Eight Days at Yalta

How Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin Shaped the Post-war World

Diana Preston

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780802147660
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The authoritative history of the pivotal conference between Allied leaders at the close of WWII, based on revealing firsthand accounts. Crimea, 1945. As the last battles of WWII were fought, US President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin—the so-called "Big Three" —met in the Crimean resort town of Yalta. Over eight days of bargaining, bombast, and intermittent bonhomie, they decided on the endgame of the war against Nazi Germany and how the defeated nation should be governed. They also worked out the constitution of the nascent United Nations; the price of Soviet entry into the war against Japan; the new borders of Poland; and spheres of influence across Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Greece. Drawing on the lively accounts of those who were there—from the leaders and advisors such as Averell Harriman, Anthony Eden, and Andrei Gromyko, to Churchill's secretary Marian Holmes and FDR's daughter Anna Boettiger—Diana Preston has crafted a masterful chronicle of the conference that created the post-war world. Who "won" Yalta has been debated ever since. After Germany's surrender, Churchill wrote to the new president, Harry Truman, of "an iron curtain" that was now "drawn upon [the Soviets'] front." Knowing his troops controlled eastern Europe, Stalin's judgment in April 1945 thus speaks volumes: "Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system."

PART ONE

Personalities, Politics and Pressures

‘No more let us falter! From Malta to Yalta! Let nobody alter.’

Winston Churchill to Franklin Roosevelt, January 1945

CHAPTER ONE

‘The Big Three’

The three leaders who would at Yalta decide the end of the war and the shape of the future peace shared completely only a single common goal – the speedy defeat of Nazi Germany. Just as their backgrounds and their route to power varied markedly, so too did their aspirations and ambitions, both for themselves and their countries.

Churchill, seventy in the previous November, was the oldest; Stalin, born in December 1878, was sixty-­six; and Roosevelt, the youngest, would be sixty-­three on 30 January 1945 as he journeyed to the conference. The stresses and strains of office and of the war had taken their toll on all three. None was in particularly good health, with that of Roosevelt being conspicuously the poorest. A bout of polio in August 1921 had paralysed him from the waist down – a paralysis which he refused to believe was permanent and tried numerous therapies to alleviate. Even in January 1945 he had a new masseur and healer, ex-­prize fighter Harry Setaro, who told him ‘Mr President, you’re going to walk.’

With the acquiescence of a media more compliant than now, Roosevelt concealed from the public the extent of his paralysis, often using a system of heavy steel leg braces to allow him to stand at important events and even to walk short distances with the help of a stick or the arm of an aide, swinging his legs from the hip. In this he was helped by the determined way he built up his upper body strength, even becoming a better swimmer than any of his White House staff. An aide recalled, ‘You did not really notice he could not walk. He was a sort of Mount Rushmore being wheeled around, and all you noticed after a while was the Mount Rushmore part.’ However, approaching his sixty-­third birthday Roosevelt was also suffering excessively high blood pressure, had an enlarged heart with a weak left ventricle leading to reduced blood supply throughout his body, chronic sinus and bronchial problems, frequent headaches, chronic insomnia, and bleeding haemorrhoids – several of which conditions were exacer­bated by his enforced sedentary lifestyle.

Stalin suffered from chronic psoriasis, tonsillitis, rheumatism and foot problems, among which was that two toes on his left foot were fused together. His face was marked by boyhood smallpox. Following an infection his left arm hung stiff, sufficiently so for him to be declared unfit for military service in the First World War. In spring 1944 his aides had found him unconscious at his desk from an unknown cause. Although almost certainly the fittest of the three, he had developed a hypochondriac’s sensitivity to any small health problem, probably heightened by fears of poison and increasing paranoia in general.

Churchill was so overweight that in 1942 he had to have a new desk installed in his Cabinet war rooms beneath London’s Whitehall because he could not fit behind the previous one. Throughout his life he had been subject to depression which he likened to having ‘a black dog on one’s back’. He routinely took barbiturate sleeping pills. He had suffered a heart attack when visiting President Roosevelt over Christmas and New Year 1941/2 and had had several bouts of pneumonia. During the worst of them, which occurred in mid-­December 1943 in Morocco as he returned from the first meeting of the ‘Big Three’ – as newspapers habitually labelled the three leaders – in Teheran, his doctor Lord Moran told one of Churchill’s ministers that he expected him to die. He had had several previous brushes with death, not only in action during his early career as an army officer and war corres­pondent, but also due to accidents, as when in 1931 a car knocked down and nearly killed him in Manhattan. The aftermath of this incident provides a major clue to one of his habits. It was Prohibition time in the United States and Churchill demanded that the doctor treating him write a note stating, ‘This is to certify that the post-­accident convalescence of the Hon. Winston S. Churchill necessitates the use of alcoholic spirits especially at meal times. The quantity is naturally indefinite but the minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimetres.’

Churchill habitually used alcohol. He enjoyed whisky – a favourite was Johnny Walker Black Label – which he always drank without ice but with sufficient soda or water for one of his private secretaries to describe it as ‘really a mouthwash’. He loved champagne, particularly vintage Pol Roger, fine wine and brandy.^*

Whether Churchill was an alcoholic has been much debated. He himself said, ‘I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.’ But many suspected he was addicted. Sumner Welles, one of Roosevelt’s first envoys to Britain, dismissed him as ‘a drunken sot’. When he heard Churchill had become prime minister, Roosevelt told his cabinet ‘he supposed Churchill was the best man that England had, even if he was drunk half of the time’.

Roosevelt too enjoyed alcohol, though he did not drink so much as Churchill. He particularly liked to mix cocktails ‘with the precision of a chemist’, as a friend observed, a social ritual he could still perform despite his disability. Churchill detested these cocktails and would sometimes slip to the lavatory with his glass to pour his away and replace it with water. Invited to taste one of Roosevelt’s cocktails, Stalin described it as ‘Alright, cold on the stomach.’

Stalin drank spirits, particularly vodka, but preferred the white wine of his native Georgia – said to be the first place wine was ever produced – and could sometimes become drunk. However, his Foreign Minister Molotov suggested that more often he used alcohol to test people, insisting they keep on drinking to see what true opinions they might express in their cups or simply for the amusement of seeing them fall down dead drunk. According to Beria’s son Sergo, ‘Stalin loved that. He delighted in the spectacle of human weakness.’ Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s envoy, detected a similar trait in the President, ‘He unquestionably had a sadistic streak . . . [and] always enjoyed other people’s discomfort . . . it never bothered him very much when other people were unhappy.’

All three men smoked heavily. So did many of their aides. Any room including those at Yalta where they met would have reeked of their various tobaccos and been truly smoke-­filled with a blue-­grey haze. Roosevelt was a virtual chain-­smoker, inhaling through a holder usually Camels but sometimes Lucky Strikes, both of which were untipped – as were nearly all cigarettes of the time. Stalin also chain-­smoked. He enjoyed American cigarettes but was more often pictured using one of his pipes, some of which were imported from Dunhill in London, frequently gesturing with them to underline a point in debate. Churchill only smoked large, long cigars, also purchased from Dunhill, often eight or nine a day.

In physical appearance Churchill and Stalin were stout and short, even if according to one of his interpreters Stalin wore ‘special supports under his heels built into the soles of his boots to make him look taller than he was’. Milovan Djilas, a Yugoslav Communist visitor to Moscow in 1944, described Stalin as:

of very small stature and ungainly build. His torso was short and narrow, while his legs and arms were too long. His left arm and shoulder seemed rather still. He had quite a large paunch and his hair was sparse though his scalp was not completely bald. His face was white, with ruddy cheeks . . . His teeth were black and irregular, turned inward . . . Still the head was not a bad one . . . with those amber eyes and a mixture of sternness and mischief.

Churchill’s daughter Sarah Oliver recalled Stalin as ‘a frightening figure with his slit, bear eyes’ although sometimes ‘specks of light danced in [them] like cold sunshine on dark waters’.

A guest at a White House dinner party described the five foot six inch Churchill as:

a rotund, dumpy figure with short, slight arms and legs, narrow in the shoulders, mostly stomach, chest and head, no neck. Yet, as he advanced into the room, a semi-­scowl on his big, chubby, pink-­and-­white face with its light blue eyes, the knowledge of his performance since Dunquerque and something about his person gave him a massive stature. He moves as though he were without joints, all of a piece: solidly, unhurriedly, impervious to obstacles, like a tank or a bulldozer.

Roosevelt’s distant (sixth) cousin and frequent companion Margaret ‘Daisy’ Suckley thought Churchill ‘a strange looking little man. Fat & round, his clothes bunched up on him. Practically no hair on his head . . . He talks as though he had terrible adenoids . . . His humorous twinkle is infectious.’

Roosevelt was more than six inches taller than either of the others, being six foot two when standing in his leg braces. The same dinner guest who described Churchill depicted Roosevelt’s ‘ruddy’ face, ‘broad-­shouldered torso and large head’ with ‘close-­set square eyes [which] flashed with an infectious zest . . . His hands gesturing for emphasis, lighting one cigarette after another, and flicking the ashes off his wrinkled seersucker coat, shook rather badly. The rings under his eyes were very dark and deep.’ One of his interpreters described how Roosevelt ‘thought he had a sense of humour’ but in fact it was ‘exceptionally corny’. He ‘loved to tell jokes . . . and roar with laughter, very visibly savouring and enjoying his own humour’.

Theatricality is a facet of many politicians. Roosevelt’s security chief Mike Reilly thought there was ‘a good deal of the actor’ about both Churchill and Roosevelt. Roosevelt had a habit of throwing back his head in a motion which he himself attributed to ‘the Garbo in me’. He once told Orson Welles that the two of them were the finest actors in the United States. An American diplomat recalled of Churchill and his British bulldog image, ‘Everything felt the touch of his art, his appearance, his gestures . . . the indomitable V sign for victory, the cigar for imperturbability.’ Milovan Djilas found it difficult to assess how much of Stalin’s behaviour was ‘play-­acting’ and how much was real, since ‘with him pretence was so spontaneous that it seemed he himself became convinced of the truth and sincerity of what he was saying’. He also detected in Stalin ‘a sense of humour – a rough humour, self-­assured, but not without subtlety and depth’. However, behind his teasing, particularly of subordinates, there was often ‘as much malice as jest’. Sergo Beria recollected how Stalin mocked Malenkov, one of his senior minister...

Table of contents

• Eight Days at Yalta
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Maps
• Dramatis Personae
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• PART THREE
• PART FOUR
• PART FIVE
• Epilogue
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Notes and Sources
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover