He, himself, he said would tell Churchill and Churchill would understand.
—Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, May 5, 1943
All the while that Churchill, Roosevelt, and their senior civilian and military leadership were negotiating the way ahead for the western Allies at the Trident Conference, FDR’s emissary was engaging to the east. His charge was FDR’s initiative to foster a personal relationship with the other critical partner in the Alliance, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin. Roosevelt intended to act alone, leaving Churchill out and uninformed. The prime minister, FDR believed, had had his turn,
Churchill had flown to Moscow in August 1942 to meet with Stalin. The prime minister’s difficult task had been to inform the Soviet premier that there would be no opening of a second front in France in 1942. As they met, Leningrad had been under German siege for more than 350 days, and advancing Germans were putting Stalingrad under heavy pressure. Churchill responded well to sharp Russian criticism of the Allies, according to Ambassador Averill Harriman, who accompanied him. However, the meetings with Stalin had gone poorly.1
To soften the message of no second front in 1942, Churchill had promised Stalin a huge Allied offensive in the west for 1943. Based on his projection of having eight to ten times more landing craft by then, Churchill told Stalin, the offensive would involve twenty-seven American and twenty-one British divisions, half of which would be armored.2 It was clear from an early stage in the May 1943 Trident Conference that nothing like those numbers of divisions or landing craft would be available to the Allies for an invasion of France in 1943. When the Combined Chiefs of Staff began the conference, they already knew that, in fact, the second front could not be opened until 1944 at the earliest. Roosevelt interpreted that as his opportunity to make an overture of his own to Stalin.
On May 20, as the CCS sat down to lunch in Washington, by now proceeding in somewhat smoother waters, Roosevelt’s emissary, Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, arrived at the Kremlin in Moscow for a 9:00 p.m. meeting. Davies was received by Stalin and Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov to present a personal letter that the president had written to Stalin on May 5. Davies had flown, via Brazil, Africa, and the Middle East, over 12,000 miles to hand-deliver FDR’s communication. At the conclusion of their friendly meeting, Stalin asked Davies to return to the Kremlin in a few days for his reply.3
Joseph Davies had been sent to Moscow previously as the U.S. ambassador in 1936. Before returning to Washington in 1938, Davies’s naiveté about the Soviet Union in his public statements and writings had made him a target for FDR’s domestic critics. However, Davies and his second wife, Marjorie Merriweather Post, had developed rapport with the principal figures in the ever-shifting Soviet regime. Davies’s connections made him the perfect messenger for Roosevelt’s personal and very secret initiative to Stalin in 1943.
Roosevelt believed that the one-on-one, agenda-free meeting that he was seeking with Stalin would provide a start on building a personal relationship with the leader of the Soviet Union, one similar to the president’s relationship with Churchill. He hoped that such a relationship would facilitate understanding and discussion among the Allies of the great issues to come. Before departing for Moscow, Davies wrote in his diary that FDR’s last instruction to him at the White House on May 5 “was to impress upon Stalin that as between friends there were no differences that could not be solved and agreed upon, if there was common purpose to win the war and to organize the peace.”4 Certainly, as president, Roosevelt’s perception was that, together with Britain, they constituted the Big Three, each with differing national interests and with the United States, FDR believed, in the favored position of influence at the apex of the triangle. In making this overture to Stalin, FDR decided, Churchill would only be in the way.
Roosevelt bluntly told Stalin in his letter that he would not meet on British territory, citing Khartoum as his example. Roosevelt rejected Iceland as a venue “because for both you and me it involves rather difficult flights and, in addition, would make it, quite frankly, difficult not to invite Prime Minister Churchill at the same time.” Upon receiving FDR’s instructions, a worried Davies had asked the president if he had a concern that Stalin might misinterpret the exclusion of Churchill. Davies recalled that Roosevelt replied that he personally would inform Churchill and that Churchill would understand.5
Roosevelt proposed to Stalin that the two of them meet without military staffs in the summer of 1943. FDR proposed that he would be accompanied by Harry Hopkins, an interpreter, and a stenographer. He wanted the meeting to be very informal and produce no official declarations or agreements.6
While Churchill—unaware—was meeting in Washington with Roosevelt, the president’s letter was being read to the Soviet premier in translation in Moscow. According to Davies’s diary entry, “Stalin didn’t flicker an eyelash. He never looked up from the sheet of paper on which he was ‘doodling.’ He looked taciturn and grim.” Habitually, Stalin doodled wolves. When Davies’s reading of the letter came to excluding Churchill from the proposed meeting, Stalin asked, “Why?” Davies replied that “Roosevelt and Churchill respected and admired each other, and although they did not always see eye to eye, they were always loyal. They were ‘big’ men, and on matters in difference, each could be relied upon. In fact each would insist on finding common ground to win the war.”7
After some discussion of differing views among the leaders about the postwar future, Davies again stated. “If you and Roosevelt meet, you will understand each other,” to which Stalin responded, “I am not sure.” Davies wrote that he said, “Knowing what you both are trying to do, I am sure.” Stalin countered, “But understanding alone is not enough. There must be reciprocity and respect.” Davies responded, “If you knew the President as I know him, you would know that this is exactly what you would get and, in fact, you are getting now.”8
Their talk turned to the shared Russian and U.S. disappointment in the delay from 1942 to 1943 in opening the second front. Their conversation went on into the night, covering a broad range of political-military topics as Stalin “continued to look down and ‘doodle’ with his pencil.” At some point during the conversation, Davies indicated to Stalin that the question of the postwar Polish-Soviet border might be settled to the Soviet premier’s satisfaction along the post–World War I Curzon Line.9 In making his remark, Davies had to know that it would be interpreted by Stalin to be an indication from the U.S. president’s envoy of openness to considering a postwar border redrawn at Poland’s expense. Near the end of their two and a half-hour meeting, Davies recalled, Stalin said, “I think your President is right. I think he represents America as I understand it. He is a great man. You may tell your President I will be glad to meet with him.”10
Stalin gave Davies a letter of affirmative reply in principle to FDR’s invitation to a private meeting of the two leaders. The letter was to be hand-delivered to the president. In the text, Stalin wrote that he could not provide a definite reply because of the present military situation. Stalin proposed that the meeting between him and Roosevelt be arranged to take place in July or August. If Roosevelt was agreeable, Stalin would communicate the date of the meeting two weeks in advance. Roosevelt and Stalin then would fly to the rendezvous from their respective capitals. Davies was to tell FDR orally the place Stalin proposed for the meeting, Fairbanks, Alaska.11
Of course, Roosevelt had been anxious to know as soon as possible Stalin’s response as to whether and when they could meet. FDR did not trust the security of such sensitive information if stated directly in a cable encrypted and handled by subordinate embassy staff. In their May 5 Oval Office meeting, he provided a solution. To cloak Stalin’s answer, FDR gave Davies a simple code of the president’s own devising for use within a cable. Only the two of them would understand its meaning. Davies described the code in his diary: “The word ‘Jonquils’ would mean June. The word ‘Jolly’ would mean July. ‘Auction Bridge’ would mean August. If it were to be in the middle of the month, the words would be ‘literally in the center of things.’”12 In this manner, Davies told Stalin and Molotov, he would cable to FDR the range of tentative dates, from mid-July to mid-August. The two hardened revolutionaries, no strangers to cryptic messages, found Roosevelt’s code simple and ingenious. Without once referring to a meeting, Davies then cabled FDR “tentative” in the context of military operations and that they had listened on the radio to Churchill’s “jolly great speech” to Congress while they were “in the center of things, playing auction bridge.”13
His private message sent, Ambassador Davies sent additional cables from Moscow to FDR and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. As Churchill’s plane from Washington was landing in the harbor at Gibraltar on the morning of May 27 to refuel for the flight to Algiers and to unload its London-bound passengers, FDR and Hull were reading Davies’s cables: “There is complete agreement in principle. Some supplementary matters he gave me to be orally transmitted to the President.” Carrying Stalin’s letter to FDR, Davies then took off for Washington by the fastest route possible, via Siberia and Alaska. His C-54 by now had been christened by the crew in yellow Russian paint on its nose, Mission to Moscow.
Ambassador Davies reported to FDR in the White House on June 3 his apparent progress toward a bilateral meeting with Stalin. In Moscow, however, Stalin had received new reason to doubt his allies’ expressed intentions. After Davies’s departure and while he was still en route to Washington, Soviet intelligence on May 29 had reported to Stalin, from a source who claimed to have attended a Roosevelt-Churchill meeting during the Trident Conference, that launching the second front had again been delayed, this time until 1944.14
Back from a visit with FDR at Shangri-La on June 7, Harry Hopkins drove to Tregaron, Joseph Davies’s graceful estate atop a wooded hill in northwestern Washington’s Cleveland Park section.15 Hopkins’s purpose was to brief Davies on what had happened during the ambassador’s globe-circumnavigating journey. He gave Davies a grim but accurate account of the contentiousness of the Trident Conference and the follow-up meeting in Algiers to which Churchill had taken General Marshall.
During Trident, the absence of a plan for a cross-Channel assault accepted as viable by the COS made resistance to that strategy easy on many practical grounds. The British Chiefs had pressed these hard in favor of the Mediterranean strategy. Still, Hopkins told Davies, the U.S. JCS had held their own and salvaged the conference with a written British commitment to a cross-Channel assault, but delayed until May 1, 1944. This was gained in return for an oral commitment to continue Allied operations against Italy. The subsequent Algiers meeting had confirmed the Americans’ suspicions that the new agreement in principle to implement Overlord already faced determined British resistance led by Churchill. Looking to inform Stalin that the second front had been put off again, Hopkins asked Davies, “How would he take it?” To which Davies replied, “He wouldn’t take it. It would raise hob.”16
Davies was surprised to learn from Hopkins that, despite what the president had said to him on May 5, at no time during the Trident Conference had Roosevelt told Churchill that the purpose of Davies’s trip had been to arrange an exclusively bilateral meeting between Roosevelt and Stalin. Worse, Churchill still did not know.17
Hopkins told Davies that Lord Beaverbrook, a close adviser to Churchill, advocate for the cross-Channel strategy, and often a bridge between the U.S. and British governments, had just been informed by FDR of the purpose of Davies’s trip. Beaverbrook, Hopkins said, “told the President that Churchill would bitterly resent [a bilateral Roosevelt-Stalin meeting] and ‘never consent’ to it.” All were in agreement, however, that Churchill’s “bitter session” with Stalin in August 1942 had left FDR with the better opportunity to resolve misunderstandings and gain agreements with Stalin.
Hopkins’s proposed solution, for which he asked and received Davies’s endorsement, was to have Averill Harriman, who had grown close to Churchill and his family, tell the prime minister about FDR’s initiative to Stalin before Beaverbrook saw Churchill.18 In the event, Harriman and Beaverbrook went together to see Churchill.
Resolution of this disconcerting surprise, sprung on Churchill by Roosevelt, would include initiation of a fourth major Anglo-American conference, Quadrant. There, reaffirmation of cross-Channel attack as the principal Allied strategy for victory in Europe would be the central issue, but not the only important one.
Flying into the United Kingdom from Washington with the charge from Roosevelt to tell the prime minister about the president’s communication with Stalin, Harriman and Beaverbrook went directly to Churchill’s country estate, Chequers. They had a late night dinner and discussion with Churchill on June 24–25. According to Harriman’s July 5 written account to FDR, the two men were tired from two days of flying, and Beaverbrook was in an ill temper. Churchill and Beaverbrook, close but volatile friends, argued at dinner. After Beaverbrook left at midnight, Harriman stayed to convey to the now-upset Churchill several messages from FDR including the gist of the letter Stalin had sent FDR in May in reply to FDR’s proposal for an FDR-Stalin meeting without the prime minister.19
Whether or not Churchill had indications earlier from British diplomatic or intelligence sources is not known. Harriman’s revelation of FDR’s unilateral, exclusionary initiative to set up an initial bilateral meeting with Stalin confronted Churchill with circumstances that eclipsed his own effort at a trilateral meeting. From an inauspicious beginning, a two-hour “direct and frank” talk ensued between Churchill and Harriman. Wide-ranging, their discussion always came back to “the talk to [the] Russian and the question of the meeting.”
Harriman reported to FDR by letter, written July 5, eleven days later, that Churchill “firmly believes a three-cornered meeting is in the interests of the war but he admitted that his viewpoint is colored by considerations of the reaction in Great Britain.” Harriman wrote that his response to Churchill was based on two points: first, “the value of the intimate understanding that in all probability would result from a tête-à-tête, impossible with three persons” and, second, Harriman’s explanation of public perception and reaction in the United States. Harriman concluded that Churchill had a “sincere desire and determination to back [FDR] up in anything [FDR] finally decided to do and, although I must emphasize his disappointment if he is not present, I am satisfied he would accept it in good part and that it would in the long run improve rather than adversely affect your relations with him.” Harriman believed Churchill recognized the logic of a bilateral meeting followed quickly by a trilateral meeting of Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt.
Harriman had told Churchill on the night of their meeting that there was no need to rush his reply to FDR. However, Churchill cabled FDR promptly. Friday morning, June 25, in consultation with Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, Churchill prepared a reply to FDR and called Harriman to the No. 10 Downing Street Annex to read it. Harriman told Churchill that although he did not agree with Churchill’s position, the cable draft “fairly expressed his [Churchill’s] views.” On the way out of that meeting, Harriman spoke with Eden, who “was not unsympathetic with [FDR’s] position and was quite satisfied to let the decision rest with [FDR].”20 Using the abbreviation of their nickname for Stalin, “Uncle Joe,” Churchill’s June 25 cable conveyed his strong dissent from the idea of an FDR-Stalin bilateral meeting, stating:
Averill told me last night of your wish for a meeting with U.J. in Alaska a deux.
The whole world is expecting and all our side are desiring a meeting of the three great powers at which, not only the political chiefs, but the military staffs would be present in order to plan the future war moves and, of course, search for the foundation of post war settlement. It would seem a pity to draw U.J. 7,000 miles from Moscow for anything less than this. . . .
I do not underrate the use that enemy propaganda would make of a meeting between the heads of Soviet Russia and the United States at this juncture with the British Commonwealth and Empire excluded. . . . Nevertheless, whatever you decide, I shall sustain to the best of my ability here.21
Roosevelt replied to Churchill on June 28. His message was disingenuous. The president wrote, “I did not suggest to UJ that we meet alone but he told Davies that he assumed (a) that we would meet alone and (b) that he agreed that we should not bring staffs to what would be a preliminary meeting.”22 In fact, FDR’s May 5 letter to Stalin had sought a venue that would facilitate avoiding an invitation to Churchill and FDR proposed in his letter not bringing military staffs. Stalin’s response had been to ask Davies why Churchill would be excluded.23 Churchill had received, through Harriman, only a selective oral gist of FDR’s May 5 letter to Stalin and not until fifty days after it was written.
In his June 28 explanation, FDR gave his five reasons why a preliminary bilateral with Stalin would be advantageous to the Allied cause adding, “I want to explore his thinking as fully as possible concerning Russia’s post-war hopes and ambitions. I want to cover much the same field with him as did Eden for you a year ago.”24
FDR then proposed a full-dress bilateral conference with Churchill: “What would you think of coming over soon afterwards and that you and I with staffs should meet in the Citadel in Quebec?” Sequentially, this would mean an FDR-Stalin bilateral followed quickly by an FDR-Churchill bilateral with FDR occupying the center. FDR then expounded on meeting dates in a way that reinforced his proposal for a pair of bilateral meetings in this sequence:
While UJ gave no definite dates he suggested the end of July or early August. This was wholly tentative and I do not expect to hear anything further until about the fifteenth of July.
If he confirms this, I would be back about August fifteenth. I would have to be in Washington for a week but could easily get to some place in eastern Canada by the twenty-fifth of August.25
FDR agreed with Churchill that “later in the autumn we should most definitely have a full dress meeting with the Russians.” He claimed the Russians would not favor flying Stalin to Scapa Flow.
FDR concluded with a philosophical attempt at conciliation: “I have the idea that your conception is the right one from the short point of view, but mine is the right one from the long point of view. I wish there were not distances.” The long view/short view echoes a description Harriman may have used in reporting by telephone to FDR immediately after his June 24–25 meeting with Churchill. Harriman certainly used the terms later in his July 5 letter.26
Unknown to COSSAC and its invitees, as they prepared and conducted their own breakthrough Rattle Conference on Overlord in Scotland, FDR’s revelation to Churchill of his bid to meet alone with Stalin and Churchill’s sharp reaction were unfolding to the south in England. Resolution would include initiation of a fourth major Anglo-American conference at which reaffirmation of cross-Channel attack as the principal Allied strategy for victory in Europe—and the COSSAC plan for Overlord—would be on the table in a showdown.
After reading FDR’s June 28 cable, Churchill replied on June 29 with his acceptance of Roosevelt’s proposed course of action. Citing his most recent message on Stalin as the reason, Churchill expressed his skepticism: “I send you first of all the very unpleasant reply I have received from U.J. and my rejoinder. This certainly has its bearing on your proposal to meet him alone and I shall not seek to deter you if you can get him to come.”27 Churchill wrote that “in view of his attitude I think it important that this contact [the FDR-Stalin meeting] should be established.” Churchill agreed to ask Canada to host a bilateral meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill and their staffs in Quebec for the latter part of August, which would be consistent with accommodating FDR’s prediction of the timing for his meeting with Stalin.28
Initiation had begun for an Anglo-American follow-up conference to Trident that the two men hoped also would follow closely on a meeting with Stalin by FDR. The Overlord planners and operational commanders gathered at COSSAC’s conference in Scotland did not know so yet, but they were assured now that whatever plan they could craft for Overlord was on the calendar for review at the highest level.