That evening Churchill went as on the previous night to the Ministry of Health balcony overlooking Whitehall, where he told the vast crowd, 'London-like a great rhinoceros, a great hippopotamus, saying "Let them do their worst-London can take it"-London could take anything.' He wished to thank them 'for never having failed in the long, monstrous days and in the long nights black as hell'.
The celebrations that week were overshadowed by events in the East: in a telegram to Eden on May 11, Churchill expressed his fear that Soviet encroachments in Central Europe and the Balkans, of which he was receiving hourly reports, would lead to a 'period of appeasement' followed 'by a third World War'. He was convinced that 'the Russian peril, which I regard as enormous, could be better faced if we remain united', yet he saw no means of halting the intense Soviet pressure, especially amid the euphoria of victory. When told by the Foreign Office that the fourteen Polish negotiators, seized earlier by the Soviets outside Warsaw while under safe conduct, were now in Moscow as prisoners, he commented, 'I do not see what we can do now in this interlude of joymaking.'
Disturbed by newspaper reports of the imminent departure of at least half the American troops in Europe to the Pacific, on May 12 Churchill telegraphed to Truman, to warn him that the Russians would have the power to maintain 'very large armies in the field for a long time'. He felt 'deep anxiety' because of the Russian 'misinterpretation' of the Yalta decisions, their attitude to Poland, their overwhelming influence in the Balkans, 'the combination of Russian power and the territories under their control or occupied, coupled with Communist techniques in so many other countries, and above all their power to maintain very large armies in the field for a long time'. What, he asked, would be the position in Europe after a year or two, when 'the British and American armies have melted and the French have not yet been formed on any major scale, when we may have a handful of divisions, mostly French, and when Russia may choose to keep two or three hundred on active service?'
The new map of Europe gave Churchill cause for alarm about Soviet intentions. 'An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front,' he told Truman. 'We do not know what is going on behind. There seems little doubt that the whole of the region Lübeck-Trieste-Corfu will soon be completely in their hands.' To this would be added the 'enormous area' which the Americans were about to withdraw from in central Germany, between Eisenach and the Elbe. Once this withdrawal was made, 'a broad band of many hundreds of miles of Russian-occupied territory will isolate us from Poland'. Then, as the attention of the Western Allies focused on inflicting 'severe penalties' on Germany, 'it would be open to the Russians in a very short time to advance if they chose, to the waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic'.
Churchill urged Truman to join him in coming to 'an understanding' with Russia 'or see where we are with her', before the Anglo-American forces were substantially withdrawn from Europe. This could be done only by a personal meeting with Stalin. 'This issue of a settlement with Russia before our strength has gone,' Churchill ended, 'seems to me to dwarf all others.' Truman agreed, and plans were made for him and Churchill to meet Stalin at Potsdam in two months' time.
On the evening of May 13 Churchill broadcast to the British people. It was five years ago 'on Thursday last', he said, that the King had commissioned him 'to form a National Government of all parties to carry on our affairs'. Five years was 'a long time in human life, especially when there is no remission for good conduct'. He wished he could say 'that all our toils and troubles were over. Then indeed I could end my five years' service happily, and if you thought you had had enough of me and that I ought to be put out to grass, I tell you I would take it with the best grace.' But there was still 'a lot to do'. On the continent of Europe 'we have yet to make sure that the simple and honourable purposes for which we entered the war are not brushed aside or overlooked in the months following our success, and that the words "freedom", "democracy" and "liberation" are not distorted from their true meaning as we have understood them.' There would be 'little use in punishing the Hitlerites for their crimes if law and justice did not rule, and if totalitarian or police governments were to take the place of the German invaders.'
In private Churchill anticipated a 'showdown' with Russia over the sovereignty and independence of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Yugoslavia. But he also sought to accelerate Russia's entry into the war against Japan now that Germany was defeated. This too had been a decision finalised at Yalta. Returning to Downing Street on May 14, Jock Colville noted in his diary: 'The volume of work is if anything more pressing than when I left. Victory has brought no respite. The PM looks tired and has to fight for the energy to deal with the problems confronting him.'
Churchill still hoped to maintain the Coalition in being until the defeat of Japan. This hope was enhanced on May 18 when Attlee went to see him at the Annexe to tell him that he was 'favourably disposed' to persuading the Labour Party to remain in the Coalition until Japan was defeated. Three other senior Labour men, Bevin, A.V. Alexander and Morrison, each of whom had held high Ministerial Office under Churchill since May 1940, were likewise disposed to continue the Coalition. Churchill proposed a national referendum to ascertain if this was the will of the people. Attlee asked if, in Churchill's formal letter proposing the continuation of the Coalition, a sentence could be added that the Government would do its utmost 'to implement the proposals for social security and full employment contained in the White Paper which we have laid before Parliament'. Churchill agreed; these proposals, a Four-Year Plan of social reform, had been worked out at his request by his assistant of pre-First World War days, William Beveridge.
As in May 1940, so in May 1945, the Labour Party was holding its annual conference at a moment of political decision. In May 1940 it was the refusal of the Labour Party activists, then meeting at Bournemouth, to serve under Chamberlain that had effectively brought Churchill to power. Now it was the Party members' equally strong desire, expressed at Blackpool, to return to the cut and thrust of Party politics, and the possibility of the first Labour Government since 1931, that effectively made sure the Coalition would come to an end. It was ten years since the previous General Election. Many Labour politicians had held Government office under Churchill, had gained great experience, and wished, above all, to put their Socialist ideals into practice. Attlee telephoned Churchill from Blackpool on the evening of May 21 to tell him the news.
Churchill realised that nothing could now save the Coalition. At noon on May 23 he went to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation to the King. He had been leader of an all-Party Government, the 'Grand Coalition' as he sometimes called it, for five years and thirteen days. The King asked him to form a Caretaker Government until elections could be held and the votes of soldiers overseas counted; this would take at least two months. Churchill agreed to remain as Prime Minister and to form a Conservative administration. 'We must hope for re-union,' he wrote to Bevin, 'when Party passions are less strong.'
On the morning of May 26 Churchill completed the last of his Cabinet appointments. He then drove with Clementine to his constituency, for his first speech in what was now an election campaign. His theme was the need to maintain the Conservative Caretaker Government in power, because 'we shall take very good care of everything that affects the welfare of Britain and all classes of Britain'. Two days later he gave a farewell Party at 10 Downing Street to the outgoing Coalition Cabinet. As he made a short farewell speech, tears coursed down his cheeks. 'The light of history will shine on all your helmets,' he told them.
A final Cabinet photograph was to be taken in the garden. It had begun to rain. As the photographer set up his camera and rearranged the group, Churchill commented, 'We'd better finish this or my political opponents will say that this is a conspiracy on my part to give them all rheumatism!' The photograph taken, Churchill was driven to Buckingham Palace, where he kissed hands on his reappointment as Prime Minister.
The General Election campaign now began in earnest. Churchill's principal theme was the perils inherent in Socialism. Watching with anguish the regimes that were even then being imposed on Eastern Europe by the Soviets, he warned in a broadcast on June 4 that no Labour Government 'could afford to allow free, sharp or violently worded expressions of public discontent', and he went on to declare: 'They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme Party and the Party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil Servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk-the common people as they like to call them in America-where would they be once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?'
Not only did Churchill warn that a Labour Government would bring in 'some form of Gestapo', he also stated that Socialism was 'inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State'. Not only property, but liberty 'in all its forms', was struck at by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism.
Widespread criticism met the 'Gestapo speech', as it quickly became known. Sarah wrote approvingly to her father to say that if she were a 'thinking' Labour voter 'it would have started me thinking along completely new lines about socialism', but she went on to say that she was 'not quite sure' that Labour voters would understand why what he said would really be so. 'Socialism as practised in the war,' she pointed out, 'did no one any harm and quite a lot of people good. The children of this country have never been so well fed or healthy, what milk there was, was shared equally, the rich didn't die because their meat ration was no larger than the poor; and there is no doubt that this common sharing and feeling of sacrifice was one of the strongest bonds that unified us. So why, they say, cannot this common feeling of sacrifice be made to work as effectively in peace?' Sarah added, 'Don't think I am a rebel!'
In a subsequent broadcast on June 13 Churchill stressed the constructive aspects and aims of Conservatism, and at Sarah's suggestion elaborated on the Coalition Government's Four-Year Plan, prepared by Beveridge and made public two years earlier, for social insurance, industrial injuries insurance, and a National Health Service 'to be shaped by Parliament and made to play a dynamic part in the life and security of every family and home'. He also announced that the Conservatives would provide free milk for 'the very poor' and for the under-fives. But he still felt the need to censure 'in the most severe terms' the efforts of the Socialists 'to drag their long-term fads and wavy Utopias across the practical path of need and duty'. He also warned, in an echo of his 'Gestapo speech', that if the Socialist system came into force 'the natural change of parties in office from time to time would necessarily come to an end, and a political police would be required to enforce an absolute and permanent system upon the nation'.
Churchill ended his broadcast of June 13 with a further reference to social policy, suggested to him by Sarah: a housing programme that would use 'war-time expedients' to ensure that homes were built for all. 'Every method,' he said, 'public or private, for houses, permanent or temporary, will be employed, and all obstructions, be they price-rings, monopoly, or any other form of obstacle, will be dealt with by the whole power of Parliament and the nation.' This was a firm and fighting pledge, but the broadcast did not go well. The reference to the political police was found offensive by some, ludicrous by others, on whose votes a Conservative majority would have to rest. In addition, there was a tiredness in both broadcasts which was commented on. 'Neither of the two broadcasts is the true PM,' a member of Churchill's staff, Edith Watson, told Lord Moran, and she added, 'There was no "vim" in them.'
Throughout the election campaign Churchill was thinking about developments in Eastern Europe; on June 14 Radio Moscow announced that the fourteen Polish political leaders arrested near Warsaw would be brought to trial in Moscow. At the same time, despite a personal protest by Churchill to Eisenhower, the Americans began to withdraw their troops from a broad swathe of land in central Germany and Czechoslovakia, to a line agreed upon earlier with Russia, and up to which Soviet forces now took control. Churchill believed that conflict with Russia must be avoided, telling Eden, 'The gulf between Britain and Russia is unbridgeable except by friendly diplomatic relations'. He went on to stress that the 'similarity and unity' which Britain had with the United States would not only grow, but was 'indispensable to our safety'.
Preparations were now being made for the final Big Three conference, to be held at Potsdam in a month's time. On June 14 Churchill told the Commons that he would be taking Attlee with him, in case anyone were to say, 'Why are you committing yourself to something for which you have no authority, when in the ballot box there may be something which strips you of your authority?' At this a Labour MP called out, 'Is the right hon. Gentleman going to take the Gestapo with him?'
Despite the continued reverberations of the Gestapo speech, Churchill's personal popularity was enormous, attested to almost everywhere by the vast crowds which came to cheer him at every point on his election tours. It was as if the leader of the nation during the war years, and the leader of a Party deep in an election struggle, were two quite separate men. 'On the way out to Chequers last night,' John Martin wrote to his wife on June 17, 'the PM's car was slowed down in a traffic jam just outside the White City where crowds were coming away from the greyhound races. Immediately he was surrounded by an extremely enthusiastic mob-smiling and waving and cheering-not a sign of unfriendliness or opposition. It was a remarkable demonstration and these were very much the "common people".'
On June 18 the trial began in Moscow of the fourteen Polish political leaders; once more Churchill's concerns were focused on the tyranny of Communism in the East. But his third election broadcast two days later fared no better than the previous two. 'He is very low, poor darling,' Clementine wrote to Mary. 'He thinks he has lost his "touch" & he grieves about it.' In his broadcast he warned that a Socialist Government 'could not allow itself to be challenged or defeated at any time in any form of Parliament that they might allow'. Churchill's criticisms of Socialism did not deflect him from his own radical views, which he had expressed so forcefully thirty-five years earlier. In a letter to Eden on June 23 he commented, 'There is nothing immoral in nationalisation so long as you pay the people who owned the property originally in a fair way.'
On June 21, as the election campaign reached its climax, news came from Moscow that twelve of the fourteen Polish political leaders had been given prison sentences of up to eight years. For Churchill, who had fought long and hard on behalf of a Polish democratic future, the news was final confirmation of his fears that tyranny would be imposed wherever Communism held sway.
What Churchill feared most in Britain was not a Socialist programme in itself, but that control of the Parliamentary Labour Party would be exercised by the Party's Executive; 'unrepresentative persons', he had called them in his broadcast of June 20, who would 'share the secrets and give the orders to the so-called Ministers of the Crown'. This fear was reinforced by the claim of the Chairman of the Labour Party Executive, Harold Laski, that although Attlee would go to Potsdam with Churchill, the Labour Party would not be committed to any decisions reached there, as these would not have been debated by the Party Executive.
On June 30, in his final election broadcast, Churchill warned that the influence of the Labour Party Executive on Ministers was 'abhorrent to the methods hitherto pursued in British public life' and would 'strike at the root of our parliamentary institutions'. To those who believed that they could somehow vote Labour or Liberal, without losing him as Prime Minister, he declared: 'There is no truth in stories now being put about that you can vote for my political opponents at this election, whether they be Labour or Liberal, without at the same time voting for my dismissal from power. This you should not hesitate to do if you think it right and best for the country. All I ask is that you should do it with your eyes open.'
To his Cabinet colleagues Churchill stressed, in a memorandum on July 3, the need for an 'intensive effort' at house-building, to be handled exactly with the energy that would have been put 'into any of the battles we have won'. He also asked them to prepare legislation both for a National Insurance scheme and a National Health Service. This aspect of his efforts was unknown to the electorate; that evening, at Walthamstow, where Labour was in the ascendant, the booing and heckling were such that he was almost prevented from speaking.
There were to be three hundred Liberal candidates at the election, led by Sir Archibald Sinclair, whom Churchill had encouraged to enter Parliament as a Liberal immediately after the First World War. Another of Churchill's Liberal friends was Horatia Seymour, who had a cottage on the estate at Chartwell. A lifelong Liberal, she would be voting Liberal once more, she wrote to him on July 3, nor could she tell any of the Party's candidates in three-cornered fights to stand down in favour of the Conservative candidate, as Churchill wished. The 'judgment and intelligence' of the Conservative Party had been 'so grievously at fault in the years before 1939', she wrote. 'No one taught me more about that than you, dear Winston!'
Polling day was on July 5. To enable the service vote to be counted, there was to be a three-week delay before the results were announced. Churchill had already planned a ten-day holiday, between polling day and the start of the Potsdam Conference. On July 7 he flew to Bordeaux, then drove south to the Château de Bordaberry, near the Spanish border, for a week's relaxation. In the morning he swam in the Atlantic. In the afternoon he painted. 'Winston at first low and tired,' Mary later recalled, 'but the magic of painting soon laid hold of him, absorbing him for hours on end, and banishing disturbing thoughts of either the present or the future.'
Churchill sent only one official telegram from Bordaberry. It was to Field Marshal Montgomery, now the Commander-in-Chief, British Army of Occupation, and it read: 'Please see that no establishments in which research and development has been carried on by the Germans are destroyed. Much of the apparatus there could be used by our own engineers and scientists.' He also sent a single minute, to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Anderson, asking that there should be a 'ruthless combing' of the armed services, so that, without affecting the front-line effort against Japan, the necessary manpower could be found 'to meet our civilian and export needs'.
On the afternoon of July 15 Churchill flew with Mary from Bordeaux to Berlin, a flight of four and a half hours. His one week respite was over. Waiting to greet him at the villa which was to be his base while at Potsdam, 23 Ringstrasse, were Eden, Attlee, Alexander and Montgomery. 'The PM looks very old,' Montgomery wrote to a friend. 'I was shocked when I saw him; he has put on ten years since I last saw him.'
On the following morning Churchill had his first meeting with Truman, spending two hours at Truman's Berlin residence, four hundred yards from his own. 'He told me he liked the President immensely-they talk the same language,' wrote Mary to her mother. 'He says he is sure he can work with him.' That afternoon Churchill was shown over the ruins of Hitler's Chancellery. In the square in front of the building a crowd of Germans had gathered. Except for one old man who 'shook his head disapprovingly', Churchill later recalled, 'they all began to cheer. My hate had died with their surrender and I was much moved by their demonstrations, and also by their haggard looks and threadbare clothes.'
On his second day at Potsdam, Churchill lunched at 23 Ringstrasse with Truman and the American Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, who put a piece of paper in front of Churchill with the words: 'Babies satisfactorily born.' He had no idea what this meant. 'It means,' Stimson told him, 'that the experiment in the American desert has come off. The atomic bomb is a reality.'
Stalin was not yet to be told of this dramatic development. At the first plenary session, held after Churchill's lunch with Stimson, Churchill pressed for 'the early holding of free elections in Poland which would truly reflect the wishes of the Polish people', one of the principal decisions of the Yalta Conference. At a private meeting with Stalin after the plenary session, Churchill spoke of the German people. They had always believed 'in a symbol. If a Hohenzollern had been allowed to reign after the last war, there would have been no Hitler.' Although he did not say so, he had first seen a Hohenzollern, the Emperor William II, fifty-four years earlier, at the Crystal Palace in May 1891.
During a moment of small talk, Stalin told Churchill that he had taken to smoking cigars. Churchill commented that if a photograph of a cigar-smoking Stalin could be 'flashed across the world, it would cause an immense sensation'.
On July 18 Truman was Churchill's guest at lunch. For two hours they were alone. During their discussion Churchill asked whether 'unconditional surrender' might not be expressed in 'some other way' as far as Japan was concerned, 'so that we got all the essentials for future peace and security, and yet left the Japanese some show of saving their military honour and some assurance of their national existence, after they had complied with all the safeguards necessary for the conqueror'. Truman commented, as the note of the conversation recorded, 'He did not think the Japanese had any military honour after Pearl Harbor.'
Churchill also told Truman of his hopes for the closest possible post-war co-operation between their two countries. When Truman spoke of the need even for bilateral arrangements to come under the United Nations, Churchill commented that the proposals were meaningless if they were common to everybody; a man might propose marriage to a young lady, but it was 'not much use if he were told that she would always be a sister to him. I wanted, under whatever form or cloak, a continuation of the present war-time system of reciprocal facilities between Britain and the United States in regards to bases and fuelling points in their possession.' Truman seemed 'in full accord with this,' Churchill noted, 'if it could be presented in a suitable fashion, and did not appear to take crudely the form of an alliance à deux.'
At the end of their talk, Truman told Churchill that it was 'the most enjoyable luncheon that he had had for many years'. Truman had replied in 'an encouraging way' to Churchill's proposal that the Combined Chiefs of Staff should be kept in being 'until the world calmed down after the great storm'. That afternoon, however, in regard to the war against Japan, Churchill learned that the United States Chiefs of Staff, while willing to consult with their British opposite numbers on general strategic matters, would only do so on condition that in the event of disagreement 'the final decision on the action to be taken will lie with the United States Chiefs of Staff'. Britain, while making a substantial contribution to the war against Japan, would have to accept American strategic direction, as she had essentially also done in Europe.
The second plenary session took place on the afternoon of July 18. When Churchill pressed Stalin about Poland, the Soviet leader assured him that the Provisional Government had 'never refused to hold free elections'. After an hour and twenty minutes the session was at an end, 'much to the PM's annoyance', Sir Alexander Cadogan wrote home, 'as he wanted to go on talking at random and was most disappointed-just like a child with its toys taken away from it. But Truman closed the proceedings.'
That night Churchill dined alone with Stalin. They were together for five hours. The Russian people, Stalin told Churchill, lacked both education and manners 'and still had a long way to go'. He also forecast a Conservative majority of eighty in the General Election. Turning to global politics, Churchill said that he would 'welcome Russia as a great power on the sea at the Dardanelles, in the Pacific, and at the Kiel Canal, 'which should have an international regime like the Suez Canal'. Speaking of the nations of Central Europe, Stalin assured Churchill that he was 'against Sovietisation of any of these countries. They would have free elections.' Like his assurance on Poland earlier that day, this too was a lie.
***
On the morning of July 21 there was a British Victory Parade in Berlin. On their way to the saluting-base, Churchill and Attlee drove in separate jeeps along a line of cheering troops. Churchill's Private Secretary, John Peck, later reflected, 'It struck me and perhaps others as well, although nothing was said, as decidedly odd that Winston Churchill, the great war leader but for whom we should never have been in Berlin at all, got a markedly less vociferous cheer than Mr Attlee, who-however great his contribution in the Coalition-had not hitherto made any marked personal impact upon the fighting forces.'
That afternoon, at a further plenary session, both Churchill and Attlee protested to Stalin that the new Polish frontier was to be drawn too far westward, including within Poland one-quarter of pre-war Germany's arable land. They were supported in their protest by Truman. But Stalin had no intention of returning Silesia to Germany. Nor, at a further plenary dominated by discussion of Poland, would he accept that the cities of Stettin or Breslau should remain in Germany; Poland's new frontier with Germany would be the Oder, and the Western Neisse. The combined efforts of Churchill and Truman could not persuade him to change his mind.
The Americans had now learned more about the nature of the atom-bomb test in the New Mexico desert. On the morning of July 22, Stimson went to see Churchill to give him the details; inside a one-mile circle the devastation had been total. Churchill went at once to see Truman. Here, Churchill felt, was the weapon that, he later recalled, might give the Japanese 'an excuse which would save their honour and release them from their obligation of being killed to the last fighting man'.
On July 23 Churchill gave a banquet for Stalin and Truman. During one of the toasts, Stalin suddenly asked Churchill, who had earlier in the day opposed Stalin's request for a Soviet naval base in the Sea of Marmara or at the Dardanelles, if Russia could have a base on the Aegean Sea instead, at the Greek port of Dedeagatch, just outside the Dardanelles. Churchill was non-committal, merely telling Stalin: 'I will always support Russia in her claim to the freedom of the seas all year round.'
Churchill and Attlee now planned to go back to London on July 25, for the election results. The victor was to return to Potsdam two days later, to continue with the Conference. That night, at his villa, Churchill asked Eden, 'What do the Party say now about the election result?' 'They still think that we will get in with a majority of about seventy,' Eden replied.
On the day before he was due to return to London, Churchill saw eight of the Polish Communist leaders, who had flown specially from Warsaw to Berlin to meet him. In vain he tried to persuade them to allow Germany to retain parts of Silesia. But when he urged them to hold 'free and unfettered' elections in Poland, and to set up an all-Party government as agreed upon at Yalta, their leader, Boleslaw Bierut, assured him that Poland's future political development 'would be based on the principles of Western democracy'. It was a worthless assurance; Bierut was to become the ruler of as strict a Stalinist system as any in Eastern Europe.
At the plenary session on the afternoon of July 24 Churchill rejected Stalin's request for a Soviet naval base on the Sea of Marmara. He also rejected the use of force in the handing over of some 10,000 Ukrainian prisoners-of-war who had served in the German Army, and were now being held by the British, pending repatriation to Russia, as also agreed at Yalta.
Two and a half months had passed since the defeat of Germany. The defeat of Japan now seemed to depend, not upon Soviet participation in the war, but upon the atom bomb. At the end of the plenary session of July 24, Truman took Stalin aside to tell him about the new weapon. Churchill, studying Stalin's reaction as he listened to Truman's account, described it thus: 'A new bomb! Of extraordinary power! Probably decisive on the whole Japanese war! What a bit of luck!' That night Churchill dined alone with Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Commander-in-Chief South-East Asia, whom he invited to Downing Street when he was next in London, to talk about the Admiral's future. 'I have great plans in store,' Churchill told him. Mountbatten, who had so recently been in India with the British troops who had already cast their votes in the election, later wrote, 'It was a mournful and eerie feeling to sit there talking plans with a man who seemed so confident that they would come off, and I felt equally confident that he would be out of office within 24 hours.'
Churchill and Attlee were to leave Potsdam on the afternoon of July 25. That morning Churchill had a second meeting with Boleslaw Bierut, who again assured him that post-war Poland would not emulate the Soviet system. It would indeed seek to follow 'the English model' of democracy: Poland would be 'one of the most democratic countries in Europe the 'whole Russian army' was leaving Poland; the Polish elections would be 'even more democratic than those in England'. But Churchill knew that the democratic Poland for which Britain had gone to war in September 1939, and had sought to uphold at Teheran and Yalta, no longer existed.
At a further plenary session that morning, Churchill again pressed Stalin not to push Poland's frontiers so far westward. He was once more supported by Truman. Stalin again rejected their request, but countered with one of his own, that coal mined by the Germans in the Ruhr should be sent to the Russian Zone of Germany and to Poland. Churchill argued that this could only be done in exchange for food for the Germans. Stalin disagreed, telling Churchill, 'There is still a great deal of fat left in Germany.'
No agreement was reached; only to defer the matter 'until a later meeting'. It was now 12.15 p.m. The ninth plenary session of the Potsdam Conference was over. There seemed no need for farewells. Both Stalin and Truman expected Churchill to be back within forty-eight hours, still Prime Minister, and still in charge of Britain's negotiating team. Churchill returned to his villa, from where, a few minutes later, he was driven to Gatow airfield. At 1.23 his aircraft took off for Britain. Two hours and twenty minutes later it landed at Northolt, where he was told that there was considerable gloom at Labour Party headquarters, where it was expected that the Conservatives would win the election with a majority of thirty seats. Although this was forty less than Eden's estimate, it would still provide a working majority.
That evening, at dinner at the Annexe, Churchill learned that his daughter Diana and son-in-law Duncan Sandys 'were gloomy about Duncan's fate' at his South London constituency. That night, just before dawn, Churchill woke up with what he later recalled as 'a sharp stab of almost physical pain', whereupon a hitherto 'subconscious conviction that we were beaten broke forth and dominated my mind'. The power to shape the future would be denied him. 'The knowledge and experience I had gathered, the authority and goodwill I had gained in so many countries, would vanish.'
At ten o'clock that morning, Thursday July 26, Captain Pim received the first election returns; ten Conservative seats had fallen to Labour. He went at once to see Churchill. 'The Prime Minister was in his bath,' he later recalled, 'and certainly appeared surprised, if not shocked. He asked me to get him a towel and in a few minutes, clad in his blue siren suit and with cigar he was in his chair in the Map Room-where he remained all day.' By noon it was clear that there would be a Labour landslide. Randolph Churchill and Duncan Sandys were among the Conservative MPs who lost their seats. 'To my dying day,' one of those present at luncheon that day, David Margesson, wrote to Churchill six years later, 'I shall never forget the courage and forbearance you showed at that most unhappy luncheon after defeat was known. It was a terrific example of how to take it on the chin without flinching.'
'It may well be a blessing in disguise,' Clementine commented.
'At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised,' was Churchill's reply.
With 393 seats in the new Parliament, Labour had a majority of 146 over all other parties. The Conservative seats had fallen, from 585 in the Parliament of 1935, to 213. For the first time in British history more votes had been cast for Labour than for the Conservatives. When Moran spoke of the 'ingratitude' of the British people, Churchill replied: 'I wouldn't call it that. They have had a very hard time.'
Constitutionally, Churchill could have returned to Potsdam as Prime Minister and resigned only when Parliament reassembled a few days later. But he was determined to accept the verdict of the electorate without delay, and at seven o'clock that evening went to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation to the King. He was now Leader of the Opposition. Two hours later a statement which he had dictated on his return from the Palace was read out over the radio. 'Immense responsibilities abroad and at home fall upon the new Government,' he said, 'and we must all hope they will be successful in bearing them.'
On the following morning, July 27, Attlee flew back to Potsdam as Prime Minister. Churchill, no longer the leader of the nation, remained in London. During the morning he said goodbye to the Chiefs of Staff. 'It was a very sad and very moving little meeting at which I found myself unable to say much for fear of breaking down,' Brooke wrote in his diary, and he added, 'He was standing the blow wonderfully well.' Next there were farewells to his Private Secretaries, then a farewell Cabinet. When it was over Churchill called Eden back. 'He was pretty wretched, poor old boy,' Eden wrote in his diary. 'Said he didn't feel any more reconciled this morning, on the contrary it hurt more, like a wound which becomes more painful after the first shock.'
Forty years later, Elizabeth Layton recalled how, on the evening of July 27, 'Mary was in tears, Mrs C went to bed early, and Mr C remained calm.' As he was about to have his bath, Churchill called for Captain Pim. 'He turned quite grey in his bath,' Pim later recalled. 'I thought he would faint. Then he turned to me and said: "They are perfectly entitled to vote as they please. This is democracy. This is what we've been fighting for."'
At Chequers that weekend there were no boxes of telegrams to keep Churchill's mind on the pressures and events of the day. On the evening of July 28 Mary 'saw with near desperation a cloud of black doom descend'. She and Sarah played him his favourite Gilbert and Sullivan records to no avail. But then some French and American marches 'struck a helpful note', and finally 'Run Rabbit, Run' and 'The Wizard of Oz' had 'a cheering effect'. On the following day Churchill wrote from Chequers to Hugh Cecil, his fellow-Conservative rebel of forty years earlier: 'I must confess I found the event of Thursday rather odd and queer, especially after the wonderful welcomes I had from all classes. There was something pent-up in the British people after twenty years which required relief. It is like 1906 all over again. My faith in the flexibility of our Constitution and in the qualities of the British people remains unaltered. We must expect great changes which will be hard for the departing generation to adapt themselves to. The next two years will present administrative difficulties of an unprecedented character, and it may well be that a Labour administration will have a much better chance of solving these than we.'
Churchill was consistent in this view, telling Brendan Bracken that he intended to be 'a support to the "stable men" of the Labour Party so as to curb the "wild men"'. Of the new Secretary of State for War, J.J. Lawson, he wrote to Brooke: 'I am sure you will like your new Secretary of State. He is an absolutely true and decent fellow, but he will need all your help and that of the Department.' And to Attlee he wrote on August 3: 'I shall look forward to talking things over with you when the House opens. We have an immense amount of work to do in common, to which we are both agreed and pledged.' Two days earlier Marian Holmes, who had remained at No. 10 under Attlee, had written in her diary: 'Working for the new PM is very different. He calls us in only when he wants to dictate something. No conversation or pleasantries, wit or capricious behaviour. Just staccato orders. Perfectly polite, and I'm sure he is a good Christian gentleman. But the difference is between champagne and water.'
***
Churchill was within four months of his seventy-first birthday. Nearly six years had passed since the end of his wilderness decade and his return to the centre of war administration. He had never spared himself, never rested, never accepted defeat or stalemate. The years of war-direction had been exhausting. His wife was afraid that once he laid down his many burdens he might simply fade away. His energies were formidable, however, even after so much effort. Mentally he remained alert and vigilant, but the fact that his power to influence events was over was very hard to bear. At Potsdam, Truman accepted Stalin's insistence that the Western Neisse become Poland's western border. Attlee deferred to the Americans. Churchill commented a year later, 'I would never have agreed to the Western Neisse and was saving it up for a final "show-down".'
On August 6 an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The effect was devastating; the number of identified victims was 138,690. A year later Churchill told Mountbatten, 'The decision to release the atom bomb was perhaps the only thing which history would have serious questions to ask about', and he added, 'I may even be asked by my Maker why I used it, but I shall defend myself vigorously and shall say, "Why did you release this knowledge to us when mankind was raging in furious battles?"' To George Bernard Shaw he wrote in August 1946: 'Do you think that the atomic bomb means that the architect of the universe has got tired of writing his non-stop scenario? There was a lot to be said for his stopping with the Panda. The release of the bomb seems to be his next turning-point.'
On the day after the Hiroshima bomb, Churchill told a friend that, had he remained Prime Minister, he believed he could have persuaded the Americans to use their new power 'to restrain the Russians'. He would have had 'a show-down with Stalin and told him he had got to behave reasonably and decently in Europe, and would have gone so far as to be brusque and angry with him if needs be'. Truman and his advisers had shown 'weakness in this policy'.
Two days after the Hiroshima bomb, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. A day later a second atom bomb was dropped, the target being Nagasaki, where 48,857 Japanese were killed. 'It may well be,' Churchill wrote to Attlee on August 10, 'that events will bring the Japanese war to an early close. Indeed I hope this may be so, for it means an immense lightening of the load we expected to carry.' To his secretary, Elizabeth Layton, Churchill commented that day, as they drove from London on the way to Chartwell, through crowds excited by the prospect of victory over Japan, 'You know, not a single decision has been taken since we left office to bring this about.' Not knowing what to say, Miss Layton muttered, was it not better for him now to have a rest. 'No,' he replied, 'I wanted-I wanted to do the Peace too.'
On August 15 Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allied powers; the Second World War was over. The peacemaking in which Churchill so wished to participate was to be done by others. At times he was 'bitter', Clementine wrote to Mary, at other times 'lion-hearted', about his exclusion. To Averell Harriman he had remarked, a week after the election defeat, 'This has been the longest week of my life, but I am all right now.'
***
On September 2 Churchill left England by air, flying to Italy in the Prime Minister's plane, which Attlee had put at his disposal. Clementine remained in England, struggling both to make Chartwell habitable after the neglect of the war years, and to prepare their new London house, 28 Hyde Park Gate. Churchill travelled with Sarah. He also took with him, and began reading while still on the plane, a printed set of his war-time minutes to the Chiefs of Staff. His mind was already focused on a task that was to take him more than five years, the preparation of his war memoirs. 'Even during luncheon he went on reading,' Lord Moran wrote of the flight to Italy, 'only taking his eyes from the script to light a cigar.'
Churchill's destination was the Villa delle Rose, on Lake Como, which Alexander had chosen for him as the ideal place for a complete rest, and for painting. Perched above the lake, with a series of gardens leading down to the shore, and a panoramic view of the opposite shore with its villages, woods and mountains, the villa became Churchill's home for seventeen happy days. That first day he was driven over the mountains to Lake Lugano, where he found a spot which caught his painter's eye, and began at once to paint. On the following day, after three hours' painting on the shore of Lake Como, near the villa, he told Sarah, 'I've had a happy day.' Sarah wrote to her mother, 'I haven't heard that for I don't know how long.'
In a letter to Clementine on September 5 Churchill wrote: 'I am much better in myself and am not worrying about anything. We have had no newspapers since I left England, and I no longer feel any keen desire to turn their pages. This is the first time for very many years that I have been completely out of the world. The Japanese War being finished and complete peace and victory achieved, I feel a great sense of relief which grows steadily, others having to face the hideous problems of the aftermath. On their shoulders and consciences weighs the responsibility for what is happening in Europe. It may all indeed be "a blessing in disguise".'
One of the officers who was at the villa, Brigadier Harold Edwards, noted in his diary, 'Churchill has the most fascinating chuckle, and his face, when he is pleased with a thought of his, or a situation conjured up by a remark of someone else, wrinkles up like a baby's-like Puck's.' Edwards wrote, of Churchill's eyes: 'They can be hard as he looks at you-or as tender as a woman's-they can weep easily. I believe now the story of how he cried-of how he wept-as described by M. Herriot, when he realised all was lost in France. He is emotional-not "Irishly" so. I think the right description is that he allows himself to react fully and without restraint and without troubling himself about what impression he makes on the onlooker. He is no actor, no poseur.'
On September 6 Field Marshal Alexander arrived at the villa. For two days he and Churchill painted together, crossing the lake by speedboat to various quiet bays. 'The painting has been a great pleasure to me,' Churchill wrote to his wife after Alexander had gone, 'and I have really forgotten all my vexations. It is a wonderful cure, because you cannot really think of anything else.' On the evening of September 8, four days before the anniversary of his marriage in 1908, he had taken over the controls of the speedboat as it drove back across the lake to the villa. 'When I was driving the speed-boat back,' he wrote to Clementine, 'there came into my mind your singing to me "In the Gloaming" years ago. What a sweet song & tune & how beautifully you sang it in all its pathos. My heart fills with love to feel you near me in thought. I feel so tenderly towards you my darling & the more pleasant & agreeable the scenes & days, the more I wish you were here to share them & give me a kiss.'
After a week at the Villa delle Rose, Churchill had painted three pictures and begun a fourth. 'I paint all day & every day,' he wrote to Mary on September 10, '& have banished care & disillusionment to the shades.' But world affairs could not be banished; while he was at Como he was consulted by Attlee about the atom bomb, and the need for an international agreement to regulate it. In his reply Churchill wrote of the deterrent effect of the bomb, given 'the supreme resolve of all nations who possess or may possess the weapon to use it at once, unitedly, against any nation that uses it in war'. For this purpose, he wrote, 'the greater the powers of the US and GB in the next few years the better are the hopes. The US therefore should not share their knowledge and advantage except in return for a system of inspection of this and all other weapons-preparations in every country, which they are satisfied after trial is genuine.'
On September 19 Churchill left Lake Como for the Villa Pirelli on the Mediterranean, eighteen miles east of Genoa. 'Sunshine is my quest,' he told his wife. On his first day at the Villa Pirelli he swam in the sea. On the following day he went to the nearby village of Recco, where he began to paint the railway viaduct and some bombed houses. The local inhabitants were not amused, and began to boo and shake their fists. 'Without any more ado,' the local British Military Commander, Colonel Wathen, later recalled, 'Mr Churchill packed up and came home. The incident upset him somewhat, but he readily admitted that it was a tactless thing to do, and said that he would have been damned annoyed if Hitler had started to paint the bomb damage in London.'
From Genoa, Churchill motored westward along the coast to Monte Carlo, a road he had last traversed with Clementine in 1921, after the Cairo Conference. He spent two days at the Hôtel de Paris at Monte Carlo. 'The food scrumptious, the wines the best. It was like the old days,' he told her; they had last stayed there in 1932. On September 23 he moved further westward to Antibes, where Eisenhower put a fully staffed villa at his disposal.
Churchill asked Clementine to join him in the South of France, but she felt that the continuing needs of Chartwell and their new London house, 28 Hyde Park Gate, made it impossible for her to do so. On September 24, reading of a Russian demand for naval and air bases in the Mediterranean, in the former Italian colony of Tripolitania, Churchill wrote to her: 'Their wish is a strange one and belongs to a very crude and out-of-date form of Czarist imperialism. In these matters they are about forty years behind the times, and I do not myself see any serious objections to their having these places if they will be reasonable in other directions. All navies, sea-borne commerce and overseas naval and air bases are merely hostages to the stronger sea and air power. However I have no doubt that these demands will cause a great stir. The Bolshevisation of Europe proceeds apace and all the Cabinets of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe are in Soviet control, excepting only Athens. This brand I snatched from the burning on Christmas Day.' Little was known, Churchill told Clementine, as to what was happening 'behind the Russian iron curtain, but evidently the Poles and Czecho-Slovakians are being as badly treated as one could have expected'.
After twenty-five days of sunshine, and having completed fifteen paintings, Churchill returned to London, to the house at Hyde Park Gate. Among the many invitations awaiting him there was one forwarded through President Truman, asking him to give a course of three or four lectures at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri; 'a wonderful school in my home State' Truman called it. Churchill and Clementine were already planning to stay that winter at Miami Beach.
***
On October 21 Churchill told his constituents that he had looked forward, on his return from Potsdam, to throwing all his 'personal strength' and that of his colleagues into the demands of peacetime; demobilisation, house-building, the switch-over of industry from war to peacetime production and 'the liberation of the British genius and energy from the long thralldom of war conditions'. But these, he added, were now 'vain repinings'.
Although cut off from the hourly inflow of information from the capitals of the world which had marked his life in office, Churchill followed with avid attention the newspaper reports of Soviet activity in Europe and beyond. The defection in Canada that October of a leading Soviet spy led him, on October 26, to tell the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, that there was 'nothing to be gained' by not letting the Russians know 'that we were not afraid of them'. The Russians were 'realist-lizards', all belonging to 'the crocodile family'. They would be 'as pleasant with you as they could, although prepared to destroy you.' What was needed, Churchill told King, 'was a continued alliance between the US and Britain. It must not be written, it must be understood.'
Before leaving for the United States, Churchill held weekly meetings of his Shadow Cabinet, to devise Opposition policy and co-ordinate its speaking and Parliamentary activities. But he spent as much time as he could at Chartwell, now being slowly returned to its pre-war comfort. German prisoners-of-war were employed to clear first the fish-pool and then the swimming-pool, both of which Churchill had lovingly created twenty years earlier, and which during the neglect of the war years had become clogged and overgrown.
Clementine had never been at ease with the demands of Chartwell. That autumn, Mary has recalled, she suffered 'from depression and nervousness. The build-up of her worries, which her fatigue served to enlarge, made her often impatient and irascible with Winston; and he, for his part, could be demanding and unrealistic. These months saw a series of scenes between them. After any quarrel they both suffered pangs of remorse, and both were always anxious to make it all up. But these were difficult days for them both.'
That November, Churchill made a short visit to Paris and Brussels. Everywhere he was met by cheering, exuberant crowds. 'I have never seen such excitement or enthusiasm,' the British Ambassador to Brussels recalled. 'People broke through the police cordon, dodged the motor-cycle escort which surrounded the car, and threw their bouquets into the car if they were not actually successful in handing them to Mr Churchill. One girl leapt on to the running-board, threw her arms round his neck and kissed him fervently.'
In his speech to a joint meeting of the Belgian Senate and Chamber on November 16 Churchill spoke of the origins of what he called 'The Unnecessary War'. If the Allies had resisted Hitler strongly in his early stages, he said, even up to the German remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936, 'he would have been forced to recoil, and a chance would have been given to the elements in German life which were very powerful especially in the High Command to free Germany of the maniacal Government and system into the grip of which she was falling'. The German people had twice voted by a majority against Hitler before 1933, Churchill reminded his listeners, 'but the Allies and the League of Nations acted with such feebleness and lack of clairvoyance that each of Hitler's encroachments became a triumph for him over all moderate and restraining forces until, finally, we resigned ourselves without further protest to the vast process of German rearmament and war preparation which ended in a renewed outbreak of destructive war'.
'Let us profit at least by this terrible lesson,' Churchill declared. 'In vain did I attempt to teach it before the war.' Although he did not say so, he was even then preparing the early chapters of his war memoirs, in which he intended to examine the years between the wars and set out for his readers his inter-war warnings and suggestions. He did call in his Brussels speech for a 'United States of Europe' which would, he explained, 'unify this Continent in a manner never known since the fall of the Roman Empire, and within which all its peoples may dwell together in prosperity, in justice, and in peace'.
Here, three months after the defeat of Japan and six months after the defeat of Germany, were the three themes that were to dominate Churchill's post-war thinking: the close working together of Britain and the United States as a deterrent to Soviet expansion; the mutual banding together of the democracies, under the United Nations, to avert a second drift to war through weakness in the face of tyranny; and the creation of a United Europe. He was convinced that the Second World War could have been avoided. He felt this so strongly that when he was invited to send a message of greeting to Baldwin on his eightieth birthday, he declined to do so. Instead, he wrote to those who had asked for the message, 'I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been better for our country if he had never lived.'
***
On November 30 Churchill was seventy-one. 'To those that love you,' his daughter Mary wrote on New Year's Day 1946, 'and there are so great a number, it is a grief to see you so set aside-and so saddened. The grief is the greater for the little we can do to help you.' In the New Year's Honours list, Churchill had been awarded the Order of Merit. 'I was so proud and excited,' Mary wrote, 'when I read in the Press this morning of yet another distinction which is yours.'
'The OM comes from the King alone, and is not given on the advice of Ministers,' Churchill explained to one of those who congratulated him. 'This renders it more attractive to me.' On January 8 he went to Buckingham Palace to receive it, and on the following day, from Southampton, sailed with Clementine in the Queen Elizabeth for the United States. One of his wartime secretaries, Jo Sturdee, travelled with him. A new secretary, Elizabeth Gilliatt, remained at Hyde Park Gate to deal with the mass of letters and keep Churchill in touch with events at home. Also he had decided to publish his wartime secret session speeches in volume form; typing out those speeches was Miss Gilliatt's first task.
The voyage had a sad aspect to it; Randolph's marriage had ended in divorce. 'I grieve so much,' Churchill wrote to Pamela Churchill's mother, Lady Digby, two days before leaving, 'for what had happened which put an end to so many hopes for Randolph and Pamela. The war strode in however through the lives of millions. We must make the best of what is left among the ruins.'
Disembarking in New York on the evening of January 14, Churchill and Clementine went at once by train to Miami Beach where, on their arrival during the morning of January 16, Churchill was asked to give a press conference. It was held on the patio of the house that was to be his home for nearly three weeks, 5905 North Bay Road, which had its own access to the ocean. Asked by a newsreel cameraman to say ten words into the microphone, Churchill replied: 'I have been asked to say just ten words, but haven't been told what ten words they should be. The ten that come to my mind are, "The great pleasure I feel in enjoying the genial sunshine of Miami Beach".'
The local journalists were entranced by their visitor. 'A look of genial impishness' was what one of them noted, and he added: 'The humor that has lubricated his life flashes in his face and sparkles on his tongue. Lubricated his life? Who that has fought as he has fought could live at all except a saving humor balanced him?' In serious vein, Churchill told the journalists why he supported the Labour Government's request for a $4 billion loan from the United States. 'If we're not given the opportunity to get back on our feet again,' he said, 'we may never be able to take our place among other nations.'
Churchill's arrival in the United States generated a vast correspondence, an average of three hundred letters a day. Three secretaries were needed to deal with this; one of them, Lorraine Bonar, who was waiting at the house to welcome her new master, wrote to her mother, 'Well, the great man has arrived and he's just wonderful-he entirely captivated me with his lack of pretentiousness and is really charming to everyone.' He was, she added, 'quite a tease', but there were also times, she later recalled, when he could be 'very difficult and contrary, and even had his little spats with Mrs Churchill when he screamed "Clemmie" at her from across the hall. Once they went for about two days with only the very necessary speaking between them.'
In a letter to his old Army friend General Tudor, Churchill described the difficulties of adjusting after the election defeat six months earlier: 'I found it none too easy to change over so quickly from a life of intense activity and responsibility to one of leisure in which there is nothing to be looked for but anti-climax. However, luckily, I have my painting, into which I have plunged with great vigour, and many other amusements, so that the time passes away pleasantly and rapidly.'
During his first week at Miami Beach, Churchill's temperature rose, and remained high for several days; but then it went down, and Churchill not only painted but swam in the ocean. On January 30 he had a long talk with Emery Reves, who before the war had ensured the wide circulation of his articles throughout Europe, about the publishing aspects of his war memoirs. 'I have not forgotten what you have done for me before the war,' Churchill told Reves, 'and I shall want you to handle it.' Over the next decade, and more, Reves made sure that the memoirs obtained the widest possible circulation, translation, and financial benefit.
On February 1 Churchill and Clementine, accompanied by Sarah, flew from Miami to Havana. It was his first visit to Cuba since 1895. After calling on the Cuban President, he gave a press conference; asked to criticise the Attlee Government, he replied, 'I do not discuss the government of my country when I am away from there'. Asked about the General Election result, he said, 'In my country the people can do as they like, although it often happens that they don't like what they have done.'
After six days' sightseeing, swimming and painting, Churchill returned from Havana to Miami by air on February 8. Two days later he flew to Washington, where he dined with Truman at the White House. There, he tried out the theme of the speech that he was to deliver at Fulton. The Secretary of State, James Byrnes, was also there. Both men, he wrote to Attlee, 'seemed to like it very well', and he added, 'There is much fear of Russia here as a cause of future trouble.' Bevin's attitude at the United Nations in this regard 'has done us a great deal of good'.
On February 12 Churchill gave lunch to Eisenhower at the British Embassy. On the following day he flew back to Miami, where, a week later, in a talk with his American financier friend Bernard Baruch, and with Byrnes, both of whom had flown specially down from Washington to see him, he put the British Government's opinion that the American loan should be interest-free.
'I am sure your Fulton speech will do good,' Attlee wrote to Churchill on February 25. On the following day, to a gathering of more than 17,000 people in Burdine Stadium, Miami, he drew the conclusion, from his own lack of success in passing examinations at school and his subsequent experience in receiving honorary degrees, 'that no boy or girl should ever be disheartened by lack of success in their youth, but should diligently and faithfully continue to persevere and make up for lost time'.
Churchill left Miami on March 1 by train for Washington, where he first showed his Fulton speech to Admiral Leahy, Truman's senior Service adviser, who was, Churchill informed Attlee and Bevin, 'enthusiastic' about it. Byrnes, to whom he also showed it, was 'excited about it and did not suggest any alterations'. News reaching Washington that day of a Soviet decision not to withdraw its troops from northern Persia, as agreed between Bevin and Molotov six months earlier, seemed to add weight to Churchill's advocacy of Anglo-American firmness.
On March 4 Churchill went from the British Embassy to the White House, where Truman and Leahy joined him for the twenty-four-hour overnight train journey to Missouri. Churchill was impressed to learn from them that, in an effort to show America's determination not to allow Soviet expansion into the Aegean or the Mediterranean, the battleship Missouri, on which the Japanese surrender had been signed in Tokyo Bay, would soon be sent to the Mediterranean with a naval task force.
Churchill reported to Attlee and Bevin that, during the train journey westward, Leahy had told him that this task force 'would consist of another battleship of the greatest power, two of the latest and strongest aircraft carriers, several cruisers and about a dozen destroyers'. Both Truman and Leahy 'mentioned the fact that the Missouri class carry over 140 anti-aircraft guns'. Churchill commented: 'The above strikes me as a very important act of state and one calculated to make Russia understand that she must come to reasonable terms of discussion with the Western Democracies. From our point of view, I am sure that the arrival and stay of such a powerful American Fleet in the Straits must be entirely beneficial, both as reassuring Turkey and Greece and as placing a demurrer on what Bevin called cutting our life-line through the Mediterranean by the establishment of a Russian naval base at Tripoli.'
Churchill continued to work on his speech during the train journey. Then, as the train steamed beside the broad Missouri River, he showed the speech to Truman. 'He told me he thought it was admirable,' Churchill wrote to Attlee and Bevin, 'and would do nothing but good, though it would make a stir.'
In words which were broadcast throughout the United States, Churchill spoke at Fulton of the 'supreme task and duty' of American democracy, and of the English-speaking world, 'to guard the homes of the common people from the horrors and miseries of another war'. The United Nations must be made to work effectively, to be 'a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words'. Each member State should provide it with an air squadron, to be directed when needed by the United Nations itself; 'I wished to see this done after the First World War, and I devoutly trust it may be done forthwith.' But the secret of the atom bomb should be kept by Britain, Canada and the United States, not shared with the United Nations: 'I do not believe that we should all have slept so soundly had the positions been reversed, and if some Communist or neo-Fascist State monopolised for the time being these dreaded agencies.'
Churchill then spoke of his admiration for the Russian achievement in the war and declared: 'We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas. Above all, we welcome constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic. It is my duty, however, for I am sure you would wish me to state the facts as I see them to you, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.' The 'facts' as Churchill saw them were these: 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone-Greece with its immortal glories-is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation.'
Churchill then spoke of the 'pre-eminence and power' of the Communist parties of Eastern Europe, far beyond their numbers, and of their attempts to obtain 'totalitarian control'. This, he said, was 'certainly not the Liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.' What was needed now was 'a new unity in Europe', within the structure of the United Nations and its Charter; a unity from which no nations should be 'permanently outcast'. The need for such a unity was urgent; even in countries 'in front of the iron curtain' such as Italy and France, and in places far from the Russian frontier 'throughout the world', Communist Parties or Communist fifth columns 'constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilisation'.
A new war was neither inevitable nor imminent, Churchill said. It was because he believed that 'we hold the power to save our future' that he was speaking in these terms. 'I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war, and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.' What was needed was 'a settlement' with Russia. The longer this was delayed, the greater the dangers would be. From what he had seen 'of our Russian friends and Allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness'. Narrow margins of military superiority were not enough; these offered 'temptations to a trial of strength'. If the Western democracies stood together, no one was likely 'to molest them'. But if 'they become divided or falter in their duty and if these all-important years are allowed to slip away, then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all'.
Churchill then recalled the bitter years before the war. 'Last time I saw it coming and cried aloud to my own fellow-countrymen and to the world, but no one paid any attention,' and he went on to explain: 'Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind. There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honoured to-day; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool.' This must not be allowed to happen again; it could be prevented 'by reaching now, in 1946, a good understanding on all points with Russia'.
Churchill urged the Americans not to underestimate the strength of Britain and the British Commonwealth. If, he said, this strength could be added to that of the United States, 'with all that such co-operation implies in the air, on the sea, all over the globe, and in science and industry, and in moral force, there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition or adventure'. On the contrary, there would be 'an overwhelming assurance of security'. If all Britain's 'moral and material forces and convictions' were joined with those of the United States 'in fraternal association', then it was his conviction, and vision, that 'the high-roads of the future will be clear not only for us but for all, not only for our time but for a century to come'.
Churchill had originally intended to call his speech 'World Peace'. Now he entitled it 'The Sinews of Peace'. It was a noble vision, but the speech was again dismissed as alarmist, as his speeches from 1932 to 1938 had been. In London, The Times described as 'less than happy' his contrast between Western democracy and Communism, stating that the two creeds had 'much to learn from each other, Communism in the working of political institutions and in the establishment of individual rights, western democracy in the development of economic and social planning'. Far from becoming known as 'The Sinews of Peace', Churchill's speech quickly became known as the 'Iron Curtain' speech, as if it had actually created the iron curtain and sought to hold it in place. According to the Wall Street Journal: 'The United States wants no alliance, or anything that resembles an alliance, with any other nation.'
Churchill was 'convinced', as he told Attlee and Bevin on his return to Washington on March 7, 'that some show of strength and resisting power is necessary to a good settlement with Russia', and he added, 'I predict that this will be the prevailing opinion in the United States in the near future.'
On March 8 the storm grew over Churchill's alleged call for a military alliance against Russia, and at the same time his actual call for a 'good understanding' with Russia was ignored. Truman gave a press conference at which he denied that he had known in advance what Churchill was going to say. That same day, having travelled overnight by train from Washington, Churchill repeated his theme at the General Assembly of Virginia. There, in Eisenhower's presence, he told his listeners: 'Peace will not be preserved by pious sentiments expressed in terms of platitudes, or by official grimaces and diplomatic correctitude, however this may be desirable from time to time. It will not be preserved by casting aside, in dangerous years, the panoply of warlike strength. There must be earnest thought. There must also be faithful perseverance and foresight. Greatheart must have his sword and armour to guard the pilgrims on the way. Above all, among the English-speaking peoples there must be the union of hearts based upon convictions and common ideals.'
On March 12, when Churchill was in New York, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda published in Moscow an attack on what it called his 'old slanders' concerning Soviet 'expansionist tendencies'. Churchill also learned that day that, on the previous day, two Labour MPs had asked Attlee to 'repudiate' the Fulton speech. When Attlee declined to do so, ninety-three Labour Members tabled a motion of censure against Churchill, calling the speech 'inimical to the cause of world peace'. Their objection was to what they called his 'proposals for a military alliance' between the Commonwealth and the United States 'for the purpose of combating the spread of Communism'. Among the signatories was a future Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan.
Unknown to the Labour malcontents, Churchill had continued to help Attlee and the Labour Government on the matter of the American loan. At a meeting of the National Press Club in Washington on March 11, and again at a private luncheon with several leading American financiers in New York on March 13, he put the case for a lenient American attitude; Attlee was grateful for this help, sending a special note of 'warm thanks and appreciation'.
Stalin was stung by the Fulton speech; in an unprecedented question-and-answer session printed in Pravda on March 14, he described it as 'calculated to sow the seeds of discord between the Allied Governments and make collaboration difficult'. Churchill was 'now in the position of a warmonger'. He had 'many friends not only in England but also in the USA'. Just as Hitler had 'begun the process of unleashing war' by pronouncing his racial theories, so Churchill 'is starting his process of unleashing war also with a racial theory, declaring that only those people who speak English are full-blooded nations, whose vocation it is to control the fate of the whole world'.
Churchill ignored Stalin's charges; but in the final speech of his visit, made in New York on March 15, he answered the main American criticism of his Fulton speech, telling a civic reception: 'I have never asked for an Anglo-American military alliance or a Treaty. I have asked for something different, and in a sense I asked for something more. I asked for fraternal association-free, voluntary, fraternal association. I have no doubt that it will come to pass, as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow.'
On March 20 the Churchills sailed from New York on the Queen Mary. When the ship was two days out, the battleship Missouri sailed from New York for Istanbul. That same day the Soviet Union announced that all Soviet troops would be evacuated from Persia. 'New York Times attributes changed Russian tactics to your two speeches,' Randolph telegraphed to his father from New York on March 24, and from London came a message of congratulations on the Fulton speech from Asquith's daughter Violet, who wrote, 'Events have powerfully reinforced your words.' In a note of thanks for the trip she had shared with him, his daughter Sarah wrote, 'I know it was far from perfect for you, but you contributed to the World Cause, quite apart from all you did for poor Old England.'
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