet Union, and suggested they meet at the Soviet Black Sea resort of Yalta. The ailing Roosevelt would therefore have to travel more than six thousand miles, and the seventy-year-old Churchill nearly four thousand. 'If we had spent ten years on research,' Churchill told Hopkins, 'we could not have found a worse place in the world.' Roosevelt would go by ship as far as Malta, then on by air. Churchill would fly all the way. He and Roosevelt would meet in Malta first. 'I shall be waiting on the quay,' Churchill telegraphed to the President on New Year's Day 1945.
For much of New Year's Day Churchill worked in bed. 'You know I can't give you the excitement of Athens every day,' he told Marian Holmes during the dictation. But on January 3, only five days after his return from Greece, he left England once more, flying from Northolt to Eisenhower's headquarters just outside Paris. On the following evening he took an overnight train to Montgomery's headquarters near Ghent. After spending the morning with Montgomery, he was driven to Brussels and flew back to England. His discussions had given him a clear picture of the plans for the next phase of the battle, the advance to the Rhine. He had found 'no trace of discord' on his visit, Churchill told Roosevelt, but 'there is this brutal fact: we need more fighting troops to make things move'.
In an attempt to put Eisenhower's mind at ease, Churchill telegraphed to Stalin to ask when the next Russian offensive would be, in order, he explained, to give Eisenhower 'the assurance that the German reinforcements will have to be split between both our flaming fronts'. The next Soviet offensive would come not later than 'the second half of January', Stalin informed him. 'I am most grateful to you for your thrilling message,' Churchill replied.
In the political sphere, January 11 saw an agreement signed between Tito and the former Ban of Croatia, Dr Subasic, whereby the future Government of Yugoslavia would be shared between the Communist and non-Communist parties; thus Churchill's fifty-fifty Moscow agreement with Stalin on Yugoslavia seemed secure. 'We should insist as far as is possible,' Churchill explained to Roosevelt, 'on full and fair elections deciding the future regime of the Yugoslav people or peoples.'
***
On January 12 Churchill was angered when Montgomery, in a public speech, appeared to belittle the American contribution in the Ardennes battle. 'I thought his speech most unfortunate,' Churchill told the Chiefs of Staff. 'It had a patronising tone and completely overlooked the fact that the United States lost perhaps 80,000 men and we but 2,000 or 3,000. Through no fault of ours we have been very little engaged in this battle, which has been a great American struggle with glory as well as disaster.'
Churchill now made his plans to fly to Yalta. The issues to be discussed were mounting. On January 15 he telegraphed to Roosevelt about growing Soviet pressure in Persia, where the Russians hoped, he said, 'to secure what they want by the using of the big stick'. Before leaving he gave the Commons a survey of the war situation; his speech, noted Colville, 'was the best effort I have heard him make since 1941 or even 1940 Harold Nicolson wrote of its 'immense vivacity, persuasiveness and humour'.
Speaking of the Anglo-American demand for the unconditional surrender of Germany, which had been widely criticised as too severe, Churchill stressed that the Germans knew full well 'how strict are the moral limits within which our action is confined', and he spoke out to them, to Britain's foes: 'We are no extirpators of nations, or butchers of peoples. We make no bargain with you. We accord you nothing as a right. Abandon your resistance unconditionally. We remain bound by our customs and our nature.'
Before Churchill spoke this last sentence, Nicolson noticed that he had taken off his glasses, and, as he spoke, 'struck his breast like an orang-outang a powerful and effective gesture. Britain would behave with humanity, even to the defeated tyrants.
On January 20, Hungary signed an armistice with the Allies. That day the Red Army crossed the German borders both in East Prussia and Silesia. There was a sense of elation in London. But Churchill was angered that day by a letter from Attlee protesting at his lengthy disquisitions in Cabinet on papers which he had not read, and on subjects which he had not taken the trouble to master. Colville commented: 'Greatly as I love and admire the PM I am afraid there is much in what Attlee says, and I rather admire his courage in saying it. Many Conservatives-and officials such as Cadogan and Bridges, feel the same.'
Tersely, Churchill replied to Attlee, 'You may be sure I shall always endeavour to profit by your counsels.' Then he invited his staff to go with him to the Air Ministry to see a film-show, bidding them, Colville noted, to 'cast care aside and "not bother about Atler or Hitlee", and so all the typists, drivers, servants etc' went off to see a newsreel of the German Air Force attack on British airfields in Holland on New Year's Day, and then Dark Victory, a 1939 American film about a society girl who discovers she is dying of a brain tumour, starring Bette Davis, with small parts by both Humphrey Bogart and Ronald Reagan.
***
On January 29 Churchill left London on the first lap of his journey to Yalta. On reaching Malta, at four in the morning of January 30, he felt so ill that he remained in bed in the aeroplane for six hours, while it sat on the tarmac. Then he felt well enough to leave the aeroplane for the cruiser Orion, where he went straight back to bed. At dinner that night he was feeling better, and had what Eden called 'some quite good preliminary talk on our conference problems'.
For the next two days there were more discussions with Eden, and with the Chiefs of Staff. It was also a time of reflection: 'I am free to confess to you,' Churchill wrote to Clementine on February 1, 'that my heart is saddened by the tales of the masses of German women and children flying along the roads everywhere in forty-mile-long columns to the West before the advancing armies. I am clearly convinced that they deserve it; but that does not remove it from one's gaze. The misery of the whole world appals me, and I fear increasingly that new struggles may arise out of those we are successfully ending.'
On the morning of February 2 Roosevelt reached Malta. His frailty was at once apparent, as were his failing powers. At the meetings which he attended he said almost nothing, yet decisions crucial for the future of Europe, and of democracy, were being made. The burden of America's cause, as well as Britain's, fell on Churchill's shoulders. He bore the burden unhesitatingly; when, at a meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff that afternoon, he said 'it was essential that we occupy as much of Austria as possible, as it was undesirable that more of Western Europe than necessary should be occupied by the Russians', there was no dissent. That night, on Orion, Churchill visited the wardroom where, wrote Marian Holmes, 'he stood at the bar and had a drink with all the officers crowding round him. He is simply wonderful at these impromptu chats'. Churchill's last words to the young officers were: 'I hope you've looked after my two young ladies. They go everywhere with me and don't mind putting up with my bad temper.'
Shortly after midnight Churchill, his daughter Sarah and Eden drove to Malta's airport. Three hours later they were airborne. Seven hours later they landed at Saki airport in the Crimea, where they waited for Roosevelt's plane to arrive. The President was a 'tragic figure', Churchill later wrote. 'He could not get out of the open motor car, and I walked at his side while he inspected the guard.' From the airport Churchill was driven for more than seven hours across the southern Crimea and over the Tauride Mountains to Yalta, to the magnificent Vorontsov Villa, overlooking the Black Sea, which was to be his base for the next eight days. Built in the Scottish baronial style by a former Tsarist Ambassador to Britain, it had been given by Hitler as a gift to Field Marshal von Manstein, after his conquest of the Crimea in 1942.
On the afternoon of February 4, Stalin called on Churchill at the Vorontsov Villa. Churchill's first act was to present Stalin's interpreter, Pavlov, with the insignia of the CBE, about which Churchill had told him in Moscow three and a half months earlier. Churchill then informed Stalin of the Anglo-American offensive due to start in four days' time, with the Rhine as its object, and showed him the Map Room in which Captain Pim had displayed the latest information from all the war fronts. An hour after Stalin left, Churchill was driven along the corniche to the Livadia Palace, once the residence of Tsar Nicholas II, where the ailing Roosevelt was staying, and where the Conference itself would take place. The first meeting began at five o'clock. 'We had the world at our feet,' Churchill later reflected. 'Twenty-five million men marching at our orders by land and sea. We seemed to be friends.'
At the first plenary session Churchill proposed Staff discussions on a possible Anglo-American landing at the head of the Adriatic and through the Ljubljana Gap 'in order to join up with the Russian left flank'. He also asked for a Soviet attack on Danzig, where the Germans were building a new type of submarine, 'ahead of us in certain technical ways', which had already sunk twelve ships in waters close to the British Isles. Stalin agreed. When, at dinner that night, Roosevelt suddenly agreed with Stalin that peace should be made by the Great Powers and not by the small ones, Churchill remarked, 'The eagle should permit the small birds to sing and care not whereof they sang.'
On February 5, at a meeting of the British, American and Soviet Chiefs of Staff, the Russians, having pointed out that several divisions of German troops were being brought back across Europe to the Eastern Front, asked for a substantial Allied air attack on German communications in the Berlin-Leipzig-Dresden region, and for the bombing of these three specific cities, as a matter of urgency. This was agreed and instructions given for a series of Anglo-American raids. That same day the Big Three discussed the political future of Germany. Stalin envisaged the dismemberment of Germany into five separate states, as proposed by Roosevelt at Teheran. Listening to this, Churchill commented to Eden, 'The only bond of the victors is their common hate.' To make Britain safe in the future, he added, 'she must become responsible for the safety of a cluster of feeble States'. To Stalin's chagrin, Churchill then advised caution with regard to the too-rapid 'dismemberment' of Germany.
In discussing the Allied occupation of Germany, Churchill pressed successfully for the French to be allowed a Zone, Roosevelt pointing out, to Churchill's alarm, that the American occupation would be 'limited to two years'. In discussing reparations, Churchill opposed too high a demand on Germany, recalling the failure of heavy reparations after the last war and telling Roosevelt and Stalin: 'If you want your horse to pull your wagon, you have to give him some hay.' It was agreed to instruct a Reparations Commission to work out the final sum. That night Churchill said to Sarah, before he went to sleep, 'I do not suppose that at any moment in history has the agony of the world been so great or widespread. Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever in the World.'
On February 6 the Big Three discussed the World Organisation which they were in the process of creating. Its main instrument of decision in international disputes was to be a Security Council in which the Great Powers would exercise control. Churchill insisted, however, that the British Government would not be doing justice to its intentions if 'no provision was made for a full statement of grievances by the many smaller nations of the world'. No Great Power should have the right of veto on a matter in which it was one of the disputants; he instanced the question of China asking the Security Council for the return of Hong Kong. Both sides would state their case, and the Council would decide.
The discussion then turned to Poland, which was to dominate the Yalta Conference. 'Coming from America,' said Roosevelt, he took 'a distant point of view of the Polish question; the five or six million Poles in the United States were mostly of the second generation.' Churchill then spoke of the right of the Poles, within the new and more westerly frontiers on which Stalin had insisted, 'to live freely and to live their own lives in their own way'. Britain had gone to war in order that Poland could be 'free and sovereign'. It was Britain's wish that Poland 'should be mistress in her own house and captain of her own soul'. Poland must have 'full and free elections'. There must be a 'free vote of the Polish people' on their future constitution and administration.
When Stalin pressed the claims of the Lublin Poles for primacy in any interim governing instrument, Churchill replied, and reiterated, that the Lublin Government had no right to say that it represented the Polish nation. Somewhat testily, at this point Roosevelt remarked that 'Poland has been a source of trouble for over 500 years', to which Churchill replied, 'We must do what we can to put an end to those troubles.' Over the next five days Churchill was to spend many hours pressing for free elections for Poland and a multiplicity of political parties, urging 'real, substantial and effective representation' of the London Poles in any interim Government, as well as the participation of other independent, Trade Union and Socialist leaders then in Poland whom the Americans wanted included.
On February 7, driving with Sarah from the Vorontsov Villa to the Livadia Palace for the next meeting of the Big Three, Churchill looked out across the sun-sparkling sea, and then remarked, 'The Riviera of Hades.' That day, at the formal session, he supported a proposal by Molotov that the Soviet Union, though a single country, should have three seats at the United Nations Assembly; Russia, Byelorussia and the Ukraine. 'I should like to make a friendly gesture to Russia in this matter,' Churchill telegraphed to the War Cabinet, 'in view of other important concessions by them which are achieved or pending.' Russia received the three seats, which she has retained to this day.[3]
One question raised on February 7 was how far to the west Poland's frontiers should be drawn. Stalin envisaged the German city of Breslau, and a large wedge of territory between the Eastern and Western Neisse rivers, being a part of the new Poland. Churchill thought that this was going too far west; that the Eastern Neisse River should be the limit of Poland's westward expansion, not the Western Neisse, which at certain points was more than a hundred miles further west. 'It would be a great pity,' Churchill said, 'to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it died of indigestion.' Stalin countered that there were no Germans left in that region 'as they had all run away'. Once more, Stalin's view was to prevail; his Army was already master of most of the region under discussion.
Physically the conference was not proving as hard as the one at Teheran, Sarah told her mother. 'They do not meet till 4 in the afternoon, when they have a whacking session of 4 to 5 hours and then they part, generally to their separate lairs. We dine quietly here-generally just Papa and Anthony and me-which of course is heaven. The pouch arrives unfortunately at about midnight-which prevents him getting to bed much before two.' Each morning Churchill would rise late, have an early lunch, work at his desk, have an early afternoon sleep, and be ready for the day's plenary session at four.
At the plenary session on February 8, Stalin stressed that only those States which had declared war on Germany could be invited to the first United Nations Conference fixed for April 25. Churchill then asked that Turkey should be invited, 'if she was now ready to make a death-bed confession and declare war'. Stalin agreed. Turkey accepted this offer with alacrity, declaring war on Germany on February 23, with effect from March 1.
The discussion then turned to Poland. As Stalin would not allow the London Poles an equal place in the interim Government of Poland, Churchill proposed another solution: Britain's worries about the Lublin Government would be removed, he said, 'if a free and unfettered general election were held in Poland by ballot and with universal suffrage and free candidatures'. Once such an election had been held, Britain 'would salute the Government that emerged without regard to the Polish Government in London'. He was pressing, Churchill telegraphed that day to the War Cabinet, for a 'free, fair, and unfettered election, which alone can give life and being to a Polish Government'.
To Churchill's surprise, Stalin then promised that free elections would be held. When Roosevelt asked how soon they could be held, Stalin replied disarmingly, 'It should be possible to hold them within a month.' There was nothing that Churchill could do but to accept that promise. When, over the coming weeks, it was slowly, deceptively, and systematically broken, the wartime Anglo-Soviet alliance was broken with it.
Ending the discussion that afternoon with a brief reference to Greece, Stalin told Churchill that he 'did not wish to interfere'. Churchill replied that he was 'much obliged'.
That night Stalin was host to Roosevelt and Churchill at his own residence, the Yusupov Palace. In a short speech, Churchill told the dinner guests that in the past nations that were comrades in arms had drifted apart within five or ten years of war: 'Thus toiling millions have followed a vicious circle, falling into the pit, and then by their sacrifices raising themselves up again. We now have a chance of avoiding the errors of previous generations, and of making a sure peace.'
During the toasts, Churchill raised his glass to the interpreters, to whom he declared, 'Interpreters of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your audiences.' This parody of Karl Marx 'went with a bang', Portal wrote; Stalin was amused.
During the plenary session of February 9, Churchill and Roosevelt obtained assurances from Stalin that British and American observers would be able to monitor the elections in Poland, and that the leader of the London Poles, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, would be able to take part in them, together with other candidates from his Peasant Party. In this way, Stalin built yet further on the credit of his promise of free and swift elections. He also gave Churchill an assurance on Yugoslavia, that he would use his influence to persuade Tito to carry out the January 11 agreement with Subasic, for an Assembly of National Liberation made up of all the pre-war political Parties, and a freely elected Constituent Assembly which would in due course confirm any legislation decided upon. When Churchill said that he knew he could 'rely on Marshal Stalin's goodwill' in asking Tito to give these assurances, Stalin replied emphatically, the minutes recorded, 'that when he made a statement he would carry it out'.
The last topic that day was the treatment of war criminals. At Teheran, Stalin had proposed taking 50,000 Germans and shooting them without trial. Churchill, who had been so offended by this at the time that he had walked out of the room in protest, now said that a list of war criminals would be drawn up and those on the list brought to trial, though personally he was inclined to feel that 'they should be shot as soon as they were caught and their identity established'. Stalin, hitherto an advocate of summary executions, now claimed to favour the judicial process. Roosevelt commented that it should not be 'too judicial journalists and photographers should be kept out 'until the criminals were dead'.
The plenary was over; driving back along the corniche to the Vorontsov Villa, Churchill found a telegram from Montgomery awaiting him: British and Canadian troops had reached, and breached, the Siegfried Line. Seven German towns and villages had been overrun and 1,800 prisoners taken. On the west bank of the Rhine south of Strasbourg, all German resistance had ceased. That night Churchill was in good humour; 'PM seems well,' commented Cadogan, 'though drinking buckets of Caucasian champagne which would undermine the health of any ordinary man.'
On the afternoon of February 10, at a private meeting with Stalin at the Yusupov Palace, Churchill agreed to the repatriation to Russia of those Russians who had been taken prisoner by the British while fighting with German units. Stalin particularly asked that these men should not be 'ill-treated' by the British before they were sent back. Churchill then 'begged' Stalin for good treatment of those British prisoners-of-war whom Soviet forces were liberating from prisoner-of-war camps in the East, telling the Soviet leader, 'Every mother in England is anxious about the fate of her prisoner sons.'
Thus was linked the fate of a hundred thousand Russians, of whom at least ten thousand were to be executed on their enforced return, and a hundred thousand Britons who were to be welcomed home with enthusiasm and love.
At the end of their meeting, Churchill told Stalin he would 'welcome the appearance of Russian ships in the Pacific', and that henceforth Russian warships should be allowed free access and egress at the Dardanelles, despite the clauses of the Montreux Convention of 1936 forbidding this. It was 'intolerable', Churchill said, that Russia should be 'at the mercy of the Turks, not only in war but in peace'. Churchill and Stalin then drove in their separate cars from the Yusupov to the Livadia Palace, for the final plenary meeting, where Churchill again expressed his unease, supported by a telegram from the War Cabinet in London, at pushing the Polish frontier as far west as Russia had proposed. A compromise word was found; Poland would receive 'substantial' territorial accessions in the west, the actual line to be determined later. In fact, the final line existed from the moment the Red Army reached it, exactly where Stalin wanted it.
At this last meeting Stalin agreed to defer to Churchill's view, also backed up by a strong telegram from the War Cabinet in London, not to press for the high scale of reparations he had hoped to extract from Germany. It too was an easy assurance to give; in the next six years Stalin was to take what he wanted from all the defeated and liberated States that lay within his military and political control. One more assurance was given by Stalin at Yalta, in strictest secrecy, and adhered to scrupulously: the Soviet Union would go to war against Japan as soon as possible after the defeat of Germany.
That night Churchill gave a dinner party at the Vorontsov Villa for Stalin and Roosevelt. After dinner he took his guests into his Map Room. There was something on the maps for each guest: Soviet forces were on the east bank of the Oder within thirty-eight miles of Berlin; British and Canadian forces were on the western bank of the Rhine; American forces, having returned to the Philippines, had entered Manila.
While the Big Three were in the Map Room there was one sour moment. During the discussion of the various military advances, Stalin suggested that the British might wish to make an earlier armistice than the Russians. Churchill, extremely hurt, went to a corner of the Map Room and, with his hands in his pockets, began to sing the opening lines of one of his favourite songs, 'Keep right on to the end of the road.' Stalin was puzzled. Then Roosevelt said with a broad grin to the Russian interpreter, Berezhkov, 'Tell your Chief that this singing by the Prime Minister is Britain's secret weapon.'
On the following day, February 11, the Big Three met at noon to sign a Declaration on Liberated Europe, upholding 'the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live', and pledging themselves to 'the restoration of sovereign rights and self-Government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations'. Where necessary, in order to help set up interim Governments 'broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population', the Big Three would 'jointly assist' in the holding of 'free elections'.
It was also confirmed, in a separate communiqué, that elections would be held in Poland for the establishment of a Polish Provisional Government of National Unity. Although on the surface it seemed that Poland had emerged as the main beneficiary of Yalta, and this communiqué confirmed the principle of free elections, it did so according to the formula Churchill had himself proposed to break the deadlock, that the Lublin Government would be the mainspring of the new Government, 'reorganised on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from Poles abroad'.
Despite its pledge to the holding of 'free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot', the communiqué on Poland made it clear that the London Poles, the Polish Government on behalf of which Britain and Churchill in particular had fought for so long, had been relegated to the status of 'Poles abroad'. Now they did not even have equality of status with the Lublin Poles; the communiqué was as unyielding on this point as Stalin himself had earlier been. In the last formal words exchanged at Yalta, Churchill warned Stalin that he would be 'strongly criticised for it at home on the grounds that we had yielded completely to the Russian view'. Churchill was right; there was to be considerable unease in Britain that the London Poles had been relegated to the sidelines, and that nothing could be done to ensure a democratic and independent Poland. But from the moment Soviet troops stood on the banks of the Oder, as they did that week, or were masters of Warsaw, as they had been for the previous three weeks, no number of communiqués or pledges could affect the outcome.
The Yalta communiqué having been signed, Churchill left the Livadia Palace for the last time, returning along the winding hill-side road to the Vorontsov Villa. It was shortly after five o'clock. He had intended to stay at the Villa that night, but, as his car drove through its magnificent Gothic entrance way he suddenly turned to Sarah with the words, 'Why do we stay here? Why don't we go tonight-I see no reason to stay a minute longer-we're off.'
Churchill then sprang out of the car and, hurrying into the Private Office, announced to his secretariat, 'I don't know about you-but I'm off! I leave in fifty minutes.' Describing the subsequent turn of events, Sarah told her mother: 'After a second's stunned silence, everyone was galvanised into activity. Trunks and large mysterious paper parcels given to us by the Russians-whoopee-filled the hall. Laundry arrived back clean but damp. Naturally fifty minutes gave us time to change our minds six more times.' After endless conflicting suggestions, including going by sea or air, and going to Athens, or Cairo, or Istanbul, 'Papa, genial and sprightly like a boy out of school, his homework done, walked from room to room saying: "Come on, come on!"'
By 5.30 the cavalcade of cars was ready, driving westward along the rugged coast, beneath towering bare cliffs, and then, darkness having fallen, leaving the sea to go inland across a mountain pass to Sebastopol. There Churchill boarded the Franconia. 'I thought he looked tired,' the ship's Captain, Harry Grattidge, later wrote, 'but his first question was whether the courier had arrived so that he could get to work.' On the following afternoon Churchill left the Franconia and was driven to the Crimean War battlefields. At the small port which had been the British base in those distant days Churchill was struck, he later recalled, by the 'large number of prisoners-of-war, slaves, Roumanians etc who were toiling there, no harder than they could make them'. The Russians were already using the defeated peoples to rebuild their devastated cities. On returning to the Franconia Churchill asked Grattidge if he could have his clothes deloused. This, Grattidge noted, 'defeated us'.
With the Franconia still anchored off Sebastopol, Churchill worked throughout February 13 in the comfort of his cabin. That night, while he slept, more than eight hundred British bombers struck at the city of Dresden, dropping 1,471 tons of high explosive bombs and 1,175 tons of incendiaries. A few hours later, American bombers dropped another 689 tons of bombs on the burning city. The Russian purpose, explained at Yalta eight days earlier, was achieved: refugees on the roads, fleeing westward from the firestorm, disrupted the movement of German reinforcements seeking to pass through the burning city to the front further east. But the cost, sixty thousand civilian dead, was as high as any single raid during the bombing in Europe.
On February 14 Churchill left the Franconia to drive to Saki aerodrome, a journey of three hours. During the drive, he later recalled, 'we saw a colossal heap of locomotives-a thousand or more-which had been pitched into a chasm by the Germans before they quitted. Amazing sight.' After a short speech of farewell to the Russian guard of honour at the airport, in which he spoke of 'the redeemed Crimea, cleansed by Russian valour from the foul taint of the Huns', and of their 'great leader' Stalin, Churchill left Soviet soil for the last time, flying south-west to Athens, where Archbishop Damaskinos was now Regent. The fighting in the capital had ended, and Churchill drove with the Archbishop through streets which echoed not to the sound of mortar fire but to the cheering of enthusiastic bystanders. Then, in Constitution Square, with the Parthenon glowing in the evening light, Churchill addressed the largest crowd he had ever seen; Macmillan, who was present, estimated it at about 40,000. 'Let party hatreds die,' he declaimed. 'Let there be unity. Let there be resolute comradeship.' As Churchill left the square, a Greek band played 'God Save the King'. Churchill failed to recognise their version and continued to walk away, until he noticed that General Scobie had stopped and was standing to attention.
That night the Archbishop called on Churchill, to ask him not to forget the ancient Greek claims to Constantinople. 'Dismiss those dreams from your mind,' was Churchill's reply. Then, shortly before midnight, he left the British Embassy for his Skymaster, where he slept while the plane remained on the tarmac. After dawn on February 15 he flew from Athens to Cairo, where he was driven direct from the airport to Alexandria, and then taken by boat to the American heavy-cruiser Quincy. There Roosevelt awaited him. 'I felt he had a slender contact with life,' Churchill later recalled. The two men were not to meet again.
From the Quincy, Churchill flew back to Cairo, where he stayed in the Minister Resident's villa. Then, on February 17, he drove into the desert, to Lake Fayyum, where he gave a banquet to the ruler of Saudi Arabia, King Ibn Saud, and asked the King's assistance, in regard to Palestine, 'to promote a definite and lasting settlement between the Jews and Arabs'. What Churchill had in mind was a Middle East Federation, headed by Ibn Saud, in which a Jewish Palestine would be an integral and at the same time independent part.
Churchill later wrote, in some notes for his war memoirs, that before the banquet he had been told that the King could not allow drinking or smoking in his presence. Far from accepting the Arab custom, he took an independent line: 'I was the host and I said that if it was his religion that made him say such things, my religion prescribed as an absolute sacred ritual smoking cigars and drinking alcohol before, after, and if need be during, all meals and the intervals between them. Complete surrender.' The King was not, however, without resources of his own. 'We were given something to drink', Churchill wrote. 'Did not know what it was. It seemed a very nasty cocktail. Found out afterwards it was an aphrodisiac.'
Returning to Cairo, Churchill telegraphed Clementine to tell her of his 'Most interesting interviews with one Emperor, two Kings and one President.' The Emperor was Haile Selassie of Abyssinia, who had shown 'no particular gratitude' for all that Britain had done to restore him to the throne; the Kings were Ibn Saud, and Farouk of Egypt; the President was Shukri Qwatli of Syria.
Churchill spent February 18 in Cairo, 'an idle day', one observer noted in his diary. At midnight he went to the airport and boarded his Skymaster, but it was not yet ready for take-off. 'Sometimes he would burst into a small snatch of song, and go right through the song too,' Elizabeth Layton wrote to her parents. 'He was in a grand mood, rather sleepy and very funny, and I must admit rather lovable.' At two o'clock in the morning the Skymaster was ready and Churchill airborne yet again, this time for a non-stop flight of thirteen hours and forty minutes. He had been away from England for three weeks.
Bad weather over London forced the Skymaster to divert to Lyneham in Wiltshire. Churchill was then driven three hours to Reading, where he waited at the Station Hotel until Clementine could join him. From Reading they drove to London, where the War Cabinet was waiting at 10 Downing Street; Churchill gave them an account of the Yalta Conference. 'He is marvellously well,' Clementine reported that day to Mary, 'much, much better than when he went off for this most trying and difficult of conferences.' That night they dined with the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace.
The issue which confronted Churchill most starkly on his return was the future of Poland. Many Conservatives doubted that Stalin would keep his word about free elections. 'The proof of the pudding is in the eating,' Churchill wrote to the Prime Minister of New Zealand. 'We are only committed on the basis of full execution in good faith of the terms of the published communiqué. Personally in spite of my anti-Communist convictions I have good hopes that Russia, or at any rate Stalin, desires to work in harmony with the Western Democracies. The alternative would be despair about the long future of the world. We shall not flinch however from our duty as we conceive it, to the last scrap of our life and strength.'
If Stalin did not give 'reality' to his undertakings about Polish elections, Churchill told the War Cabinet on February 21, 'our engagement would be altered'. Britain would indeed continue to recognise the Polish Government in London as 'the legitimate Government of Poland' until a Government had been set up in Poland on the basis of the Yalta communiqué: free elections and a secret ballot. At dinner at Chequers two days later, Colville noted that 'the PM was rather depressed, thinking of the possibilities of Russia one day turning against us, saying that Chamberlain had trusted Hitler as he was now trusting Stalin (though he thought in different circumstances) but taking comfort, as far as Russia went, in the German proverb about trees not growing up to the sky.' When Bomber Command had completed its destruction of Germany, Churchill asked, 'What will lie between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover?' Perhaps, however, the Russians 'would not want to sweep on to the Atlantic, or something would stop them as the accident of Ghenghis Khan's death had stopped the horsed archers of the Mongols, who retired and never came back'.
On February 24 the exiled President Beneš of Czechoslovakia lunched with Churchill at Chequers, together with his Foreign Minister, Jan Masaryk. Churchill told them that 'a small lion was walking between a huge Russian bear and a great American elephant, but perhaps it would prove to be the lion who knew the way'.
Three days later, during the Yalta debate in the House of Commons, Churchill tried to calm the widespread unease about the future of Poland. He had the impression, he said, that Stalin and the Soviet leaders 'wish to live in honourable friendship and equality with the western democracies. I feel also that their word is their bond.' But times were far different from 1940 and 1941, when Britain's actions had seemed plain and simple. 'If a man is coming across the sea to kill you, you do everything in your power to make sure he dies before finishing the journey. This may be difficult, it may be painful, but at least it is simple.' Four years had passed since then. 'We are now entering a world of imponderables, and at every stage occasions for self-questioning arise. It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.'
Churchill ended with an appeal that the Great Powers 'must seek to serve and not to rule'. In a peroration which at the last moment he decided not to deliver, he had intended to say: 'No one can guarantee the future of the world. There are some who fear it will tear itself to pieces and that an awful lapse in human history may occur. I do not believe it. There must be hope. The alternative is despair, which is madness. The British race has never yielded to counsels of despair.'
That evening in the smoking-room, Poland dominated all conversation. After talking to Churchill there, Harold Nicolson wrote: 'He is really sensible. He says he does not see what else we could possibly do.' Not only were the Russians very powerful, 'but they are on the spot; even the massed Majesty of the British Empire would not avail to turn them off that spot'. Colville noted on the following day, 'The PM is trying to persuade himself that all is well, but in his heart I think he is worried about Poland and not convinced of the strength of our moral position.'
Churchill recognised the strength of the feeling that Poland had been betrayed. 'There is a great deal of uneasiness in both parties that we are letting the Poles down,' he telegraphed to Roosevelt on February 28. Churchill also told Roosevelt of many stories 'put about' of the wholesale deportations of Poles by the Russians, and of executions by the Lublin Poles 'of elements they do not like'. He had no means, he said, of verifying or of contradicting these allegations. That night news reached Churchill of massive Russian political intimidation in Roumania, backed by troops, for the establishment of a Communist minority Government. The Moscow 'percentages' agreement prevented any British response. But Poland was not a part of that agreement; its democratic future had been guaranteed by the Yalta communiqué. Angered and frustrated by Stalin's obduracy, Churchill told Colville that night, 'I have not the slightest intention of being cheated over Poland, not even if we go to the verge of war with Russia.'
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