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1945: Churchill, Roosevelt And Stalin At Yalta

click image to enlarge Map of germany and Poland drawn for the Yalta coference, showing the different proposals for postwar boundaries and the consequent transfers of territory and population.

Neville Chamberlain pioneered modern summitry, but Wlnston Churchill made it almost routine. He was even readier than Chamberlain to take personal charge of foreign relations. In the first month of his premiership, Churchill flew across the Channel five times in an increasingly desperate effort to stop the French from surrendering.

Once Britain was left to fight Germany alone, Churchill turned his formidable attention on America. "No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt," he remarked later. The courtship was conducted through nearly two thousand telegrams and letters, but also face to face. Because Franklin Roosevelt was "the wheelchair president" - stricken with polio in his forties and henceforth unable to move unaided - Churchill usually traveled to North America.

After their seaboard meeting off Newfoundland in August 1941, famous for the Atlantic Charter, they met three times in Washington and twice in Quebec, as well as at Casablanca, Cairo and Malta. They also conferred on two occasions with Josef Stalin - at Teheran in November 1943 and Yalta in February 1945 - and Churchill went twice to Moscow, in August 1942 and October 1944.

President and prime minister both enjoyed these trips, which provided a welcome respite from the pressures of politics at home - especially when the meetings were held in warm and exotic locations. Plumping for North Africa rather than Alaska in January 1943, FDR told Churchill: "I prefer a comfortable oasis to the raft at Tilsit." FDR's allusion to Napoleon and Alexander I on the Niemen River in 1807 reveals the degree to which these leaders self-consciously thought of themselves as successors to the potentates of the past. Harold Macmillan, Churchill's emissary in North Africa and a lover of classical allusions, depicted Churchill and 1Zoosevelt at Casablanca as an encounter between the Emperor of the East and the Emperor of the West, because it seemed "rather like a meeting of the later period of the Roman Empire."

Yet these modern emperors traveled very differently. Churchill's first two visits to Roosevelt were by ship but he returned from America in January 1942 on a flying boat, which opened up new possibilities. "Perhaps when the weather gets better," he cabled the president in April, "I may propose myself for a weekend and flip over. We have so much to settle that would go easily in talk." After that Churchill flipped around in a big way. In all he flew 107,000 miles during the war, much of the time in unheated, unpressurized converted bombers that were frequently under threat from enemy planes. After his ten-thousand-mile round trip to Moscow via Cairo and Teheran in August 1942, the American general Douglas MacArthur, no Anglophile, remarked that Churchill deserved the Victoria Cross for the journey alone. At Teheran, when someone said that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were like the Trinity, the Soviet leader quipped that Churchill was the Holy Ghost: "He flies around so much."

Of the two "Big Three" summits of the war, Teheran has often been neglected.Yet in crucial respects it marked the turning point in the wartime alliance,g when America and Russia became dominant. What was agreed there is essential background to what transpired at Yalta.

During the first two years after Pearl Harbor, the British were the senior partner in the Anglo-American alliance. With more troops available for the European theater, they were able to override the preference of the U.S. military for an early, direct invasion of France, instead drawing the Allies into North Africa. FDR went along with this because he believed that some kind of action against Germany was essential that year in order to head off "Pacific first" sentiment at home. By November 1943, however, U.S. mobilization was almost complete. American preparedness, along with the presence of Stalin, meant that Churchill was outvoted at Teheran, where the Allies confirmed the invasion of Normandy, code-named Overlord, for the following spring.

D-Day on June 6, 1944, therefore occurred two years later than the most ardent American planners had wished; there has been debate ever since about whether the Western Allies could have landed earlier in France.9 Probably they could have made a serious attempt in the summer of 1943, but only by husbanding their resources, particularly scarce merchant shipping and landing craft. Such an effort would have come at the expense of the Pacific war, where Japan was running amok, and would have precluded the landings in Morocco and Algeria in autumn 1942. Doing virtually nothing in 1942 was never a serious political option.

But the real point is that Britain and America did not invade France until 1944. As a consequence, the land war in Europe was decided largely on the Eastern Front. Between June 1941 and June 1944 (from Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union up to D-Day), 93 percent of Germany's combat losses were inflicted by the Red Army. In cold figures that meant 4.2 million German dead, wounded or missing on the Eastern Front, against 329,000 in North Africa and Italy.

Once the Soviets turned the tide at Stalingrad in January 1943 and then began the rollback at Kursk the following July, it was almost inevitable that they would end up deep in Eastern Europe. Stalin's influence at Teheran, indeed his readiness to leave his lair and meet Roosevelt and Churchill, reflected these new geopolitical realities.

June 1944 saw not only the great invasion of Normandy by America, Britain and their allies but also the massive Soviet summer offensive, code-named Bagration after one of Russia's generals in the war against Napoleon. In the West this operation is virtually unknown, yet its achievements were as significant as Overlord and came much more quickly. In a bare five weeks, while the Allies were still bogged down in the hedgerows of Normandy, the Red Army drove nearly five hundred miles across Belorussia and Poland. It destroyed thirty German divisions - more than the whole force engaged by the Allies in Italy - and inflicted double the losses of Stalingrad. By the end of July Soviet troops were on the outskirts of Warsaw.

Bagration was only one of five great offensives mounted by Soviet forces during the summer and early autumn of 1944, in the course of which they recaptured the Baltic States and secured Romania, Bulgaria,Yugoslavia and much of Poland. This dramatic shift in the European balance of power was the stimulus for Churchill's second visit to Moscow in October 1944 and his so-called percentages deal with Stalin. On a piece of paper he itemized the percentages of influence each country would have in southeastern Europe. Precisely what the prime minister had in mind by the numbers is unclear, but Churchill's general aim was to highlight those Balkan countries in which the British felt a particular interest - notably Greece (supposedly 90 percent British) and Yugoslavia (fifty-fifty).

Churchill did not intend to imply that Britain had no interest elsewhere but Stalin seems to have understood his 90 percent stake in Romania and 80 percent in Bulgaria and in Hungary to signify virtually a free hand in these countries.They had all been conquered by the Red Army, unlike Greece (where British troops intervened) and Yugoslavia (liberated by Tito's partisans). As Stalin observed in April 1945: "Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army has the power to do so."' So Churchill and Stalin had very different understandings of spheres of influence and this mattered enormously during and after Yalta.

By February 1945, when the Big Three convened at Yalta, the Soviets were in control of much of Eastern Europe.They could not be evicted except by force, and it was politically impossible for Britain or America to turn on their ally in this way. The French and American myths about Yalta gloss over these realities. If the Western Allies can be said to have forfeited Eastern Europe, it was by their strategy in 1942-3 rather than their diplomacy in 1944-5.

The interesting issue about Yalta is not the things that Roosevelt and Churchill conceded (Stalin had most of them already) but their belief that it was possible to build a cooperative and durable relationship with the Soviet leader. As with Munich, this fundamental misjudgment takes us into the realms of perceptions, politics, and also hubris.

Where then should be the verdict today on Yalta? Unlike the summits of September 1938, these were multifaceted negotiations from which each party came away with something. Roosevelt secured his priorities - agreement on the UN and a Soviet pledge to enter the war against Japan. Churchill managed to avoid firm commitments about Poland's western border, German dismemberment and reparations - the latter to Stalin's undisguised irritation. The British also secured a larger role for France in postwar Europe than either of their partners wanted. Stalin, for his part, gained acceptance of his main territorial goals in Asia and agreements that seemed to recognize his predominance in Poland. Each of the Big Three left with the belief that the wartime alliance would continue after the war.That indeed had been their major goal for the conference. Building on Teheran in 1943, they hoped to turn summitry into a process.

Unlike Chamberlain's summits, the leaders came to Yalta with detailed briefing books and a body of specialist advisors, including all three foreign ministers, and in many cases they acted on policies already laid down. The deals on prisoners of war, for instance, or Soviet territorial demands in Asia had already been established in outline, while Maisky's presentation on reparations followed the lines of a report he had drawn up over the winter.

At a number of key points, however, the leaders took their own line. Stalin rejected the advice of Beria and others to offer the West more fig leaves on the Polish government. Ignoring his advisors, FDR succumbed to British pressure to accept three Soviet votes in the UN. And Churchill batted aside Eden's apt questions about why the Western Allies needed to buy Soviet entry into the Far Eastern war.

But the British foreign secretary was very effective in obtaining a greater role for postwar France than any of the Big Three, left alone, would have preferred. In September 1938, Halifax had – belatedly - exerted influence in Cabinet, but he never appeared at the conference table. Eden, in contrast, was a real presence at Yalta - vocal if rejected over the Far East, influential over France, and backing up Churchill robustly on Germany. He was far more significant at Yalta than his counterparts, particularly Stettinius.

As Eden and Cadogan remarked, Stalin was indeed a skilful negotiator, letting the others do the talking and saving his succinct remarks for the right moment. Nevertheless Churchill's more bombastic approach should not be underrated: it wore down the other two over France and German reparations. And Roosevelt pushed harder on Poland than the myths might suggest.

The real problems lay not in negotiation but in assumptions. Churchill and Roosevelt - who were right about Hitler from afar - were both captivated by Stalin when they met him in the flesh. Hopeful that the Soviet Union was gradually shedding its revolutionary skin, they saw a man of business with whom they could conduct meaningful negotiation. Both hoped and, to a large extent, believed that he could be trusted. Whenever doubts welled up, particularly for Churchill, he looked into the abyss, recognized that confrontation, let alone war, was "unthinkable," and pushed on with the search for cooperation.

Contrary to French mythology,Yalta was not the moment when the big powers crudely divided Europe. Churchill and FDR were still resisting a stark separate-spheres deal of the sort advocated by George Kennan. Nor was Yalta a sellout of Eastern Europe to the Soviets, as claimed by the Republican right: it was already clear that the Soviet Union would be the predominant influence in Eastern Europe. That had been decided on the battlefields of Russia in 1942-3, by the Allied failure to mount a second front until June 1944, and by the understandings already reached at Teheran in November 1943 and Moscow in October 1944. When they went to Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt sought only to "ameliorate" Soviet influence.

To compensate for their intrinsically weak hand over Poland, both hoped that Stalin would offer cosmetic concessions because he wanted to maintain the alliance. They were right on the latter point but wrong on the former. Poland was a fundamental, even visceral, issue for Stalin and his expectations of a free hand had been fostered by Churchill's blatant spheres-of-influence approach in Moscow the previous autumn. He could not begin to comprehend the limiting conditions that his democratic partners wished to set on his influence in key countries in Eastern Europe.Their need for some degree of political pluralism and openness in order to persuade domestic opinion made no sense to this ruthless dictator. The misapprehensions atYalta occurred on both sides, not just in the West.

But the failures of implementation were equally important. Both Churchill and Roosevelt oversold the agreements and especially the "spirit" ofYalta when they got home. This would create grave credibility problems for them in the weeks that followed. Churchill's desperate public hyperbole about trusting Stalin over Poland is particularly remarkable, given his trenchant critique of Chamberlain in 1938. Many were appalled by it at the time, but Churchill repackaged himself as a fierce Cold Warrior with his "Iron Curtain" speech in March 1946, whereas Roosevelt, being dead, could not retrieve his reputation. Yet Stalin overreacted as well. As the Western Allies surged into Germany in March 1945, his fears revived that they were negotiating a separate peace with the Nazis. This would threaten his position in Germany on which - portentously, it now seemed - Churchill had been so uncooperative at Yalta. Stalin knew much more about his Allies than they did about him - thanks to well-placed agents - but, as with the intelligence failures of 1938, interpretation matters as much as information. If Churchill and FDR were seduced by their hopes, Stalin was the victim of his own paranoia.

The summitry of 1938 changed history decisively. It saved Hitler's regime and postponed world war for a year, by which time the Nazi-Soviet pact tilted the balance against the Western Allies. In contrast Yalta in 1945 was less significant than American and French stereotypes have made it out to be. The West's surrender of Eastern Europe to the Soviets, if that is what it can be called, occurred earlier and by default, because of Anglo-American delays in mounting a Second Front. The formal partition of Europe came later, in 1947-9, with the Marshall Plan, the establishment of two German states, and the creation of NATO.

But the aftermath of Yalta did play a significant part in the breakdown of the Grand Alliance, engendering a sense of betrayal on both sides. And the interpretations about why that happened shaped the history of summitry. The Soviets harked back to a golden age of cooperation with Roosevelt that was abandoned by his successors. And in America the political sensitivity of the Yalta myths haunted policymakers for decades, deterring them from a parley at the summit to thaw the Cold War.

David Reynolds. Summits: Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century. Basic Books. 2007.

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