As the fifth day of the conference, Thursday 8 February, began, Sarah Oliver wrote to her mother: ‘Papa is bearing up very well – despite the strain of getting through so much in really so short a time, and the accompanying patience and toil that a million complexities call for . . . He has been sleeping well without any little pink pills.’ She and Sawyers, his valet, had had ‘a wonderful idea’ for keeping her father sustained at the long plenary sessions – ‘We are going to send him over some chicken soup in a thermos – and when they break for a few minutes for tea – he could have his chicken soup! If he doesn’t have a whisky and soda!’
With a cold wind blowing from the east, Moran and Cadogan visited Chekhov’s small, neat house perched above Yalta, as had Kathleen Harriman a few days earlier when she had met the writer’s sister, ‘a grand old lady of 83, thrilled to meet some Americans’. Moran thought the dining room with its piano, large photograph of the playwright, ‘and a life-size painting by Chekhov’s brother of a young woman sitting distractedly trailing a very shapeless hand’ rather ‘grim’. He preferred the homelier sitting room with its window overlooking the valley, bronze bust of Tolstoy and, lying on a table, the small wooden stethoscope belonging to the consumptive Chekhov, a fellow physician who had only reluctantly ceased practising on his own doctor’s advice.
Moran also called in at the Livadia to visit Hopkins. He ‘looked ghastly’ though he soon ‘began to talk with all his old verve’ about the Soviet request for two additional votes in the UN General Assembly. He complained, ‘The President seems to have no mind of his own. He came to Yalta apparently determined to oppose any country having more than one vote, but when the P.M. came out strongly in favour of Stalin’s proposal Roosevelt said he, too, would support Stalin.’ Some in the US team – himself and Byrnes included – remained strongly opposed to the Soviet demand, and State Department official Alger Hiss had that morning circulated a memo entitled ‘Arguments Against the Inclusion of Any of the Soviet Republics Among the Initial Members’. One can only wonder if he had also passed copies to his Russian handlers. At noon Roosevelt conferred with Hopkins, Harriman, Byrnes and Bohlen about the issue.
Meanwhile Stettinius set out by car for the Vorontsov Palace where Eden was chairing that day’s Foreign Ministers’ meeting, at which the major issues for discussion would be the time and place of the inaugural UN conference and, of course, the Soviet request for additional seats. Negotiating the precipitous hairpin bends, Stettinius was struck afresh by the burned-out shells of villas where the Tsarist aristocracy had once passed balmy summers, dotted ghostlike on the hillsides.
The Foreign Ministers quickly agreed a date for the conference – 25 April – and accepted Stettinius’s invitation for it to convene in the US. Discussions on the Soviet demand for extra seats proved more difficult. Although Roosevelt had told Stettinius the night before that the Russian request ‘was all right’ and appeared to be leaning towards making some concessions, Stettinius wanted to reserve the US position until he could speak to the President again and be certain he had reached ‘a definite conclusion’. He therefore tried to steer a middle course, telling Molotov the Soviet request would receive ‘sympathetic consideration’ at the April conference. Unmoved and with support from Eden, Molotov battled for the immediate granting of extra Soviet seats. When Stettinius objected that this would conflict with the principle of ‘one nation, one vote’ agreed at Dumbarton Oaks, Molotov reminded him that Australia and Canada had individual membership despite being part of the British Empire. He then began ridiculing other aspects of the UN proposals, observing that some countries to be invited did not have diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and questioning which Polish government was to attend. He also suggested that if the powers failed to agree on UN membership, this should be made public.
Realizing that any exposure of disagreement between the Allies would compromise the new organization before it was even established, Stettinius said hastily that he was seeking a way of satisfying the Soviet request before the UN conference met. When Eden suggested placing the admission of the Soviet republics as original members on the UN conference agenda, Molotov pressed for ‘an amendment’ to Eden’s plan, a statement that at Yalta Foreign Ministers had ‘agreed that it would be advisable to grant admission to the Assembly to two or three Soviet Republics’. Stettinius said he was ‘favorably impressed’ but had to consult the President. He expected that ‘the United States would be able to give a favorable reply before the end of the day’.
When the meeting ended, Stettinius hastened back to the Livadia to report to Roosevelt, leaving a drafting committee to produce the report that Eden would present to that day’s plenary session. Stettinius told the President the British and Russians were united in pressing for membership of the UN for at least two additional Soviet republics but that he had ‘reserved the American position’. At that moment, 3.30 p.m., as Roosevelt replied that ‘somehow we would now have to accept the proposal’, the study doors opened and Bohlen ushered in Stalin. Roosevelt immediately told him the Foreign Ministers had met and reached agreement on their report to the day’s plenary meeting. When Stalin asked whether this agreement included the admission of additional Soviet republics the President simply said, ‘Yes.’
The reason for Stalin’s private visit to the President was the issue raised in Roosevelt’s memorandum to him of 5 February – the Soviet Union’s entry into the war on Japan. The parallel approach of the US Chiefs of Staff to their Soviet counterparts had also borne fruit. Somewhat to their surprise, the Russian Chiefs had agreed to meet the Americans at the Yusupov Palace at 3 p.m. that same afternoon – ‘a good omen’, General Marshall thought. While Roosevelt was welcoming Stalin at the Livadia, the two sides were already sitting down together for the first time in the war without the British present. Leahy and Marshall were detailing the support they wanted from the Soviet Union. Antonov was being encouraging, calling the American proposals ‘excellent’, but saying he could not agree anything without the permission of his Commander-in-Chief – Stalin.
Roosevelt now set about winning the commitments his military chiefs wanted so badly. He told Stalin that with the fall of Manila the Pacific war had entered a new phase. Given that Japan had 4 million soldiers, he would only invade the Japanese home islands if absolutely necessary but hoped ‘by intensive bombing to be able to destroy Japan and its army and thus save American lives’. To achieve this he needed new air bases in the Far East.
Stalin said he would not object to the US establishing bases on the Amur River – the border between the Russian Far East and north-eastern China – but setting up US bases on the Kamchatka Peninsula would be ‘difficult’: a Japanese consul based there could not but help notice the military build-up. However, he agreed that Soviet military staff should begin detailed planning talks with their American counterparts. Knowing Roosevelt was the suitor and he the one being wooed, Stalin then queried whether after the war the US might sell some of its surplus shipping to the Soviet Union as Stettinius had suggested to Molotov. Roosevelt said it should be possible for both America and Great Britain to supply vessels on interest-free credit, adding that although ‘the British had never sold anything without [charging] commercial interest . . . he had different ideas’. When Stalin praised the President’s approach and lauded Lend-Lease as ‘a remarkable invention without which victory would have been delayed’, Roosevelt told him the idea had originally come to him while sailing his yacht.
Stalin then set out his terms for joining the war against Japan. They were not entirely new to Roosevelt. In mid-December 1944 in Moscow, Stalin had presented Harriman with a list of demands which he now restated. First, he asked for the southern half of Sakhalin Island, north of Japan, and the largely uninhabited Kuriles, a chain of thirty-two islands extending from ten miles beyond the northernmost Japanese home island of Hokkaido 800 miles northwards to the Russian Kamchatka Peninsula. Believing that Japan had seized all these territories after its victory over Tsarist Russia in the 1904/5 Russo-Japanese War, Roosevelt assured him, ‘there would be no difficulty whatsoever’ about restoring them to Russia. In fact, Japan had acquired only southern Sakhalin at that time. Tsarist Russia had ceded the Kuriles to Japan earlier – in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bohlen later wrote, ‘If the President had done his homework, or if any of us had been more familiar with Far Eastern history, the United States might not have given all the Kuriles to Stalin so easily.’
Unprompted, Roosevelt next reminded Stalin of the latter’s request at the Teheran Conference for access to warm-water ports in Manchuria which Russia had lost as a result of the 1904 war, and his own suggestion of Dairen at the end of the Chinese-owned Manchurian railway as a solution. Acknowledging he had yet to discuss this with his ally, the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, he suggested either establishing Dairen as an international free port or that the Soviet Union lease it from China. Personally he preferred the former because of the issue of Hong Kong, which he hoped the British would return to China after the war to function as an internationalized port, though ‘he knew Mr Churchill would have strong objections’.
Stalin said he would not object to Dairen becoming an international port, then continued his demands, which included access to the Manchurian railways, pointing out that the tsars had made use of the lines. Roosevelt suggested Russia and China could operate the railway jointly or even that Russia might lease the railway direct but again commented that he had not consulted Chiang Kai-shek.
Stalin did not share Roosevelt’s reservations, however mildly expressed. Privately he considered the Chinese Nationalist leader a nonentity and did not intend to allow squeamishness about consulting him to pose an obstacle. He told Roosevelt that unless all his conditions were met he would find it hard to explain to the Supreme Soviet why their country was going to war against Japan, a country that, unlike Germany, had not attacked it and with which he had signed a non-aggression pact. However, if his demands were met, the Supreme Soviet – and the Russian people – would understand that the national interest was involved. As Bohlen realized, invoking the Supreme Soviet as ‘the pre-eminent arbiter in the country’ was a favoured Stalin ploy. Although it fooled few, it often signalled issues on which the Marshal was determined to have his way. Stalin, in turn, suspected that the President often played a similar game, telling Molotov:
Roosevelt . . . thinks I will believe that he is truly afraid of Congress, and that is why he is unable to make concessions to us. He just does not want to do it and is using Congress as an excuse. It is all nonsense! . . . But he won’t take me in.
Roosevelt repeated for the third time that he had not yet been able to discuss matters with the Chinese Nationalists, but made the excuse for not doing so that their security was so poor that anything said to them was known to the whole world within twenty-four hours. Useful expedient though this was, there was a genuine point behind it. If Japan did get wind of a US–Soviet pact against it, their forces might attack Siberia before Russia was ready to send troops to the region. Stalin agreed that nothing could be announced publicly and suggested there was no need to speak to Chiang Kai-shek until he had moved Soviet divisions eastwards. Shrewdly he also suggested ‘it would be well to leave here with these conditions set forth in writing agreed to by the three powers’. Roosevelt agreed that Molotov should draft a secret agreement.
If Chiang Kai-shek was being sidelined, so too to an extent was Churchill, who was disconcerted to learn, on arriving at the Livadia for the plenary session, that Stalin was privately with Roosevelt; the President had not told him about the meeting. Stettinius sent in an aide with a message that the British Prime Minister had arrived, to which Roosevelt wrote back ‘Let him wait.’
Churchill would also have been displeased had he known that Roosevelt and Stalin had discussed trusteeships in the Far East. Roosevelt proposed that after the war Korea – occupied by the Japanese since 1910 – be administered by a joint Soviet, American and Chinese trusteeship body to prepare the country for eventual self-government but, he suggested, one issue was ‘delicate’. Though he personally saw no need to invite British participation, ‘they might resent this’. Openly amused, Stalin replied they must certainly be invited or the ‘Prime Minister might kill us’. When he queried whether foreign troops would be stationed in Korea, Roosevelt said no. The President also suggested a trusteeship would be suitable for Indochina, whose people were ‘of small stature and . . . not warlike’ but, in a further poke at Churchill, said the British would oppose this since they wanted Indochina returned to France so as not to raise questions about their own rule over Burma.
With that, the President and Stalin moved the short distance to the ballroom where the assembled delegates were waiting for them. Both must have felt reasonably content. In a meeting lasting barely half an hour, Roosevelt had secured Soviet agreement to enter the war against Japan while Stalin had obtained his objective of territorial acquisitions at Japan’s expense and a Soviet foothold in north-east China at the expense of an unconsulted major American ally.
At 4.15 p.m. Roosevelt opened the fifth plenary session with a buoyant announcement that the Foreign Ministers had achieved ‘complete success’ in their discussions and invited Eden to present their report. Eden duly said that the ministers recommended that the UN conference be held on 25 April 1945 in the United States, that only those countries which had declared war on Germany and signed the UN Declaration by a specified date in February should be invited and that the conference itself should decide who should be the organization’s original members. At that stage the delegates from the US and UK would support the proposal to admit two Soviet republics as initial members.
While the latter statement was no surprise to Roosevelt after his brief conversation with Stettinius, it shocked some of his delegation. Alger Hiss, one of those who had drafted the Foreign Ministers’ report which the British had then had typed up, knew the original text had not referred to US support for extra UN votes for the Soviet republics. The first he knew of it was when Eden handed him a copy of the report just as the plenary was about to open. Though as a Soviet agent the revised wording would have pleased him, in his guise of dedicated State Department man he joined his colleagues in accusing the British of exceeding their authority. He challenged Eden, who snapped back, ‘You don’t know what has taken place.’ What had actually happened remains unclear. The British insisted Stettinius – presumably after his brief meeting with the President – had sanctioned the wording. Stettinius later claimed it was the President himself after ‘a private talk’ with the British.
Whatever the case, Stalin was still far from satisfied with the UN proposals. As Molotov had done, he pounced on the illogicality that the list of states which met the proposed criteria for UN membership included ten which had no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. How could the Soviet government be expected ‘to attempt to build future world security’ with such countries? Roosevelt suggested that most of those countries would like to have relations with Russia ‘but had just not gotten around to doing anything about it’ and in the case of others blamed the influence of the Catholic Church, which was hostile to the Soviet Union. He also reminded Stalin that earlier in the war the Soviet Union had sat down with such nations. The best way of encouraging them to establish relations was surely to invite them to the conference.
Unconvinced, Stalin also challenged why nations which ‘had wavered and speculated on being on the winning side’ and were now rushing to declare war on Germany should be treated the same as nations ‘who had really waged war and had suffered’. Churchill said he sympathized with Stalin’s points but felt that ‘having a whole new group of nations declare war on Germany’ would help puncture German morale. He also said the British government felt a special responsibility towards Egypt, which it had twice dissuaded from declaring war on Germany and Italy in order to preserve its neutrality, more useful to Britain than if Egypt had joined the fight. Roosevelt said it had been his personal idea that only those nations which had declared war on Germany should be invited to join the UN. He proposed 1 March 1945 as a cut-off date for them to do so, which Stalin and Churchill accepted.
After further wrangling and sniping over which countries had behaved well in the war and which had not – Stalin agreed Turkey should be invited to the UN conference provided it declared war by 1 March but queried whether Denmark, which ‘had let the Germans in’, need yet be admitted – discussions finally turned to the position of the Soviet republics. Stalin asked that the Foreign Ministers’ report specifically name the Ukraine and Belorussia as the Soviet republics for which he was seeking UN membership. Molotov asked whether it would smooth their admission if these republics signed the United Nations Declaration by 1 March and Stalin suggested that, although the Big Three had agreed to recommend their admission, the fact that they had not signed the Declaration might be used as a pretext for excluding them. Roosevelt and Stettinius rushed to assure him this would not happen. However, as he had the previous day, Churchill weighed in on the Soviet’s side, suggesting it was ‘not entirely logical’ to invite to the UN conference, as he himself wished, ‘small countries which had done next to nothing for victory and had declared war only at that last moment’ while failing to reward ‘the martyrdom and sufferings’ of the Ukraine and Belorussia with an invitation. The two republics, he said, should sign the UN Declaration and attend the conference.
Claiming he did not wish to ‘embarrass’ the President, Stalin asked him to explain his specific difficulties over the Soviet republics. Flushed into the open, Roosevelt said that ‘giving one of the Great Powers three votes instead of one’ in the General Assembly was so significant it must be put before the forthcoming conference itself. When Stalin proposed that the Ukraine and Belorussia at least be allowed to sign the UN Declaration, Roosevelt again resisted, saying it would not overcome his difficulty, and Stalin withdrew his proposal.
After these uneasy exchanges, the Big Three again ‘wrestled with the problem of Poland’, as Harriman put it. The American delegation had prepared a response to Molotov’s proposals of the previous day, which they had circulated that morning and which Roosevelt now read out, claiming it was ‘very close’ to Molotov’s proposals. It accepted the Curzon Line, with minor modifications, as Poland’s eastern border but stated there was little justification for extending Poland’s western frontier as far as the Western Neisse River.
On Poland’s government, the President proposed that Molotov, Harriman and Clark Kerr meet in Moscow to oversee the appointment of the presidential council he had suggested two days earlier. Composed of perhaps three men it would ‘represent the Presidential office of the Polish Republic’ and in turn form a new ‘Polish Government of National Unity’ comprising ‘representative leaders from the present Polish provisional government in Warsaw; from other democratic elements inside Poland, and from Polish democratic leaders abroad’. This government would need to pledge to hold free elections as soon as a new Polish constitution was in place. Molotov at once sought assurance that on recognizing the new Government of National Unity the US and UK would no longer recognize the London government. Roosevelt and Churchill confirmed this.
However, if the British and American delegations hoped the Polish question was about to be resolved, they were disappointed, as what Andrei Gromyko recalled as ‘a sharp confrontation’ ensued. After a short adjournment, Molotov launched a barrage of objections. He accused both the Americans and the British of ignoring ‘the existence of the present government in Poland’, which had ‘great authority’. The Polish people ‘would never agree to anything which would greatly change the Provisional Government’. The only viable course was to enlarge the existing provisional government and the only debate was the number and identity of the additional Poles to be invited to join it. He added that the government in Warsaw would not accept Mikołajczyk as one of the Poles to be invited to Moscow to take part in the discussions. Molotov also claimed he had not ‘the slightest doubt’ that the Poles themselves desired their western frontier to be along the Western Neisse.
When he had finally finished, Churchill spoke. Guessing what was coming, Roosevelt scribbled a note to Stettinius: ‘Now we’re in for 1/2 hour of it.’
Peering over his half-moon glasses, Churchill said that they had reached ‘the crucial point of the Conference’. If they left Yalta while still recognizing different Polish governments, ‘the whole world will see that fundamental differences between us still exist. The consequences will be most lamentable and will stamp our meeting with the seal of failure.’ He had seen no evidence that the overwhelming mass of the Polish people supported the Lublin Poles – in fact quite to the contrary. ‘If the Conference is to brush aside the existing London government and lend all its weight to the Lublin Government there will be a world outcry.’ Furthermore 150,000 Poles had fought bravely for the Allied cause. Those soldiers would regard it as a betrayal if the British government abandoned the Polish government in London to which they had looked since the war began. He himself had no special regard for the London Poles. They ‘had been foolish at every stage’ but the provisional government formed by the Lublin Poles had been in place only a year.
Building to his finale, Churchill said the only way to avoid a situation highly destructive to Allied unity was to demonstrate that ‘a new government, representative of the Polish people, had been created, pledged to an election on the basis of universal suffrage by secret ballot . . . When such elections were held in Poland . . . Great Britain would salute the government which emerges without regard for the Polish government in London.’
Ignoring the previous charade over inviting Polish leaders to Yalta, Molotov said blandly that it was very hard to resolve the Polish question without the participation of the Poles themselves. Roosevelt sought to move things on by suggesting that, since all were agreed on the need for free elections, the only remaining issue was how Poland should be governed until then. Stalin, who had listened in silence to these exchanges, now spoke at greater length than usual, making clear his own rejection of the US proposals by stating, ‘Molotov is right’. He insisted the situation was by no means as ‘tragic’ as Churchill had made out. The British and Americans could send their own observers to Poland where they would discover that the popularity of the provisional government – admittedly not composed of ‘geniuses’ – was ‘truly tremendous’.
Stalin spoke of the psychology of the Poles whose sympathies lay with those who had stayed in the country and suffered with them under a brutal occupation, rather than with those who had left. He also claimed that the Red Army’s advance into Poland had transformed the age-old hostility of the Poles to the Russians into tremendous goodwill. They viewed their liberation from the Nazis as ‘a great national festival in their history’. Clearly implying that the Americans and the British were being hypocritical, he compared the legitimacy of the Lublin government with that of the unelected de Gaulle, asking, ‘who is more popular?’ and pointing out that the two had concluded treaties with the French leader. ‘Why was more to be demanded of Poland than of France?’ he asked, then came to the crux. The way to achieve agreement at Yalta was to focus on reconstructing the existing provisional government in Warsaw – not to attempt to set up a new one.
Roosevelt tried to shift the debate back to holding elections in Poland, saying his main concern was early elections and asking how soon they could be held. ‘In about one month unless there is a catastrophe on the front and the Germans defeat us,’ Stalin said, adding with a smile, ‘I do not think this will happen.’ Churchill conceded the holding of free elections would settle the worries of the British government and Roosevelt suggested deferring further discussions until the following day to allow Foreign Ministers to reconsider the issues, prompting rare jocularity from Molotov who said, laughing, ‘The other two will outvote me.’
After briefly discussing the obstacles to forming a unified government in liberated areas of Yugoslavia and the current situation in Greece, where Stalin assured Churchill he had no desire to intervene but merely to know the facts, and Churchill reciprocated by saying that he was ‘very much obliged to Marshal Stalin for not having taken too great an interest in Greek affairs’, the meeting finally broke up at 7.40 p.m. Stalin again had conceded nothing. On Poland’s government, he had told Lavrentii Beria, ‘We shall allow one or two émigrés in, for decorative purposes, but no more,’ and true to his word he had not budged. A depressed Eden wrote in his diary, ‘February 8th: Not such a good day. Stuck again over Poland.’
Roosevelt was exhausted. Howard Bruenn recalled how the President emerged from an ‘arduous’ and ‘emotionally disturbing’ meeting ‘worried and upset’ about Poland and looking even more worn than the day he had arrived in Yalta. His complexion was grey. When Bruenn took his blood pressure he discovered for the first time that the President was suffering from ‘pulsus alternans’ – a condition in which strong heartbeats alternate with weak ones and a sure indication of an overtaxed heart. Bruenn had already done what he could to restrict his patient’s working hours. Again taking Anna Boettiger into his confidence about her father’s condition, he sought her help in restricting them further and ensuring that the President received no visitors until noon.
However, Roosevelt had less than an hour to rest and change his clothes before departing for the grand dinner Stalin was hosting that night at the Yusupov Palace. Tropical plants fringed the double doors though which the guests entered the fifty-foot-long, twenty-five-foot-high dining room which had a large half-moon window high in one wall and an elegant Moorish-style fireplace. The table was laid with the very best china and crystal the Moscow hotels had produced. Cadogan rejoiced he had not been invited. Some of the thirty guests who had, anticipated little enjoyment. Brooke feared it would be ‘one of those late nights with many toasts and much vodka’. He was right. They would have to sit through twenty courses and forty-five toasts, with people moving endlessly up and down the long table to clink glasses with the person being toasted. Leahy recalled how ‘All the people who had any sense watered their liquor and managed to stay alert.’ He also remembered voracious mosquitoes buzzing beneath the table ‘that worked very successfully on my ankles’.
Stalin himself, well pleased with what he called ‘the good, very good’ agreement with Roosevelt on Soviet entry into the war against Japan, was in ‘excellent humour and even in high spirits’, teasing Gusev, the Soviet ambassador to London, ‘for always being glum and serious and for never cracking a smile’. The ‘regular giant of a man wearing a black alpaca jacket’ who stood behind the Soviet leader’s chair and ‘occasionally helped with the waiting and sometimes advised the great man what to eat and drink’ intrigued the British and Americans. British naval chief Andrew Cunningham wondered whether he was Stalin’s personal bodyguard but next day saw the same man, ‘unless my eyes deceived me . . . in a General’s uniform’.
Stettinius was observing Lavrentii Beria, who was among the guests and whom he had not seen before at Yalta. ‘I had been informed that he was one of the strong men in the Politburo, and he impressed me that evening as being hard, forceful and extremely alert.’ Cunningham, sitting beside Stettinius, noted Beria’s ‘saturnine’ expression and how ‘he listened very carefully to all that was said, and drank all the toasts in lemonade or mineral water’. Beria also intrigued Roosevelt, who asked who he was. A grinning Stalin, speaking loudly so Beria could hear, said – just as he had once told Ribbentrop – ‘Ah, that one, that’s our Himmler,’ a comparison Beria resented deeply, as Stalin very well knew.
Despite the frequent moments of ‘irritation and bitterness’ in recent days, Charles Bohlen was struck by the generally benevolent mood that night. So was Churchill, who recalled that ‘even Molotov was in genial mood’. One reason, perhaps, was the knowledge that for better or worse, the conference with its strains and stresses, would soon be over. Writing to his wife that day Cadogan predicted the conference would end on Sunday 11 February or Monday at the latest and that he would be home by the middle of the month, which would be a relief: ‘caviare [sic] and mince pies for breakfast are all very well once in a way, but they pall after a bit.’
The inevitable toasts began. Stalin first proposed the health of Churchill – ‘the bravest governmental figure in the world’. He lauded Britain for standing alone ‘when the rest of Europe was falling flat on its face before Hitler’ and claimed he could think of few other instances when one man’s bravery had been so crucial ‘to the future history of the world’. Churchill was ‘his fighting friend and a brave man’ and he laughingly quoted Ribbentrop who in 1939 had assured him ‘the British and Americans were only merchants and would never fight’. Stalin’s passion convinced Clark Kerr that ‘Stalin has got an impression of the P.M. as a broth of a boy, full of guts and determination’. Not to be outdone in fulsome rhetoric, Churchill hailed Stalin as ‘the mighty leader of a mighty country which had taken the full shock of the German war machine, had broken its back and had driven the tyrants from her soil’.
Stalin next toasted Roosevelt. He himself and Churchill ‘had had relatively simple decisions’. They had been fighting for their countries’ ‘very existence against Hitlerite Germany’. Roosevelt’s position had been very different. Though his country had not seriously faced invasion, the President ‘had been the chief forger of the instruments which had led to the mobilization of the world against Hitler’ and Stalin again singled out the Lend-Lease programme as one of the President’s ‘most remarkable and vital achievements’. Roosevelt replied graciously, likening the atmosphere that night to ‘that of a family’ and claimed that the Big Three had met in Yalta ‘to give to every man, woman and child on this earth the possibility of security and wellbeing’.
Stalin, at his most genial, also said:
I am talking as an old man; that is why I am talking so much. But I want to drink to our alliance, that it should not lose its character of intimacy, of its free expression of views. In the history of diplomacy I know of no such close alliance of three Great Powers as this, when allies had the opportunity of so frankly expressing their views.
However, he struck the most realistic note that night when in toasting the alliance between the Big Three, he observed that maintaining unity in wartime when there was a common enemy to defeat was ‘not so difficult’. The harder challenge would come after the war when differing interests might divide the Allies, but he expressed himself confident that they would withstand the test. It would be the three leaders’ duty to ensure their relations in peacetime were ‘as strong as they had been in wartime’.
Shortly before the dinner broke up, Churchill – perhaps under the influence of ‘buckets of Caucasian champagne which would undermine the health of any ordinary man’, as Cadogan observed of Churchill’s consumption at Yalta, or of the Armenian brandy on offer – proposed yet another toast. They ‘were all standing on the crest of a hill . . . with the glories of future possibilities stretching before us’. A leader’s duty was:
to lead the people out from the forests into the broad sunlit plains of peace and happiness. This prize . . . was nearer our grasp than at any time before in history, and it would be a tragedy for which history would never forgive us if we let this prize slip from our grasp through inertia or carelessness.
For the translators it was a hard night after a long, hard day. Charles Bohlen always enjoyed Churchill’s ‘extraordinarily impressive oratory’, noting how carefully he crafted and practised apparently extemporary remarks. However, he considered that his speeches suffered ‘a great deal from translation’:
While I suppose serious hours of work might have produced a Russian equivalent to Churchill’s masterly use of English, the immediate responsibility of the interpreter did not permit this and they largely came out relatively colourless, relatively flat. But sometimes the passion and feeling in his voice would be transmitted to Stalin. It is a question at international conferences working through interpreters whether eloquence is ever worth the trouble it costs to produce.
However, the translators had their reward. To their amazement during the dinner Stalin ‘got up, glass in hand and said’:
Tonight, and on other occasions, we three leaders have got together. We talk, we eat and drink, and we enjoy ourselves. But meanwhile our three interpreters . . . have to work, and their work is not easy. They have no time to eat or drink. We rely on them to transmit our ideas to each other. I propose a toast to our interpreters.
Arthur Birse recalled, ‘Stalin then walked around the table, clinking glasses with each one of us.’ Churchill raised his glass, exclaiming: ‘Interpreters of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your audience!’ This parody of the Communist slogan ‘so tickled Stalin’s sense of humour that it was some minutes before he could stop laughing’.
Watching and listening with fascination were the ‘Little Three’ as the leaders called them – Sarah Oliver, Anna Boettiger and Kathleen Harriman – whom Stalin had invited. Sarah wrote to her mother, ‘The “Bear” as host was in terrific form.’ The three women were the subject of frequent toasts. Warned by her father ‘that the price of my meal ticket would be a toast in Russian’ and coached on what to say by Bohlen, sitting to one side of her, and General Antonov sitting on the other, Kathleen Harriman stood and thanked their hosts for all they had done ‘to make everyone so comfortable’. ‘Jesus, I was scared,’ she wrote home afterwards.
Before the meal began, Sarah Oliver, helped by the normally austere and distant Ivan Maisky – ‘very friendly’ she thought – had recited to Beria the five Russian sentences she had mastered, including, ‘Can I have a hot water bottle please,’ to which the security chief leerily replied, ‘I cannot believe that you need one! Surely there is enough fire in you.’ Kathleen Harriman was amused when during the dinner the somewhat tipsy Archibald Clark Kerr, whom she knew well from Moscow, toasted Beria as the ‘man who looks after our bodies’, writing to her sister, ‘Archie always seems to get an obscene touch to his toast.’
Churchill wasn’t pleased to have his eccentric ambassador toast Beria with such an inept innuendo. He walked round to Clark Kerr and instead of clinking glasses shook his finger at him and warned, ‘None of that. Be careful, Archie, be careful.’ Nevertheless, Clark Kerr and Beria were soon enthusiastically debating the sex life of fish.
The stocky, Australian-born British ambassador, who wrote his diplomatic dispatches with goose quills plucked from a flock of geese he kept especially for that purpose, indeed had a lewd sense of humour. He famously wrote from Moscow to a friend during the war:
In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven . . . So I propose to share with you a tiny flash that has illuminated my sombre life and tell you that God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustapha Kunt. We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when Spring is upon us, but few of us would care to put it on our cards.
The dinner finally broke up well after midnight. Churchill returned with his daughter to the Vorontsov, ‘sentimental and emotional’, Moran wrote. Secretary Marian Holmes, waiting up for him in the little office adjoining his bedroom, knew he had returned when she heard him singing ‘The Glory Song’, a boisterous Evangelical hymn. He told her gleefully that he had persuaded Stalin to drink the King’s health – something he had previously declined to do.
Others were merely relieved the evening was over. Writing to Pamela Churchill ‘while letting the vodka settle’, Peter Portal told her it had been:
a very trying meal . . . FDR was very wet indeed, and just blathered. U.J. in marvellous form and so was big W, but as usual he ran away from the interpreter & was untranslatable . . . Honestly, FDR spoke more tripe to the minute than I have ever heard before, sentimental twaddle without a spark of real wit.
Brooke took an even dimmer view. ‘Stalin was in the very best of form, and was full of fun and good humour apparently thoroughly enjoying himself’, but ‘the standard of the speeches was remarkably low and most consisted of insincere slimy sort of slush! I became more and more bored, and more and more sleepy, and on and on it dragged.’
Stettinius went to bed that night with the UN still very much on his mind. He woke suddenly in the early hours,
with a clear picture in my mind of San Francisco playing host to the United Nations. My mind raced with enthusiasm and freshness. I saw Nob Hill, the Opera House . . . the Fairmont and the St. Francis Hotel, each filling its purpose. I saw the golden sunshine, and as I lay there on the shores of the Black Sea in the Crimea, I could almost feel the fresh and invigorating air from the Pacific.
The Allied advance continued that day. Montgomery launched his new offensive, Operation Veritable, aimed at driving south from Nijmegen to clear German troops from the area between the Rhine and Maas Rivers as part of Eisenhower’s ‘broad front’ strategy to secure the west bank of the Rhine. In cold, grey, miserable weather Veritable began with a five-hour barrage by 1,034 guns – the heaviest of the war in the West – followed by an advance along an eight-mile front of five British and Canadian infantry divisions and three armoured brigades. Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks found the sight ‘awe-inspiring. All across the front shells were exploding. We had arranged for a barrage, a curtain of fire, to move forward at a rate of 300 yards every twelve minutes, or 100 yards every four minutes, in front of the troops.’ To signal when the guns would increase their range ‘they all fired a round of yellow smoke . . . I could see small scattered groups of men and tanks all moving slowly forward’. ‘All our thoughts are with you and your splendid troops,’ Churchill found time to telegraph Montgomery that day. ‘Strike hard for victory in the West.’
In a slave labour camp at Peenemünde, on a Baltic island where the German scientists and engineers led by Werner von Braun researched and produced their V2 ballistic missiles, a Russian prisoner, fighter pilot Mikhail Petrovich Devyataev, knew that unless he got away he would soon be dead either of starvation or at the hands of his brutal guards who considered him and his compatriots as ‘Untermensch’, subhuman. His solution on 8 February was to steal the camp commandant’s plane. Persuading the nine other members of his work gang to join him, they killed a guard with a crowbar and stole his uniform so one of them could impersonate him. Then, ‘escorted’ by the fake guard, they marched a mile to the airfield where the commandant’s Heinkel 111 was standing. It took time to start the twin engines and Luftwaffe mechanics were already at work on other aircraft nearby by the time they were ready to take off. However, no one challenged them and as the Heinkel raced along the runway and rose into the sky, they broke into the Communist Internationale.*
Disaster nearly followed. Devyataev had never flown this type of plane before and didn’t know how to raise the undercarriage. The aircraft went into a sharp nosedive. He struggled with the lever controlling the flaps to level out the plane but, by now emaciated and weighing only ninety pounds, he lacked the strength. Only when others entered the cockpit and added their efforts to his did he manage to pull back the lever and fly on along the Baltic coast to attempt a crash-landing in snow behind the Soviet lines. As the Heinkel touched the ground its undercarriage collapsed. The first Red Army soldiers to reach the shaken escapers greeted them as heroes. But they were followed by members of Beria’s NKVD who refused to believe their story and alleged, ‘This is obviously a German plot.’ Devyataev’s companions were sent to penal battalions and five were killed in the subsequent weeks crossing German minefields. He himself was locked up in solitary confinement and only released a year after the war ended. He later said, ‘the sun began to shine for me again only when Stalin died’.
While Stalin feasted his guests at the Yusupov, in Berlin Hitler studied a grandiose architectural model for the post-war reconstruction of his birthplace of Linz in Austria, destroyed by Allied bombing, which he wished to rise phoenix-like as one of five ‘Fuhrer Cities’ of the Third Reich. As they viewed the model he told an SS general worried about the state of the German people’s morale, ‘Do you imagine I could talk like this about my plans for the future if I did not believe deep down that we really are going to win this war at the end.’