38

Stalin Lies

AS THE Ferdinand Magellan made its way back from Ontario to Washington, the President finally heard from Stalin. Once decoded, the cable—dated August 8, 1943—was handed to him. It was a long message agreeing to a meeting. Not, however, the meeting Roosevelt was hoping for.

In surprisingly friendly English, the Russian marshal—who had gotten himself promoted as the first civilian to hold that rank by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on March 6, 1943, in recognition of his role as supreme commander in chief of the armed forces of the Soviet Union—began by apologizing. His focus as a Russian marshal had had to be on his “primary duty—the direction of action at the front. I have frequently to go to the different parts of the front and to submit all the rest to the interests of the front,” he kept repeating—blatantly lying, since he had only once ever gone near the front, and that only for a few hours. “I hope that under such circumstances you will fully understand that at the present time I cannot go on a long journey and shall not be able, unfortunately, during this summer and autumn to keep my promise given to you through Mr. Davi[e]s. I regret it very much, but, as you know, circumstances are sometimes more powerful than people who are compelled to submit to them.” He was, however, willing to agree meantime to a later “meeting of the responsible representatives” of the United States and the Soviet Union at Archangel, on the north coast of Russia, or Astrakhan, on the south, Caspian, coast—i.e., on Russian territory, and terms.

If the President was unable to go to such a summit, so distant from Washington, Stalin continued, Mr. Roosevelt could send a “responsible and fully trusted person”; moreover, he was quite happy for Churchill to attend the get-together—thus making it a “meeting of the representatives of the three countries.” In the meantime they should raise, in advance, the “questions which are to be discussed,” and the “drafts of proposals which are to be accepted at the meeting.” He added his belated congratulations to “you and the Anglo-American troops on the occasion of the outstanding successes in Sicily which are resulted [sic] in collapse of Mussolini and his gang.”¹

 

The dictator’s excuses for not meeting the President might be specious, but what was clear, now that the battle of Kursk was over and Mussolini toppled, was that Stalin saw no need to travel to America or to Alaska, cap in hand. He could afford to play hard to get—or please.

The President was understandably disappointed, given the phenomenal amount of Lend-Lease equipment, food, chemicals, and metals being shipped to the USSR. Even Marshal Zhukov, Russia’s greatest general, would admit after the war that “the Americans shipped over to us materièl without which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able to continue the war.” As Zhukov explained, “We did not have enough munitions [and] how would we have been able to turn out all those tanks without the rolled steel sent to us by the Americans?”²—let alone the four hundred thousand trucks dispatched.³

“Drafts of proposals,” meantime, made the President frown. Not only might it be more difficult to get agreement on the President’s United Nations authority plan if preconference proposals had to go through the endless (and appropriately colored) red tape of Russian communist bureaucracy, but Churchill’s presence might let the cat out of the bag—namely, that Churchill and his generals were once again tilting away from a cross-Channel Second Front in favor of exploitation in the Mediterranean. And dangerous overoptimism in London.

One American chaplain in London, Colonel Maurice Reynolds, had openly forecast that the war might be over in five months—that he would not be “surprised if we all went home for Christmas. The rats are beginning to leave the sinking ship—one [Mussolini] has left already,” he’d been quoted in Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Army newspaper.

This was an almost tragic assumption, given the tough fighting that lay ahead with the Germans. Not only was Allied strategy in danger of being compromised by naive opportunism, but if the Western Allies pulled out of their commitment to a Second Front, the President recognized, there would be tough problems with America’s Russian partner—with grave consequences for the peoples of central and even western Europe.

 

The disagreement between the U.S. generals at the Pentagon, and the growing continental divide between the Allies, was thus the unhappy scenario that faced the President when he finally entered the White House on the morning of August 9 for a whirlwind round of meetings. He’d agreed to meet Churchill and the British chiefs of staff in Quebec around August 15. This gave him only a few days to get his ducks back in a row.

He saw Secretary Hull for lunch, General Marshall at 2:00 p.m., Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, at 2:30, and dined with Hopkins that evening. He called his cousin Daisy to tell her what a great fishing trip he’d had—“a real success—the place much like the Maine Coast—rocky, wooded, 100s of islands, cool on the whole, very nice—He says he’ll take me there, perhaps, next year!”⁴ But he also confided to her his latest plan: that he was determined to do his best to head off another Trident-like battle royal in the Canadian capital. He would therefore see Churchill in private at Hyde Park before the Quebec meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff even began—and twist Churchill’s arm there until the Prime Minister backed off.